THE SIMPLE JOYS ARE THE MOST MEANINGFUL

By Mark Manson

The cute Brazilian girl in the cell phone store looks up at me and sputters a series of syllables in my general direction. She’s been fiddling with my phone for 15 minutes now, the phone I just bought for twice as much as I would have paid in any other country. Now she can’t get it to work. Explanation is pending, at least until I decipher the Portuguese syllable soup she continues to vomit at me.

I’m frustrated, if you didn’t notice.

“Não entendo,” I reply, for probably the twelfth time. It means “I don’t understand.” One of the only Portuguese phrases I know.

The coy smile she had given me the first few times I said it are now replaced with an aching impatience. She frowns at me, then at the phone, and then sighs. She pulls out a Post-It note, scrawls some Portuguese on it, hands it to me along with my dysfunctional new phone and slowly instructs me to go to another store in the mall and have them deal with it. She has to repeat these instructions three times before I understand them. This is the fourth cell phone store I am being sent to. Apparently there are a lot of bureaucratic procedures involved with buying a cell phone in Brazil, the details of which are obviously sailing clear over my head. And since none of the store clerks speak English, they’ve all eventually reached a breaking point, lost patience and sent me down to the next store to be somebody else’s headache.

The entire process has taken close to three hours… and it’s still not over. The mall cell phone nightmare continues.

(Although to be honest, it should have only been about an hour-and-a-half, I fell asleep in the Claro store waiting for a customer service rep to call my number. I awoke 45 minutes later to find they had proceeded to half a dozen customers beyond me. I strained to convince the rep to take me next since I had been there an hour. But my Portuguese persuasion skills weren’t very effective… OK, since we’re being honest right now, they were non-existent. I couldn’t say a thing, and therefore I hardly raised a fuss. Thus I took a new number and sat my ass back down, this time forcing myself to remain awake for the ensuing 30 minutes I would wait… again.)

I never resolved my cell phone issue that day. I finally found an old man in the mall who spoke English and was kind enough to come translate for me — yes, I walked around a Brazilian mall randomly approaching people to find someone to translate for me. It turns out that Brazil requires an identification number to activate any cell phone bought within the country, the equivalent of having a Social Security Number in the US to buy a cell phone. There’s a formal process that’s required and if you’re a foreigner and don’t work for a Brazilian company, then you’re screwed (unless you can get a friend to come in and register your phone under their name). As is probably obvious, I did not have any Brazilian friends with me. So almost four hours after arriving, I left the mall, having paid too much for a phone I still couldn’t use.

…And then got lost going home.

This was my first day in Sao Paulo. And I would be lying if I said days like this were rare. They don’t happen that often, but with enough regularity that the seething frustration, the awkward self-consciousness, the mental exhaustion, and the unavoidable sense of isolation, they’ve all become familiar to me now.

Today, internet entrepreneurship is the latest rage. Attachment-free mobile living is the new dream. And you don’t have to look much further than the 4 Hour Work Week to see the romanticization of such a post-modern lifestyle.

But as with any lifestyle, there are strengths and weaknesses to it. It’s not all a bed of roses. You sacrifice some things to gain others. And don’t worry, I’m not here to complain about every trying moment I’ve come across in two-and-a-half years of traveling. There have been far, far, far more good days than bad. And I would not take back a single life decision I’ve made.

But I do want to paint a realistic picture of what this lifestyle entails, the highs with the lows. And posit that perhaps the biggest difference between this lifestyle and a conventional one, is simply that the highs are higher and the lows lower, thus reorienting what one values spending their time on.

Because this is what you don’t hear, and that Tim Ferriss would never tell you: that day after the Brazilian cell phone debacle, after finally finding my way back to my hotel at dusk, I went and sat in my room by myself. Without TV. Without Wifi. No movies. No friends (not like I’d be able to call them anyway). Nothing to do. I went home and laid in bed for most of the evening. Physically and mentally drained and miserable.

And alone.

There’s nothing new about a bad day. We all have them. And we all have our own strategies to unravel our negative emotions. Sometimes we call up a friend and unload on them, perhaps over beers. Or we call up mom or dad and look for a little reassurance. Maybe we put on a movie with our significant other and just forget about everything for a few hours. Or maybe we hit the gym or take it out on a basketball court.

