Pain

Pain is the struggle against death. It is the same pain of growing up. It is the same pain of growing old. It is the same pain you fear when you have substituted that pain with shrewdness and wealth, when you forget that the struggle against death is never over. No, it is not over. It is only over when you have learnt to breathe that struggle like air. It is only over when death overtakes you and leave you nothing to struggle against.

Nobody else knows how to be you 24/7
You're the only one who's done it and survived.
Take advice but don't forget
It's your heaven your hell your world your life!

Focusing on individual differences is about not resorting to conformism, but it's not opposed to social cohesion. On the contrary, understanding the ugly details of how we are different makes us more integrated. A bundle of sticks doesn't break as easily as one single stick, exactly because each stick is different. 

10 things to do to stay young

1. Make young friends to stay in touch with what's happening.
2. Take care of your looks. Look at least relevant and approachable so you can make young friends.
3. Exercise. Young at heart is no good if your body isn't there to keep your heart pumping.
4. Try something new every day.
5. Start something you've never imagined doing before every year.
6. Listen to music you've never heard before. All the time.
7. Take risks. The older you are, the less you have to lose.
8. Discover yourself. If you think you know yourself well enough, you probably don't.
9. Seek new environments. New homes, new jobs, new lives - for some, new religions, new cultures, new countries and new families.
10. Stop talking about the past and dare to talk about the future. You're never too young too love, never too old to dream.

On slenderman

There's something profoundly human about the desire to believe - religion, philosophy, tradition, folklore, branding - are just some labels we use to artificially categorize things that feed on this mechanism because - giving things names helps us believe they exist.

Wednesday Survival Guide

Stress is the result of allowing yourself to be tricked into believing you are responsible for things you have no ability, authority, or social liability to achieve. Don't try too hard; you have a right to be here. Focus on letting go of what you need not control, and enjoy whatever you have in your court. Strive to be happy. When in doubt, eat, sleep, and exercise.

Silence

The wind never tries to blow
It blows because it is the wind.
When you sit in an open field
You hear silence
In the wind that doesn't try.

A duck by the stream
And all the fish in it
All live in the silence of the park
Because silence is the sound
Of not trying.

In Remembering what peace there may be in silence
You don't recall what soundlessness sounds like;
That would make you try too hard
To sit still.
Because silence is not soundlessness; silence is being conscious that doing is a kind of being;
Not a kind of trying.

It's the same 24 hours.

It's the same 24 hours.
Busy is what you do with it.
Happy is how you do it.
Fulfillment is why you do it.
Achievement is when you do it.

The secret of an awesome daily todo list: plan one little event a day that makes you happy!

TNBT : world history reimagined

Imagine : baggage free history curriculum

What if archeologist and educationists of diverse backgrounds got together and formed a cloud to design a cross-national history curriculum for children between 8 and 18?

What if a generation grew up learning about the world not from one biased perspective, but from the perspective of artifacts and documents, intertwined with an education in human behavioral psychology?

What if a generation grew up seeing world history as a universal heritage instead of walls that divide cultures?

TNBT

The next-next-next big thing : Imagine Democracy Kickstarter

What if it became cheaper to provide mobile internet access than sinking billions into election campaigns, minister pays, and top-down decisions that don't work?

What if you voted not for people, but for causes?

What if funds available were divided equally among all voters, and your vote determines how much funds the cause actually gets?

What if policies were drafted by a Parliament which can present proposals and analysis, but the Parliament has no power to decide - the power to decide were given back to the people?

What if the government were not subjected to the power structure they build up, but are constantly subject to the vote market, proposal after proposal?

What if the ballot ticket had not only YES and NO, but also RE-PROPOSE to demand the proposal to be redrafted?

What if all the time you spent on Facebook and Twitter, actually counted in Policy?

Before you were born

Do things sometimes feel like they're not going right?
Let me tell you a secret:
Everything is working out exactly according to plan.

Before you were born
You had envisioned this day - 
In fact, you planned every single event
So meticulously laying out every hour
In your Masterplan; and now
Everything is coming to life
Exactly how, exactly when, exactly where you had meant it to.

So the next time you're wondering
What's wrong? Why are things so?
Try instead to recall:
What was that single perspective you had taken
That made everything look right
Before you were born?

Pascal's Wager

The dilemma of believing in the Christian God on the basis of Pascal's Wager results in the strange situation where the one thing you believe in more than God him/herself, is the value of your personal gain. If you keep that position in your faith, you will break the 1st commandment. If you don't keep that position, you invalidate the reason you chose to believe in God, releasing you from the faith. Applying Pascal's Wager to another religion would therefore be much simpler.

Love

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not compare, it does not rank, it does not favor top performers. It does not pathologize, it is not profit-oriented, it does not make short-sighted responses, it cannot be quantified for arithmetics. Love cannot be abused to hurt, but rejoices when the hurting are set free. It always takes the blow, always believes in the face of betrayal, always hopes when things go wrong, always runs the full marathon to the finishing line.

Without the Grid

Without the Grid

How do you invite someone home for dinner,
If the land line
Is digital somewhere?

How do you get an invitation card delivered,
If logistics is real time
And digital?

How do you buy your ingredients,
If your retailer pays rent
Digitally?

How do you locate a local farm
If you cannot search that
Online?

How do you drive over
If traffic lights
Are controlled digitally?

You'd walk over to your friends house
Which is probably within walking distance
Because without the Grid
You'd probably not get to know
Someone living that far away anyway.

TNBT

The next-next-next big thing :  Just-In-Time Manufacturing





Imagine: You order a new handphone, selecting the customizations you want - features, design, customized printing and name engraving. You click "submit", and your new phone arrives the same evening.

Imagine: You enter your credit card number and click "submit" - and in that moment, an autonomous car starts driving your way, loaded with the 3D printers, weaving and painting robots and everything to manufacture your order. The car's route is optimally planned, considering road conditions and manufacturing time. When the car hits your doorstep, your product has just been sealed into the box.

Whatever you are most afraid of, will plague you for life - not because others are free from it, but because they are not obsessed enough to notice it come and go.

Happiness

My definition of happiness : the emotion invoked (1) by a memory associated with the release of dopamine, or (2) by the actual release of dopamine through the reward-motivation mechanism our brain uses to make us prefer actions that lead to decisions favorable for survival.

No happiness, no survival.

leadership

woke up this morning thinking, what is the most important skill leaders must have?

and it seemed to me today, that this is not engineering, not financial planning, not scientific belief, not cultural depth, but story-telling.

leadership falls apart once your people stop believing in your story. different cultures use different narratives, and the leader in  that culture must master that narrative.

and this leaves me with the thought - there's something very magical about royal families and monarchies, because instead of telling the story, they have become the story. they are the people's ideals, incarnated in flesh. there's something god-like in them, in both their charms and their failures... but of course the people have stopped believing in this story...

what is the story your leader is telling you today?
is it working?

Diversity

1
Is anti-diversity not a tolerable position in a framework for diversity?

2
If we got rid of all extremely extreme extremists, would moderately strong opinions get recalibrated as the new extremist? If that's a natural response I hope extremists stay as extreme as possible!