Mind the Beginner

How often do you complain about something? Be it the weather, another driver, a service or simple about yourself that you’re not good enough? Everpopular are curse words (when your computer crashes) and quick sarcastic remarks. You’re not alone.

It has a been a while ago, actually it was back in 2007 when the pastor of a Kansas City church told people in his congregation he wanted them to test their limits. “The one thing we can agree on, is there’s too much complaining.” according to the Rev. Will Bowen, and so he asked the group to stop complaining, criticizing, gossiping or using sarcasm for 21 days. An insane idea so far, how would you monitor something like that.

Another stroke of genius: the Reverend issued purple bracelets to those who were willing to take on the challenge. If someone caught himself complaining he was supposed to take off the bracelet and place it on the other wrist. A simple way to physically label a complaint. As soon as a wrist-swap was made, of course the counting started over. Rev. Bowen took three and a half months to reach his 21 day milestone.

The media hype

On the website www.acomplaintfreeworld.org there is a counter stating that over 6.3 million of these purple bracelets are in circulation around the world. You could say that’s a huge number, or you could realize that there are over 307 million people living in the USA alone. They also have a twitter account, with just over 400 followers. On facebook just 12,000 people like them. Looking at it that way it’s not a huge success. But that’s entirely besides the point here.

Obviously you don’t need a swank purple bracelet. You could swap your watch, a ring, the keys in your pocket or even that mala you wear around your wrist. Anything that is easy enough to do but takes enough effort to make the act of swapping something to complain about. Use your own imagination here but choose something that you can consistently, anywhere and any time.

Complaining gets you nowhere

Most of the time complaining is just a way to vent irritation about something, to let the people around you know you disagree. But does that really do anything? A quick complaint is so easy, a quick stab at something. Does it change what just happened into something that no longer irritates you? If it’s a person you complain about, that person will either still be there tomorrow (a colleague) or they won’t (a total stranger in the street).

If that person is still there tomorrow, clearly complaining won’t do you any good because you’ll still have to be in their presence for some reason. If that person is not there tomorrow (or even in five minutes from now) and is a complete stranger, all you did was let the world know what you thought. Is the world waiting to hear your negative thoughts? Or will others start complaining about you because you complain?

Likewise complaining about a failing computer won’t get it fixed, complaining about a lack of money won’t make you rich and complaining about how other people drive (you -of course- are an excellent driver) won’t change how they drive. It might just be because they are not in the same car as you. Just a thought.

Investigating self

Everybody complains, it’s a simple fact of life. Although some people complain far less than others. Complaining actually can make a difference, but only if you complain to the right people who can actually do something for you. In general other people aren’t waiting to hear you complain about something just like you don’t want to hear others complain all the time. That is, unless you have a common subject to complain about in which case you get a group of people complaining to each other about the same thing, and nobody doing anything about it.

What do you complain about and what does it do for you? Please share in the comments.

Have you ever tried to deliberately mess something up? It’s hard to make it look convincing isn’t it? It’s impossible to create an genuine mess when you know how not to mess up.

But looking at “how to mess up” isn’t what we are after, we’re always looking for ways not to mess things up obviously. The internet is overloaded with “how-to’s” to take your hand and guide you through all the steps and help you not to mess up. It’s all very nice obviously, but it doesn’t focus on what it is that makes you fail.

Why you fail

Did you ever stop and think about why you fail at something? Why it’s not the best you can do? If something is the best you can do but it’s not good enough, is it still a failure? That’s up to you, but  would it be the same kind of failure if you didn’t give it all you have to give and so failed. Knowing full well that if you gave everything you’d succeed.

If you’re just not good enough, you’ll just have to get better. And that’s not what this blogpost is about. This blogpost is about failing where you could (should?) have succeeded just because you didn’t give it your best.

A few questions for the conscience

Look back at your resent failures, yes it’s painful but it’s for the greater good here. Did you fail because of not being good enough or because you were slacking. With those failures you were slacking on, can you recall working on the project? I’m going to make a few guesses here:

• You weren’t focused
• or worse.. you were multitasking *shudders*
• and you weren’t spending enough time on the project

I know, I know, it’s almost as if I was there with you and have seen what you were doing. There are two problems here, the time spent and the focus.

Spending enough time

Taking just 20 minutes to work on a task is certainly a good idea, but by itself it will do nothing for you. You’ll have to do more than just sit there and watch a timer as it counts down. Watching it will actually slow it down! Spending enough time has a lot to do with knowing what you actually want or need to do. As soon as you have a clear images of the goal, make an estimation on how long it will take. The first pit-fall presents itself: your estimation is off, maybe even by as much as 90%. Either you over exaggerate the time it takes (no wonder you’re reluctant to do it) or you thought it was far easier than it actually was  (no wonder you got in trouble at the deadline).

