Teachable Moments

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kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

PROVERBS AROUND THE WORLD

Post by kmaherali »

1.Swedish proverb: The pillow is the best advisor.
Meaning: Sleep over a problem and see how you feel in the morning.

2. Kenyan proverb: When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets hurt.
Meaning: Fights of the powerful hurt only the little guys.

3. Ancient Roman proverb: Hunger is the best sauce.
Meaning: Everything tastes better when you are hungry.

4. Japanese proverb: A frog in a well does not know the great sea.
Meaning: There is more going on than you know, try and see the big picture.

5. Turkish proverb: If the world flooded, it would not matter to the duck.
Meaning: Things that are bad for you, aren’t always bad for everyone.

6. Filipino proverb: Leave it to the batman.
Meaning: Some problems require superheroes to solve.

7. Russian proverb: To live with the wolves, you have to howl like a wolf.
Meaning: In dangerous situations, try and blend in.

8. French proverb: A hungry stomach has no ears.
Meaning: You can’t concentrate without food in your tum tum.

9. Kenyan proverb: Slippery ground does not recognise a king.
Meaning: Even the most powerful people are just human deep down.

10. Gaelic proverb: A cat in mittens won’t catch mice.
Meaning: Being careful and polite doesn’t always get things done.
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Stop Multitasking. No, Really — Just Stop It.

Post by kmaherali »

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A few months ago, I was teetering on the brink of feeling overwhelmed by life’s responsibilities, afflicted by the ambient anxiety that seems to be an intrinsic part of life in the 2020s. In an effort to maintain — or maybe restore — my sanity, I embarked on a personal endurance challenge.

Other people, at similar moments, begin competing in grueling triathlons, or head off on intensive meditation retreats. Me? I decided to give up listening to podcasts or music while running, or driving, or loading the dishwasher, or doing almost anything else. To just focus, in other words, on what it was I was actually doing, one activity at a time.

It was surprisingly hard. Once you’ve finished mocking me for treating such a trifling alteration to my habits like a grand existential struggle, I have one request: Try it. Identify the small tricks you use to avoid being fully present with whatever you’re doing, and put them aside for a week or two.

You may discover, as I did, that you were unwittingly addicted to not doing one thing at a time. You might even come to agree with me that restoring our capacity to live sequentially — that is, focusing on one thing after another, in turn, and enduring the confrontation with our human limitations that this inherently entails — may be among the most crucial skills for thriving in the uncertain, crisis-prone future we all face.

It’s not that the urge to multitask is anything new. “One thinks with a watch in one’s hand,” Nietzsche complained as early as 1887, “even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market.” We’ve also long known that multitasking doesn’t really work. You’ve probably read — perhaps while half-watching TV — articles explaining the research findings that multitasking isn’t really even possible; mainly, we’re just switching our attention rapidly between different foci without realizing it, incurring cognitive costs each time we do so. One study of drivers found only 2.5 percent of people showed no performance decrease when attempting two tasks at once. The rest of us just end up doing everything worse.

Yet the pressure to multitask can still often seem like something imposed on us from outside. Burdened by so many demands at work, you can feel as though you’ve no choice but to split your attention among them. Meanwhile, should you feel some responsibility to address the troubles of the wider world as well, then the causes for alarm — the climate, the fate of democracy, the threats from artificial intelligence and the risk of nuclear war, to name just a few — are so numerous as to make multitasking look like every citizen’s duty.

Technological advances turn the screw further. Those of us not raised as “digital natives” can remember a time when we didn’t have the option of using social media to distract ourselves from unpleasant tasks, and when the limits imposed by our tools — the speed of snail mail, for example, or the time it took to visit a library to conduct research — meant we felt less pressure from bosses or customers to somehow transcend the limits imposed by our finite attention spans.

But philosophers and spiritual teachers have long understood that the urge to avoid giving ourselves fully to any single activity goes deeper, to the core of our struggles as finite human beings.

