Global warming means dangerously rocky rides for fliers
White-knuckle turbulence powerful…https://t.co/fAfHVZnbiu http://pic.twitter.com/TkhKyb3KO5— Sig Nordal, Jr (@signordal) April 10, 2017
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Differentiating what one can change and what one cannot control in life can be invaluable for some people. As obvious as it sounds, there is no point in trying to change what is outside of one’s control.
However, that shouldn’t always be the case.
Although we can’t control everything, we still have the power to change how things can affect us. And it starts with changing perceptions.
A full understanding of the things that are out of our control gives us a greater sense of power and authority over our own lives. Accepting our inability to influence many external events allows us to focus our time on the things we can change.
For example, we cannot change our past but we can certainly change our future by influencing the present. We always have the choice to focus on the parts of our lives that can make us happier. A lot of people fail to realize this and they get pushed to a series of disappointments trying to chase things outside their control.
Although there are things in our lives that we don’t have control over, we can always work on how we think of them. How we react to a situation is ultimately our choice. One can choose his own perception of a certain event.
Take, for example, traffic.
We can’t always control the traffic in front of us but we can choose how we’ll react to it. We can shout and argue or stay calm and collected.
“Reality doesn’t bite, rather our perception of reality bites” – Anthony J.D’Angelo
In essence, there are still some controllable aspects to the things we consider uncontrollable. Once you know what they are, you’ll have more power, freedom, and clarity.
We have our own mind and its power is endless. Our choices can never be taken away from us.
You can start off by identifying which areas of your life are outside and inside of your control. By differentiating them, it will give you more clarity.
Once you know the things that you don’t have too much control over, examine your feelings about them. If you realize that you are unhappy, try to start changing perceptions. You’ll be surprised at how much it can improve your life.
A common example is the rain. We cannot change the weather; it is external to us. If it rains, we should let go of any negative emotion and simply accept that we cannot do anything about it. We can, however, change our perception of it. We can either complain and be miserable, or we can choose to be strong about it and see it in a positive manner. Rain today will allow us to appreciate sunny weather tomorrow. Also, rain in itself can be a pleasurable thing. There is no point building up negative energy within you for things which are not in your control.
1. We will live a happier life. Once we realize that most of the things that don’t make us happy are outside of our control, we can easily start changing perceptions.
For example, when we know that we can’t force certain people to agree with us all the time, we can accept that they won’t agree and therefore be at peace with it.
See Also: 10 Life-Changing Tips That Will Boost Your Happiness
2. We will live a life feeling more powerful. Although we can’t win all battles, there are still things in our lives that can be controlled. We just have to realize that we have an advantage over them.
3. We will live a life with greater clarity and focus. The more we understand that it is our choices that shape us, we’ll be able to have a better understanding of the people around us.
See Also: How To Find A Dose Of Clarity In Your Life
4. It will motivate us. Because we now have a greater sense of control, we can start working harder towards the goals that truly matter to us.
We shouldn’t let outside events get in the way of pursuing our dreams. Instead, we should focus more on the things we have more control over, like changing perceptions and choices.
These tips will take time and effort before they can completely change your thought process. The positives, however, far outweigh the negatives of inaction so just keep trying.
Don’t try to change what you can’t control. Instead, start changing your perceptions and you can change your reality.
The post Changing Perceptions: Understanding What We Can Control In Life appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Houda Benyamina, the French Filmmaker Who Brought the Banlieues to Hollywood https://t.co/1rhACPFlgn via @newyorker
— Sig Nordal, Jr (@signordal) April 10, 2017
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White-knuckle turbulence powerful enough to seriously injure unbuckled passengers in airplanes could become much more common because of global warming, a new study found. “Anthropogenic climate change is expected to strengthen the vertical wind … #globalwarming
When China’s Dinner Partner Went To War https://t.co/JiJIlMv6ch via @eosnos
— Sig Nordal, Jr (@signordal) April 10, 2017
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For an American president, bombing is easier than thinking. For an American lawmaker or opinion-maker, it costs nothing to celebrate the resolve of a president who bombs. What conclusion will be drawn by the mind of Donald Trump when, after firing missiles at a Syrian government airfield, he is now being promoted to the ranks of the sane and responsible by the people who once characterized him as dangerously unstable?