Focus

If you have read the four hour workweek you know the Pareto principle: 80% of the work gets done in 20% of the time. Great! So now you can cut down your estimation by 80%. Wrong again! The 80-20 principle when applied to work implies that the 20% of the time you spend on work you actually do the best you can. You focus on the task, no distractions whatsoever. No checking facebook, twitter or steeping a pot of tea. Petting your cat or answering the phone, although nice breaks aren’t to productive as well.

Giving it your best: combining focus and time

In the time you actually work on something, do just that and nothing else. You might find it hard to keep that focus but with some training in meditation it’s actually not that hard. Steeping some tea or brewing a cup of coffee will have to wait until you take a short break. For whatever length of time you are working, cut out all distractions and know exactly what it is you are working at. You can do it!

Fail to fail

If you spend enough time and focus on whatever it is you are doing, you-can-not-fail. It is now impossible for you to mess up. And if you do fail, you either, didn’t focus enough, didn’t spend enough time or spent your time focused on the wrong thing.

Now you know how not to fail, what are you waiting for?

Are you having trouble focussing on a single task, being constantly distracted by thoughts? Have you ever listened to your mind chattering away in your head?

You have, haven’t you!

At night when you lie in your bed you can’t stop thinking about things, how life should be, what your goals are or what you’ll have to do to become successful.

The good news is, we all do that. The bad news is,  we all do that.

Would you like to learn how to overcome this and get an almost laser-like focus? It’s just one of the benefits of meditation. There are reasons besides enlightenment why people meditate, very practical reasons:

1. You’ll develop a laser-like focus

During meditation you train focussing on one single task. In most types of meditation this task is counting your breath. For 20 to 25 minutes you sit perfectly still and just count every exhale. Each distraction -that is, each thought that is not concerned with the counting- is ignored once you realise that you got sidetracked. And of course, noticing you got sidetracked is the first step in going back to what you were supposed to be doing.

2. You’ll need less sleep

It’s true! If you meditate every day you’ll start noticing that you sleep better. Not only will you fall asleep easier because you can control that chatter in your mind but your sleep will become better as well because you’ve already started to process everything that happened during the day while you were meditating. If you make meditation a part of your bed time ritual, just imagine how rested you’ll feel even before you actually go to bed. Lights out in ten minutes, or less.

3. You unclutter your mind

How stressed do you get when you’re in the big city, in the subway during rush hour perhaps. All those people talking, all those noises. A constant bombardment you try to drown out with your iPod. That might work great in the world out there, but in your head it’s the same thing. A lot of noise, a lot of talking all-the-time. If that won’t get you worked, up nothing will. With meditation you learn to single out that voice in your head that does matter. The rest will go away with time because you no longer listen to them. Your thoughts will become much clearer.

4. Your pain threshold increases

Meditation is quite uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong there, it’s a ritualized form of self-torture with a happy ending. You’ll be sitting in a position that will cause your legs to start aching after 10 minutes and by the end of the session it just might hurt a bit more. Meditating on a regular basis will train you to ignore this minor discomfort and focus on what you are doing instead. It’s not that uncommon for people to actually shed a few tears the first times. That’s all perfectly alright, you’ll be able to handle it soon enough.

5. Your endorphin levels rise

Managing the pain has a lot to do with endorphins. A hormone that reduces the pain signals from your body to your brain and makes you feel good. It’s the same hormone that gets released when you reveice a long hug from your loved one, eat chocolate or take a long run. (The runner’s high) This hormone stays in your body for a short time and if you meditate daily you’ll always have some of it in your bloodstream so you’ll feel good, all day long!

6. You’ll automate happiness

There’s even more to these endorphins. Given enough time – a few weeks- the thought on meditation alone, seeing your meditation mat or folding your hands in the same way as you would while meditating will cause a Pavlovian reaction. What’s so great about that is that wherever you are and you feel like you need a quick fix of “feelinggood” (right before an exam) you can mimic the meditation posture and your body will react. Say goodbye to performance anxiety.

7. Your overall quality of life will increase

After meditating for a while, not only will your focus become better but your overall quality of life will increase too. You’ll feel better about yourself, better about your surroundings and you will have a clear mind that allows you to focus on your goals. Becoming aware of the present moment will lead you to being able to influence the present. A better life starts now, not tomorrow and meditation forces you to be in the present.

A summation: It will make you feel great!

Meditation is good for you. You could find hundreds of reasons and find that they all interlink somewhere. The biggest benefits are:

• your ability to concentrate will drastically improve
• you’ll find discomfort easier to handle
• it will make you feel great!

