Love of mine…

• past love of mine, o don’t you miss our times,
• ill be gone for sometime,
• but ill carry you, in my heart
• no bombs in sight, or matches to ignite,
• just our love clasped so tight,
• not waiting for – a hint of a spark
• if we let our hearts decide,
• and they won’t be denied,
• illuminate the sky, and stop this great divide,
• if theres no one beside you, when you’re heart embarks,
• then Ill call you, the love of mine.
• Protestant  school, as legal as Roman rule,
• I was built on rules, taught by an Irish soul,
• I held my tongue, as he said   listen son,
• rules are the heart of life, and I never thought twice
• if you let your heart decide,
• it can’t be denied,
• illuminate the sky, and stop this great divide,
• if theres no one beside you,
• when you’re heart embarks,
• then Ill call you, the love of mine.
• you and me, have so much life to see,
• from Berlin to Calgary,
• and our souls will be moved,
• although we are all torn down,
• the time to rebuild is now,
• I know you have your doubts
• but we’ll hold each other soon,
• in the blackest of rooms,
• if you hear my heart tonight,
• and walk without spite,
• illuminate the room,  with gentle candlelight
• if theres no one beside you, when your heart embarks,
• ill call you the love of mine.
• ill call you the love of mine

there’s a category for that

the reason for this article is to really look deeper at how we as people fall into place. No matter what you do, you’ll find out quickly that you’ll fit somewhere quite nicely. If you are an out cast, you’ll find a significant of people who are also out cast, it’s nearly impossible not to fit a category and standing out is a lot harder than it looks.

Essentially you could wear a mask and really stand out, but that’s kind of the easy way out. [even though must people don't have the guts]

The reason it is the easy way out it because of the effect of what it does, it scares people and makes them uncomfortable, while people in general are familiar with masks, society has a time and place for everything. This negative effect only last a short while and the pop factor is instantly considered over the top…

So for companies or people in general to have a high possibility of standing out is they have to do what society considers at the very least – borderline acceptable and effective, owning a trend and making it your motto, or something of this sort while staying consistent is going to outsell going over the top any day… Just a short rant for today… Cheers.

I’ve never been good at [ some subject ]

I’ve heard these phrases a plethora of times:

” [some subject] just isn’t my subject…”

“I was never good at [some subject] …”

or if not that there’s always:

” I can’t learn this way. “

” I need images, I can’t read books”

” I can’t listen well, I need it to be written “

These are all pretty equally popular, I’m sure 9/10 people have said it at least once, I recall saying it at least one myself,  but that was before I really started learning about neuropsychology and really starting to grasp at the brain’s potential to learn, expand, adapt, and rebuild. I am not totally blemishing the statements above, they can be relatively true. My problem is the fact that we state  that we aren’t good at [some subject] and we do not do anything about it. So it seems that these phrases are being used as  suppressors of the problems.

Surprisingly I’ve  heard the same statements from people who are overweight. In a recent test drive in a Mini Cooper, a woman told my girlfriend and I that she was fat and could barely fit in the car, I smiled awkwardly for half a second, (not knowing if this was the proper micro-expression to use and if  I should be thinking of making any one at all),  then I just thought to myself, is that how she deals with it? By quickly eliminating the elephant she believed was in the room, (I could care less but of course my brain had already labeled her in terms of weight), it seems that she provided closure and now we could resume the test drive without just thinking it internally and/or  having to feel, unconsciously, more courteous than usual. Yes I am saying people tend to be naturally more polite when the person is disabled, elderly, or in this case overweight.  Even though, we were still more courteous than usual, she seemed to be more comfortable with herself. Ok with exercising  her right to wiggle herself into comfortability with us all explicitly aware that she was in her words, “a fat woman”.

So the conclusion here is the fact that when we start to accept our faults and we stop making plans to progress in those areas we put a cap on our abilities. This is devastating since we could prevent  this anti-progessive act by simply rebuilding. If you aren’t good at math, take it back to step 1.In a recent article about math learning disabilities in teens and adults, I read that the problem almost always occurs early on in the learning development process. So as we are building these foundational blocks of knowledge on the subject, we often don’t get the adequate attention to help in some our problem spots as they are created, this void not only sits empty but it blocks the brain’s understanding of furthering topics.

For example if I showed you 10*10 and you didn’t know how to count, nor did you know what that asterisk meant, then you wouldn’t know how to even go about solving this problem. It doesn’t make you stupid it just means you need to rebuild what is missing before you go on. The problem is that too many students miss parts(axioms, procedures, functions, theory) of math that are links to learning other parts of math and those other parts are almost impossible to teach otherwise. (That is why prerequisites exist.)

So we must find our weak spots in whatever we seem to be weak at and approach it, find the underlying problem. We need to not satisfy our brains with statements that avoid learning and make it ok to be weak in any given subject, but instead we need to not accept that we will always be weak at anything. We have to stop creating mental blocks by saying I can’t do this, this way, only this way and find out each way to do it and build on those foundational problem solving skills. If you struggle with Geometry go back to basic math and find the void and fill it with the knowledge you missed out on. If you are overweight the problems maybe more apparent right? (dieting and exercise) But usually it’s you the person, you need to obtain self control before you can go on a diet. Before self control you may need to rebuild your habits and let go of unnecessary ones. Sometimes we need to go all the way to our Beginner’s Guide to move forward again. The reward absolutely outweighs the sacrifice, it’s more than worth it and if even a 3rd of people thought more like this, we’d have a more progressive world. Stay progressive, my friends.

