Sep 5th 09
Posted by Arnold in All in a days work
Marketing guru Seth Godin made an excellent post today. While this is targeted to a business or marketing, the principle applies to our everyday lives. I though of sharing this.
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All the evidence I’ve seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything.
Give someone an easy math problem, watch them get it right and then they’ll do better on the ensuing standardized test than someone who just failed a difficult practice test.
No, positive thinking doesn’t allow you to do anything, but it’s been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.
Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid?
The reason, I think, is that negative thinking feels good. In its own way, we believe that negative thinking works. Negative thinking feels realistic, or soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment. Negative thinking protects us and lowers expectations.
In many ways, negative thinking is a lot more fun than positive thinking. So we do it.
If positive thinking was easy, we’d do it all the time. Compounding this difficulty is our belief that the easy thing (negative thinking) is actually appropriate, it actually works for us. The data is irrelevant. We’re the exception, so we say.
Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.
Jul 31st 09
Posted by Arnold in All in a days work
Could it be that you know something is wrong, you’re not doing anything about it, you’re messed up and you’re suffering because of it? And you’re not doing anything about it?
My “baby” at work is my iMac 2.0Ghz with 1GB RAM pre-installed. I have this since a year and a half ago. In the past few months, my demand at work slowly increased until the time that I realize I have more than a dozen applications open. Adium, Yahoo IM, Firefox, Safari, Coda, Photoshop, iTunes (need music, baby!), Word, Tweetie and a number of other applications, working all at the same time. Why, I can’t help it, I need all of them!
This scenario has been killing my iMac. It crawls — and I mean, crawwwlll. And it’s killing me too! Until yesterday when I decided to get poorer by P1,500 and get an additional 2GB of RAM. The result? My mind can’t even comprehend, I can’t type in the words, I’m speachless … I’m just… just… this is awesome, dude! Just awesome. These applications plus all others include a Windows XP machine running via VirtualBox — all running at the same time. Will I need anything more? I’ve suffered for months and the solution is something I know, but didn’t do it because I’m just not interested.
During my quiet time today, I’ve come to thinking — isn’t this something more like life? I mean, for most of our problems, we actually know the solutions. We’re suffering because we decided not to do anything about it. It could be a wrong relationship, a wrong habit, a wrong direction in life. You know it, you just don’t want to solve it.
The reality is, with the help of God and godly friends, you can overcome that problem. It could just be an “upgrade” — an upgrade in your relationship with God, doing the right thing even if it’s hard, or just thinking about that better direction for your life.
I realize I sound preachy. But I’m not preaching at you. I’m preaching to all of us because I’m not excepted to this, too.
So, get that upgrade. I did. Look at me. I’m dancing. I’m typing with 15 high powered, memory hog applications open.
PS: Friday Night Experience at Grace Place tonight talks about the lie “I’m not good enough”. Try it. It’s happening at Tiara Oriental Hotel.
Jul 8th 09
Posted by Arnold in All in a days work
Before I piss off some really good friends of mine, let me first say that while I’m not an Iglesia ni Cristo, I respect them as a religious sect. I have several friends who are members of this organization. The point of this blog is not about them, it’s about how this government is treating our intelligence.
The Inquirer reported today that the government is declaring July 27 as Iglesia Ni Cristo day in commemoration of their founding anniversary.
An anniversary celebration for a big religious group, yes. But a national holiday? Shouldn’t it follow, then that Bro. Mike’s El Shaddai receive the same holiday treatment on their own anniversary — especially that according to their claims, their membership is far more than that of INC? Or Bro. Eddie’s Jesus is Lord? Oh, by the way, Victory Christian Fellowship, one of those huge Christian groups that contributes to the spiritual and moral development of the country is having their 25th founding anniversary in 2 weeks time. I’m not a member, but I love these guys. I know some of their pastors and they are one of the most sincere and passionate leaders I’ve ever known.
Can we also ask for a Grace Place day on September 3?
Let me get straight to the point. You advisers in Malacanang are doing this for one reason: votes for 2010 election! The INC are known for block voting. You’re insulting our intelligence.
Hayyy!. Sana 2010 na.
Update: It gets even worse: It was actually a law signed by congress. Magalit na ang magagalit sa akin, but don’t we have better laws to pass these days?
Jul 7th 09
Posted by Arnold in All in a days work
I know I said I’m on a blogging break, but since I intend to convert this blog into some sort of techopreneur slash politics slash business type of blog, let me start with reposting these very wise advice from the guys at Less Everything — I follow these guys closely and get inspiration from them:
#10 Rules for Bootstrapped Web App Startups
- Build something people need and love. People will talk about it.
- Release, release and release. Release it before you think it’s ready, you’re wrong, you don’t need that feature.
- Your app will probably fail, most of them do.
- Be Ballsy, don’t follow the heard, make a courageous moves.
- Build something you want to use. Continue to use it, feel the user’s pain.
- Google Adwords isn’t a revenue model.
- Find the cheapest, fastest way to 500 paid users. People will pay for your app, if it’s good.
- Design is an iterative process, not just development. And you won’t get it right the first time, so don’t sweat so much.
- Don’t scale until you actually need to. (The front page of Digg does not count as need.)
- Don’t spend any money.
Jul 6th 09
Posted by Arnold in All in a days work, Too Personal
I love blogging. I guess I can never leave blogging.
There has been a lot of things, though, that’s going on right now. So, again, for the nth time, I’m having another blogging break. When everything settles down, I’m going to start blogging again. Not that anybody misses me — I may have 2 readers on this blog… myself and my brother. Anyway, I’ll blog away soon.
