I Will Not Die

Now that is the best kind of war.

Not only is it the best because it’s the sort that makes the best films and the best novels, but it’s also the best because it’s the most winnable kind of war to wage.

The Best Kind of War

It makes for the best of entertainment because it’s the brutal kind of total war that brings to mind the epic, almost endless feud. We’re talking about Greece versus Troy. We’re talking about the free world against the Nazi clenched fist.

It’s the most winnable kind of war because if knowing your enemy fully is the primary requisite to a successful campaign, then you are guaranteed access to the best spy available. You have an ear to anything and everything that’s said, planned, devised. That information will become the decisive betrayal that turns the course of the war into your direction.

But before we get too far, we have to make sure that he or she who you declare to be your mortal enemy is in fact just you and you alone.

Make Your Enemy the Right One

So who is your enemy? Or, if you’re particularly lucky, who are your enemies?

If you’re a younger version of me, they are your father, your jealous bosses, your angry spouse, your coworker. They are your government, your birthright, your poor luck. Your lack of rich friends, rich family, your lack of opportunity. Fight them if you want. Fight them all bloody hell. At the end of the day, bloody knuckles and all, you will still find more of them.

You won’t win that way.

If you choose to fight external enemies, you will squander your precious few days faced off against a horde whose ranks will gladly replenish themselves right in front of your flailing arms and courageous yells of valor. They will mock you.

You must square off in the mirror.

Total War Against Yourself

The less futile route is to envision some future life whose sandy beaches and blue skies above taunt your mind behind the closed lids of your eyes. Imagine who you want to become. He or she must be your new hero; the uncanny villain could be your present self.

At this stage your enemy is just one.

Now this is familiar turf. But far from being a villain of villains, this antagonistic couple is composed of mere antagonists. Like a carefully guarded agreement the future you can gain the epic upper hand and guide with a kind of grace found mostly in full friendship, the present you off on a journey to meet the future you.

Enemies Fewer Than You Think

If it’s your boss who prevents your ascent, you can fight your boss or you can leave. If it’s your father who strangles your growth, you can battle him or walk away. If your friends are holding you back, you can try to change them or you can go off and look for new ones. In each case, the only versions whose outcomes you can guarantee are the ones where you face off against yourself.

You have within you the possibility to make the greatest gains.

You should just remember that those gains will come from your encounter with yourself. Everything else is just a waste of good war.

Dereck :: Nov.06.2008 :: Growth, Perspectives, Success :: 24 Comments »

So long as they do one thing consistently throughout their failings:

Keep on trucking along.

And that’s what I’m going to keep doing. Ultimately, that’s the primary theme of this whole site.

Friends, I’m not going to be able to raise enough money to go on the bike trip before it gets too cold. While I received more generous help than I ever could have imagined early on, I’ve struggled to reach an audience that is large enough, and I’ve failed to communicate my efforts in a compelling enough way. While my efforts have certainly resonated very well with some people, they have not resonated with a very wide range of the people who have heard about it.

So I’m going to keep what I’ve raised so far, and continue to communicate my efforts to people over the winter. I’m also going to try to reform the way I tell people what I’m doing to make it more meaningful for people who come here, but who do not have the benefit of knowing me fully.

I’m also going to initiate some other ways of raising funds through more tangible means, in case they will appeal to another subset of visitors. One example will be using wee-books as several people have suggested I try. I’ve got a couple of high-profile guest posts that I’ve written for other blogs in the chute and I will be writing more over the next few months.

In the meantime, I’m going to refocus my writing away from the bike trip a little because quite frankly, I don’t want to become a bore. I don’t want to alienate too many readers because I’ve spoken so much over the last month about a topic which may not interest them.

At the same time though, this blog has had its best month ever. In fact, during October, it has had almost 70,000 page views. In all of the months before October combined the total was just over 50,000. So October alone has had nearly 50% more traffic than all other months before it together. I’d like to continue that trend by writing more about my core topics.

In other news:

I haven’t been looking forward to the prospect of staying at the job I’m at, confined to the cubicle from which I was hoping to escape by going on the bike trip, so…..

I put my notice in a few weeks ago.

