life management + learning + technology
This is one of the most inspirational videos I have ever seen. Like me, you have probably seen it before. And, like me, you will probably benefit from watching it again.
It’s 15-minutes of time that we should all periodically invest in.
Have a good and safe holiday weekend, my friends. And please take 15 minutes sometime during this period to review Steve’s speech. It has some insights that we all really need to internalize. If you have already internalized them all, you are to be commended.
Posted in Learning.
– July 2, 2009
A couple of former Engadget bloggers have set up a site called GDGT, and it appears to be a great resource for gathering opinions on gadgets of all sorts.
Since several of you are gadget enthusiasts, I thought it would be good to point this site out to you.
I think it will be interesting to see how it develops. Will it become the key place people go to get opinions about gadgets, or will people just continue to Google and Bing and Yahoo for information, or use the Amazon ratings of a product to see what others think of a gadget? A lot depends on how well the community supports GDGT, with good and useful comments and data, and a lot depends on how good their ratings algorithms are. I know that Amazon’s algorithms are sound and have been thoroughly tested and improved based on years of use. So, GDGT faces tough competition.
Anyway, it’s a site you may want to add to your “periodically browse” list, or at least one to keep in mind the next time you are thinking of adding to your gadget collection.
Sources: a tweet from @trhall and a Gear Diary post
Posted in Gadgets.
– July 2, 2009
As if I didn’t have enough of an online presence, I have set up another “blog,” or rather a “lifestream.” This lifestream is called Bruce Keener’s Lifestream … original, huh? 
My first lifestream post explains why I have decided to set this sort of thing up. Basically it is to let me think out loud, and to have a place where I can share information with you that is interesting but not necessarily immediately useful. For example, it may be about some new finding in science that is just so fascinating that it should be shared, but one which has no practical value for your lives at this time.
I used to have a blog, a few years ago, called bkreflections, and it was this sort of thing. I have missed having an ability to just think out loud, without having to worry about relevance. I have fallen into the trap of doing a little bit of it here from time to time, and I have later realized it is not fair to those who are looking for life management / learning / technology information, which is presumably what readers of this blog are interested in.
Steve Rubel has a good post on why this “lifestreaming” sort of thing is emerging. I am interested in your thoughts on lifestreaming and blogging and where “this whole web thing” is going, or where it should go.
Posted in Site News.
– July 1, 2009
When I am thinking about what to write on this blog, I sometimes ask myself “How can I serve my readers?” I should ask this every time, but sometimes I just think of a topic and decide to share it with you, without having thought through how it might or might not serve you.
The difficulty I find in answering the question about being of service to you is that I really do not know your needs. Sometimes it is hard for us to know what our own needs really are, let alone the needs of someone else.
So, I have to guess at answers to the question. Hopefully I do reasonably well with this, but I know that I am far from 100%. Hence, please feel free to email me with suggested topics or use the Skribit widget on the front page sidebar to suggest topics.
My overall goal with this blog is to give you insights to help you live a better life. I try hard to not be another “me too blog” that posts what 10,000 blogs post about. For example, I would wager that at least 1,000 blogs today had a post announcing the release of Firefox 3.5 … so, I don’t see a value in me piling on with such an announcement. You’ll get the news through a dozen sources.
Okay, now let’s side that aside for a moment and talk about the value of service in general.
As I think back over my life, the people I have most admired (and do admire) had some involvement with being of service to others. In some cases, such as with priests/pastors, their entire lives were lived in the service of others. In other cases, service was a significant component, even if not the complete picture of the person.
We aren’t born with a desire to be of service. In fact, if it comes to us at all, it is sometimes in our later years. An example is my younger brother, who is the person I most admire. He retired a little more than a year ago and is now dedicating significant amounts of his time to public service. He’s always been helpful to others, but when you work 16 hours a day, there’s no time for public service.
My own desire to be of service is a fairly recent one … I sure didn’t have the desire in my 20’s or 30’s, or even 40’s.
