Keep Pushing On

It is quite easy to set a goal and fail at it.  I know that for certain as I have done it many times.  The point is not whether you fail during your attempt, but it is whether you quit along the way.  Instead of quitting, get yourself back up and keep on pushing onward.  It is definitely easier to quit, but you will get success, of some kind, if you refuse to quit!

Some goals should be abandoned if you realize they are not worth achieving, but only do that with a conscious thought, not just because things are hard.  Make sure your goals are good ones.  If they are, never quit!

Priorities

A while back I heard the story of how to fit many stones into a container.  Start by adding the biggest ones, then smaller until the container is full.  Adding in the reverse order will end up filling the container much faster with less getting in.

This is a lot like our day, but I think the base analogy and our lives have to be adjusted a bit.  The higher the priority, the larger the pebble.  You can't totally fill things with the high priority items or you will only be able to fit in a few low priority items.

Instead, do things in layers.  Do a couple high priority things, then some medium and finally some low priority items.  Repeat this process and you will fill the container that is your day with much more.  It will allow you to accomplish many things, but to be much more efficient about it.

Some high priority items may not get done as fast as they should, but it will all get done quicker overall.

The only tricky part with applying this to life is that things keep being added to our incoming pile.  We just have to adapt to this and live with a layered approach to get more things done.

At least that is my theory now!

Building a Habit

I have proven how hard it is to build a new habit.  I completely forgot about blogging yesterday, blowing my attempt to post once each day this year. 

This demonstrates how hard it is to do something new.  Our existing habits will push to keep their active status, making it hard to fit in the new item.  I could say all kinds of clever ways to use post it notes, electronic reminders and other things to help keep us on track; but it ultimately comes down to a matter of repeatedly doing what our new habit is.

It is also important to keep pushing at the new habit.  It really doesn't matter that I missed one day.  The real point is to start posting something on a daily basis, even if specific days get missed in the process.

I would encourage all of you to take the same approach.  Aim at good goals, but don't quit if you seem to not hit them at first!

Allow Cheap Ebook Upgrades

A big flaw I see in purchasing ebooks is that you normally cannot receive updated versions at a reduced price.  I can understand completely why you don't get cheap upgrades for printed books, but it seems completely unreasonable that I cannot upgrade version 4 of a technical book to version 5 without buying the entire book again.

Companies really need to consider this and find a way (say for 10-20% of the full electronic book price) upgrade a book when a new version comes out.  I suspect that many of us will refuse to pay full price for a new version, but would consider a price like that as a reasonable cost to get the new and updated material.

A True Purpose

One tremendous advantage of having a relationship with the Creator of the universe is that my life can have meaning far beyond the relatively short time I am in this world.  He has the proper perspective to direct me to the things that will use my life for the best effect.

I pity those who think they are really all alone in this world.  Our life has no true value in the long run if it is nothing more than just a batch of chemicals.

I would encourage any of you reading this to work on your own life mission and goal statements, but to make sure those are built on a foundation of performing the will of the One who made it all.

A New Year - A New Goal

I am not a big fan of New Year's resolutions, especially since those things made in a fit of passion tend not to have true sticking power in our lives.

I am going to break that view though and resolve to post something here every day in 2012, provided I have access to do so.  As with many bloggers, this has been a "when I feel like it" effort and that has made for very sparse posts and very little to read on a regular basis.  I doubt many people read it, but I figure getting into the regular habit of writing will both help me write better and should make the content more interesting to others.

No Absolutes?

Ask someone if they are absolutely sure of it the next time they assert that no absolutes exists.  That statement is self-contradictory.

Projection

One underlying human trait is that we usually project our own thoughts onto others.  We expect others to be trustworthy if we are trustworthy.  We expect others to cheat us if we tend to cheat others.  It is interesting how many human relations are colored with this.

How Much Can Discrimination Explain?

I always enjoy Walter Williams. I find his ideas to be very cognizant and well thought out.

How Much Can Discrimination Explain?