Books by Jewish writers on Jewish topics usually carry a heavy personal subtext. Whether the author is writing about Yiddish folktales or medieval theology, he is also asking a question: what does it mean to be a Jew—for me to be a Jew? In premodern times, this would have appeared a meaningless inquiry. A Jew was a Jew because he prayed like a Jew, lived like a Jew, and lived in a community of Jews. But what if you are a rationalist, and so you don’t pray; culturally assimilated, so you don’t follow Jewish customs; and a devoted citizen of a non-Jewish country– like Germany in the 20th century or the United States today? What does being born into Judaism mean for such a person? For many modern intellectuals, a good answer has been that Jewish identity involves thinking about Jewish identity. A Jew is someone who wonders what it means to be a Jew.
The genius of George Prochnik, in his new book Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem, is that he surfaces this subtext and makes it his explicit subject. The result is an immersive, passionate work that is really two books spliced together. The first is a quasi-biography of Gershom Scholem, the pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism, whose life encompassed the greatest Jewish quandaries of the twentieth century. The second is a personal memoir, in which Prochnik describes his own experience of moving from America to Israel, where he lived and raised a family for more than a decade, and then moving back again.
Sections of these two tales alternate, creating a meaningful counterpoint, for they are really variations on the same story. Prochnik loves Scholem—and this is clearly a book written out of love, not mere interest or duty—because he offers a role model for a soul in quest of an authentic way to be Jewish. “Scholem’s work effectively substituted for the Bible … I was one of those for who Scholem loomed as a kind of prophet,” Prochnik writes.
Stranger in a Strange Land is not a full biography of Scholem. It covers only the first half of a long life (he lived from 1897 to 1982), draws only on English-language sources (Scholem’s languages were German and Hebrew), and concentrates on certain themes and relationships, especially his friendship with another major Jewish thinker, Walter Benjamin. At the same time, it explores some of the dense thickets of Scholem’s thought, which took the form of commentary on the ancient tradition of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah.
Getting to know Scholem involves a difficult feat of triangulation. To understand why he is important, you have to understand the essentials of Kabbalah, in order to make sense of his revolutionary interpretation of it. You have to be familiar with the social and political context of German Jews in the early twentieth century, where Scholem grew up in Berlin as a highly discontented member of an assimilated family. And you have to know about the history of Zionism, a movement Scholem joined as a teenager, leading him to move to Jerusalem in 1923. (A working knowledge of the writings of Walter Benjamin is also useful.)
These are all complex and controversial subjects, which helps to explain why Scholem is a figure of such fascination. Prochnik performs impressive feats of concise elucidation, taking the reader through Scholem’s life, times, and work in under 500 pages. He offers outlines of Scholem’s major books and close readings of some important essays, such as “Redemption by Sin,” in which Scholem analyzes the antinomian impulse in Jewish mysticism. Still, it is impossible to fully capture Scholem’s significance in a single book for a lay reader, and anyone who comes to Stranger in a Strange Land without some prior knowledge of Judaism and Jewish history is likely to find it challenging.
The title of Stranger in a Strange Land itself has multiple meanings. In the Bible, Moses names his son Gershom–which in Hebrew is related to the word ger, “foreigner” or “sojourner”–because “I was a stranger in a strange land.” That is, Moses was an exile from both Egypt, where he was born, and Israel, where he was destined to go. Scholem was born with the fine German name Gerhard, but when he arrived in Palestine at the age of 25, he exchanged it for Gershom. This was a standard Zionist gesture, trading in a foreign, Diasporic name for a native, Hebrew one; and the name Scholem chose suggested that his life in Germany had been a kind of exile. Yet in fact, it was Palestine that was the “strange land” for him, where he had to make a new life in a new language. What does it mean to leave home in order to go home?
