June 16 came and went last week without me realizing that it would have been my 5th anniversary in my former company had I not departed from it. Not that I had a reason to remember, though.
However, once I had realized it, I couldn’t help but ask myself the question:
If you would go back five years in the past, what advice would you give your past self?
Ever since my parents gave me my last allowance almost five years ago, I’ve always been a financially stable person.
The key word here is stable. I always say flat out that I am not a rich person because I know a lot of people are richer than me because my previous salary isn’t that high. But you will rarely see me complain about money problems. And you will never see me struggling with debt.
Just as losing weight can be simplified to four obvious words, my financial stability can be simplified to four similar obvious words:
Procrastination is perhaps my most serious character flaw. When I see that something isn’t really important, I tend not to do it right away.
People who know me might say otherwise, though. What they are seeing is actually me doing workarounds for my flaw:
They see me finish something way ahead of time.
Usual scenario: I get office mail to do something as trivial as update an Excel file or send the total page count of your work in progress. Deadline is end of the week.
I finish the task 10 minutes later.
Reason why I didn’t procrastinate: It was a trivial task. As long as I am not “in the zone” coding, I probably have a couple of minutes to spare doing trivial tasks. Besides, the mere fact that I have my mail client open means that I’m not too occupied at the moment.
They see me finish something not trivial way ahead of time.
Usual scenario: same as above, but the task will take more than 2 hours to finish.
I’ll finish the task 3 hours after receiving the mail.
Reason why I didn’t procrastinate: It was probably a mechanical task and I want to procrastinate on my “thinking” tasks. Usually these tasks are similar to the stuff I mentioned in the previous example, but in a larger scale. I get to turn off my brain and I get paid to do it. Everybody wins! (err.. sort of)
They see me finish something that requires thinking way ahead of time.
Ok, so the task doesn’t fall under the two scenarios above. What’s my excuse now?
Actually there are a couple of possibilities:
Remember the mantra in my first post? Putting things in different perspectives is an effective way of applying that mantra.
Don’t want to fail Calculus? Put your mind into aiming for an A+. If you win, you get an A+. If you don’t, you might get depression but I doubt you’ll get an F or even a C.
Same thing with tasks. Deadline is next week? I could either personally shorten the deadline to this week (this is a bad thing, I’ll explain in a later post) or I could fool myself that it’s a lot more important than my other tasks so I’ll prioritize it.
Similar to fooling myself, but I decided that this deserves a bullet point of its own.
For some odd reason, I don’t like to lose to other people. So if there’s a task that requires thinking, nothing riles me up more than the thought of competing with my colleagues — even though there’s no really no competition involved in the task itself.
Actually there is something that riles me up more: the thought of competing with cute female colleagues who are a lot more skillful and smarter than me. Go ahead, call me chauvinist if you want, but this M.O. singlehandedly allowed a guy who graduated with no honors in HS to graduate with Latin honors in college (my HS was an all-boys school… you get the picture).
and lastly…
Yup, you read that right. Sometimes I procrastinate on all my tasks and I end up doing nothing.
Doing nothing = boredom.
Bry + Boredom = unexpected results.
Finishing tasks way ahead of time ∈ unexpected stuff that happens when Bry is bored.
Given that man is a social animal, he will encounter ideas in conflict with his own. For example, one guy might like Pepsi while another person might perfer Coke. There are a couple of ways how the clash of ideas between the two will turn out:
Now what I just wrote above is what happens when civilized people are arguing. When dealing with pricks in the Internet (or pricks in general), there is another possible outcome:
This is, of course, the main reason why people say arguing in the Internet is stupid.
The traditional approach to such trolls is to just ignore them. That would work in normal situations, but if you’re faced with a closed-minded individual threatening to affect your life e.g you’re sure that you’ll go through a world of pain if the group goes with his ideas, you will have to get creative.
Personally, I always use one certain approach when logic fails to convince the troll:
Memetics, baby!
By treating arguments as memes, one will realize that instead of trying to attack your opponent’s meme directly with your own, it makes more sense to make your meme more appealing to the other members of the society so that they would accept it. The point here is that you do not need to convince your opponent that he is wrong — the mere fact that everybody believes he is wrong makes things moot.
One thing to note about this approach is that numbers mean nothing when memes collide. Your opponent may have convinced a thousand people that he is right, but unless those people are really influential with regards to the issue you can still “win” even if you have just 5 directly influential people indoctrinated with your meme.
Another thing to note is that the meme approach isn’t as simple and easy as it looks, and it can backfire especially if you’re not really familiar with your target audience. If you’re not confident about using this approach, I would suggest that you try to find other alternatives instead.