And all it takes is 20-25 minutes every day. Time you have to spare because you fill that time with unproductive things right now.

If you want advice on meditation or have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line or leave a comment.

Every day I’m confronted with problems, problems of my own and problems other people have. And as with all problems I like to see them for what they are: challenges and puzzles to be solved. Sometimes problems are much easier to solve than you’d think. Take the classic Gordian Knot, a very complex knot impossible to untie but made short work of with a sword. Other problems might not be that easy but are still easy enough when cut down to size a bit.

The trap

The hard part here is yielding the sword properly. Cutting the problem down to size will in the end leave you with a very simple problem to solve, but will the solution still hold in the big picture? You could cut the knot, but what if the owner of the rope would get very upset if you cut the rope, which was a family heirloom? You got so focused on finding a solution to the knot itself that you forgot the context.

Just a few days ago I made this mistake in a very complex problem. I kept reducing and cutting away until I got the simple solution, but I forgot all about the context of the problem. My solution to the small problem would actually do exactly the opposite when applied to the problem in situ.  If someone turns down your solution because of this, they are absolutely right to do so. Nobody wants to make things worse now do they? And of course I’m sorry for suggestion such a stupid and short-sighted “solution”.

Keep the context in mind

Finding answers to questions is what we all do. Even up to the point of “If it won’t fit… get a bigger hammer” or “You’ll just have to make time”. Did you ever try actually making time, let’s not go there. Fact remains that when you whittle down a challenge, reducing it to a single step, that step may no longer be an answer to the question. While simplification is a very nice tool, and you can cut away a lot of things that don’t matter at all. If you cut away even a single chip of the context that has a direct or indirect impact on the problem, you just changed the problem and so the answer.

So there you are hacking away at the problem, making it smaller and smaller. It’s actually starting to look like the answer just like making a statue of an elephant from a piece of marble is as simple as chipping away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.  We all look on while you’re blurred behind a cloud of chippings and then suddenly we hear that dreaded word “oops”.

…

Thankfully you noticed that you messed up and didn’t present your answer as the answer to the question right? What? You didn’t notice!? You were so happily chipping away that you didn’t notice? We’ll just have to display that elephant without a tail and hope nobody bothers to look at the backside of the statue. You might pull it off every now and then, but you will know the tail isn’t there and I’m sure it will get noticed once you realise that the statue was meant to be placed on a low pillar in the centre of a lawn.

The clear view

If you want to simplify problems you’re always free to do so, at your own risk. If you’re to extreme you’ll get into trouble. If you’re not extreme enough you still have a lot of work to do. Simplification is a very delicate business and more of an art-form than just a skill. Something I’ve definitely not mastered yet but am working on every single day to perfect.

What are you trying to simplify?

What is the difference between failure and success? Or more accurately, what is the difference between learning and not learning? A very simple fact of life: You have to make mistakes in order to learn. But that isn’t where things start.

The first step in learning is actually getting of your behind and getting to it. In some cases you’ll have to get on your behind actually (like when you want to learn how to program a computer, desk-flying is the way to go.) but nevertheless, you need to act. Something I’ve been learning the hard way the last few days. For a quick background on that: I’m studying for a few exams and so I’m spending almost all my waking hours on it. Not to pass the exams (it’s important) but to learn more. To end each day knowing things I didn’t know when I woke up. (much more important)

Twenty minutes

By far the best way I know of to learn something is to completely focus on it for twenty minutes at a time. Set a timer and make write down what it is you want to have done in those twenty minutes. Start the timer and immerse yourself in what it is you want to learn. The timer goes off and you grab a quick cup of tea, perhaps some fresh air and after a short break (five minutes) you immerse yourself again for 20 minutes. Spend the first few minutes reviewing what you did in the previous block and then continue with the new things.

Studying this way  you can learn anything you want. Yes it takes some time but that’s common knowledge by now, getting something for nothing is exceedingly rare. You’ll just have to come to terms with it: if you want something you’ll have to work for it.

Twenty minutes, isn’t that a very long time to focus on something? Once you get going, the twenty minutes fly by and the timer will startle you. Seriously, time flies when you’re having fun. And if you’re a bit like me, learning something new is fun and you’re always looking to learn more. Every day brings new opportunity to learn stuff and to go to bed just a bit wiser than when you got up this morning.

Cutting down time

Now we go back to success and failure. What is the difference? It’s time spent on trying to be successful. Nothing more then that! The more time you spend learning how to be successful the more you will learn how to be a failure. In time you’ll learn every single pitfall that is stopping you and you can easily navigate around them. Success!

