MURAKAMI

I’m a hard worker. I concentrate on my work very hard. So, you know, it’s easy. And I don’t do anything but write my fiction when I write.

INTERVIEWER

How is your typical workday structured?

MURAKAMI

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Haruki Murakami Interview - Paris Review

Hustle matters – Grit matters. Ideas are cheap. 

You will have a million ideas, and they will happen constantly, and they will all seem great at the time, and you usually won’t do anything about them. 

Ideas are constant and cheap. Ideas are not the key to your success. 

The only thing that matters is what you take action on and the results you get. What you do matters, not what you think. Take action.

 I don’t listen to what people say, I watch what they do. What the say tells you who they want to be or who they think they are, what they do tells you who they are. As you start toact, and things start to happen, other opportunities will come up, other possibilities will come your way. Action equals success. Ideas equal wishes.


D

7 ways to Improve Your Brain Plasticity

A Brain Fitness Plan

1. Exercise.

Change can only occur when the brain is alert and engaged, so you need to be rested. A tired brain is not a highly functional brain. Stay in good shape, go outside, walk each day, eat good food, enjoy the sun. An active and healthy body means an active and healthy brain.

2. Be Positive because Being Positive Works

Positive Change strengthens connections between neurons engaged at the same time towards a model of perfection. The brain wants to make connections that make your life and itself better, that improve its chance of survival. Knowing you can literally change the physical aspects of your brain means you can change.

3. Learn new things. Cross train, study things in groups.
Neurons that fire together wire together. Studies show your brain lights up when learning something new, and once habit, your brain lights up and the beginning and the end. Challenge yourself, learn a new language, take up a martial art, start painting or write a book, start a business., (www.lifestylebusinessbookclub.com).  Training needs to be taxing and systematically improving.

4. Initial changes are just temporary. Incremental engaged steps, bit by bit produce lasting knowledge.
Study a little every time, I study in blocks of twenty minutes switching tasks or subjects, but you need to do a little bit every day, consistency matters. Then test yourself. Training should be incremental.  


5. Brain plasticity can be positive or negative (bad habits)

Habits can work either way, good or bad, so be conscious of what you do habitually. What you do daily, you become. Control your habits, know what causes you to do something, the cue to your habit, learn what the routine is, and then know the reward. What do you get out of the habit. 

Think about it. Then hack it. 
Tweak the cue. 
Find a better way to achieve the reward. Also, being part of a group helps reinforce the change.

6. Memory is crucial for learning and can be improved.


Memory is a skill, not a born gift. It takes work and practice.

A quote from Walking With Einstein:
It was a technique he promised I could use to remember people’s names at parties and meetings. “The trick is actually deceptively simple,” he said. “It is always to associate the sound of a person’s name with something you can clearly imagine. It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name. When you need to reach back and remember the person’s name at some later date, the image you created will simply pop back into your mind ... So, hmm, you said your name was Josh Foer, eh?” He raised an eyebrow and gave his chin a melodramatic stroke. “Well, I’d imagine you joshing me where we first met, outside the competition hall, and I’d imagine myself breaking into four pieces in response. Four/Foer, get it? That little image is more entertaining—to me, at least—than your mere name, and should stick nicely in the mind.”
More notes on walking With Einstein are here:  http://www.darylburnett.com/1/post/2012/03/memory-tips-from-the-book-moonwalking-with-einstein.html 

7. Motivation is key.  Be Engaged.

What you do needs to be interesting to motivate, if you want it, you will learn it, so much it interesting. Reward yourself when you progress. Have goal, a reason to improve.D


D

The Book Willpower has quickly become one of my favorite reads, and I have literally slowed down reading it to one section a week to make it last longer and to give me time to think about what I read.

It is worth owning.
A WRITER CHALLENGES THE VOICE OF SELF-CRITICISM

Excerpt form  The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It 


Ben, a twenty-four-year-old middle-school social studies teacher with literary aspirations, had set the goal to finish writing his novel by the end of summer vacation. This deadline required him to write ten pages a day, every day. In reality, he would write two to three pages one day, then feel so overwhelmed by how far behind he was that he skipped the next day completely. Realizing that he wasn’t going to finish the book by the start of the school year, he felt like a fraud. If he couldn’t make the effort now, when he had so much free time, how was he going to make any progress when he had homework to grade and lessons to plan? Ben started to doubt whether he should even bother with the goal, since he wasn’t making the progress he thought he should be. “A real writer would be able to churn those pages out,” he told himself. “A real writer would never play computer games instead of writing.” In this state of mind, he turned a critical eye to his writing and convinced himself it was garbage.

