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The Intention Economy

The end of corporatism. How net heads will help society on creating smart and easy to use tools for managing your personal data. An end for the corporate having the upper hand of controlling and planning our customer journey and a beginning for the individual to show their intention.

You may be confused on the difference between net heads and net bells. It is very straightforward. Net-heads enables us on becoming more productive members of society. Instead of making a profit from a product, they created free useful products so everyone could add more value than without. Net-bells, in contrast, are dogs wagging their tails hoping their master will give them a treat. Net-hands, on the other hand, care about their integrity and providing services without gimmicks. It is the net-heads that provided the Linux environment system and the Internet protocols that we use today. We take for granted on the flexibility of the systems we use and how we connect with each other. Most of the systems that operate today run under Linux and open source software. There is a huge negligence from the community and are seriously underfunded for its contribution value. Quoting from the report "Roads And Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure", after the Heartbleed bug, Marquess took to the Internet to make an impassioned public plea for funding stating

These guys don’t work on OpenSSL for money. They don’t do it for fame. They do it out of pride in craftsmanship and the responsibility for something they believe in. There should be at least a half-dozen full-time OpenSSL team members, not just one, able to concentrate on the care and feeding of OpenSSL without having to hustle commercial work.

This giving is the same giving as a couple bringing offsprings to our world. They do this act of goodness without expecting something back as a reward. Similarly, it is no wonder Steve Jobs named one of his computer projects as Lisa, which was the name of her real daughter. These projects are like their own little babies and a deep care is taken for them in order for them to become valuable and useful assets through our society. It is thanks to those pioneers and builders that we were able to horizontally spread so everyone is able to enjoy a better customer experience. With big companies like Google and Facebook, we have:

• The Android, an open operating system for mobile devices.
• Several open source development tools that were used internally from those companies.

A lot of innovation related to customer experience that is fairly new comes at a great cost. The time of research, designing, gathering the resources, is not an easy task. Take, for instance, Apple, which tries to provide revolutionary forms of customer experience vertically through innovative products that only a few and the rich can afford. Nevertheless, we should try to optimize existing processes that in today's world are perceived as costly. However, we should not cling on those processes once they are efficient enough. Optimizing existing innovations is like working with a kettle. When the water boils enough, there is a whistle that says enough is enough and we need to move on improving the next existing innovations that are not affordable. In other words, we have to be every so often vertical as well.

We have to be Steve Jobs and say we can do better and even better than what our customer experience could be. This community so far created a set of builders that manifested the world where each of us had a better customer experience. However, let us admit one thing for sure: A need for better customer experience is overestimated. A need for a society with more customers showing their intentions is underestimated. We need a new Steve Jobs that focuses on better customer intent instead of a better customer experience. We need leaders that drive the car instead of builders that build a car. We need to incorporate righteousness not only by providing better customer experience, but to keep everyone have a conscious voice that they are able not only to speak it but to navigate it and reach it. Where instead all of the planning is done by corporations, individuals play not only an influential role but are the ones that initiate the pivots for where corporations have to head next. This in part requires us to change our mindset from ones that focus on providing only a better customer experience to a one that takes accountability that all of us can a have a more meaningful role than what we take part of today. This dance has been one where corporations that was forced and never apologized when they stepped over our shoes and it has to be changed to a one where each dance has the respect of the sensitivities of our partners.

Society today is plagued with customers that do not have intent. Instead of customers with intent, we have passive consumers. In the online Recode article "The Rise of Data Natives", there is a trend where Data Natives (the next generation of society after the "Digital Natives") on a Store of Starbucks not only want to use the Starbucks app but also "want" the app to "know" their favorite drinks — and when to suggest a new one. It seems our next generation want an application that is customer-centric instead of customer-driven. We are further away than original before for the average individual bringing up their own intent explicitly. If we do not provide the tools that enable a two-way road where also the average individual can express their own intent (CRM, I am talking to you), the more corporations will do all the planning for us. In order for setting the other sideline of the road, we need to allow each individual to have its own personal data store that is very responsive through API on taking and accepting requests. That initiative is called VRM. In a world where we live with the internet of things and more mobile technologies, this is starting to become an infrastructure that is more enabling than ever before. The book discusses the many initiatives that have gone through on providing this system of thought where the customer can be reached instead of being captivated. With machine learning tools that are handed to the few that derive biases of our own intentions, to little to no liabilities when our personal data is misused and breached, to providing inaccurate information of our self and limiting the choices of our preferences to only the most popular ones, there is more a need than ever for the individual to step in and have a side version of their own demands. With how current online agreements are a contract of adhesion, there is no much the individual can do to this day.