This is the question at the heart of Zionism, and one of the central subjects of Prochnik’s book is what Zionism really means. Scholem was exactly the same age as the Zionist movement—the first Zionist Congress, under the leadership of Theodor Herzl, was held in Basel in 1897—and as he grew up he saw it split into several strands. There was the mainstream Zionism that wanted the gradual building of a Jewish population and institutions in Palestine; the more aggressive Revisionist Zionism that favored confrontation with the Arab population and a maximalist territorial claim; and a less worldly cultural Zionism, which saw settlement in Palestine as the key to a spiritual regeneration of the Jewish people.
Scholem was most drawn to this last definition of Zionism. As a young man, Prochnik shows, he was a kind of spiritual anarchist, against just about every organized society—a feeling heightened by the experience of living through the First World War. This meant that every concrete form of politics felt to Scholem like a letdown. What he wanted was a messianic transformation of the Jewish essence, compared to which building a Jewish state looked like a sordid compromise. In the 1930s, Scholem joined a small group of Jewish intellectuals who agitated for a binational state, in which Jews and Arabs would coexist. But as Prochnik acknowledges, Scholem’s highly theoretical Zionism bore little relation to political reality.
When Prochnik himself lived in Israel, in the 1990s, his hopes for such coexistence were first raised by the Oslo Accords, then dashed by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and Israel’s turn to the right. As he tells the story, personal, economic, and political motives combined to drive Prochnik’s family out of the country. Unlike Scholem, he ultimately found that the place where he was born felt more like home than the Jewish homeland–which is in part a testimony to the difference between Germany and the United States. Yet he retains a love for Jerusalem, and the book concludes with a vision of the city’s pulsating life, in which “the spell of hopelessness is broken.” This book is worthy of the rich, ambivalent, complex, and compelling stories it has to tell; more than a work of history, it is a document of the living spirit of Judaism.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2oj4cyd
This spectacular construction is embedded into the mountain, and is surrounded by thick vegetation. It was built on several levels to adapt it to the unevenness of the terrain. From there, the views of the sea and the mountains that surround it are simply spectacular, and it is definitely one of the great advantages of this house. The view of the calm waters – which during daytime reflects the sun..
The post Parsonson Architects Design a Stunning Contemporary Home in Marlborough, New Zealand appeared first on HomeDSGN.
What do Mark Zuckerburg, Arianna Huffington, Jerry Seinfeld, and The Terminator have in common?
They’ve all been ridiculously successful by hacking their productivity, often in super simple ways. And they’ve all been generous enough to share their methods so that you can benefit, too. Inspired by CEOs, best-selling authors, and even comedians, we’ve collected a gigantic list of advice that can really make a difference.
It’s split into 7 sections. Motivation and Time Management need no explanation. The Productivity and Organisation tips are perfect for busy people. Focus and Success Attitude teach about mindset, and finally there’s a section we’ve dubbed ‘Uncommon Hacks’ – you might find them esoteric or odd, but they’ve been proven to work.
If you have employees, colleagues, or friends who need a boost in productivity and success, please share this post with them!
Identify three things: a daily mantra, your short-term goal, and your long-term goal.
Visualize what you want to achieve before you sleep and as soon as you wake up. Consider it done and in the flesh. As you close your eyes, your visualization should be the strongest and most intense you can make it. Say it is a target profit from your business of $5,000. You should be able to see the money, feel the bills in your hand, and smell the scent of this money.
Create intermittent visual reminders during the day. Use it as your screensaver on your gadgets. Pin up a printed sheet on your workstation, your bathroom mirror, and refrigerator door.