Ben had actually abandoned his goal when he found himself in my class that fall. He had enrolled in the class to learn how to motivate his students, but he recognized himself in the discussion about self-criticism. When he did the self-forgiveness exercise for his abandoned novel, the first thing he noticed was the fear and self-doubt behind his giving up. Not meeting his small goal to write ten pages a day made him afraid that he did not have the talent or dedication to realize his big goal of becoming a novelist. He took comfort in the idea that his setbacks were just part of being human, and not proof that he would never succeed. He remembered stories he had read about other writers who had struggled early in their careers. To find a more compassionate response to himself, he imagined how he would mentor a student who wanted to give up on a goal. Ben realized he would encourage the student to keep going if the goal was important. He would say that any effort made now would take the student closer to the goal. He certainly would not say to the student, “Who are you kidding? Your work is garbage.” From this exercise, Ben found renewed energy for writing and returned to his work-in-progress. He made a commitment to write once a week, a more reasonable goal for the school year, and one he felt comfortable holding himself accountable to.

Exercise:

Below is an exercise that psychologists use to help people find a more self-compassionate response to failure. Research shows that taking this point of view reduces guilt but increases personal accountability—the perfect combination to get you back on track with your willpower challenge.

1. What are you feeling? As you think about this failure, take a moment to notice and describe how you are feeling. What emotions are present? What are you are feeling in your body? Can you remember how you felt immediately after the failure? How would you describe that?

2. You’re only human. Everyone struggles with willpower challenges and everyone sometimes loses control. This is just a part of the human condition, and your setback does not mean there is something wrong with you. Consider the truth of these statements.

3. What would you say to a friend? Consider how you would comfort a close friend who experienced the same setback. What words of support would you offer?

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It by Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal 

You can’t read your way to expertise. I have tried. 

You have to do. 

People who get things accomplished choose to work on things more consistently and with more ficus than average people.

They  systematically work, making what they want to accomplish a series of habits to repeat. 

So here is what I want you to do:

1. Today, I want you to pick one thing that you really want to do. 

2. In the next 24 hours, I want you to do one thing to make that happen. Make it simple and short,  10 to 15 minutes to do. Mark on a calendar. 

3.  Then the following day do that one thing again.  Mark it on the calendar. 

4.  Continue for 7 days and then calculate what you have done.  How much did you get done in one day? Take that and multiply by 365, and that is what you will have done in a year. 


Consistency is powerful.  It creates productivity. 

Woody Allen states “If you work only three to five hours a day you become very productive. It’s the steadiness of it that counts. Getting to the typewriter every day is what makes productivity.”

It takes Woody Allen a month to write a comedy and three months to write a drama so at three to five hours a day it shows me he writes every day, he’s consistent, and he doesn’t waste time. 

D

John von Neumann’s says it the best in the following quote, 

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models..”



My writing is basically model-building.

Though in my blog I don’t use mathematics, my approach is basically the same one as explained in the above quote.

Writing allows you to see all the potential things you can do, or see, or create.
Once you have many ideas, and you have thought of and written through the various ideas or models, then you do.

• Analyze than do and sometimes it is better to do than to think. You can over analyze. 
  
• Do the smallest easiest thing. 
  

 I learned this only because of all my self-experimentation. I started doing self-experimentation because of better to do than to think.

Actions matter.

D

PS. This is the first post from my phone. Basically a test, and if it works, get ready.

My app idea is called the Balance Bar.

It is a productivity/ lifestyle app. The process and layout is very simple and straight forward.

You have 5 buttons in your app that represents 5 categories; Health, Mental, Network, Spiritual, and Money.

At the beginning of each week you define for each category what you will to improve.

Each day as you do it, you push the button you just did, and it lights up.

At the end of the day if you light them all up, you gain points, and if at the end of the week, you consistently do the daily list, you are put in a fishbowl pool.

This idea plays off a couple of others, it takes a methodology that is similar to Tim Ferriss's of three key items a day and ties it with James Altuchers 4 Spiritual practice model. The person inputs what they plan to do each day of that week in 5 catagories; Health, Mental, Network, Spiritual, and Money. As they do each thing each day. the button for that items lights up. At the end of the week, if you did each item each day (perhaps putting a time requirement to keep from just clicking it.)