The Hindu mystic Patanjali, for example, saw doing one thing at a time as a core yogic discipline, suggesting that it didn’t come easily to people 2,000 years ago, either. We rail against what the Christian productivity writer Jordan Raynor calls our “unipresence” — our inability to be in more than one place at a time, in contrast to the omnipresence attributed to God — and against the shortness of our time on earth, which averages little more than four thousand weeks. All this finitude feels unpleasantly constraining, because it means there will always be many more things we could do than we ever will do — and that the choice to spend a portion of our time on any one thing automatically entails the sacrifice of countless other things we might have done with it.

This explains the attraction of multitasking: It offers the false promise that we might somehow slip the bonds of our finitude. We tell ourselves that with sufficient self-discipline, plus the right time-management tricks, we might finally “get on top of everything” and feel good about ourselves at last. This utopia never arrives, of course, though it often feels as if it might be just around the corner.

The uncomfortable truth is that the only way to find sanity in an overwhelming world — and to have any concrete effect on that world — is to surrender such efforts to escape the human condition, and drop back down into the reality of our limitations. Distracting yourself from challenging tasks by, say, listening to podcasts doesn’t actually make them more bearable over the long term; instead, it makes them less enjoyable, by reinforcing your belief that they’re the sort of activities you can tolerate only by distracting yourself — while at the same time all but ensuring that you’ll neither accomplish the task in question nor digest the contents of the podcast as well as you otherwise might.

At work, the way to get more tasks done is to learn to let most of them wait while you focus on one. “This is the ‘secret’ of those people who ‘do so many things’ and apparently so many difficult things,” wrote the management guru Peter Drucker in his book “The Effective Executive.” “They do only one at a time.” Making a difference in one domain requires giving yourself permission not to care equally about all the others.

There will always be too much to do, no matter what you do. But the ironic upside of this seemingly dispiriting fact is that you needn’t beat yourself up for failing to do it all, nor keep pressuring yourself to find ways to get on top of it all by means of increasingly extreme multitasking.

Instead, you can pour your finite time, energy and attention into a handful of things that truly count. You’ll enjoy things more, into the bargain. My gratifying new ability to “be here now” while running or driving or cooking dinner isn’t the result of having developed any great spiritual prowess. Rather, it’s a matter of realizing I could only ever be here now anyway — so I might as well give up the stressful struggle to pretend otherwise.

Oliver Burkeman is the author of “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

My Three Favorite Pieces of Advice

Post by kmaherali »

Dear Karim,

I recently got an invitation to be interviewed on a podcast, and I was asked to share my three favorite bits of advice for others.

In the end I decided not to do the podcast interview, but I thought I’d share my thoughts with you. These pieces of advice are really from other people, but they have been important to me, and I hope they make a difference in your life, too.

The first bit of advice is “It’s only a thought, and a thought can be changed” from Louise Hay. I have thought about this Louise quote thousands of times over the past 35 years. When I first heard it, I really didn’t understand how transformative it could be, but over time I began to realize the true power of this message. It was really the basis for much of what Louise taught for so many years, and it has helped so many people, including me.

This simple truth is so empowering because once you really take it in, you know you can always make your life better just by changing the way you’re thinking. So many of the troubles we think we have are really created by our own thoughts. We have about 10,000 thoughts a day, and many of those are negative ones that we choose to think about ourselves and our circumstances, when in reality they aren’t true at all.

The second bit of advice is very similar, yet it’s different in the way I think about it. While doing the PBS special for his book, The Power of Intention, Wayne Dyer said, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” The minute Wayne said this for the first time, it began to resonate with listeners and viewers. I remember Wayne saying this again on QVC, and the phones just lit up with callers because so many people related to this statement.

I have written other newsletters about this quote and the simple power it can have in your life if you really apply it. Just take the time to look at circumstances in your life from a different view or lens, and you will be surprised how those things change.

