Willpower, part 9: an image of how to use willpower
Awareness / Blog / Fitness

Willpower, part 9: an image of how to use willpower

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Yesterday's post showed some delightful images of children and marshmallows from a video of the marshmallow experiment. If you want to see cute images and hear cute music, the video is great. If you want to improve your willpower, the video doesn't help much. It shows people struggling to use willpower, so you can empathize with them, all the more since children haven't learned to hide their struggles as well, and they're on hidden camera. If that helps you, great. A major…

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February 6, 2012
Willpower, part VIII: images of temptation
Awareness / Blog / Fitness

Willpower, part VIII: images of temptation

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Here is some footage of a remake of the marshmallow experiment I found online. I prefer the stills below to the video they came from. I find the video missed the point and unhelpful. It shows very cute images of very cute kids. Something didn't sit well with me. I think the music tipped me off that the point of the video wasn't to help people develop willpower. It's cutesy. Finally I realized what was missing. Look at the pictures and watch…

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February 5, 2012
Awareness / Blog / Fitness

Willpower, part 0: The value of willpower

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] The ability to use willpower helps you more than you think. Much more. Most of us think about willpower helping us to avoid eating too much chocolate cake, to go to the gym, to quit smoking, and the like. New Year's resolution type stuff. It helps with such things, but it helps a lot more than that. The problem is what we also associate willpower with -- giving in to the chocolate cake, sitting on the couch instead of going to the…

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February 4, 2012
Awareness / Blog / Exercises / Freedom / Humor / Tips

Communications skills exercises, part 10a: examples of voicing your self-talk

[This post is part of a series on Communication Skills Exercises for Business and Life. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Here are examples of two masters of voicing their self-talk, Robin Williams and (I believe) his mentor Jonathan Winters. They make great role models for what level of freedom in communication people are capable of. Before watching, keep in mind you don't have to reach that level to achieve more freedom in communicating to others and yourself. According to Wikipedia, Robin Williams was shy until he began drama in high school and developed his skills through practice. You don't need the impressions, the…

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February 3, 2012
Awareness / Blog / Fitness

Willpower, part VII: what to do with your old motivations

[This post is part of a series on willpower and how to understand and use it. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Say you're using willpower effectively -- you know what you want to achieve and you know once you will yourself get started, emotions will kick in and help you finish. What about the old emotions motivating you to sit on the couch instead of exercise, to eat the pie instead of the carrots, or to yell in anger instead of thoughtfully consider your next actions? If they linger, you may find yourself at the starting point again. Again there are effective and…

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February 3, 2012
Is New York City’s warm February weather scaring you?
Blog / Nature

Is New York City’s warm February weather scaring you?

I don't see many people celebrating New York City's incredibly comfortably warm January and February weather. I think it's scaring people. When I was a kid people would have celebrated 62 degree weather in February. Now, with each of the past eleven years registering in the hottest twelve years on record, the chance we may see that the worst fears of global warming not only in our lifetimes, but in the next few years, seems scarily likely. When charts like this feel more relevant, who wants to celebrate balmy weather when next year may feature global scale crop failures, islands submerging, and worse?

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February 2, 2012
Blog / Fitness / Tips

More on burpees

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] A few words on burpees and working out to follow up the past two days' posts (yesterday, the day before) Having read that some people consider burpees one of the best single exercises, I was happy to try them out. I haven't tried to optimize my workouts, to build as much muscle as possible, to reduce fat as much as possible, or any big or specific goal like that. I only exercise because I enjoy exercising, the feeling of exhaustion afterward,…

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February 2, 2012
Blog

Grand Illusions and North Korea, part 2

Following up yesterday's thoughts on illusions our leaders benefit from, another occurred to me in learning about ping-pong diplomacy, the 1970s sports phenomenon that contributed to opening relations between the U.S. and China. In particular, the United States and Chinese governments followed, not led, the opening process. The government of each country called the other its enemy and armed itself against the other. Yet I expect most people of each nation cared at most little about the others, but certainly didn't care to fight random people they'd otherwise never meet on the other side of the planet. I doubt anyone wanted to pay taxes to develop weapons just to threaten them either. Today we commonly say Nixon opened China. While his visit improved relations, I…

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February 1, 2012
Blog / Fitness / Tips

Who knew a one-minute-a-day workout could do so much?

[This post is part of a series on my daily exercise and starting and keeping challenging habits. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] So what are these burpees I raved about yesterday? First, from the New York Times article that got me started with them: Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations…

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February 1, 2012

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