But life on the road, it’s quite often that you don’t have any friends to have beers with, you can’t call a parent and lean on them for some support, you don’t have a movie to watch or someone to curl up with, no gym membership, no basketball court. Often you have to take the brunt of your emotions alone, with nothing to distract you from them.

And it’s hard. But it makes you stronger, more mentally resilient, more centered. When you do eventually bounce back, life feels much lighter. And those joyous experiences you feel in contrast to the dark and lonely ones become that much better. In fact, I’ve found that the stark contrast between highs and lows has actually begun to redefine what those joyous moments are.

Some of my happiest memories from last year were going out and just having beers with some friends. Nothing more, nothing less. Something which I did weekly for years and years prior to this new lifestyle and that was always available to me.

It’s a bizarrely paradoxical effect on one’s emotional life: the extreme highs and novelty of experience render certain “exciting” activities to feel meaningless, and the extreme lows of isolation and frustration make many “normal” activities feel exciting and fulfilling. A Fourth of July parade looks a lot different after you’ve been to Carnaval in Brazil (twice) and stayed up three days straight partying in Ibiza. And I’ll give you a hint: it becomes really boring.

A road trip to the beach back home seems silly in comparison to living on the beach in Thailand, or taking surfing lessons in the swells of Bali. In many ways, you become jaded to your former life.

But on the other hand, the dark times of loneliness, depression, frustration, and isolation make other routine daily events of life — events which you and everyone else take for granted — that much better and more significant.

Last year, I got terribly sick in a rural town in India — possibly the last place on earth you would want to be sick. I had a scorching fever, cold chills and a headache that jackhammered the inside of my skull. I ran out of potable water at about 10PM, and the only stores in town had closed down for the night. I laid in bed through the entire night, unable to sleep due to fever and sweats. No medicine. Dehydrated and incredibly thirsty. And just to make things more interesting, a few hundred bugs swarmed into the room and were now crawling and buzzing around the walls, and occasionally on me.

Mom’s Christmas dinner tastes a lot better after an experience like that.

Which I guess is what the paradox resolves into: a devaluing of superficial pleasures and a greater appreciation for simple, authentic ones. I don’t really enjoy the presents at Christmas anymore, the fireworks at fourth of July, or even the parties on New Year’s Eve. I’ve seen bigger parties, been to more beautiful places, and already own everything I’ll ever want in this life. But unlike before, I appreciate every day spent with those who mean a lot to me. A quiet beer on a patio. Watching a basketball game together. Going to a birthday party or a barbecue. These are the events I look forward to now and get excited about, days and weeks ahead of time… And that’s probably the way it should be.

12:28:00 - By Vincent 0

HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK

By Mark Manson

We’ve all had the feeling at some point in our lives where it seems other people catch all the lucky breaks while we seem to be screwing everything up. It’s a common perceptual bias. In other people we focus on the successful result, not the toil and struggle they endured to reach it or the missed opportunities and growth experiences they suffered through. While in ourselves, all we’re aware of is the toil and strugglewe endure and not the success that is readily apparent to others. It’s a kind of Blind Man’s Bluff that we’re all doomed to continue playing throughout our lives.

The concept of “luck” stems from this perceptual bias: the belief that some people’s existence defies mathematical probability, that because they have it and we don’t, they’re violating the universe’s probabilities.

The truth is, across the spectrum of a lifetime, we all receive both opportunity and injustice in healthy doses. Some of us may defy the odds early in life, perhaps by being born into perfect circumstances, and then face unfair or unlikely challenges later on. Others may be born into squalid conditions, but as they grow, they meet great opportunities that change everything for them. Or sometimes chance can be just that — random chance. My grandfather started seven businesses throughout his lifetime. He became a millionaire once and went bankrupt twice. He finally sold his last business for a modest sum so he could retire in rural Texas with his remaining comforts. A few years later they struck oil on his property. A lifetime of hard work, risk-taking, spectacular successes and more spectacular failures, and the minute he hangs it all up and calls it quits, he struck oil.