It is worth the time to listen to this, especially if you believe that the modern idea that the outcomes imply discrimination if they differ from the population distribution.

Make Sure Things Work the Way You Think

I have become very much of a contrarian as I have grown older. I have found much "common wisdom" to be far from accurate, especially in our modern society where the rules are drastically different than most of recorded history. It can be dangerous to comment on any specific ones of these, especially since so many take offense to those who don't agree with them today, in spite of the wide openness everyone is supposed to be following. I would encourage everyone to really look at things that you have taken for granted and make sure they really work as you think they do. Figure out which of your "core beliefs" are reliable and which are built on a faulty foundation. That will put you in a much better stead in life. This does not mean that everything is relative, but the our understanding of things is often off the mark, especially in certain situations. The absolute truths may still be there, but they may not be the exact things you thought they were. Keep that in the forefront of your mind!

Free from All Risk?

One of the areas where I do a lot of work is in information security. We learn there that a key underlying principle is that we can never completely remove risk, we can only reduce it to an acceptable level. This is a principle that needs to be spread throughout more of life. We live in a time when we try to completely eliminate any risk. Not only is this not possible, it costs a lot of money to find that out. We can never completely remove every harmful substance, no matter how hard we try. Don't give into the rhetoric that claims you can do so. Instead, turn the conversation toward the goal of finding the proper level of risk.

Not Dealing with Reality

I am not optimistic that it can change, but I am still very discouraged that our country (the United States) is not dealing with its overspending problems. No one should be surprised that the Debt Commission failed in its effort to find an acceptable compromise to fix our problems. I just read an editorial by my own Congressman and while he noted his disappointment that no deal was made, he credited Democrats with trying to do what they could. Balderdash. No one is trying to deal with this. The only one I have seen admit that we need massive spending cuts is Ron Paul and he faces a huge uphill climb, even if he somehow managed to win the presidential election. Too many people benefit from government's redistributing money. The problem is that no one has enough money to keep the game up, so it will crash in one way or another. I tend to agree with those who believe we will inflate our way out of this, which will make everyone who has savings much, much poorer, as their money is worth far less. Some say we just have to make "the rich pay their fair share," yet few can answer what that "fair share" is. We would still have a huge deficit even if we took 100% of the earnings of "the rich." How can people be so ignorant of that? Ultimately, the middle class will pay the price and may even end up not existing in the same way in a few years. We are in for quite a wild ride.

Why is "Her" OK, but "His" Isn't?

I notice a lot of hypocrisy in writing today. I regularly read blog posts and online articles that use "her" for the generic human pronoun, eschewing the more traditional "his" in attempt to not imply that all the targets of the topic are male. The root challenge is that English does not have a generic pronoun for this. "Its" might be accurate, but doesn't work well. "His" was the traditional word for centuries, but the modern politically correct movement has proclaimed that it is no longer acceptable. You would likely get outcries of complaints if you used "his" that you will not get if you use "her." How stupid can we be?

A Ponzi Scheme

Does anyone really think that Social Security is not a Ponzi Scheme? It relies on current contributions to make its payout. How is that any different? The only thing it has in its favor is that the government is a legal counterfeiter, unlike Ponzi and Madoff, the poster children of this same scheme. We simply don't have the money. How will we magically get it?

Problems with the Death Penalty

I just listened to a news story about someone in Georgia who has had significant doubts raised about his guilt. The only person speaking on camera in favor of carrying through the death penalty was the mother of the slain officer. She said that it should proceed and she wanted to ask those who questioned it how many of them had their sons shot. What difference does that make? Likely kill an innocent man because your son was shot? Are people really this stupid? I am in favor of the death penalty when it is properly applied, but I find that our modern legal system allows the rich to buy their way out of it and the poor to get railroaded. That is flawed. We must protect society, from cruel predators in society and inside prosecuting offices.

Wishing Scary People Were Far Away

A recent Economist article noted that a lot of the responses to the riots in England were merely "wishing scary people far away." What exactly is wrong with that? I certainly want scary people to be far from me!

