Life Hacks & Learning Archives - Page 5 of 6

Understanding your body’s auto-pilot

Picture some of the following actions: Walking in your neighbourhood, solving 10 + 10, talking in your mother tongue, counting 6 oranges. Now imagine the following scenarios: Walking through a crowded railway station or airport, solving e² cot 27.9, talking about science in a language that you cannot speak very well, counting 39 oranges. What difference did you notice between the two sets of situations?

If you pay close attention, you will notice that the amount of activity in the brain increases significantly during the activities in the second set. This is because those are situations that you are not used to being in on a regular basis. E.g. you may not even pay attention to your steps while walking through your neighbourhood, but while walking through the crowd of the railway station, you have to watch each step and be attentive. But if you are a regular commuter, even jostling through the crowd will become a habit. That exactly is the power of habits. Your mind runs in cruise mode when you perform activities as a habit and you will often find that it drifts into thoughts of its own while your body finishes the activity on its own accord. You can say that you are running on auto-pilot mode without thinking about it. Continue reading Understanding your body’s auto-pilot

The Joy of Acceptance

The Story of a little girl (me):

I am about 5’3”, may be a bit shorter. It is about the height of an average Indian Woman. But my family is no average. I am a dwarf among the giants. Women in our family including my mom are on an average of 5’5” and men around 5’10” .In both my family and my extended family among all the elders, siblings and cousins I’m the shortest. It was a source of great agony for me during my growing (or not growing enough years).

I can see I really fell short of my parents’ expectations in this front. We visited a number of doctors in various disciplines – Siddha, Ayurveda, Unani as well as the conventional English Medicine. Bought a number of miracle pills for height enhancement as well as exercise books. Most of this only made me feel more self-conscious of my vertical deficit and I abandoned them sooner or later.

Continue reading The Joy of Acceptance

Get more out of your reading

Let us go through an exercise. Consider all your reading sessions during your day. Factor in all that you read: blog posts, magazine & newspaper articles, social network posts, books, novels, just about everything. On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfying do your consider your reading sessions? Do you come away from each reading session having learnt something new and looking at the world or your career in a different perspective? Are your reading sessions pleasurable and relaxing, making you want to read on and on? Or are they rather stressful, making you shake your head and ponder how terrible the world is? Continue reading Get more out of your reading

What does this make possible?

Today we are celebrating the ability in the disability. Paralympians not only stand for the celebration of human spirit but every Paralympic athlete is a tale of great courage and human potential unperturbed by great personal tragedy.

Life often throws at us difficult situations that are in our Circle of Concern, where there is little we can do to make the situation better. Neither can we ignore and move for it is a reality that is to be faced.

Inspiring Paraolympians — Inspiring Paralympians

I’m sure most of us have never and probably will never face anything as challenging as any of these athletes had faced and overcome. But we have our problems and they do seem big enough to disturb us.

So what do we do then? We can stand there..cry and whine..complaint about or we can ask.

‘What does this make possible?’

Continue reading What does this make possible?

Power up with a rousing morning routine

Imagine the following scenario. You wake up in the morning with the alarm ringing in your ears. You know that you must leave for work in an hour or so. You brush quickly, take a bath and put together a quick breakfast, something minimal like a sandwich with jam and a quick cup of tea. The clock is ticking away and the rest of your morning is spent getting dressed as fast as you can and getting your office bag in order, while taking a few quick looks at your phone for new emails and updates. Finally you rush out of home hoping to catch your train / bus to work.

Now imagine that you wake up in the morning and spend a few moments to stretch and take a deep breath. You enjoy the view from your window and steadily start your next sequence of actions. You fix yourself a healthy breakfast rich in nutrients and have it slowly enjoying each flavour. You spend some lovely time with your loved ones. You take some time to work out, meditate and read a book. Then you get ready for the day. You transition from shut-eye sleep to complete wakefulness in small steps, fresh and ready to face the day. You become a healthier and better person day by day.

Which one of the above is you? Continue reading Power up with a rousing morning routine

The art of dabbling

We, as humans, certainly have a lot of hobbies. Some of us paint, some of us collect things, some of us travel and some enjoy things as connoisseurs. However, almost every human enjoys ‘dabbling’ in something at one point or the other. Hold on. What exactly is dabbling?

Let’s see. There are two ways to do anything that has methods. One way is to acquire as much knowledge about something as you can and then start doing it in tiny meticulous steps, making sure that everything is done right every step of the way. Another way is to find out about something as little as you can, then jump straight in with both your feet, learning on the go and enjoying the experience despite its flaws. This second method is what I call the art of ‘dabbling’. The term comes from ducks plunging head first into the water and paddling the surface of water! It is also used when a person tries out something with minimal research to see what works for him/her. Continue reading The art of dabbling

Why being open about your life’s flawed past makes you better

Lewis Howes is a former American football and handball player, and is now an entrepreneur and an author of The School of Greatness. He also has a podcast of the same name. He is looked upon as a super-hero in the States. In fact, he himself used to think of himself as an impenetrable super-hero who could supress his darkest emotions and put up a brave face when challenged by adversity. One freak outburst incident made him change his mind. At the World Domination Summit 2015, Lewis urges us to tear down the facade of iron-clad straight face and be more human and express our feelings. He advocates vulnerability. In his own beautiful worlds, “Don’t be a super-hero. Be a super-human.” Continue reading Why being open about your life’s flawed past makes you better

How to get your way by thinking out of the box

Big sports events are passionate, frenetic, dramatic and super fun. Sports also reveal the character of the participants. We come to know who is persistent and fit, who has nerves of steel and can rise to the occasion. At the same time, we see who can be magnanimous and who are lousy losers. We can learn a thing or two from big players in big events. Olympics, Tour de France, Super Bowl and the Football World Cup. So many things to observe & learn. However little did I know that the qualifying rounds for big events, where some of the smallest teams compete to try to make it to the big stage can teach some rather surprising and jaw-dropping lessons.

In this post, we will see how the national football team from Barbados thought completely out of the box and managed to qualify for Caribbean Shell Cup of 1994. Continue reading How to get your way by thinking out of the box

The Four Phases of Successful Habit Building !!

You probably already know that building good habits is the shortcut to building success. Determination and Willpower are good traits. But they are fleeting and limited and to count on them for building a habit is like having Hope as a strategy.

setyourselfupforsuccess_grande

Most people rely on their will power to stick to a new habit. No wonder new year resolutions don’t even last a few weeks. We have all set resolutions to get fit, study harder, spend more time with family, travel more, start a business and we clock another year without doing any of it.

How can we create and sustain change? How do we set our self up to succeed ? If will power does not work, then what works ?

Continue reading The Four Phases of Successful Habit Building !!

Why does the standard gauge in US have a distance of 143.5 cm or 4 ft 8 1/2 inches ?

It is not a whole number in either meters or feet…how did the engineers come up with this number.. what made this the standard in this standard gauge.

Let’s examine the reasons:

– Because that’s what it is in UK, who were the original Pioneer of the railways. Ok. But why?
– Because that was the distance of the tram in Pre- rail road era. Ok. But why?

Apparently this is the average distance between the two wheels of a horse pulled carriage of the yester years. The engineers who were developing the rail system, for lack of any reference points took this to be the standard.

And do you know why a two wheel horse pulled carriage had this really odd wheel distance?

horsedrawn-carriage — horse drawn-carriage

Continue reading Why does the standard gauge in US have a distance of 143.5 cm or 4 ft 8 1/2 inches ?