Life’s cruel roll of the dice.

But the truth is, we can actually control our luck to a certain extent. Although we may not directly affect the major opportunities that enter our life at any given moment (like finding oil on our property), we can indirectly influence how many opportunities spring up and the ferocity with which we pounce on them. In fact, if we define “luck” as the amount of beneficial opportunities and life events that happen to us which aren’t completely in our control, recent research not only finds that some people are much luckier than others, but that those lucky people have quite a few things in common.

And no, it’s not rabbit’s feet. Or a dearth of black cats. Lucky people have specific behaviors and mindsets which cause them to encounter far more opportunities and advantages than others on average. You can, in effect, train yourself to become a lucky person, if you so choose:

1. BE A SOCIAL BUTTERFLY

Psychologist Richard Wiseman is an authority on luck — or what is perceived as luck in our lives. In his book The Luck Factor, Wiseman found that the best predictor of how many “lucky breaks” a person has was how social and interconnected they were with those around them. Lucky people enjoy connecting and relating to other people and are comfortable doing so. When presented with new social situations, unlucky people talked to people they already knew or people who were most like themselves, whereas lucky people talked to a large array of people equally.

Most of life’s opportunities don’t land on us mysteriously. They come through our networks, our connections, people we stumble across at random.

My one-and-only attempt at a day job was landed through an acquaintance I had made when I was going out five nights-a-week in Boston back in 2007. I once landed an audition for a touring rock band by randomly meeting the singer at a Fourth of July party (he and I happened to be hitting on the same girl). A blogger recently wrote about sitting down in a coffee shop to work on his laptop and accidentally striking up a conversation with an old man who just happened to have invented the first ever programmable computer and spent the afternoon chatting with him.

Wiseman states in his book:

“I discovered that being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind… Lucky people increase their odds of chance encounters or experiences by interacting with a large number of people. And that makes perfect sense: Chance opportunities are a numbers game. The more people and perspectives in your sphere of reference, the more likely good insights and opportunities will combine.”

As the old saying goes, it’s not what you know, but who you know.

2. PERIODICALLY DO SOMETHING STUPID

The perception of luck is more likely to fall on those who take a dumb risk or two. Again, it comes back to our perceptual biases. We notice the spectacular successes and quickly forget about the fizzled failures. If you’re on vacation with your buddy and he decides to go on to the strip club by himself at 5AM and next thing you know he’s showing up in your hotel room at noon with two women on his arm and stories about partying with Charlie Sheen all morning, chances are he’s not some divine purveyor of fortune, but rather he’s had a lot of meaningless, lackluster nights at strip clubs and this time he happened to wander into the right one at the right moment.

Spontaneity will open you up to more potential opportunities and adventures. Falling into the same drab fixed routine is going to yield less unexpected opportunities and fewer possible big gains.

There is a horizon to our ability to see opportunities when we pursue certain actions. For instance, we may see the one clear opportunity available if we quit our job or move to a new country or take up a new hobby. But we don’t see the other opportunities that job, that move, or that hobby will lead to.

For instance, when I started working online, I thought it was my internet business or bust. I either made it work or I’d be dutifully gulped back up by the 9-to-5 world. But over the years, I’ve met people and had opportunities for business ventures in places as odd as Thailand, Ukraine, and Brazil. I’ve made friends of different industries in the most random of ways and have developed connections that keep me confident that I’ll never have to work a day job again for the rest of my life.

And chances are if I had acted on any of those opportunities, they wouldn’t have completely worked out, but would have opened me up to a whole new host of opportunities I can’t fathom at the moment. Such is success — a long, painful string of failed shots and course corrections. What is commonly perceived as luck is often merely someone who wasn’t afraid to screw up a few dozen times.

The point is this: be open-minded and spontaneous. The guy with the hideous shirt may actually be the perfect business partner for your new venture. The networking event your brother is dragging you to could actually score you court-side tickets to a playoff basketball game. That guy who sold you cocaine might introduce you to your future spouse. You never know.

(OK, probably not.)

3. MAXIMIZE YOUR RETURN ON LUCK

See? Bill Gates had bad luck too.

