How Silicon Valley does meetings

In meetings, managers should do 90% of the listening, and in one-to-one meetings, managers should ask certain questions: (link).

Management Skills from Life

Not everyone is lucky enough to experience poverty. If you're from a struggling poor family, you're bound to have natural leadership qualities. Poverty makes you master management without going to any management or business schools. Not having any money will unleash your unknown abilities.

If you have money, learning to endure suffering provides lots if valuable lessons for life. It teaches resilience that you can apply to other parts of your life - especially when it comes to mental stress of life situations. It helps you see situations more richly. They are not bad or good; pain or pleasure. They are more mixed and knowing that there is some good in there can point you in the right direction. It teaches you patience. This too will pass. When you are suffering minutes can seem like hours and hours like days. Learning how to cope with this mentally; learning the tricks and the way your mind works can give you strength. Finally it teaches you about yourself. You are the only one who has an impact. How you learn to suffer is up to you. Physical exercise is the most effective and healthy way I know.

The importance of an attractive work environment.

The truth is that we are inspired by beautiful things, and our environment plays a big role in what we ultimately produce. It’s why the best designers use Apple hardware—because they are powerful and beautiful. Or we work at clean desks, with headphones playing our favorite songs, or beautiful coffee shops with bright furniture. Because we are inspired by everything around us. Functional begets functional, and beauty begets beauty.

Designer notes

Your style should be unique and bring structure to the design. Your style should leave an imprint on the minds of the audience. Leadership is demonstrated in how well you manage your design projects. Typography is the official language of graphic design.

"A graphic designer should be lucid about discovering and producing the picture that other people are trying to express with words and desire. The picture may not always be clear at first, but this is where creativity stands out." [link]

2015

1. Purpose answers the question, "Why do you exist?"
2. Values answer the question, "What do you believe?"
3. Vision answer the question, "Where are you going?"
4. Strategy is how you are going to get there.

My mission is to become the author and illustrator of the favorite fairytale of every young child. This will be accomplished by writing a journal and creating images each week (strategy). My book will be insightful, playful, and mysterious - combining art and spirituality; earning popularity based on merit (values). My readers will be transformed by the creativity expressed in the story and images which will translated into movie (vision).

Psilocybin Research

Go to Quora.

Johns Hopkins studies on psilocybin:

Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/P... 

Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later
http://csp.org/psilocybin/Hopkin... 

Human hallucinogen research:guidelines for safety
http://csp.org/psilocybin/Hopkin... 

Press Release:
http://csp.org/psilocybin/PressR... 

New York Times article: "Can Mushrooms Treat Depression?"
<A study published last year in the journal Experimental Brain Research found that psilocybin eliminated conditioned fear responses in mice, which has implications for sufferers ofPTSD. And psilocybin has been shown to relieve anxiety, depression and despair in terminal cancer patients, who describe their experience as giving them a new perspective on their lives.>

USA Today: 'Magic mushroom' drug may improve personality long-term
http://www.usatoday.com/news/hea... 

Dr. Roland Griffiths on TEDx:

http://tedxmidatlantic.com/2009-...

Organizational Culture: Japan vs U.S.

Sometimes the "problem" is that the organization's culture is diverse. For example, in the modern Japanese culture, corporate culture is based on a network of hierarchical relationships rather than the Western pattern of shared values and goals. However, Japanese workers reject a superior whose orders they perceive as detrimental to the organization as a whole - loyalty to the members of the group, or organization, supersedes hierarchical rule. 

Group-think can result in the development of low self-confidence in decision-making as personal evaluation and observation seems more threatening to Japanese. Independence is often seen as anti-conformity. Creative thinkers are regarded as acting negatively against authority rather than seen as seeking new independently-formulated goals.

Various Japanese terms related to conformity: dakyo, kyocho, docho, and ison.

Independence occurs when person is consistent and logical in judgement.

Reference link.

"Blindsight" quotes

"...who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I?"

Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself."

What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?” 

People simply can’t accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride.” 

You can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language.” 

...something ELSE set your body in motion, sent an executive summary - almost an afterthought - to the homunculus behind your eyes ...that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as The person, mistakes correlation for causality," ...and thinks He moved the finger” 

Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.” 

The second mouse gets the cheese.” 

We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just … light and motion. Motion draws the focus.  And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image, the movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just … shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an … an illusion of continuity into your head.” He turned to face me. “And you know what’s really amazing? If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just … ignores it. It’s invisible.” 

PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES. —OLD ECOLOGIST’S PROVERB”

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat?” 

― Peter Watts, Blindsight

Eudaimonic Well-being

The Greek word eudaimonia means literally ‘the state of having a good indwelling spirit, a good genius’.

