591–600 of 839 posts
Realizing this after listening to an interview with one of my favorite musicians really helped me approach my (at that point) deteriorating mental health from a different perspective and feel better.
From my father: No matter how correct you are, you won't get anywhere by making the other person feel stupid. He gave me this after we went together to a conference on communication and I found the presenter to be making some rather doubtful statements. I asked questions and tried to break the presenter in the QnA session and when I didn't get what I wanted, I left. I was 15 at the time. So, I forgive myself but stil…
I came to the same realization some time after an incident at Uni...
In a Uni class I tried to correct the lecturer about some Unix/Solaris? feature using my Linux knowledge and when he wouldn't agree, I basically ignored everything he taught for the rest of the class.
I think it was maybe something about file systems and IIRC I looked it up after (realizing what a dick I was) and I found that I was indeed correct, but I still feel bad about the way I acted to this day.
Although, in my defense, earlier in the class I had to show a whole bunch of students how to exit Vi/Vim so as you can imagine, I was already starting to feel like some kinda Unix god at that point.
I consider myself to be a bit of an introvert and this idea has helped me tremendously with networking and meeting new people. I often project the worst casinario in my mind, but in reality, outcomes are almost always positive and enjoyable.
"Never settle for anything less than you know you deserve".
Sounds simple and obvious, but when you are under pressure it is easy to give up and convince yourself you're not good enough for whatever it is you are aiming at. It always pays to aim higher. The thing you want to achieve may be hard, it may take a long time, it may not even be entirely possible, but if you keep telling yourself you don't deserve this or that sooner or later you start believing it and then your chance of achieving it is completely destroyed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the problems with statements like this one is that IQ tests tend to be classist. They tend to measure the kinds of information valued by people with upper class lives and upper class educations, so they tend to measure people who are well fed and privileged and so forth. Also, if you aren't physically well, this will hinder your performance. So it's really quit hard to sort out if your "low IQ" is due to your…
When I say IQ I mean the number gotten to through something like WAIS or WISC (which start becoming unreliable above 130. It is almost as if it is hard to standardise a test for the 99.3rd percentile... :) ) Not the crap used most places. The only environment I know WISC from is cognitive disabilities testing in school, where it is used for two things: check whether someone has legal right to extra support and as a t…
This is partly a function of population going up. It means we need more complex systems for the world to be able to support that population and for human life to work.
In the time of President Lincoln, the average education level of a woman was about 2nd to 4th grade and most of them were homemakers. I used to talk to folks in Pakistan and they had similar education levels for their women. It's one of the youngest countries in the world in terms of demographics.
In my father's day, most people grew up on farms and it was common to stop formal education at the eighth grade. You typically completed high school if you were planning on going to college and becoming a doctor or lawyer or something.
My dad dropped out of the tenth grade. It was the Great Depression and he was a big guy and he could earn a man's wage and finishing school didn't make sense and it wasn't the stigmatizing failure that it is today.
He joined the Army and he had so many Army schools that he got out of going to Korea. He fought in WWII and in Vietnam and he had his bags packed for the Korean war and got a phone call the night before that he was the only guy in the battalion -- about a thousand people -- with all the military schools they wanted for teaching ROTC. She he and some officer got out of going and he taught college ROTC instead of fighting in the front lines of the Korean war, even though he was a high school drop out.
And in his day, enlisted soldiers like him never had college. That was limited to officers.
By the time my husband was well into his Army career, enlistees needed some college to make it to the higher enlisted ranks and I have seen articles that a lot of factory workers these days have college degrees.
It's not really shocking that we need more information in the system to make the same resources go further for purposes of letting 7 billion people occupy the same land mass that used to support a lot fewer people than that and make sure there is enough to go around. If you build up, you can fit more people in the same land area than if you build out.
And this is something that can be overcome to a large degree by education and "practice" so to speak.
Lots of people use tech today that would have been special tech only found at a university or in a research facility or whatever and now it is the norm. I think you are making a mistake to conflate that trend with some kind of measure about individual intelligence.
Ant colonies change over time. They mature and behave differently. The individual ants aren't anymore intelligent and they don't have books to read or whatever. The system of the ant colony undergoes what you might call cultural changes and the ants in a later stage colony inherit the accumulated wisdom and they aren't any smarter or better educated and they don't have a higher IQ individually, but the system becomes more intelligent in some sense anyway.
And that's kind of what you are seeing with humans, more or less.
"Never settle for anything less than what you know you deserve".
Sounds simple and obvious, but when you are under pressure it is easy to give up and convince yourself you're not good enough for whatever it is you are aiming at. It always pays to aim higher. The thing you want to achieve may be hard, it may take a long time, it may not even be entirely possible, but if you keep telling yourself you don't deserve this or that sooner or later you start believing it and then your chance of achieving it is destroyed.
From my father: No matter how correct you are, you won't get anywhere by making the other person feel stupid. He gave me this after we went together to a conference on communication and I found the presenter to be making some rather doubtful statements. I asked questions and tried to break the presenter in the QnA session and when I didn't get what I wanted, I left. I was 15 at the time. So, I forgive myself but stil…
So many cringe-inducing interactions where I was a total jerk just to come off as the smarter guy. Feels awful and I strive to not behave like that anymore. This quote serves as an anchor.
The power of the subconscious mind. Without actively seeking it, I happened to stumble on this idea about 8 years ago, at a time when I was struggling with some pretty big problems in my relationships, career and physical+mental health. Since then, I've been living "as-if" the biggest factors that influence my reactions, choices and outcomes are in my subconscious, and that by continually undertaking practices that i…
I have witnessed a lot conversations where support could not help them because support did not have the right information. This made a lot of people very angry.
So i started applying this rule more and more. Now only some people (mostly project leaders) are sometimes angry.