But, one thing I am finding about service is that it adds a sense of meaning to our lives. That is not to say that you can’t have a sense of meaning if you are not of service, but being of service certainly adds to that sense.
So, I will leave you for now with these thoughts:
Posted in Insights.
– June 30, 2009
My 60th birthday occurred the day after the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, so naturally those tragic events had an impact on my birthday thinking. I will share the insights I had from that thinking below. But, first I want to share some lessons from other major birthdays in my life.
The first birthday that really made me focus on my age was my 30th. I had always thought I would be a millionaire by my 30th birthday, and when that did not happen, it really impacted me. Realizing that I had not achieved that dream was a real letdown to me. I realized that it was not too late to become a millionaire, but I also realized I would never turn 30 again. Hence my dream could never come true.
That is not to say that I did too much thinking and not enough doing. Rather, it is to say that I just did not do enough doing.
In fact, many of the top-selling books today emphasize that we do not do enough thinking. David Allen certain makes a point of that in his newest book, Making It All Work
Anyway, I guess as a consequence of my being so bummed out at turning 30 without becoming a millionaire, I entered a long period in my life in which I did not think about my age. It got to the point that, when people asked my age, I would actually have to figure it out. My view was “I cannot change my age, so why think about it?”
I don’t remember my 40th birthday being a very big deal to me. I did not have an overwhelming desire to enter my second childhood, as so many do who turn 40. I’d say my general disposition was that I was pretty content.
My 50th birtday had a bit of an impact. It did not depress me, but it did cause me to realize, solemnly, that I had lived for a half-century. Moreover, it caused me to realize that more than half of my life was gone.
Then, a couple of years after Vickie died (my wife), I decided that I wanted to retire at 57. So, age finally became important to me again. It became a part of my plans and my tracking spreadsheets.
So, what about my 60th birthday?
I was very saddened by the passing of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. My insights from thinking about the deaths of these national treasures are as follows:
Also:
I hope there are some insights in here that you can and will use. And, I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.
Posted in Personal Development, Perspective.
– June 28, 2009
One of the things I particularly enjoy about Twitter is that people sometimes tweet some real wisdom.
The tweeted wisdom often is just a quote from a famous person, but some of it is original. Regardless, I have been collecting some of it for a while, and thought I would share the collection with you. I believe you will find some inspiration in the following.
Posted in Personal Development.
– June 24, 2009
If you are a self-improvement enthusiast, you have almost certainly read books that tell you how to reprogram yourself, how to replace “bad thinking” with “good thinking.”
You may have had some success in implementing the methods taught in these books, but you may also have noticed that the methods just didn’t work as advertised. Sometimes it may have even seemed as if they made matters worse.
Well, some new research is shedding some light on why such self-help programs are not always so helpful:
So, if you have read, as I have, that the subconscious can be programmed, and that it cannot distinguish between a lie and the truth, you have read something that is wrong. In fact, there is doubt as to whether the subconscious, as classically defined, even exists, as discussed in this Wikipedia article.
Does all of this mean that we cannot reprogram ourselves? Of course not. We have all done some reprogramming, at least to some degree. We now know, though, that there are limits to this reprogramming (shouldn’t be too surprising, when you think about it), and we know a bit more about the mechanisms involved.
Your thoughts on this?
Posted in Personal Development.
– June 23, 2009
I’m a big fan of self-teaching. There is so much information available now on the web, and in libraries, that you can teach yourself just about anything you desire to know. (Within limits, of course.) And, being self-taught can sometimes save you money over paying for experts.
But, self-teaching has its drawbacks, too:
Like a lot of people who blog and operate a website, I have tried to teach myself how to do it. But, after doing this for about two years, I decided it was time to try some professional help.
So, at the beginning of this month, I signed up for Aaron Wall’s popular SEObook Training, at a cost of $100/month. I had resisted doing this because I thought the price would be hard for me to justify. But, after not getting anywhere on my own, I finally decided to try it.