Recently, two researchers finished up a nine-year study on luck and its role in determining the fate of the most successful companies in the world. Did tycoons such as Bill Gates simply get bigger lucky breaks more often? Did software businesses go under when Microsoft thrived because of unfortunate circumstances, because of unpredictable events outside of their control which derailed their company?

The surprise answer is no.

In fact, the researchers found after measuring 230 “luck events” over dozens of businesses, that the ultra-successful businesses did not receive any more lucky breaks than the companies that failed on average and vice versa. What set them apart is something they dubbed “Return on Luck” (ROL).

All businesses have positive and negative events impact their businesses in unpredictable ways. What sets the successful companies apart from the others is that they maximize their positive luck and minimize their negative luck. They get a high ROL. When Bill Gates found out he had the opportunity to program an operating system from the original Altair, he stayed up for weeks on end, skipping classes, often not sleeping for days at a time, to take advantage of the opportunity. He was able to recognize that this was a once-in-a-lifetime moment and he had the wherewithal to push through and take advantage of it. That’s a high ROL. Researchers found that the ultra-successful companies regularly did this. And even though other companies were exposed to similar lucky circumstances, the most successful companies took far more advantage of the serendipitous situation.

In addition, the best companies were able to minimize bad luck the most successfully, or even in some cases, turn bad luck into a strength and an advantage. The companies that failed? Not so much. As soon as disaster struck, they caved.

4. BE OPTIMISTIC

Not to rattle off the ridiculous list of the benefits of optimism or anything (optimists are healthier, happier, more successful, more likable, they live longer, etc.), but being optimistic and generally expecting the best of people and things around you goes a long way to accomplishing bullet point number one above: i.e., no one likes hanging out with a negative asshole.

But beyond just helping you become the most popular girl at the prom (like you’ve always wanted to be), optimism and overestimation of oneself is more likely to lead to successful performance. Even the belief that one is lucky can alter one’s results drastically. Score another point for adopting positive beliefs.

But this isn’t hocus-pocus stuff. Our performance usually rises to the level of our expectations. If you consistently expect yourself to be better than you actually are, then research suggests that you’re more likely to improve and have a large breakthrough. A little bit of healthy delusion goes a long way.

And in terms of optimism/pessimism, think of it this way. Optimists are more likely to identify a lot of “false positives” — believing something is good when it’s really bad — while pessimists will more likely identify “false negatives” — believing something is bad when it’s actually good. It’s not hard to see what is more advantageous. While optimists will sometimes mistake a steaming turd for pure gold, they will not miss a piece of genuine gold when it crosses their path. Pessimists, on the other hand, will spot every steaming turd they come across (and duly let you know about it, I’m sure), but they will also mistake opportunities of genuine gold and let them slip away (kind of like a turd).

So are you in the business of spotting turds or spotting gold?

SOURCE

12:36:00 - By Vincent 0

Digital Detoxing - Social Media Age Necessity or Hollow Fad?

BY Paul O’Mahony

A very common complaint about modern society is that we're all a bit too connected.

 I mean sure, social media has enabled us to forge friendships without borders, set up businesses with no fixed office and gain unlimited access to infinite animal GIFs, but is a life spent staring at screens turning us all into the digital undead?

Some seem to think so, which is part of the reason why 'digital detox' camps have suddenly come into existence. What's digital detoxing? Glad you asked, it's essentially a retreat you go to where you completely relinquish your technological tethers, no computers, no phones,  no smartwatches, not even a solitary FitBit. 

It's an intriguing idea, if not a particularly revolutionary one, after all that's how weekend retreats used to work by default, back when none of this technology was as portable, or permanently hooked up to the grid. There are a few examples of this that are just retreats which give you the option of uncoupling yourself from the web, but many newer iterations do actually make it their main prerogative, such as Camp Grounded.

Camp Grounded has 4 sites: Mendocino in California, Cold Spring in upstate New York, Hendersonville in North Carolina and Marble Falls in Texas. All of them follow the same ethos - beautiful surroundings, activities that make adults feel like big kids and absolutely zero internet or digital access until you leave.