You’re already and expert with life but I’m sure you want to be an expert in other things too. But here’s another hard truth for you: you only have so many “10,000 hours” in a lifetime to spend. Now if we apply the 80/20 principle that Tim Ferris made popular to that you can become  really really good at something in 2,000 hours. But we can cut that down even further. Learning the basics of something takes far less than that.

If you want only the barebone basics of programming in c++ for instance. That can be done in 160 hours or less. (That’s what my University expects at least, the course Programming 101 is “worth” 6 ECTS, and one ECTS is equivalent to 28 hours of investment). Like a lot of courses students somehow manage to complete the tasks and pass the exams while not investing nearly as much time as expected. Another cut in our hours to leave us with the final number: 100 hours for something as complex as computer programming. That’s 300 blocks of 20 minutes to learn the basics.

Basics

Becoming an expert isn’t all that hard, find a direction and head off into it. Keep going into that direction and you’ll soon be the expert. Teach others how to do the same and become rich. Doing it for them will be even more profitable. Conquering the basics in any field often is more than enough. Do you need to be able to dream html/css/xml to build a website? Of course not, look at this blog for instance. I have no experience with css or xml (yet) and very little html. But I’m running a blog, a successful one at that as well.

You can get a tune out of a guitar on just one string, or if you want something a bit more fancy, learn a power chord and you can slide that all over the neck. Add a distortion and you’ve got rock! 100 Hours of learning to play a guitar and you can join a rockband. That’s all it takes, and you’ll get better while in the band of course.

Ruling the world

Does every guitarist on stage have 10,000 hours spent? If they have now they sure didn’t when they started out in a band. Likewise a computer programmer is capable of producing good basic code within 100 hours. Ruling the world isn’t being an expert, it’s investing twenty minutes at a time learning something so every single day you go to bed wiser, better and smarter than when you got up that morning. Day in day out: keep learning and going to bed wiser and you will rule the world, twenty minutes at a time.

There are more and more things these days, simple tasks and skills that people just have any more. Knowledge that hasn’t been passed on or something, basic skills. If you can’t do these and so pay others to do it for you, it’s going to cost you loads of money and you don’t even get to have complete control. As an added bonus you don’t even know what needs to be done so they can overcharge you. These skills are so basic that you should feel insulted because I claim you can’t do them, and feel ashamed if you can’t do them. I’ll start of with a list of computer-related stuff, basic maintenance. Yes a computer needs maintenance!

Computer skills

1. Properly install a program if needed

That doesn’t mean blindly clicking “okay” and “yes” at every pop-up. The program might be installed, but where to exactly? Will there be shortcuts? (and where), is that language pack installed you won’t be needing?

2. Removing a program if needed

It’s not enough just to locate the folder (in c:/program files most likely) and delete it. This is the equivalent of letting Australia sink into the ocean and forgetting to tell everyone it’s no longer there.

3. Defragmenting your hard disk

Imagine your hard drive is a kitchen. Defragmenting is like doing the dishes, cleaning up, throwing away broken and used things and leaving everything tidy. Fail to do so and in time you’ll have a heap of clutter you can’t find anything in. You clean your kitchen after using it right? Why don’t you clean your hard disk after using it? It won’t do so by itself.

4. Know what cable goes where

It’s not so long ago that people used to ask me where they should insert a floppy disk. Knowing that made me the computer geek. These days there’s a bit more to it. Take a look at the back of your desktop computer. If I unplug every cable there, can you put them back? If you have a laptop, at least you know where to plug in the power, but where do USB, DVI, HDMI, Firewire, PS2, audio and perhaps the VGA cables go? If you can hook up your pc, you can hook up your TV, DVD and everything else.

5. Cleaning the case on the inside

Having unplugged everything you can open up the case. You should never do this unless the power is off! (or you know exactly what you’re doing). Computers cool themselves with air, and so the computer case is essentially a vacuum cleaner. It’s always sucking in air and dust. This dust builds up, covering everything with a nice insulating blanket. If you do not clean this your computer will heat up, your fans will wear out faster and just maybe, you might short-circuit something. Opening up a laptop is generally a bad idea though.

6. Know what all the components are

You know what the keyboard is and the mouse. The screen shouldn’t be to hard either. But once you open the case, can you point out the motherboard, the CPU, the hard disk and the memory modules. This is basic stuff just like finding your car battery and the dipstick to check the oil with. (Both are also basic things to know by the way). Why do you need to know these things? It works, so why worry? You don’t want the garage to do a complete engine overhaul when you have a flat tire. Your power supply has a fan, if that one doesn’t work it most likely has nothing to do with your hard drive now does it. And now the help-desk wants you to bring in your system for a re-install of your operating system. Go figure.

