Month: December 2022

Poi for the mind

When I went on my honeymoon to Maui, Hawaii, we went to a luau – a Hawaiian feast with live music and cultural dances.

I remember when they were serving various dishes at the luau, they encouraged us to eat poi in the middle of each dish.

I had no idea at that time what the heck poi was and why would I eat that before eating the next dish?

That’s when I found out that they were encouraging us to eat poi as a palate cleanser in-between dishes so we could taste each dish separately and not have the tastes all mixed up going from one to the other.

I believe a poi for the mind is needed as well going from one activity to another. Especially in the world we live in going from one online meeting to another, if we don’t give our brain some form of poi in the middle, it all runs together and it would be very hard to give the right attention to each event much less to consume and be productive at the event.

My favorite forms of mental poi are the following:

  • Taking a nap or at least closing my eyes for a few seconds focusing on my breathing
  • Going for a short walk if there’s enough time
  • Few minutes of exercise

I’m sure you can find your own mental poi that will help you reset and refresh in-between activities.

For many of us who are working from home, it is now more important than ever to introduce an intentional dose of poi between our mentally taxing events.

Why write when you can use AI to do it?

Since I’ve discovered the Open AI technology, I’ve been asking myself this question:

Should I still be racking my brain writing content or should I just let AI spit out the content and just paste the responses into my article…? 🤔

It’s definitely very tempting.

However, if you think about it, getting Open AI or a similar technology to write for you is the same thing as getting someone else to write for you. The main differences of course are that it’s free and it’s faster.

So in that respect, things have not changed as much and now we are just outsourcing to artificial intelligence instead of someone else’s human intelligence.

Also, in my own case, I’m not a professional writer by any means. And my reasons for writing are different than most. I write to:

1) Document my thoughts, feelings and any other information I would like to externalize in some form and not leave it inside my head

2) Exercise my brain

 

Yes, I definitely feel that the process of writing massages and exercises my brain which I very very much appreciate.

Neither of these things can be done with any AI that I’m aware of. At least not yet 😊.

 

 

Compassion starts with the Self

Give yourself permission to be selfish.

I believe that compassion does not start at home as the famous saying goes. Compassion starts with ‘the self’.

Only when you put your own oxygen mask on first that you can help others around you. Otherwise you will eventually run out of oxygen helping others and be useful to no one. You owe it to yourself, your family and friends and the world to be self-compassionate.

Take care of your inner and outer self and you’ll find the energy, willingness and drive to help others.

 

 

You are the center of your universe

The title might sound selfish but it’s true. You are the center of your universe. Emphasis on “Your” ☺️.

The question now is: are you going to be passive and let forces and people around you influence and impact you or are you going to be proactive and impact them instead?

Most people do the former because it’s easier to go with the flow. If they are surrounded with positive energies and people then the benefit from that or vice versa, if this round themselves with negativity and people who are always down, then that’s what they absorb.

The alternative to absorption is creation obviously. But as we all know, that is always more difficult to pull off because it requires initial momentum which is hard to conjure up for most of us.

So what are you going to do? Are you going to be creating content, information, and spreading goodness in the world from your core or are you going to let people and circumstance and things that encircle you act upon you and make an impression on you The way they want?

You can be the receiver or the producer.

The choice is yours.

The stock market is holding a big sale. Oh no 😲

We humans are so weird. When there’s a store that is holding a sale, we run towards it and even buy things we don’t need.

But when there’s a sale in the stock market and stocks and indexes are undervalued, we run away.

Stock market is the only place where we are afraid of the sale season

Of course, the reasoning that we tell ourselves is:

How do we know that it’s a sale?

What if the discounts get even deeper? I would just be missing out by buying right now at potentially higher prices.

Then as the prices start increasing, we still tell ourselves “well, this could be a short-term increase and I’ll wait until the market really bottoms out.”

Of course, nobody knows when and if that’s going to happen.

We are routinely telling ourselves that we can time the market when In the back of our mind we know that even the bravest of the brave and the richest of the rich humans around the world have not been able to figure it out.

Yes, that is correct. Even Warren Buffett will tell you that he does not have that figured out.

So what do you do? Do you dive in or do you wait?

Well, since we understand the departmental store sales so well, I think we should use the same analogy.

If we see an Under Armor shoes that is being sold for $30 and we know from past experiences that its value is really $60, we pick it up. We don’t wait for the prices to go further down because we fear that the sale might go away or the shoes might no longer be available anymore.

What if we followed the same mindset when picking indexes or stocks to invest in? When we see a sale and we know for a fact that it is a sale and that the index or the stock is definitely worth a whole lot more (which definitely requires research and understanding of the particular entity), we invest!

We don’t worry about the possibility of a deeper sale which is definitely possible. We just pull the trigger now and keep it simple.

I know that what I just said above is easier said than done. It requires keeping our emotions in check and changing our mindset completely. But I firmly believe that it is definitely possible to do. Good luck to us all!

How I became a writer

I still remember the day when I was talking with a friend in college who was an English major and loved writing articles. I was an Electrical Engineering major and I hated writing articles. I could not understand how this person could love writing long form articles. In my mind, it seemed like a torturous thing to do.

Many years have passed since that conversation and I now produce many articles or blood a month. Some of them you might argue are too long 😊.

So how did that happen? How did I become a writer ?

Well, to be honest, the truth is that I still don’t ‘write’ for the most part. I talk.

Let me explain…

 

I have been speaking on various topics in classes as a trainer and speaking at conferences as a speaker all the world.

The first official class I taught was on C Sharp in Buffalo Grove, Illinois back in 2002. Since then, I have produced curriculum and taught in person as well as virtual multi-day courses online more than a few hundred times on many different subjects.

On the other hand, I have been speaking at conferences since November 2006 when I first presented a session in Las Vegas on the concept of SharePoint Excel Services.

Since then I have been speaking on all kinds of topics related to technology and sometimes psychology of employees in organizations.

Needless to say, I’ve done a Lot of speaking over the years and enjoyed all of it since I love the process of transferring the knowledge that I am acquiring to other people.

My conundrum was that I wanted to be able to replicate this transfer of knowledge through text as well so I could reach folks who love consuming this information through the written word.

So how do I do that if I don’t enjoy the traditional form of putting fingers to the keyboard to generate the text…?

 

That’s when I discovered the speech to text functionality within the Google and then the Microsoft ecosystems – the two technology companies that I utilize the most in my personal and professional lives.

And my life changed forever…

I now use the speech to text function everywhere! In fact it is my preferred mode of “writing”.

 

I use it to:

  • Compose text messages
  • Write emails
  • Transcribe articles
  • Write down my notes
  • And everything else in between that would have required my fingers before

 

Don’t get me wrong, I still end up using my hands to massage the writing after I have done the initial brain dump using my voice. But that still is for me so much better than writing the whole thing using the keyboard.

So there you have it, the secret to how I became a writer (or a ‘voicer’… Is that such a thing?)