Tied to this I would like to take two concepts I read in the book Willpower;

One is that people do better with long term goals if they can identify with their future self, so create a way of having them define their future self and see what they can do to help them meet it.

Excerpt;
You can use this quirk of decision making to resist immediate gratification, whatever the temptation: 1. When you are tempted to act against your long-term interests, frame the choice as giving up the best possible long-term reward for whatever the immediate gratification is. 2. Imagine that long-term reward as already yours. Imagine your future self enjoying the fruits of your self-control. 3. Then ask yourself: Are you willing to give that up in exchange for whatever fleeting pleasure is tempting you now? 
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can DoTo Get More of It by Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal 


The second step is social, each time you meet your goals of the week, you join the group board and you are put in a fishbowl drawing that is held each month.

Here is an excerpt from Willpower that applies;
The promise of reward has even been used to help people overcome addiction. One of the most effective intervention strategies in alcohol and drug recovery is something called the fish bowl. Patients who pass their drug tests win the opportunity to draw a slip of paper out of a bowl. About half of these slips have a prize listed on them, ranging in value from $1 to $20. Only one slip has a big prize, worth $100. Half of the slips have no prize value at all—instead, they say, “Keep up the good work.” This means that when you reach your hand into the fish bowl, the odds are you’re going to end up with a prize worth $1 or a few kind words. This shouldn’t be motivating—but it is. In one study, 83 percent of patients who had access to fish bowl rewards stayed in treatment for the whole twelve weeks, compared with only 20 percent of patients receiving standard treatment without the promise of reward. Eighty percent of the fish bowl patients passed all their drug tests, compared with only 40 percent of the standard treatment group. When the intervention was over, the fish bowl group was also far less likely to relapse than patients who received standard treatment—even without the continued promise of reward 
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can DoTo Get More of It by Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal 

This app can fit in many categories; such as Lifestyle and  Productivity.

First off, I just made beef bourguignon made from Julia Child's recipe. It took a while, but came out well.

Actually it was awesomely good.

I just updated my other site,  http://www.lifestylebusinessbookclub.com/ , with my notes on Tim Ferriss' book The 4-Hour Workweek.

Also, take a look at  http://www.indestructiblemuscle.com/.

 I recently have been reading through the blog, and it is rare I go back and read the old material, but I am glad I did. Looking at one post is nothing, but looking at them all, I learned a lot about myself and I now have some ideas on how to improve the blog.  Let me know how I can improve it, and what you would like to see more of.


The 8 things I think I need to do (so far);

1. I obviously need to get tested for ADD. I get fascinated by way too many things. Focus would help. I will call Dr. Kim this week. 

2. It wouldn't hurt to show my sense of humor, I have read through this, and damn I come off as a stiff and some articles are way too dry aka boring, and trust me, I have been accused of many things, but being a stiff not one of them.

3. Kind of similar, but after reading through all the entries, I realize that I have been very vague, and do not ever get personal. Tha needs to change. (Example: no real picture of me)

4. Every time I start to get into something, I drift off and then create a new domain, and then don't link them together. Time to just put it all here, and if there is something on one of my other sites I will connect it.


5.Write more, quote less. I love quotes but damn. (There will still be some, but hopefully they will be accompanied by some text from me. Think Montaigne.)

6. Make the format a little easier to follow. Look at my categories / (says it all.)

7. I should link in and out to my other sites. ( See links above.)

8. I need less abstract and more concrete examples. Do. Test. Correct. Do Again.

If you have any ideas or thoughts, feel free to email me, or leave your thoughts below.


D

Bruce, of course, was a firm believer in the scientific method in not only his philosophy, but also its application to combat. He once said in an interview:   "We should regard our martial art training as scientific and every energy and capacity can be explained by science. It is not mystical at all. Therefore, everything should logical."[26]   And:   "In any physical movement there is always a most efficient and alive manner to accomplish the purpose of the performance for each individual. That is, in regard to proper leverage, balance in movement, economical and efficient use of motion and energy, etc. Live, efficient movement that liberates is one thing; sterile, classical sets that bind and condition is another." 

Bruce Lee: Dynamic Becoming by James Bishop