I’m normally a person that likes toys but this twitard thingy has gone too far. I mean… C’mon! Dolls??. And right near the checkout counters. When will the stupidity stop?

BTW, you should totally buy Edward, not Jacob. Jacob is lame. I mean there were more Jacobs dolls left than all the other 2 figures combined. Jacob is lame. Pair Edward with Bella, we know you want them to be together! Let Edward suck the blood out of her plastic neck already!!

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The first commercial was for laser assisted liposuction. Cutting edge stuff for the narcissistic fatso. Exercise? Eating correctly? At least reading the damn labels on the ultra processed food we’re buying? Nah.. We don’t have time for this. Just aim the nice laser at me and suck the fat like there’s no tomorrow. Suck it. Now, if everybody would have the money the “laser people” are asking for, we would definitely eradicate obesity from the face of the Earth.

The second commercial was for McDonalds. It was advertising some cheap Coke that you can buy with some crap menu that they have. The commercial made some sense, I guess, if you were into this fast food shit or if you cannot afford anything else. We are, after all, in the middle of an economic crisis (do not go in the parking lot of your favorite mall if you want to keep living with this apocalyptic image).

Now, each commercial on its own made sense. They were trying to sell you something and were managing (more or less) to get the message through by using pleasant sounding people and light, joyful jingles. The really disturbing fact is that they played one right after the other.

Now what am I supposed to understand if I am listening to the radio? Is this a tactic? Are they just dumb?

After the traffic light turned green and I started accelerating on the interstate ramp I remembered the words of my math high school teacher (who was also a bit of a philosopher): “for everything in this world there are pluses and minuses so everything reaches a stable state, an equilibrium”. If you look at the commercials like that, one was the plus and one was the minus. The radio people had grouped them together like this to prevent an unstable state. Maybe they knew something. Maybe the time-space continuum would have been torn if only one commercial of these commercials was played.

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Two small children (probably around 3-4 years old) were humming a song. A boy and a girl. It was impressive how well they followed the melodic line by gently arching their tiny voices. Their mother was closely watching them from a nearby picnic table that she was setting up. Now, for truly amazing part: the kids were humming a piece of Mozart, this one to be more precise. The surreal experience was kinda ruined by mother telling them something… in German. Those Germans, you cannot get rid of them even when you’re exploring a geological wonder

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Well, this gentleman who lived between 1839-1929 is responsible for some feats that are simply remarkable. To make a long story short he is famous for… walking (The Father of Modern Pedestrianism as Wikipedia describes him).

The one piece of information that drew my attention is the “walk” he did from Boston to Washington, DC in 1861, due to a lost bet. 479 miles (769 km) in 10 days and 10 hours. That is simply incredible. If we compute his average speed, we end up with a number that most of people nowadays cannot obtain even on short distances, and by short distances in this context I mean 4-5 miles (assuming he walked 16 hours/day => 16*10+10=170 hours => 479 / 170 = 2.8 mph)

Read the whole Wikipedia page and sources to see how exceptional his whole story is. Considering he lived 90 years in the 19th century, what do you think about the benefits of an active lifestyle now?

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From Wikipedia:

Orthorexia: an eating disorder characterized by excessive focus on eating healthy foods. In rare cases, this focus may turn into a fixation so extreme that it can lead to severe malnutrition or even death.

So, if you’re eating unhealthy and stuffing your face with all the crap you can find you turn obese. You will probably die of one of the many diseases obesity causes (of at least it favors). If you pay attention to what you eat (and you have to do this in a controlled almost obsessive way to be successful in the long term) you might end up with this newly invented discovered disease. In severe cases you die. So the extremes are not very encouraging in either cases.

So I guess that, as with everything in life, the key is moderation. Too much of something can harm you Of course, we all die eventually so you should take this piece of information with a grain of salt. But not too much salt, as it’s bad for you

You can find a quiz to help you figure out if you have this new trendy disease here: http://skwigg.com/id8.html.

Found out about the quiz in the same episode of the podcast mentioned above.

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Step 6 is planning. It may just be that I am a control freak, but whenever I do something I must have a plan. But everyone has to have a plan when they do something, right? Well, sure everybody has a plan, but I guess there are two fundamental differences between me and an average Joe. First is the amount of detail needed for to be satisfied with the activity that I am going to do. Second is the how much in advance I am putting it together. Of course this depends on the complexity of the activity I’m doing. Regardless of this though, there will always be some overhead associated with what I am doing.