I am glad I signed up. Within 30 minutes of signing up, I felt like I had gotten my money’s worth for the first month. Aaron pointed out several problems with my site (too many topics, needs a separate home page highlighting best content, needs logo instead of plain text, need to use links to categories to flow page rank, etc). I learn something from his site everyday. The forums are outstanding, and have great advice not only from Aaron but from lots of other true experts. Detailed advice, not hand-waving words.
Hence, if you blog, I encourage you to try Aaron’s training program. (Note: if you sign up through this link, I get a commission on the sale. So, if you are determined that you don’t want me to do that, you can search for SEObook and signup from the Googled-link. I won’t lose sleep over it. I like money, but I believe in Aaron’s program regardless.)
But, the main point, regardless of your profession or the area you want to learn in, is that it can be worthwhile to pay for expert advice. I know that we recently talked about this, but, given how much people are holding back because of the economy, I thought it worthwhile to bring it up again.
Again, I am not against self-learning: in fact, I love it. But, it pays to recognize when it’s not the best way for you to learn.
Posted in Personal Development.
– June 21, 2009
After using an iPod Touch as my PDA for over a year, and a BlackBerry Curve for my phone, I decided to take the plunge and get the new iPhone 3GS so I could have an all-in-one device.
It was an absolutely painless process. I went to an AT&T store yesterday (the day of release) at about 10:30am, stood in line outside for 10 minutes, went into the store for 15 minutes, and came out with an activated iPhone 3GS 32GB model. Painless.
Then, I came home and hooked it up to my iMac, and the setup utility asked if I wanted to use my iPod Touch’s data, and I said yes. This resulted in all of my settings, data, and apps being transferred to the iPhone. Easy.
My thoughts so far: I loves it. It is fast. I have not measured the connection speeds, but they are much, much faster than I was getting with my BlackBerry or with WiFi on my Touch. Apps open so much faster, too. And the battery life looks really, really good. It is much better than on my Touch.
The only negative I’ve seen so far: when I went for groceries, the signal at the grocery store was almost non-existent, even though it is 4-5 bars at my home (a distance of only a few miles). This is in Cobb County, outside Atlanta, and one would expect a strong signal everywhere within the county. So, AT&T still has work to do on boosting the signal strength. They recognize that, and have supposedly stepped up their upgrade plans, so let’s hope this improves in the near-term. Otherwise, when AT&T loses their exclusivity with the iPhone, they will lose customers in a big way.
Posted in Gadgets.
– June 20, 2009
I share Warren Buffett’s philosophy that we should learn something new every day. To help you accomplish this in your own life, I thought a short list of video resources for learning would be useful to you. Note that, while this list is short, the number of actual videos available through these links is huge.
Google provides at least two video learning resources that you will probably find of interest:
There is an enormous amount of material at both of these locations. You can find anything from talks on mindfulness and GTD to talks on stem cells to talks by authors of controversial books (and noncontroversial ones, too). A typical video is about an hour in length.
I’ve mentioned before that Standford University makes a lot of coursework (and other material) available via iTunes. Some of the material is in video format and some is just audio, but it is all high quality.
The length of the material varies with the subject. Much of the coursework is split into several one or two-hour segments. For example, famed physicist Leonard Susskind gives a series of about 9 lectures on quantum entanglment which run about 2 hours each (all are in video format). I plan on watching this series in the near future.
One of my favorite video “channels” is the TED Talks series. You will find fascinating talks here by thought leaders in a variety of subject areas. The length of the videos varies. The ones I’ve watched have typically been 15 to 20-minutes each.
As an example of these talks, I recently found the following one on Positive Psychology, by Professor Martin Seligman:
This is a fascinating video in which Prof Seligman discusses how we are starting to learn more about what makes people happy, and that the results are a bit surprising (for example, living for meaning yields longer-lasting happiness than seeking pleasure). Prof Seligman also mentions that he runs a website that has resources that will help you figure out where you are on the happiness scale.
Posted in Learning, Personal Development.
– June 18, 2009
