Bike. Want.

The Marin Terra Linda
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Marin-Bikes-model-meets-challenge-of-riding-in-5275528.php

30 second life changing habit

This is a new one.  I very much like the premise and have never hear of it before.  The blog post sounds like it is written by a nonnative speaker, but who cares.  The concept of editing being crucial and very difficult makes this post very believable to me.  Her blog looks very interesting.

Immediately after every lecture, meeting, or any significant experience, take 30 seconds  — no more, no less  —  to write down the most important points. If you always do just this, said his grandfather, and even if you only do this, with no other revision, you will be OK.

1. It's not note-taking: Don't think, just because you write down everything in a meeting, that you're excused from the 30-second summation. Though brief, this exercise is entirely different from taking notes. It's an act of interpretation, prioritization, and decision-making.
2. It's hard work: Deciding what's most important is exhausting. It's amazing how easy it is to tell yourself you've captured everything that matters, to find excuses to avoid this brief mental sprint  —  a kind of 100 meters for your brain.
3. Detail is a trap: Precisely because we so often ostensibly capture everything, we avoid the hard work of deciding what few things count. So much of excellence is, of course, the art of elimination. And the 30-second review stops you using quantity as an excuse.
4. You must act quickly: If you wait a few hours, you may recall the facts, but you lose the nuance. And this makes all the difference in deciding what matters. Whether it's the tone in someone's voice or the way one seemingly simple suggestion sparks so many others or the shadow of an idea in your mind triggered by a passing comment.
5. You learn to listen better and ask better questions: Once you get into the habit of the 30-second review, it starts to change the way you pay attention, whether listening to a talk or participating in a discussion. It's like learning to detect a simple melody amid a cacophony of sound. And as you listen with more focus and ask better questions, which prompt actionable answers, your 30-second review becomes more useful.
6. You're able to help others more: Much of what makes the 30-second cut are observations about what matters to other people. Even if the purpose is to help better manage different interests in future conversations, it also helps you understand others' needs and so solve their problems. This does not surprise me: in months of interviewing people who make generous connections, I've been struck by how many have their own unconscious version of the 30-second review: focused on the question of how best they can help.
7. It gets easier and more valuable: Each time you practice, it gets a little easier, a little more helpful, and little more fun.

Creativity Prompts for Writes

Had to stash this away!
http://www.creativity-portal.com/prompts/imagination.prompt.html

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"

Welcome Failure

this seems to be a recurring theme...

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

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.