Sunday, March 16, 2014

Learning a language in 3 months

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-learn-a-foreign-language-in-3-months-2014-3?utm_source=alerts&nr_email_referer=1
Sort of the problem here, is that it's based on full time (!!) language learning.  Um. ok.  Still some good links for non traditional language study methods.
Since the languages I'm most interested in adding are non-traditional, Catalan and Swiss German, this may be for me.
Tim Ferriss has a list of the most common words and a good strategy for basic language skills. (Too lazy to get link.)

Confidence



Or another take on "How you think is everything." 
"

Confidence is a choice, not a symptom

...
It's easy to feel confident when we're on a roll, when the cards are going our way, or we're closing sales right and left. This symptomatic confidence, one built on a recent series of successes, isn't particularly difficult to accomplish or useful.
Effective confidence comes from within, it's not the result of external events...
You succeed because you've chosen to be confident. It's not really useful to require yourself to be successful before you're able to become confident."


I love this photo. This woman worked her way up from the "mail room" at Petrobas. Talk about confidence.

Kipling
"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same"



Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Welcome Failure

this seems to be a recurring theme...Sara Blakely

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-successful-people-crave-mistakes-2014-3


Journal article, he shared some of his past failures and how much he learned from each one.(Dilbert author)
“If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I’m not satisfied knowing that I’ll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again. Failure is a resource that can be managed.”
Scott’s view of failure is that we should not only not shy away from it, but by seeking it out we’ll be more likely to find success:
“The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it’s your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.”

Learning from your mistakes

I can’t tell you to think different about failure. You can’t even tell yourself that, really. Thinking differently about something takes time and effort, and often requires compounding evidence.
One thing I can suggest is working on that compounding evidence to help convince yourself that failure isn’t so bad after all. Here are two ways to get started:
1. Start a journal.
Start documenting all of your mistakes. Keep track of where these are happening: at work, at home, with friends. Did you ignore your intuition and go with a safe option, only to regret it later? Or did you take a risk that didn’t pan out?
Keep a detailed account of what happened so you can start to see patterns in where you’re making mistakes and which ones you’re repeating too often.
2. Review past mistakes.
At some point, sit down and look over the record you’ve been keeping of the mistakes you’ve made. Take note of the patterns you can see and what you think you could do to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
Even before you’ve had time to start a journal of mistakes you can learn from, I bet you can think of a bunch you’ve made in the past (I know I can). Try looking at past failures or mistakes and working out what you learned from them. How did those failures help you get to where you are now? How did those mistakes help you learn?
Faced with a true list of your past mistakes and how they’ve helped you, rather than hindered your progress, you may find your opinion of failure changing slowly.
3. View decisions as experiments.
Recognizing our mistakes is almost impossible, according to Kathryn Schulz. Since it’s so common for us to brush aside or forget our failures, a better way to learn from when we go wrong might be this approach from Zen Habits author, Leo Babauta:
“See decisions not as final choices, but experiments.
The anxiety (and paralysis) comes when people are worried about making the perfect choice. And worried about making the wrong choice. Those are two outcomes that aren’t necessary to make a decision, because if we conduct an experiment, we’re just trying to see what happens.”
Leo’s idea is to conduct experiments to help us make the best choices we can. For instance, he suggests trying to sell cupcakes to friends and family to test whether setting up a cupcake business is right for you. Or taking a ballet class to test whether ballet is something you’d enjoy learning.
It’s all about testing, rather than “making decisions.” Sounds less scary, right?
“When you’re just conducting experiments, there’s no failure. Any result is learning. If there’s no failure, you don’t have to worry.”


Read more: http://blog.bufferapp.com/why-highly-successful-people-crave-failure-and-mistakes#ixzz2vkpURjIZ

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

On Criticism from Marcus Aurelius


From James Clear
On dealing with criticism…
You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.
I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.