Making the Switch to V.I.M.

This weekend I needed to do some training with VIM (vi Improved – text editor), most of the programmers at my job use Nano(I believe) but the Developers seem to use VIM, so I began to find out the reason and what was all fuss about.

So after using Nano for the last 10 months I’d become pretty competent and it’s ease of use, fast editing, and other features made it great to use. But it wasn’t as great as I thought it was. But I didn’t find this out until after I start to use VIM.

I went scouring the internet for about 3-4 hours in search for a quick start guide, feature guide, and anything else VIM related; if I was going to use it I needed to immerse myself in it quickly, learning enough to replace nano and then some was the plan, admittedly I didn’t think I would learn as fast as it’s coming to me. In fact in about 1 hour I replaced a lot of Nano’s inefficiencies with Vim’s powerful features.

After scouring I became saturated in the fact that Vim is not just a replacement text editor, it is not only a huge switch it was a huge plus at what I could do. Here are a list of features I loved about Vim.

UNDO – you can undo your edits (impossible in nano w/o exiting the file)

MODE BASED – depending on what you want to do you use the specific mode to suit your needs. Ranging from Normal, Visual, Edit, Command, and a couple of others I haven’t ventured too, VIM aims to be your all in one text-editor monster.

Customization – You can customize Vim like you can customize a blank sheet of paper with a pencil, adding line numbers, color code, plugins, and a range of efficiencies that  isn’t offered anywhere else. VIM rocks.

Speed – it seems faster, more responsive, and just plain efficient.

Overall this tool, language, lifestyle is a great addition to anyone’s toolset. My goal for this week is to use Vim whenever I need to ssh into my server and edit files. I will be immersing myself into it’s vast amount of features. Lets hope I don’t get lost

Use Vim because it rocks!

Introspection

Introspection or self-observance is a very tricky monster, I spend a lot of time introspecting my current skill set to find where I am lacking and where I should be filling the gaps. Introspection is a great method in really finding out more about yourself. It can be the first step in reinventing yourself. We all have bad habits and most of us have a few customs we’ve grown up around and we don’t question their existence, instead we embrace them. But I believe we need to understand the reasoning and the consequences of every  habit we have. We are filled with other people’s ideas, perspectives, outlook, in general we are heavily fueled by societies defaults, which include our generation’s bias, media, friends, family, and superiors.

We are all very heavily mixed up..grabbing bits and pieces, each of us is a very unique mixture of various pieces of our own lives, we really need to go outside of ourselves, and look at our processes based on black and white definitions. The more you can minimize from your bad habit list, then the more successful you can be at any certain task. Learning from yourself by introspect allows you to see yourself from outside yourself metaphorically speaking, with this type of analysis you can continue to find your negative or less effective methods and take the next step in bettering the methods and/or cutting down on the negative parts.

We rarely realize what we are capable of, we rarely push ourselves after we get to a certain point to break barriers, we build all sorts of walls around ourselves and expect different results. These walls are the reason we quit, complain, and develop a bad outlook on success and us in the same context. The only way we can break these walls that we, ourselves and society, has built we most tear them down strategically. By being self-aware we can see the challenges in front of us and beat them by adequately approaching each problem and finding the most pragmatic solution. Introspection at it’s core is looking in at yourself and defining yourself,  in a race for success we tend to be our main competition, by using introspection we can find those visible or not-so-visible  kinks in our armor and assess them accordingly.

Effective Goal Setting

Setting goals is easy but really knowing if you’ll meet them and if you will meet them has been the biggest issue.

I’ve set enough goals to accurately speculate if I will reach them, so I’ve set out to solve or help with the problem of failing.

Here is a list of common reasons I fail at completing some of my goals,(I hope you can also relate to some of these if not all of them):

Lack of determination.

You need to get excited, and you need to hold on to your inspiration, you need to get your mind ready for each and every goal that comes your way and wrap yourself around it. Determination will keep you fighting when times get hard and see that the end objective is worth it.

Inaccurate Deadline

Sometimes the problem is that your goal is too high to climb in a selected amount of time. Giving yourself a reasonable amount of time is key because this could be detrimental to the goal and to your brain as well. You set a goal, you don’t meet it, and then you quit. Your brain shuts down on the goal and it becomes a lost cause, you don’t want to do that. You need to be honest with yourself and consider your capabilities in the context of your life and how you do things now.

Too BIG a change and not enough resources

I had a friend in my past that weighed just over 150 lb.s and my friend wanted to lose 30 lb.s before the summer, it was around this time. No doubt this is possible, and she read several articles on the web of success stories from other women that helped support her choice. But the problem is she hadn’t worked out or jogged consistently for 3 years, and we need to understand that very few of us can really just turn on a button and expect to become superstar fitness people overnight and start a rigorous regimen all of a sudden. The girl on tv is not you and you need to consider what you can adequately do without quitting after a few days. If you do insist on losing those 30 lb’s you should probably look into some type of trainer, diet, plan, or something similar to invest in. With the proper resources you’ll be able to push yourself harder since you know you’ve invested something tangible into it. So consider mentally focusing on yourself then putting together a plan around your goal and push towards it.

Not enough SUPPORT

You need support, rather that is your mother or a social community that talks about your goal, you need to find it and build yourself around it. With more people trying to do it and supporting your initiative, you’ll find yourself more motivated to complete the task and you’ll find yourself maybe even going above and beyond.

Summary: You need to immerse yourself with support, determination, logical goal-setting, and invest in YOU! This is all I have for now and might add a few more later.