The third bit of advice is from a country song called “Buy Dirt” by Jordan Davis. There is a lyric in the song that says “Do what you love but call it work.” This is probably the best advice I could give anyone because if you can do what you love every day (and get paid for it), your life will be much richer. This resonates with me because I consider myself very lucky to have spent the last 35 years doing what I love and calling it “work.” People ask me when I’m going to quit working, but I don’t think I’ll ever quit because I don’t think of what I do as work.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I couldn’t find something else I love doing. And it doesn’t mean I have loved every single task, every single day; there have been some very challenging times for sure. But overall, it has been wonderful spending my time here at Hay House.

After Louise Hay founded Hay House at age 60, she spent the next 30 years doing what she loved every day. Wayne Dyer spent 40 years writing books, giving speeches, and teaching, and he loved it. They both found so much joy and meaning in their “work.”

I give this advice to my kids and nieces and nephews often. It seems to make sense to them, even if they aren’t able to apply it at this moment in their young lives.

I hope you find something in these pieces of advice that you can apply in your own life.

Have a great week.

Wishing You the Best,
Reid Tracy
CEO, Hay House
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: Teachable Moments

Post by kmaherali »

A lovely little girl was holding two apples with both hands.

Her mum came in and softly asked her little daughter with a smile; my sweetie, could you give your mum one of your two apples?

The girl looked up at her mum for some seconds, then she suddenly took a quick bite on one apple, and then quickly on the other.

The mum felt the smile on her face freeze. She tried hard not to reveal her disappointment.

Then the little girl handed one of her bitten apples to her mum,and said: mummy, here you are. This is the sweeter one.

No matter who you are, how experienced you are, and how knowledgeable you think you are, always delay judgement.

Give others the privilege to explain themselves.

What you see may not be the reality. Never conclude for others.

Which is why we should never only focus on the surface and judge others without understanding them first.

Those who like to pay the bill, do so not because they are loaded but because they value friendship above money.

Those who take the initiative at work, do so not because they are stupid but because they understand the concept of responsibility.

Those who apologize first after a fight, do so not because they are wrong but because they value the people around them.

Those who are willing to help you, do so not because they owe you any thing but because they see you as a true friend.

Those who often text you, do so not because they have nothing better to do but because you are in their heart.

Those who take out time to chat with you, do not mean they are jobless or less busy, but they know the importance of keeping in touch.

One day, all of us will get separated from each other; we will miss our conversations of everything & nothing; the dreams that we had.

Days will pass by, months, years, until this contact becomes rare... One day our children will see our pictures and ask 'Who are these people?' And we will smile with invisible tears because a heart is touched with a strong word and you will say: 'IT WAS THEM THAT I HAD THE BEST DAYS OF MY LIFE WITH'.

Send this to all your friends that you will never forget.

Put this on the whatsapp of those who made you smile in any type of way.

It might surprise you but look at how many will be sent back.

Thank you for making me smile for sometime in my life.
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: Teachable Moments

Post by kmaherali »