Waiting for the perfect time to start doing something is the perfect procrastination ploy. There is no perfect time. You will always feel quite sleepy, tired, full from a meal, or uncomfortable. Sit down and take that first step in your task.
Whenever you get stuck, lost, or procrastinate big time, take one step. After you finish this one task, move on to the next step. Keep moving forward until you get in the flow and you find yourself completing your big task.
Rewarding yourself whenever you hit your short-term goals is no rocket science. Take it one step further by making sure that your rewards do not undermine your goals, and instead, contribute to them. For example, a huge tub of ice cream will just send you to a sugar crash. (More on this below)
Reward yourself instead with a healthy sushi meal, a new pair of running shoes, or an affordable massage cushion. Studies of massage therapy, for example, show an overall reduction in stress, anxiety, and heart rate. Now that’s a power boost!
A good mentor will help keep you on track and keep you from making newbie mistakes. This saves you considerable time and energy that would otherwise just be wasted.
Identify your golden time and do your hardest tasks during this time period. What is the time of day where your energy and focus is at its peak? Identify and line-up your most brain-intensive tasks for optimal productivity. You’ll enjoy your day better once your hardest tasks are out of the way.
Sounds gross! But, this only means doing the ugly, unpleasant things that you need to do first over the tasks you actually like to do but aren’t that high up in priority. Here’s how you should be prioritizing:
Don’t kid yourself. That 10-minute Youtube break to clear your head won’t end at 10 minutes. This is me speaking from painful experience. I gave Rescue Time a whirl and I was shocked to realize how much time I actually was on YouTube. I’ve since replaced it with stretching, Donothingfor2minutes, or memorizing Japanese kanji.
Being pressured to say yes to doing certain tasks derails you and keeps you from doing your own stuff. Have the confidence to say no when needed.
When you wake up in the morning, don’t fall into the trap of snoozing your alarm repeatedly. It’s a bad start and will make you feel bad the rest of the day. Waking up early, on the other hand, has been proven to be a huge productivity and morale booster. Embrace the morning hours!
Use a calendar system to keep yourself going on a certain habit. Jerry Seinfeld utilized a big wall calendar and a big red magic marker. For every day he wrote on his blog, he put a big red X.
“After a few days, you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
Using a timer (whether physical or digital), break down your work into intervals of 25 minutes or however long works best for you. In between would be short breaks. A successful chain of pomodoros result in longer breaks.
If a task can be done in two minutes, do it. Get it out of the way. This will keep small things from snowballing and nagging your mind. Says who? Says the best-selling author of Getting Things Done, that’s who.
Perfectionism at work can be dangerous. It keeps you too long at one task. Instead of trying to do one task to perfection, do more. For example, if you’re writing an article, trying to perfect the first few paragraphs will keep you from finishing. Write now, right later. (Wasn’t that clever?!)
Bryan Guido Hassan noticed that he got some of his best work done in airplanes. Airplane Days is blocking 1-2 days as if you were on a long intercontinental flight. Turn off distractions, restrict internet access, and go through your high-priority items. (See eating the frog)
Facebook has a loose rule wherein Wednesday is set aside so that their engineers could code. Similar to Airplane Days, set Wednesday (or whatever day makes sense) as a No Meeting Day so that employees can focus on their individual tasks all day.
A lot of entrepreneurs and CEO’s check in on work for a brief time on Sundays. The key point is to check in briefly. This allows Mondays to be more manageable.
Coined by psychophysiologist Peretz Lavie, ultradian rhythms refer to the natural rhythm that the body cycles through every 90-120 minutes daily. I’ll spare you the complex mumbo jumbo but the key takeaway is to concentrate when energy levels are high AND to rest when energy levels are depleted. Top-tier violinists, for example, practice for only 4.5 hours a day in 90-minute bursts.
Distractions cost you more lost time than you think. Turn off notifications for email, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Check these only at designated times.