It's an intriguing idea, but is there any merit to it beyond a few days bumming around in forests and lakes? Seemingly there very much is. Evidence has suggested that people who take more time out from their digital proclivities forge better relationships, have improved mental health and are generally more productive. Like the Radiohead song, but without the deliberate irony. 

Many companies have actually adopted digital detoxing as a form of company vacation, which will sound familiar if you've ever seen The Thick of It. More and more, digital dependency is becoming a recognised condition among psychologists, and social media has a particularly active roll in it. The need to scroll through a news feed several times a day, watch a status update to see the likes trickle in, or even just wait to see when someone sees a message are all on the more severe end of the spectrum. 

The beauty of 'digital detoxing' is that it needn't be something you have to seek out. It's as simple as just taking some time away from screens, for a few hours, a day or a weekend, as long as people know they won't be able to get hold of you. You could even just turn all your push notifications off so that only calls and texts come through, cutting out anything that you can wait to look at until later. Give it a try some time, you might find yourself feeling very refreshed, and less square-eyed.

source

16:30:00 - By Vincent 0

My Blackberry Is Not Working! - Apple vs windows. A must see! Brilliant

Absolutley brilliant. almost 25 million views. I understand why. 

British humor at it's best. What do you think?

15:04:00 - By Vincent 0

How to be yourself and stop adjusting to others

By Till H. Groß

 A couple of years ago I went back to my home town and visited family and friends from back in the days. The following happened:

“What’s up, bro? How’s everything going?”, my friend asked me who I haven’t seen for years. “I’m great. I’m doing a lot of public speaking right now and I make a ton of money with that.” I replied.

A few hours later another friend called me and wanted to hang out. He asked me the same question “How are you man? How’s life treating you?”. I replied “It’s going great. Doing lots of public speaking right now, that allows me to travel so much. It’s awesome.”

Later that night I was having dinner with my mom and since we haven’t really talked in quite a while she asked me as well “How are you? How is everything going?” And once again a different answer to the same question “I’m doing great. I did a lot of public speaking recently. I love it because I can help a lot of people.”

Can you see what I did here?

Well…I can see it now. However, it took me years to notice it. I tried to adjust each of my replies in such a way that it would match the values of the other person. I wouldn’t lie or make things up, but simply highlight the things I knew the other person cared about.

My friend who I grew up with is immensely impressed by people who make a lot of money, so I highlighted that part. My other friend loves travelling, so I focused on that. My mom cares about neither of these things but being a good person is something that’s important to her, so I told her that I’m helping a lot of people.

That’s something I would do on a regular basis. Instead of honestly saying why I care about the work that I do, I tried to live up to the standards of the other person. I simply reacted to my environment.

Now, this doesn’t have to be a problem at all. Doing this is a great way to easily build rapport with people and show them in a non-obvious way that you understand their world and what they care about. In the past this allowed me to easily make friends in the most diverse environments.

However trying to constantly live up to the values of others, even though it can be helpful in the short run, can have pretty severe long-term consequences. At best, you seem inauthentic or fake, promoting things you don’t care about or trying to emulate another person’s behavior, and at worst you will lose yourself in the expectations of others, hunting for validation.

To lose yourself sounds kinda esoteric, but that’s essentially what it is, you lose sight of what you really care about and you end up compromising what matters most to you in the attempt to fit in.

Here’s a cheesy example…

A while ago my wife made me watch Mean Girls. If you haven’t watched it, don’t bother. Even though I’m still mad at her for making me sit through the movie, it’s full of examples of people who compromise on their values to be accepted by others.

The main character, Cady, arrives at a new school. She’s lonely and hopes to fit in somewhere, going from lunch table to lunch table on her first day. So, when the A-list clique “The Plastics” offer her a chance to join the cool table she gladly accepts. However, everything goes downhill from there. In an attempt to fit in with her new “friends” she begins wearing makeup and pink clothes even though she dislikes it. She is really good at math. But in order to get with a guy she pretends to be stupid, gets failing grades and doesn’t join the math team. This escalates and not much later she doesn’t invite her real friends to a party and writes mean things about other people into the secret book of her clique.