This has to be flipped one day and humbly speaking, there are four pillars if done properly can make the individual exponentially a more trusting entity than a corporation. The author says that there is a lot of MLOTT (Money Left On The Table) where people can give to others without a second thought whenever they appreciate a specific service. But I begged to differ, as I know for the fact that most do not have a lot of money left on the table because of the following reasons:

1. Make Sure People Are Healthy: We need to make the commitment where people prioritize their health issues and keep their bodies straight and fit to prevent the inevitable. After all, an ounce of prevention is a pound of cure. I think people will not have clear intents when their bodies preoccupy them (painkillers are not the ultimate solution).
2. Make Sure People Are Merited By Value: We live today in disrupting times where Artificial Intelligence is removing those mundane jobs that can be replaced with computers. In the online HBR cover story "Inside Facebook's AI workshop", Artificial intelligence is not used anymore only by experts of the field, but your average Joe employee, by making the user interface of those AI solutions simple. For this reason, we have to keep people ahead of the curve on bringing value to society before they fall in a deep hole. For people who have families and others to take care of, this weight is even further for them to take themselves back on their own two feet. If people can barely pay their next bills, not due to extravagant lifestyle choices, then how can we assume what they can offer when they can't keep up with themselves?
3. Make Sure They Do Micro Accounting: A lot of the stuff that we use and buy as a service we seem worthy may not be worthy of the actual value. I think being accountable on investing in products and services that will add value to the long-term is a step that people should already start making it as a habit. It will eventually be a cornerstone habit for people actually putting money on the table at the right place.
4. Make Sure They Have a Growth Mindset and a deep care how our brain works: If the physical constraints are lifted from the above three, then according to Maslow's Pyramid, they have the ability to self-actualize. But it's best we self-actualize in a way where we all live in harmony instead of stepping others in order to reach the top. In that sense, we won't be any different than what corporations do these days. Education focuses a lot on giving us a foundation on how to be able to survive with a technical field of our choice in our society instead of how to be a morally ethical good being with the rest of the members of our community. This was part optional for the education system to teach because we so far lived a life where we most were responsible to follow the status quo and be passive. In the intention economy, this will not be an option, it will be mandatory for everyone to have some form of good intent, or otherwise, without good intent, the wheels won't keep rolling.

Please read the book The Intention Economy by Doc Searls, as this is only one out of the few authors that go beyond the Advertimania we have today for improving our own customer experience and unearthing our customer intent in order to keep the books between demand and supply on balance. The only reason I gave it four stars is because this book is very open-ended that needs you to take the time to look at the many references the author goes through in order to have a more better clear picture. Other than that, it is very well organized and provides as much historical background to understand how we ended up in this current situation mess besides all the good intentions the founders of the internet envisioned.

My last parting words are that there are supporting movements for individuals that have lost their time spent by the influences of corporations. Tristan Harris, behind the movement "Time Well Spent", discusses in of his 2017 Ted Talks "How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day" on the different tactics companies use on taking most of the attention from you. Taking away of our attention may not be harmful, but it is definitely psychological. If the person submits their time to others than spending something more purposeful, we are decreasing the value of what each individual is worth, stagnating the economy on the long term. So if you care about the world where people can take their own small ships and traverse their own adventures rather others letting them do the handling for them, let's make the Intention Economy a reality in order to have a more accurate model of the supply and demand market.

The internet is free
But our data is not free
It is not a "chance"
It is "guaranteed"
One day, we will definitely flip
That card with the words engraved:
"Get Out Of Jail, Free"
To use or not to use the card?
Time to make the switch

Time Well Spent

In the past, we were limited to our own physical vision. 

Today:
1. The accessibility of the internet has penetrated to most of our world [1]
2. The amount of internet bandwidth capacity has reached to a point where we can blur the lines between real and digital life [2]

We cannot deny that we live in times that are better than ever before on creating new opportunities to our self. Instead of being constrained to our current physical location, we have the ability to gain insights and bring influence to anyone anywhere in the world.

We are discovering today one thing that we were in denial, but cannot be in denial anymore: human nature has the choice to not run the pedestal of improving our world or move the pedestal of improving our world. Besides all the bumps we went through, we fortunately, by the mercy of our minds on making our world a better place, made great strides on making people more connected and expressive.