Found on a blog

Did you ever realize how much your body loves you? I mean its always trying to keep you alive. That’s all your body has to live for. Your body is making sure you breathe while you sleep, stopping cuts from bleeding, fixing broken bones, finding ways to beat the illnesses that might get you. Your body literally loves you so much. It’s time you start loving your body back.

u think i am walking around the house with a blanket around my shoulders because i am cold, but in actuality it is my cloak and i am on an adventure

Forgive the past. It is over. Learn from it and let go. People are constantly changing and growing. Do not cling to a limited, disconnected, negative image of a person in the past. See that person now. Your relationship is always alive and changing.

there are 7 billion people on the planet and you only interact with like a fraction of a fracton of them in your lifetime. imagine how many incredible friendships or relationships you could have but you’ll never meet or get to know those people

People who notice everything but remain silent are to be feared.

Never trust a person who talks to their pets in a normal voice.

I want to be around people that do things. i don't want to be around people that judge and talk about what other people do. I want to be around people that dream and support and do things.

"Could you please hold this for a second?" hands you my problems and runs away

Making something beautiful requires effort and perseverance.

Once you stop wanting something you get it.

One must accept the fact that others don't see what you do.

You are not free until you have no need to impress anybody.

You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming.

I want to make beautiful things even if nobody cares.

The sign of intelligence is that you are always wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about everything damn thing they are doing in their life.

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of bestial machinery.

To see/read from original blog, click here

Mindfulness and "skill in action"

Mindfulness is the ability to cultivate awareness of the present moment while putting aside our lenses of judgment. It is being in connection with the direct experience of the present moment, the here and now. 

Skill in action.

This is the prime message of many spiritual classics too, all of which embody insights into the difference between engaged action and the concept of action (unrealistic ideas or ideas ideas about what might happen or should havehappened).  

• Bhagavad Gita chapter 2 verse 47:  You have control over action alone, never over its fruits. Do not live for the fruits of action, nor attach youself to inaction.
• Likewise, the Buddhist concept of non-attachment does not mean withdrawal, or inaction, but the realization that action only occurs in the full engagement with the present moment.  
• The Taoist principle of Wu wei (non-action) does not mean inaction, it means fully effective action that does not diverge from what is natural and actual.

Quote on the Best Kind of Coworkers

The best kind of people to work with take their work seriously but don't take themselves seriously.

Chaos theory in the News

There is no such thing as Order. Order is nothing but another random part of Chaos. Order can be part of Chaos, Chaos can not be part of order. 

The fundamental basis of science is cause and effect. Every effect has a cause. And therefore, there is no chaos in the universe, simply an inconceivable number of causes.

Chaos theory is not *a* theory, it's a field of study, which, scientifically speaking, is a completely different concept.

From comments on article:

"The chaos theory is a complicated and disputed mathematical theory that seeks to explain the effect of seemingly insignificant factors. The chaos theory name originates from the idea that the theory can give an explanation for chaotic or random occurrences. The first real experiment in the chaos theory was done in 1960 by a meteorologist, Edward Lorenz. He was working with a system of equations to predict what the weather would likely be.

In 1961, he wanted to recreate a past weather sequence, but he began the sequence mid-way and printed out only the first three decimal places instead of the full six. This radically changed the sequence, which could reasonably be assumed to closely mirror the original sequence with only the slight change of three decimal places. However, Lorenz proved that seemingly insignificant factors can have a huge effect on the overall outcome. The chaos theory explores the effects of small occurrences dramatically affecting the outcomes of seemingly unrelated events."

"Are You Cooked Yet?"

As an employee, are you held accountable for work that you are unable to do well due to mismanagement of resources and/or a lack of tools (aka, proper technology)? Are you and your peers given directives to be creative and innovative, yet must suppress creative ideas for fear of being labeled “subversive” by the organization?

Your organizational culture might be codependent. The leadership needs, yet fears, their smart, creative workers. But creativity is not fostered because change is threatening to the comfortable status quo.  Employee low morale is bad for teamwork – and that’s the point – then leadership can blame the employees’ lack of collaboration for the organization’s shortcomings. Over time, just like in an abusive relationship, the employee develops self-doubt and low self-esteem.

“It’s a bit like placing a frog in a pot of warm water that it is then set to boil. Because the temperature rises so gradually, the frog never even realizes it’s being cooked.”

-Article about “gas lighting”<Link>

Superposition etc

The main idea of quantum mechanics is that an object like an electron or a photon behaves as both a particle and a wave… The other weird characteristic of quantum particles is that they can exist in multiple places at once, a phenomenon called superposition. But superposition is a fragile state. The moment that scientists try to measure the particles, the superposition state collapses and the particles come to exist in only one spot. Before the particles are disturbed, they exist in multiple places all at once.

Quantum entanglement is superposition on a larger scale… Particles become entangled when they interact with each other. Entanglement means that when an action is performed on one particle, it directly affects that particle's entangled partner no matter how far apart they are.