Keeping notifications on on your email client is a constant distraction as it breaks your focus on your current task. Check email twice a day only — once before lunch and once more before going off work.
Dragging meetings are huge time-wasters. Set the timer. Include only the people who really need to be there (and not just for FYI or for form).
When you are trying to focus, your mind will remind you of laundry, undone dishes, corners that need cleaning, or paperwork that needs organizing. Ignore these distractions. Know that it’s your mind playing naughty tricks on you.
If you know that certain sites make you waste too many precious hours (in my case, it’s YouTube), set up a site blocker. It will help police your bad habits.
If you share your workspace with other people, earbuds are a good “I’m busy” sign. People are more likely to leave you alone this way.
In the same vein, if you want to concentrate on the task at hand, do not make any eye contact with passing co-workers. Eye contact invites communication.
Keep a lemon on hand at work. When you start feeling sleepy or losing focus, squeeze the lemon and smell. It should energize you. Studies show that smelling lemons increases mental stimulation. Other energizing scents are peppermint, rosemary, and eucalyptus (but lemon is my favorite!).
Multi-tasking is a myth. The brain can only attend to one item at a time. And if you think you’re successfully multi-tasking two tasks — driving and talking on the phone for example — then you’re mistaken. The brain is actually switching its focus from one task to the other thus there is no temporal overlap.
Instead of trying to do several work tasks at once, focus on one thing, and do them well by turns.
Different people use different types of sound or music to put them in the zone. These include classical music, ambient music, white noise, or even binaural beats. The excerpt below is from one of our old articles and it influenced me to start using focus songs from that point onward.
“You’ve listened to the same song on repeat for almost two decades?!” I asked in disbelief. He just shrugged and said, “Man, I don’t even hear it anymore. I just immediately get in the zone.”
The author’s friend’s focus song happened to be Derek Webb’s “Down Around You”. I scouted around the net and for others, it’s Explosions in the Sky.
Not checking out after work-hours only sets you up for decreased productivity the next day. At the same time, the blue light from your phone results in insomnia for many people. Keep your phone (and other digital devices) a foot or more away from your head and bed.
If you’re on different platforms, choose only 1 or two at the most and ditch everything else. Checking and keeping up with social media can lead to much wasted time. Instead, hire a social media manager if you need it for your brand.
Before you do one task, set your intention. It’s like a prayer or a meditative state. Close your eyes briefly, focus your energy, and state your intention. For example, “I will finish this business brief today.” Apply this to especially challenging tasks that you have difficulty doing.
Poor health is one of the top causes of poor focus. All-nighters and excessive overtimes are not sustainable for you and your business. Sleep well, eat well, and exercise for consistent high performance. Margaret Heffernan notes that losing one night’s sleep is cognitively equivalent to being over the alcohol limit.
See Also: Are You Sleep Deprived? 8 Health Risks Of Poor Sleep
Still don’t believe us? Just ask Arianna Huffington who, while doing emails, passed out, fell, and woke up in a pool of blood, with a broken cheekbone and a cut over her eye. It was the “wake-up call that changed my life,” she says.
To-do lists can be depressing and set you up for failure instead especially if they are unrealistic for the time frame you set. Instead of daily to-do lists, schedule your tasks instead. I didn’t understand this until I started using the next tip on the list.
If you’re an email rat, utilize Google Calendar. Set it up to remember everything you need to remember including your hourly tasks, if applicable.
Running and managing too many productivity tools is ironically counter-productive. Pare it down to the core essentials that you need and stick to it. In my case, I currently have a Franz-Slack-Google calendar combo.
Don’t try to do everything. Don’t think you’re the only one who can do a certain task. Train the right people well. Let them do 1) shallow tasks or 2) jobs that fall under their specialization. For yourself, do the highest-level tasks that you are best at.
A cluttered desk is a visual cue that brings on stress. Toss the old coffee cups and napkins, throw old paper into the recycle bin, and get your desk organized (but don’t make it an excuse not to work!).