It can be dangerous when this is merely a method to close our eyes to danger, but it is completely valid when legitimate things are done to protect ourselves. You must protect yourself, your family and your neighborhood first. Not doing so is far more immoral than anything else.

Hopefully people learn this before society completely falls apart.

NCAA

I grew up in Columbus, so I have a soft spot for Ohio State even though I went to another Big Ten school, Illinois for my degrees.

I don't watch a lot of football, but I happened to pick up their game today against Akron and some of the talk was on the penalties they faced for past actions.

I know that many, especially in the NCAA, want to pretend that college football is purely amateur, but they are total idiots. I have not delved deeply into the issues, but the things that happened seemed to be pretty minor compared to the penalties, and potential future penalties, that were put on the team. I would say the same whatever school it was, I just noticed it because it was Ohio State.

Have some consequences, but require flagrant violation of rules for such penalties, not the things most schools are certainly getting away with.

Controlling Our Lives

We live in an era of the freedom to do whatever you want, unless it is on the list of "incorrect" things that are OK to control. Eat some food that is not healthy for you? Hold some beliefs that others strongly oppose? You can be freely opposed in many cases.

This is the hypocrisy that gets to me. You are horrible if you are a certain way, but you are fine if you fit in their box. I never liked being stuffed in a box.

Are we really that different than the rest of history or do we just favor different things? People always want to control others. Stop it!

Everything is a Trade-Off

I am going to write a few blog posts on the trade-offs inherent in life. Some of these may touch on what we see as given rights and even discussing them ends up causing a bunch of people to get uptight unless you repeatedly stress what "should be."

What "should be" is completely irrelevant. I may think I "should be" able to walk off a tall building and float through the air, but we still know this is not possible.

Unfortunately, we do not know this for many of our choices in life. The best choice may still be to jump off that building and into a nearby lake to escape the building fire, but the jump will still impact us.

We want to "have it all" today and that never works. Everything comes at a price. There is no such thing as a free lunch. This is a message we need to drill in our heads: "No free lunches!" Everything comes at a price.

What prices are you paying today for your past choices and those of others?

Who is the Crazy One?

Many people believe:

- Life spontaneously organized itself. Experiments show life doesn't proceed from non-life, but they believe it happened anyway.

- This belief is sometimes based on an experiment where heavy human interaction (outside intelligence) was needed to get the "right" ingredients separated. Though the right ingredients may not all have really been right since the had both right- and left-handed ingredients, one being the building block of life and one being fatal to it.

- Little things change (cats changing to different cats) so big things must change (dogs changing to cats). No clear cut examples of this shift exist, but science channels can make up shows that show it with lots of "and then a miracle happened" steps in between.

- In a related manner, lots of time produces order out of randomness. This doesn't work anywhere in real life without external intelligence, but hey, the theory is true so it MUST happen.

- Sometimes "outside energy" (unorganized) is brought in to produce that order. So that's why my lawn dies off (or at least turns quite brown) in the heat of the summer. It is really organizing more with all that energy.

- Organization and brilliant design imply randomness. Except that is when such came in a signal from outer space. Then it would imply a really smart civilization.

- Those who find their views stupid are afraid of them. It couldn't be that they find their views completely ridiculous, could it?

- It is science because they say it is science. They don't have to perform falsifiable experiments like are required for all other areas of science. If something fails, make up a new explanation for how it is still true.

We have a modern high priest cast. They are called "scientists" and we are supposed to bow down at their proclamations. They can sometimes argue amongst themselves on the really weird things (string theory, multiple universes, etc.), but we have to believe their ultimate proclamations of how it happened because that is "science" and it is the way it is.

How is this any different than ancient civilizations when they believed some really odd things and insisted they were true because that is what their high priests said?

Lots of faith in all of them, even while claim not to have faith.

Those of you who stumble on this while investigating me may not agree with my views, but they are built on a whole lot more logic than I see exhibited in the "science" high priesthood.

More to come....