A bit of a mix between software and hardware skills here, and there are many other things you’d think are essential. Sending a mail, adding an attachment, basic file management, setting up a wifi internet connection. You might even thing HTML is basic and everyone should know how to upload a file using ftp and how to download a movie. (Pirate Bay anyone?) Let’s not make things to hard to begin with.

Food skills

Let’s continue with some skills concerning food. I could not hope to cover all the bases here so I’ll give you a general direction in terms of simplicity and basicness:

7. Boil an egg,

Yes you may laugh, but do you know how get a soft boiled egg? can you peal it without having the shell stick? It’s basic. If you know how to boil an egg, northing’s stopping you in boiling rice, potatoes or vegetables.

8. Fry an egg.

If you can’t do this you’d better not try anything more complicated, like baking pancakes. Breaking the egg on the side of the pan without getting shell in the pan is of course essential. Frying the egg with success means you can fry other things too. Brilliant.

9. Brew a decent cup of coffee

I can quite easily brew a cup of coffee that will cost me 25 cents and tastes better than anything you can find at Star Bucks. Let me make this perfectly clear, senseo (or any other pod system) does not produce coffee. At best it’s a black warm liquid what was passed through what was collected off the floor at the coffee-grinding factory a year ago. We’re so used to drinking bad coffee we no longer know what coffee should taste like and now will drink just about anything without question. Coffee that has been preground and is not “best before” some date, Is actually so old it has lost most of it’s qualities. When it comes to vegetables you go to the farmer’s market, demanding fresh vegetables. But with coffee you’ll settle for anything. Why?

10. Brew a decent cup of tea

Just like coffee, brewing tea is actually a basic skill, with a few key bits in there. It’s not just dunking a teabag into boiling water and letting it steep for an undefined period of time, judging by colour. The steep time and water temperature are actually quite different in different tea types, as is the colour. Sounds logical doesn’t it? The wrong temperature (to hot) will get you a very bitter tea, likewise with to long a steep time. Keep temperature and steep time in mind.

11. Wielding a knife

You can buy just about anything pre-sliced at the store. Up to and including tomatoes, lettuce and mushrooms. Nicely packaged in plastic and probably a bit dried around the edges. Not only are you adding to pollution with the plastic, but you’re also spending more money because you don’t chop things yourself. It really isn’t all that hard to use a proper kitchen knife. And remember: A dull knife is far more dangerous than a razor-sharp one. Let the knife do the work for you, don’t use force. Sharpening a knife is not exactly a basic skill, but very useful and will guarantee you that you’re blade is sharp. If you can cut things yourself you can buy your vegetables at the farmers market, saving even more money.

Technical skills

12. Basic bike maintenance

You know I’m Dutch right? And that we Dutch people have more bikes here than actual people? Almost every bike here has a simple dynamo that provides power for lighting. He’s a basic scheme for lighting from a battery:

As you can see the bulb sits in a holder with two contacts on it. With a bike it’s a single contact and a connection to the frame of the bike. The loop back to the negative pole of the  battery (or with a bike, the dynamo) is made through the frame. There are only a few components here and very few things that can go wrong. Most common are a broken wire, a broken bulb or a bad/no contact.

Now I’m a student at the science faculty. A faculty where people know basic physics. A place where people would know how to connect a battery to a bulb. And even there, perhaps one in four bikes doesn’t have working lights on it! People would rather buy those fancy clip-on LED lights than repair their bike lighting. And as the battery runs out they buy a new one. Don’t get me started.

That is part one of bike maintenance. The other two skills I think are essential are: being able to repair a flat tire (will cost you $10-$15 to let someone do it for you, 10 minutes and 20 cents do to it yourself) and adjusting the brakes. That’s no more than a few turns of a nut and last time I checked, brakes are very useful to have function properly. A small side note goes to maintaining proper tire pressure.

13. Changing a light bulb

It’s the classic. A household light bulb is easily replaced, just remember that a bulb will stay hot for a while. Can you change a light bulb in your car though? It’s mandatory here (In many countries of the EU) to have a spare set of bulbs and fuses with you in the car. I wonder how many people here would actually know how to replace those though.

14. A few car skills

Assuming you know how to pop the hood, let’s have a look under there. Where is the battery, the brake fluid, windscreen wiper fluid and the oil dipstick. The fusebox might be in there somewhere too, along with the back sides of the lighting, you can change the bulb from there. The car manufacturers provide you with a nice owners manual they expect you to read, the car-salesmen pray you don’t. It’s all in there and knowing those basics will save you a lot of money.