If you work with teams and there are too many working parts and procedures, create a process flow that everyone can access anytime. A Google Doc or spreadsheet is ideal for this. It can be shared, and a well-documented process flow sheet will keep questions, clarifications, and mistakes to the barest minimum.
Training new personnel is very time-consuming. Create video tutorials using Snagit or other easy-to-use tools. Do a demo on your PC while explaining as you go. Snagit records your voice and screen as you go. Instant training material! Uploading to YouTube (and setting the privacy settings) helps make the material easily accessible too.
To keep your brain from jumping from one type of task to another, do similar tasks in one go. It will make your day go smoother.
Keep a paper and pen on your desk. There are times when we remember to do something but it’s not so urgent for us to break our focus on what we’re currently doing. For these cases, jot them down quickly on a piece of paper. This frees your memory for more important things but keeps you from dropping the ball on these tasks.
Trying to remember a ton of passwords is too much work. Not only does it take up memory space in your brain, recovering a lost password is very time-consuming. Use Google’s New Smart Lock, 1Password, or LastPass.
We all come upon interesting stuff we want to read or watch. Rather than stop what you’re doing and breaking your flow, save these with a click using Pocket. Very handy!
We all have tasks we hate. For me, it’s rote work. If you have nobody to delegate these tasks to, then outsource them instead. Outsourcing to the amazing workers at great prices is very cost-effective in the long run.
The body expends too much energy in keeping itself warm when the temp is too cold. Too-low temperatures make you unproductive. Make sure you have the right temperature in your work or home office. (The recommended temp for your thermostat is 70-77 degrees.)
And vice versa. If it is too warm and hot, you’re likely to feel lethargic. Get a cold shower or turn up the AC.
Chocolates, sweets, and other sugary foods can bring on a rush of energy and alertness. However, this is only momentary. When your sugar level spikes, a sugar crash or hangover is sure to follow. You’ll be paying back with subsequent lethargy and fogginess which can bring your productivity down the drain for the entire day.
Working too long and staying focused for long periods can make you forget to drink water. Dehydration can make you sluggish and underproductive.
See Also: Top 5 Tips On How To Stay Hydrated
A confident stance has been shown to influence your mental and emotional well-being. Strike a power pose and bring your swag on. Come on. Try one now!
Studies show that pets boost productivity and improve one’s mood. If you need to relax, instead of checking your Twitter or FB feed, gossipping with your colleague, or watching funny Youtube videos, hug your pet instead (if your dog is not averse to it, that is).
If you’re too fired up about being optimal and productive, it will stress you out and have the opposite effect. Relax. Find your composure. Enjoy each task. You will get more done this way.
As the author Mark Lesser says, do more by doing less.
Albert Einstein is the poster child for curiosity. Research shows that curious people are happier. They also achieve more and succeed more.
Have a grateful heart for every small or big thing. Be grateful for your breath, for your work, for your clients, for your colleagues, for all your blessings, and for moments of happiness during the day. Watch this amazing video for the gift of gratefulness.
Don’t let instances of failure faze you. All successful people powered through their huge and repeated failures. As Arnold Schwarzenegger says, “That’s what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they’ll go through the pain no matter what happens.”
The post 55 Bulletproof Productivity Hacks – Do You Know Them All? appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
From the bottom of the deepest glacial fjord to the summit of its highest peak, Glacier Bay National Park encompasses some of our continent’s most amazing scenery and wildness. If we need a place to intrigue and inspire us, this is it. Alaska’s Glacier Bay is a living laboratory, a designated wilderness, a biosphere reserve and a world heritage site. It’s a marine park, where great adventure awaits by boating into inlets, coves and close to its dynamic, namesake glacier. It’s also a land park, with its snow-capped mountains, spectacular glaciers and vast forests. Photo by National Park Service.
Sig Nordal 