Rethink!

travelhighlights:

“It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons - automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams.

Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and soon, their genes. Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.

The fast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless word of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.

And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.

The words in this book are written for people, not computers.

I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.”

You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

(Source: travelhighlights)

Personal development theories and advices:

A young priest asked his bishop, “May I smoke while praying?” The answer was an emphatic “No!”

Later, when he sees an older priest puffing on a cigarette while praying, the younger priest scolded him, “You shouldn’t be smoking while praying! I asked the bishop, and he said I couldn’t do it!”

“That’s odd,” the old priest replied. “I asked the bishop if I could pray while I’m smoking, and he told me that it was okay to pray at any time!”

http://litemind.com/framing/

 Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.

http://litemind.com/problem-definition/

And even more of Einstein:

Albert Einstein stated that “problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” Einstein, of course, was right. Sometimes our problems require more than life hacks, tips, tweaks, etc. Sometimes our lives don’t need optimization, they need to be fundamentally reconfigured.

http://zenhabits.net/2008/07/8-great-anti-hacks-to-fundamentally-change-your-life/

The way you define a problem is often the key to solving it. Take a current problem from your life that you’re having difficulty solving. Then ask yourself: How can this problem be redefined as a financial problem? A health problem? A time management problem? A human resource or staffing problem? A technology problem? A prioritization problem? A communication problem? An education problem?

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/03/changing-perspectives/

And the how-to style article:

As a person is growing, that person has a certain way of looking at what happens before his or her eyes. Once you’ve seen life from a different point of view, you gain a very wide knowledge of your world. Try and see the world from a new perspective! It’ll be worth it.

http://www.wikihow.com/Gain-a-New-Perspective