40 ʏᴇᴀʀs ᴀɢᴏ, ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴏɴᴇ ᴡᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴄʜɪʟᴅʀᴇɴ. ᴛᴏᴅᴀʏ ᴍᴀɴʏ ᴘᴇᴏᴘʟᴇ ᴀʀᴇ ᴀғʀᴀɪᴅ ᴏғ ʜᴀᴠɪɴɢ ᴄʜɪʟᴅʀᴇɴ.
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40 ʏᴇᴀʀs ᴀɢᴏ, ᴄʜɪʟᴅʀᴇɴ ʀᴇsᴘᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴇɪʀ ᴘᴀʀᴇɴᴛs. ɴᴏᴡ ᴘᴀʀᴇɴᴛs ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴛᴏ ʀᴇsᴘᴇᴄᴛ ᴛʜᴇɪʀ ᴄʜɪʟᴅʀᴇɴ.
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40 ʏᴇᴀʀs ᴀɢᴏ, ᴍᴀʀʀɪᴀɢᴇ ᴡᴀs ᴇᴀsʏ ʙᴜᴛ ᴅɪᴠᴏʀᴄᴇ ᴡᴀs ᴅɪғғɪᴄᴜʟᴛ. ɴᴏᴡᴀᴅᴀʏs ɪᴛ ɪs ᴅɪғғɪᴄᴜʟᴛ ᴛᴏ ɢᴇᴛ ᴍᴀʀʀɪᴇᴅ ʙᴜᴛ ᴅɪᴠᴏʀᴄᴇ ɪs sᴏ ᴇᴀsʏ.
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40 ʏᴇᴀʀs ᴀɢᴏ, ᴡᴇ ɢᴏᴛ ᴛᴏ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇ ɴᴇɪɢʜʙᴏʀs. ɴᴏᴡ ᴡᴇ ᴀʀᴇ sᴛʀᴀɴɢᴇʀs ᴛᴏ ᴏᴜʀ ɴᴇɪɢʜʙᴏʀs.
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40 ʏᴇᴀʀs ᴀɢᴏ, ᴠɪʟʟᴀɢᴇʀs ᴡᴇʀᴇ ғʟᴏᴄᴋɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄɪᴛʏ ᴛᴏ ғɪɴᴅ ᴊᴏʙs. ɴᴏᴡ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛᴏᴡɴ ᴘᴇᴏᴘʟᴇ ᴀʀᴇ ғʟᴇᴇɪɴɢ ғʀᴏᴍ ᴛʜᴇ CITY ᴛᴏ ғɪɴᴅ ᴘᴇᴀᴄᴇ.
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40 ʏᴇᴀʀs ᴀɢᴏ, ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴏɴᴇ ᴡᴀɴᴛᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ғᴀᴛ ᴛᴏ ʟᴏᴏᴋ ʜᴀᴘᴘʏ. ɴᴏᴡᴀᴅᴀʏs ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴏɴᴇ ᴅɪᴇᴛs ᴛᴏ ʟᴏᴏᴋ ʜᴇᴀʟᴛʜʏ.
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40 ʏᴇᴀʀs ᴀɢᴏ, ʀɪᴄʜ ᴘᴇᴏᴘʟᴇ ᴘʀᴇᴛᴇɴᴅᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴘᴏᴏʀ. ɴᴏᴡ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴏᴏʀ ᴀʀᴇ ᴘʀᴇᴛᴇɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ʀɪᴄʜ.
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40 ʏᴇᴀʀs ᴀɢᴏ, ᴏɴʟʏ ᴏɴᴇ ᴘᴇʀsᴏɴ ᴡᴏʀᴋᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ sᴜᴘᴘᴏʀᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡʜᴏʟᴇ ғᴀᴍɪʟʏ. ɴᴏᴡ ᴀʟʟ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴡᴏʀᴋ ᴛᴏ sᴜᴘᴘᴏʀᴛ ᴏɴᴇ ᴄʜɪʟᴅ.
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40 ʏᴇᴀʀs ᴀɢᴏ, ᴘᴇᴏᴘʟᴇ ʟᴏᴠᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ sᴛᴜᴅʏ & ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʙᴏᴏᴋs. ɴᴏᴡ ᴘᴇᴏᴘʟᴇ ʟᴏᴠᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ғᴀᴄᴇʙᴏᴏᴋ & ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴛʜᴇɪʀ ᴡʜᴀᴛsᴀᴘᴘ ᴍᴇssᴀɢᴇs.

40 YEARS AGO WAS 1983...WHICH SEEMS LIKE YESTERDAY!

These are hard ғᴀᴄᴛs of ᴛᴏᴅᴀʏ's ʟɪғᴇ.

SURE TRUTH
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

When the Best Gift Costs Nothing at All

Post by kmaherali »

In a season of high spirits and spirited spending, experts say focusing on sentiment over receipts is more likely to bring holiday cheer.
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On Christmas Eve in 2013, Elisa Stead, an American living abroad in Iceland, was ready to celebrate the holiday with her fiancé and his family. But when she tore open the wrapping on his gift for her, she was disheartened to discover what lay inside: a car-window scraper. Sure, she lived in a frosty place, but she didn’t own a car. Receiving such a thoughtless gift made for an unhappy holiday, and the relationship ended within the year.