15. DIY

If you ever bought a piece of furniture at IKEA you must have seen the manual they supply. These people believe you have about the cognitive capabilities of a shrimp. They offer a very easy manual for you to assemble whatever it is you bought. But do you realise that every DIY job is about as easy as assembling something from IKEA? Look up a manual online if you must and after just a few tries you’ll be able to drill a hole in a concrete wall and using a spirit level mount a bookshelf to the wall perfectly horizontal.

Skills of the mind

16. People skills

Talking to people, talking with people, accepting when you’re wrong and admitting it, complimenting others and saying thank you. You get the idea don’t you?

17. Curiosity

Without being curious you will learn nothing. All the skills above are learned within minutes if you are curious however. I bet you can learn everything on this list within a week! They aren’t basic skills for nothing now are they.

18. Patience

There are skills that will not be learned within a week, the people skills I mentioned might prove a bit hard to do in a week for some. But if you’re curious enough and want to learn than you will learn. It’s simple, but it takes time.

19. Common sense

Common sense is highly underrated. A lot of knowledge handed down simply doesn’t hold up to common sense. Did your parents teach you that you should dress warm when it’s cold outside and should never go outside with wet hair? You might catch a cold right? The common cold is a virus transmitted through saliva mainly (coughing). There is no link between being in cold weather and catching a cold. It’s more likely to do with people huddling up in winter and closing all sources of fresh air like windows. One sick person in a huddle with other people and no fresh air. Got it? If you can think you can deduct what’s really going on with common sense.

It doesn’t take that long to learn

There are so many simple things out there that you can learn within an hour or less that it’s very strange that we pay others to do them for us. Would you rather stay ignorant and have others laugh at you behind your back because you can’t do a simple thing? Or are you going to take matters into your own hands. These simple skills is what will make you confident to take on bigger things, these simple skills will save you a lot of money, these simple skills will make life easier.

It’s all so simple, don’t you agree? This list is far from complete, If you think a skill should be in this list, please do share it with us all in the comments.

Like so many students I have a student loan, it’s not pretty but it’s there. It’s a statistically sound assumption to say that you have some form of debt too. Especially if you live in the USA. Although I don’t know my exact amount of debt to the cent that is a figure that keeps haunting me. But you know, there are two types of people with debt:

1. Those who are fully aware of their financial situation
2. Those who have a vague idea at best

Either you know you have a debt, how big it is, and what it’s doing from week to week or you have no insight in your financial situation. The reason I don’t know my exact debt is because I’m not to good with numbers. A click of the mouse will bring me to GNUcash. A totally free accounting program (Linux, Windows and OS X) that lets me keep track of every single cent I spend, earn and is otherwise added or subtracted from my assets and liabilities.In big red numbers is my student loan, down to the last cent. GNUcash lets you keep track of everything, in as many categories as you deem necessary. Form big ones like that student loan down to small ones like cash you find in the street. (Do you leave free money on the ground? I sure don’t!)

Keep track

As mentioned in “Your money or your life” it’s vital to “keep track of every cent that comes in to or goes out of you life”. It’s so important that on one page alone it’s printed three times, in bold. (Page 67 if you want to see) and I couldn’t agree more. The benefits are clear:

• You’ll never wonder at your balance again, and have no idea where it all went
• You’ll know exactly how much came in this month and how much was spent
• These two combined let you see if you live below your means
• You learn where your vices are if you have them.

Setting up GNUcash takes a little bit of time and the learning curve is a bit steep in the beginning but it’s a really easy program after the initial setup. No fancy layout, it’s minimal and does only what it’s supposed to do. You can generate graphs for just about anything but the most useful one is income vs expenses. Three collumns per period show you how much came in, how much went out and the difference. If the difference is chronically negative you’re having a serious problem. if it’s always positive, you’re living below your means. This is where you want to be for it’s no more than common sense to spend less than you earn right? The amount you don’t spend you can save for a rainy day or pay off that debt. If you manage to live below your means habitually your debt will decrease and in time you will no longer be haunted by that negative figure. Knowing your ghost makes it all the less scary.

If you have no clear idea on your financial status: Start keeping track as of today!
(Yes, every single cent)

I promise you, although it’s hard at first you will get better at it and soon it will become a habit, a very healthy one.

Some more reading:

The Four Noble Truths about Money

Winning the Lottery by being Frugal

The Defective Consumer says: Eat your vegetables

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If you’re not interested in effective writing or have mastered the skill of writing skip this blogpost. If you’re like me and always on the lookout for tips to make things more effective, this one if for you!

Block quotes are one of the three attention-grabbers when scanning an article to see if it’s worth reading. Read the blogpost to discover the other two.