After all the movie has an happy end. The different characters actually figure out who they want to be and instead of just trying to be “cool” they pursue what they care about. Cady wins a math contest, the leader of the “Plastics” joins the lacrosse team and the other “Plastics” also own their individual interests.

Obviously it’s a movie and the examples are kind of extreme, however I am sure that all of us have done things we usually wouldn’t do to or said yes to things we would usually say no to, just to be accepted by others.

Next to the examples at the beginning where I would focus on different benefits of my job, I remember being in high-school and I would go out of my way to hide the fact that I’m reading books in my spare time, because it was simply not cool.

That’s because during our teenage years our personalities are fickle and we cling on to whatever makes us look cool or grants acceptance or respect from the other kids. Compromising the things that we care about isn’t necessarily healthy, but completely normal during our teenage years.

However, an important part of growing up is to stop turning to others to figure out what we should do and instead listen to ourselves to figure out what kind of person we want to be. Often this is a mix of discovering internal preferences and simply making the decision that we want to be a certain type of person and then living up to that. Being able to distinguish between what we care about and what was forced on us by others is crucial to living a fulfilled and meaningful life.

Unfortunately not all of us go through this process and that’s when we end up being like a leaf in the wind trying to live up to the standards of whatever person we are dealing with. At least that’s what happened to me when I went back to my home town trying to appeal to each person’s taste, instead of clearly saying why I cared about my job.

In order to stop being a leaf in the wind, it’s important to define our own values. Values act as a compass in our lives and give us direction and meaning.

Russ Harris, a pioneer in the field of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, said

“values are our heart’s deepest desires for the way we want to interact with and relate to the world, other people, and ourselves.”

Of course during different contexts different values become a priority. For example in a career setting being “hard working” is important to me, however trying to live up to that value would be kinda weird when I’m at a party.

To define one’s values is obviously not always easy. It can even be really hard to let go of what your friends, your mom or your boss think is the right thing to do. However, this shouldn’t hold you back from thinking about it. Over time you’ll get better at listening to yourself and noticing what’s important to you. It’s a process that takes time, but every time you do it and reflect on it you’ll move closer to the core.

As soon as you formulate your own values you can constantly check in to see if your behavior is in tune with your values or if you are trying to impress someone or overly adjusting to the other person. So in the situations from the beginning where I talked to my childhood friends I could have asked myself “Am I saying this because I really care about this or because HE cares about it?” And it would become apparent that I’m just adjusting.

Therefore having figured out what your values are makes it a lot easier to be yourself, because now you actually know what it means to be yourself.

The most extreme case where it becomes apparent when somebody has no idea what their values actually are, are guys on a first date. Usually they try to adjust to whatever the other person cares about, but since they have no idea yet what the girls’ values are, they end up trying all different things to figure out what sticks. Or in Louis CK’s words

“A guy during a first date is just a mess. He has no actually personality. He is just a mish-mash of different kinds of dudes for a couple of seconds each. Just anything. No cohesive…Just like random notes cut out of a magazine…Just like a blind dick in space….Just thrusting in infinite directions. Hopefully to find pay dirt at some place.”

So to combat this “blind dick in space” phenomenon define for yourself what YOU care about.

On the deepest level we emulate other people’s values because we hope for their appreciation and acceptance. Ironically, when we stop adjusting and instead focus on living up to your own values, one side effect is that other will respect you more. You might not build immediate rapport with everybody, but people will sense that you are real and authentic, which usually draws people in.

And that’s exactly the experience I had over the past years. The more I started to unravel what it is that I care about and then communicate it, the more people began to lean in. So when someone asks me nowadays about my career I answer honestly and say “It’s going great. My work is very intellectually challenging and I can help a ton of people at the same time. I love that!”

And now….

It’s your turn.

If you sometimes suffer from the “blind dick in space” phenomenon and try to overly adjust to fit in, start independently defining your own values. As soon as you’ve done this, you can begin to catch yourself every time you are trying to adjust and then focus back on your values.

Defining your values is an ever-improving process and it takes some practice. The trick is to simply start somewhere and then move closer and closer to the core. You can kick things off by using this worksheet to define your values: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Values Worksheet

SOURCE

16:25:00 - By Vincent 0