Two years later, Stead was living in Norway and recently engaged to a different man. She still felt detached from the magic of Christmas so her new fiancé, Tore Græsdal, made it his mission to revive it for her. But that didn’t mean spending lavishly. Instead, Græsdal recorded himself reading Norwegian folk tales, and added in a couple of sound effects, like a crackling fire, to make it feel cozy.

The recordings signified their future together in her adopted country and her embrace of a new culture and language. Stead, who traveled often for work and didn’t yet live with her fiancé, took comfort in listening to the folk tales when she and Græsdal were apart. Years later, the couple still return to the recordings, now playing them for their children. Græsdal’s gift that year was priceless in both senses: It cost him nearly nothing to create, and it was so unique no price could be placed on it.

The holiday season is a time of high spirits and spirited spending. As people deal with the pressure of finding the perfect gift for their loved ones, many gifters respond by throwing money at the challenge. One survey found that Americans plan to spend an average of $831 on gifts this year; more than half of them incurred credit card debt to cover last year’s costs, and nearly a third of those are still paying that debt off. According to experts, this approach may be misguided.

Givers “tend to overspend each time they set out to purchase a meaningful gift,” Francis J. Flynn and Gabrielle S. Adams, two professors at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, wrote in a study. They found that, while “gift givers assume that more expensive gifts convey a higher level of thoughtfulness,” recipients don’t see them that way.

Instead, it’s worth considering gifting options that, like Græsdal’s, cost little or nothing, but can be especially cherished because they demonstrate the time and effort that have gone into a token worthy of the giver’s affection for the recipient.

People tend to overestimate the correlation between a gift’s monetary value and its emotional impact, explained Julian Givi, an assistant professor of marketing at West Virginia University’s John Chambers College of Business and Economics. “These no-cost gifts that people are creating from scratch, they’re conveying thoughtfulness and care and appreciation,” he said, all of which mean more than a receipt.

Givi also found that experiences are often better appreciated than material gifts. Some experiential gifts cost money but it is possible to give ones that don’t: a scavenger hunt, a personalized walking tour or hike, teaching someone a skill they’ve expressed interest in. Such presents also tend to generate less physical and financial waste — another concern this season — than material gifts.

Some of the best gifts draw on shared interests. Megan O’Hara and Jonathan Krieger met at a board game speed-dating event in Boston in 2019. The year after they started dating, O’Hara gave Krieger a board game based on a book he had written. She didn’t have a background in game design, but drew on games they enjoyed playing together. She made the cards on the graphic design website Canva, printed them out and used a shoe box as the game’s container. It was, Krieger said, one of the best gifts he’s ever received. (Perhaps the best known example of such a gift is the New York Times game Wordle, which was created as a present by a software engineer for his partner, but ended up being a gift to millions of others.)

While homemade gifts can seem daunting to those who don’t consider themselves crafty, it helps to shift the idea of what those gifts can look like. The key is doing something personal, such as writing someone a letter, song or poem, or recording some favorite memories. If creating something original feels overwhelming, curation is another way to give a thoughtful gift, whether it’s making a mixtape (or, these days, more likely a Spotify playlist), or compiling and sharing favorite recipes.

“Givers refrain from going with the sentimental thing more often than recipients would prefer,” Givi said. “People shouldn’t be as afraid to give them.”

The value of such gifts is found in their enduring resonance. When I was growing up, my grandmother and I shared a love of reading, and she often gave me books from her extensive personal collection as holiday gifts. But one year, when I was a teenager, I unwrapped a bundle of nine typed pages labeled “Favorite Books.”

She’d listed over 30 books and, with each suggestion, she shared a paragraph about her relationship to the book — when she encountered it, why it had stuck with her or a favorite quote. That year, I wondered why she hadn’t just given me another book, which I could have happily cracked open in front of the fireplace that day.

But her desire to share her memories of the books with me was an unforgettable gift. I didn’t end up getting to most of the books while she was alive, so having this special list offers me a way to keep reading alongside her.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/styl ... -cost.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25105
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

[FREE] Announcing the Living a Joyful Life Summit

Post by kmaherali »

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Hello Karim,

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