Yesterday I dug up and old syllabus from my previous education as therapist. It was about effective writing and there were some nice pointers in there I really want to share with you. Over the years there have been a lot of blogposts and entire blogs on writing effectively. But as of yet there is one rule in my syllabus that I haven’t found out there yet. It might be, it might not be, at least now it’s here on this blog.

The rule of seven:

• No more than 7 sentences to a paragraph
• No more than 7 paragraphs to a chapter
• No more than 7 chapters to a text

With a margin of 2 on all these.

The word count

Simple isn’t it? But there is more of course. The maximum length of a sentence that  people can comprehend is related to education. It’s bit harsh but people who didn’t finish high school can’t handle sentences the way academics can. If you want to write a text that’s readable for everyone sentences should be no longer than 10 words. High School drop-outs can take 14 words and 24 words is a suitable length for academics. It’s not set in stone but it’s a good guideline to keep in mind when writing. Who is your audience? It’s quite easy to overestimate your readers.

Combining these two rules we get between 1250 and 7290 words to a text for everybody, and 3000 to 17496 words for academics. Somewhere in the order of 7000 words seems the ideal length for the typical eBook and 980 for a blogpost. All these are rough estimates of course but using these you can expect that an eBook over 17500 words long will surely be a bit on the long side.

Improving readability can be done by including underlines, bold, and italics but especially underlines are not a particular good idea in blogposts. After all, links in blogposts are almost always underlined and you could send the wrong signal. A text full of underlined words at first glance would seem like a text full of links. It could get even worse if you underline a word and make it blue as well. Now surely your first impression is that it’s a link. Did you try and click it?

Subheadings

are another way of grabbing attention and dividing a text to improve readability. It draws the attention and effective subheadings will almost lure the reader deeper into the text. The title of the article is the first thing people see and so that too should grab attention while covering the essence of the article. Not to long and definitely to the point, it should leave the reader with the feeling of “I need to read this”. These aren’t all the tools you have to write effectively. Blogreaders are a special breed of readers, they want the information in quick, scannable bits and are always in a hurry. As a blogger you can help your readers with that and provide highly scannable content.

One of the easiest things to scan is the:

• The list
• it’s short
• easy to scan
• and provides structure
• see what I mean?

Chances are you already scanned the list before actually reading the blogpost. Together with the subheadings these are two of the three most scannable features in any blogpost. The last one you’ve probably already scanned as well before deciding to read this post. It’s the block quote at the beginning of this blogpost. These three text-based eye catchers are what grabs you at a first glance. (Four if we count the title of the blogpost.) That leaves us with one non-text eye catcher that is absolutely crucial. A picture is worth a thousand words and doesn’t increase the word count! A bad picture or no picture at all will seem dull and uninspiring. The right picture makes or breaks a blogpost.

The closing line to a blogpost is where you make your statement. Use all the tools you have, make your blogpost scannable, make a clear statement, and don’t forget to write both a good opening and closing  line, they really matters.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards – Soren Kierkegaard

In my previous post the Truth had a central role. In this blogpost again the Truth is an important thing. The Truth after all is what is right now, this very instant. And as soon as you think about it you’re thinking about the past. You can’t even pin the word “now” to actual now before it becomes past. Trivial though it seems this means that you can’t capture the moment. All you can do is accept it and live in it without trying to fight it.

So many people out there are constantly looking towards the future or the past to identify the perfect moment to do something. Mostly that moment was in the past and if you’re lucky you might find a moment in the future that’s perfect for what you want. The problem with that moment in the past of course is that you can’t relive that moment although you might understand the lessons and take that with you into the future. The problem with the future is that it’s distracting from the now.

Living forward is all there is. One moment after the next, following each other at instant speed. Trying to understand is dealing with the past, trying to look into the future is distracting from what is happening. We continuously hunt down the precious moments in our lives, but we’re always late or early.

Living without dealing with past or future robs us of all meaning it seems. I recall a fellow student of Cheng Hsin a few years ago who described trying to be perfectly in the now, the more he tried the less he was actually doing because almost all tasks were either dealing with something from the past or preparing for the future. Eventually he decided to give up in being perfectly now because it was boring and unproductive. He took things so far that he wouldn’t even brew a cup of coffee because brewing was preparing for the future event of drinking the coffee. This lasted for only a few hours before the decision to give in and act “normal” again. Possibly it’s the caffeine addiction that pushed him over the edge.

Preparing for now is impossible, preparing for the past senseless, preparing for the future a shot in the dark. That shot in the dark is your best guess out of the three options and is a very good idea indeed. Study the past and understand, prepare for the future and brew that cup of coffee, just don’t forget about this moment.   …to late… it already passed.