Today is my last day. Three more hours, exactly. While I do not have a new job lined up, I hope to find something (even if it’s temp work or several part-time jobs) early next week. It’s senseless to stay here anymore, considering the degree to which I dislike it. Why do I dislike it so much? The answer to that should be coming this weekend. It’s complex and deserves some serious space all to its own. I’m writing a whole article about my experiences here.

Finally, after I put in my notice, some fortuitous opportunities have surfaced.

I might be returning to school in January. After all these years of working tirelessly and without benefit or advancement toward my main goal, I might be sitting right on its doorstep.

Dereck :: Oct.31.2008 :: CUBE, Success :: 16 Comments »

Yes actually, you can. Significantly.

Somehow I keep managing to attract a wide variety of pretty bright people to this blog, so I thought I’d write on the topic of getting smarter. One reason this is so important to so many people is that a major obstacle people think they face when they consider moving up in the world is that the next step requires them to be smarter than they think they are now.

This article brings together a lot of material from across the Web all related to mental function, and ends on how to solve logic puzzles, which happens to be one of the ways you can get smarter. It’s a good resource to save and come back to, or to share with your friends to use too.

Can you make yourself smarter?

Defining “smarter” is always kind of tricky, but we’ll just say, for the sake of this article, that we’re referring to fluid intelligence-related activities like problem solving and memorization. These are the kinds of skills that can impress potential employers and business partners. Like when you can throw down some quick calculations and snap facts and events down on the table like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. Okay, maybe not quite that good, but still, this stuff works.

It turns out that even though scientists believed for decades that the number of brain cells we have is constant, this may not be true at all. They used to believe that the number of connections between the cells was something that could increase, but now we know that both are possible. So how do you encourage new cell growth and new connections between the cells?

How to do it

Various articles similar to each other share lots of the same basic ideas. These include:

• Getting adequate rest,
• Eating nutritiously,
• Getting exercise, and
• (the most common one) Reading

Oh yeah, and easy on the booze.

Lots of other ways

Even more common activities like gardening and even woodworking can stimulate mental function, and even better, possibly prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

Now where was I? Who? Oh right.

It doesn’t just have to be crossword puzzles and algebra either. This video has some other novel activities and foods that can contribute to increased brain function. But besides these, there are even other ways we can contribute to and benefit from being more intelligent. Like having a much wider world view. Is your world getting bigger or smaller? I like that.

Is this going to take a while?

Constantly exercising our memory seems to be a huge factor in getting smarter. In some cases, seeing a measurable difference in standardized testing can happen in just a few days or weeks. But don’t just believe it from a single source. There are more.

Probably one of the most important things you can do is to make “exercising your brain” a habitual part of your life. The most fabulously brilliant, funny and well-written example of the joys of adopting a summer reading project can be found here.

We have ridiculously complex brains

They’re so complicated and able to do amazing feats, that they can even grow completely new pathways and even operate normally while almost being completely absent. I’d say the possibilities are almost endless if we can be fully normal when having almost no brain at all. What do you think?

Flex your brain like your biceps

Another way to increase your brain function is to try to visualize complex abstractions in your head, or to make your brain do things it doesn’t want to do. Here’s one of my favorites: first see which way she spins when you look at her, then see if you can get her to start spinning the other way. Then see if you can make your brain flip back and forth on command. Sometimes it takes me a good ten or twenty seconds to get her to switch on command. (If you get stuck, leave a comment below and I’ll give you a hint on how to do it.)

Logic puzzle time

Lots of people get stuck on logic puzzles. I found one recently that was actually pretty tricky. It took me over 80 seconds to solve. For right now, I’ll just present the logic puzzle, then after a few days, I’ll add a couple of things to this article. I’ll add the solution, and I’ll also go through a quick tutorial on how to approach these so you can solve them more quickly in the future.

Here’s the word problem/puzzle:

Mondays and Tuesdays are the days that Sarah, Rick, and Neo shop together for books.
The books they purchase are either history or fiction. they each only buy one book per day. Here are some rules for their selections:

1. Either Sarah or Rick will pick history, but not both of them.
2. If Sarah picks history, Neo picks fiction.
3. Neo and Rick do not both pick fiction.

Which one of the three could have purchased a fiction book on Monday and a history book on Tuesday?

Feel free to think about it, and like I said, I’ll post a follow up soon.

Dereck :: Aug.05.2008 :: Growth, Success :: 7 Comments »