Let me give you two examples:

1) Whenever I go hiking I spend 1-2 hours researching the trail that I’m going to hike. It starts with a name, some nice pictures and ends up with knowing specific details about the trail (who actually cares what you’re going to see at mile 1.2??), time durations, GPS coordinates, weather, difficulty, what I’m going to eat during the hike, how much the drive to and from the trail head is going to take, what time I’m going to wake up in the morning of the hike… So from a simple hike now I’ve broken it down to multiple, more manageable activities. Repeat and rinse until the desired detail granularity is achieved. Kinda insane, if I think about it.

2) The other example is the trivial grocery shopping that everybody does. In an ideal world you go to the supermarket and buy what you need. Of course, you will end up buying some stuff that you don’t need and you’ll forget some stuff that you do need. You will get annoyed and at some point you’ll figure that a list is a good idea. This has the effect of reducing the extra crap you buy (only 1-2 items on the list rule) but you’ll soon realize (if you’re me) that you’re still forgetting some stuff you need (not as much, but it’s still annoying). Now, here comes the next step (for the true control planning freak): I ended up building a huge list of every possible item that I would ever buy from the grocery store and use that as a check list when building the shopping list I use each time I go shopping. There might be a case in which I need something that isn’t on the meta shopping list. Guess what? New item on the meta list. This ain’t gonna happen again (at least not for this item).

So, bottom line: the advantage of being a control freak and doing detailed planning is peace of mind. the disadvantage is that I get extremely pissed when something is ruing my carefully crafted plan – but I take that as a challenge and plan for failure also. It’s layers upon layers

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In case you don’t know, this guy claims that he’s the most influential business blogger in the world. Maybe he is. The 2 book are are:

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

The recipe seems to be almost identical: take a simple idea and wrap it in a few layers of stories to make it more credible. Build around it using simple but somewhat hard to prove claims and keep repeating the main idea obsessively. Speak to your audience like they are the second coming of Jesus on this Earth and make them genuinely believe that they are a hidden gem ready to be uncovered.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against these kind of motivational tactics and I do get the fact that the author understands how his audience thinks. Actually I admire the fact that he can do that with such a simple message and get away with it.

What I do have a problem with is the “you’re special, you don’t need anything else, just take this pill” approach. Also I have a problem with the simple message which should be applied to any generic situation. But than again, if the message wouldn’t be in this form, he wouldn’t be the “world’s best most influential business blogger”

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Step 5 is realizing that what we call normality, in almost every aspect of it, is unhealthy. By normality I mean what most people do by default or think that should be the default choice. Lately this have been a favorite pet subject of mine and the more I look around the more this seems true.

If you look at the ads for food you’ll see exactly what I mean. When is the last time you saw an ad that was promoting eating fruits? How come people choose to eat all this crap but eating a piece of fruit or some fish is regarded as boring at best?

If you look at the ads that are promoting weight loss products you know what I mean. Do you really think that you’re gonna lose weight and look better by just taking a magic pill? Do you think that if you go once a month to the gym and after the work out you drink the magic juice your muscles are gonna grow out of control?

Now if you look at what is the first thing that people do when they go to see a movie at a local theater what do you think this is? Grab a huge bucket of popcorn (with lots of butter of course) and a half gallon soda “glass”. By the end of the trailers they’re done with that and go back for more. Is there something wrong with this? Of course not, everybody does it… doh. That’s why they sell it there, right?

Now look at the choice of physical activity. I’m not talking about “hardcore” fitness. I’m talking about what you do during the day. Confronted with the choice of either walking 15 minutes to a destination or driving  what do you think is the normal choice? What about going up or down 1-2 floors within the same building? Do you really think the stairs are an option?

How much coffee do you drink in a day? Do you think that’s normal? What about checking your twitter/facebook/email each 2 minutes? Do you think that’s normal? Maybe in some cases latency is preferred to throughput but it most definitely should not be that in all cases. It should not be the “normal” case.

I could go on ranting about how normal are some choices that we make every day, but I won’t.

Instead I will sometimes just reserve the right to step back and say: this should not work this way and simply do it in another way. In all lifestyle related aspects. Normality is unhealthy. Doing that, I’m taking another step to a better me!

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All pictures were taken during the fabulous Mt Pilchuck hike.

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