A bit more reading on the subject:

-Time-place dissonance and the quick fix

-The prison of the mental world

Before you read this take a look around…

Did you have a quick look around the room, your desk area and perhaps even your desktop? Is it cluttered? Are there things there that you haven’t used in 2009? Things collecting dust that somehow just keep put but have no actual use?

Seriously, is there anything there you just spotted that you didn’t use for a whole year? The obvious question to ask as soon as you spot something like that is “Why is it still here?”

At least, that’s what the minimalist would ask himself. Always striving to make things less cluttered and as an added bonus easier to keep clean and tidy. I did that very thing this weekend and it resulted in the removal of two bookcases from my room, books included. That’s 2/3 of my shelf space and of course a drastic reduction of things to dust.

To keep things from looking to empty I rearranged what was left and added a two-seat sofa. Although I live in a single room at least now I have proper seating which means that the bed (which was also my sofa) can now be used exclusively for what it’s meant. The TV is no longer easily visible when sitting at my desk and it’s impossible to watch from the bed.

What happened here is something that might seem very insignificant but actually is nothing of the sort. We humans tend to combine just about anything we do and most of the time it’s not very productive at all or at least we aren’t mindful of what we are doing:

• Eating and watching TV
• Trying to fall asleep and watching TV
• Studying behind a PC…. with Internet (social media etc.)
• Studying with the TV on
• Working and playing

Now all of those save one are things you actually don’t want to be doing to often. Very soon you’ll have the habit of eating while watching TV and don’t notice you’re emptying a whole bag of crisps. It’s just suddenly empty. I’m sure you’ve had that happen at least once. The same goes for trying to fall asleep with the TV on. Your retina keeps getting bombarded with light. A great way not to get restful asleep. Sure, most people claim they can’t sleep without the TV to “help them”. But that’s because they have a different problem: The bed is not the exclusive domain of sleep.

The Pavlovian Bed

Humans are creatures of habit and as such we associate things with one another. We get Pavlovian reactions to things. When I was young my parents didn’t allow me to have a TV in my bedroom. A very wise choice when I think back, of course at the time I couldn’t disagree more. You see, my bedroom was used for but a few things and my bed for only one. So as soon as I went to bed my body knew it was supposed to go t sleep and so triggered all the necessary responses. My eyes closed and I was asleep within 20 minutes or less. Reading wasn’t part of the sleeping ritual, or rather it was but not while having my body in a horizontal or half-seated position. Bed = sleep and nothing else.

In later years I got that TV I wanted, now I could watch TV from the comforts of my bed. How wonderful. My body disagreed of course because now it got it’s signals mixed up. Was the bed for sleeping or for watching TV? Or should it do both things at the same time, and not doing a very mindful job of either. The bed was no longer the exclusive domain of sleep.

Distractionless Internet

The same goes for your workspace, your desktop, your sofa. Is a sofa meant to be used for a quick nap? Why not use the bed for that one, at least you won’t fall asleep during the movie because sleep isn’t triggered by the sofa. Homework/studying and your RSS reader or Internet browser? Though far more subtle preferably these two shouldn’t mix either, unless you need the Internet to study. And be honest here (talking to myself) do you really need social media, IRC, music and the TV on to study? Nope, most of the time all you need is your textbook, a piece of paper to make notes, previous notes and in some cases a computer to write something. (or in my case, write code). There are but few reasons to keep connected to the Internet while studying and all of them have an inherent danger of distraction. Wikipedia for instance is a great resource to help clarify things, but it’s all to easy to become distracted and before you know it you’ll be reading about the history of bonsai trees. IRC is a great way to keep in touch with fellow students and ask questions when you are stuck. If you can use it exclusively for that purpose, brilliant. If you get sucked in to idle chatter and random uselessness, better examine what it is you had planned and if what you are doing is part of that plan.

It’s hard to keep things separated, to have a clear idea about what something is for. Is your bed the place to sleep? If your desk the place to work and your sofa the place to watch TV? Or is eating at your desk, sleeping on the sofa and watching TV from the bed the way things go.

Books and Dust Bunnies

So what do the bookcases I mentioned have to do with it? Well, the bookcases were not only holding books, there was other stuff in there too. And everything in there hadn’t been used for at least the whole of 2009 and I had the dust bunnies to prove it. Getting rid of the bookcases made room for proper seating and relocation of the TV. Now watching TV is a major time suck mind you. So what better way to notice that than to make it impossible to watch from anywhere but the designated seating.

Concluding I’d like you to have another look around for two things:

1. Are there things there that you didn’t use in 2009, if so ask yourself why they are still there.
2. Do you have designated (preferably exclusive) area’s for your most important your activities?

I challenge you: For this month, use your bed only for sleeping – if you’re not sleeping, don’t be in bed – and please do tell me about your experiences.