The next step of our mission is how to make people more complete. In this world, most of us, we feel that we do not have complete control of the ship that we are on board, that our fate was not chosen by our own will, but by picking a ship whose captain we most like, for after all, would we be good accountable captains when the responsibility was granted to us?

This is a mission that few will take, and even fewer will take if we still treat people as passive consumers and professionals only merited by skill. The world will have a lot of people that will provide basic needs by playing the role of a passive consumer and many enough on creating the basic infrastructure as the role of builders, but only very few will be shaping and lifting the world as the role of an inventor.

Builders and passive consumers take actions that have no liability because they are not the ones that choose the destination where the ship goes. It is a very safe path to choose, but at the same time, these people cannot be trusted to run the wheels for big destinations, for they do not have the competency to keep the ship afloat for long. In contrast, we need to give people training wheels on running small ships on their own for short trips before they are able to get challenged with bigger ones.

I think people taking control and taking action on improving our world instead of just being a member of our world will be a big paradigm shift in how we view ourselves and others. For we can always give an excuse and blame if we follow orders from a captain that lead us to a road astray that was away from our expectations, but we cannot escape on the choices we make and how we react and adapt to them when we become in charge of running the ship. Then, at that moment, we will be more focus on improving our own self instead of expecting others to take us to our ultimate destination. Before, only a few had a moral compass for improving themselves. Now, more will have accessibility to that compass for striving a great fortune to their inner self.

People will learn a lot of elements when they start improving the world: They will learn that expectations cannot be too lofty. Expectations cannot be redeemed in an instant. It requires a lot of steps before we can reach to our ultimate destination and we have to be disciplined on keeping running the pedestal through that destination. Second, we will be better at not underestimating and overestimating things. A lot of the stuff that we use and buy as a service we seem worthy may not be worthy of the actual value. I think being accountable on investing on products and services that will add value to the long term is a step that people should already start making it as a habit. It will eventually be a cornerstone habit for keeping our planet clean and avoid climate change.

People have a choice now to become accountable. There is and will be more technology for people to become more accountable. However, we cannot wait for too long. It seems people are asking for bad habits and technology is feeding it in the same format smoking companies profited from it. When scientific evidence shows that smoking caused lung cancer, it was not taken into account because the effects did not become on a grand scale. Only after decades when a lot of people already suffered from its effects, did it became conclusive. And even when it became conclusive, people, especially the youth, were on a smoking spree. When people have a choice and they do not choose the good path then we do not have any other choice other than to regulate it: In most developed countries, we don't allow people to smoke indoors, hotels and cafeterias have their non-smoking spaces and we even have cigarette packages with ugly images for the side effects of smoking where you have to even pay higher taxes from the rest. We do not want people to be forced in doing the right thing, but if they do not, for the sake and mercy of humanity as a species, we do not have any other choice but to influence them to do the right thing.

Now, we may not be harming people physically, but we are influencing their attention. It may not be physical, but it is psychological. If the path they do deviates the person to innovate, we are decreasing the value of what each individual is worth, stagnating the economy on the long term. If the path they do aligns with what they want to innovate, it increases the value of each individual is worth, increasing the economy in the long term.

There is a lot of friction for people to innovate these days, especially if you are not at a young age and have to take care of your family or health. We should not be too afraid of playing small risks on finding our own sense of morality by taking a small journey on making our world a better place through trial and error, for when the time comes when we depart to this world, how will we know that we were good moral characters in the world in the end if we didn't experience doing it in the first place? The other problem is that the education system (even the digital one) focuses too much on placing people to build stuff instead to innovate.

There are a lot of companies that give back to the world. Allocating that giving properly to the right people can expand their capacity on giving back to the world, accelerating our growth and diversity. However, a company is more whole if it both gives and teaches people how to be better role models of society. It is similar to how companies hire people: smart companies do not hire people with their skills alone, they hire also if they are a good cultural fit or not. Similarly, teaching people to be better role models will be the culture fit for humans bonding with earth to transform our world into a paradise.

Companies may not choose to disrupt themselves if it does not affect their business. We cannot expect a better social world from others if they do not care as much as we do. So if you care about the world where people can take their own small ships and traverse their own adventures rather others letting them do the handling for them, join the movement Time Well Spent. Although we live in a world where there is a lot of clutter of information that must become relevant to us, we lack more on prioritizing our free time with correct expectations on the daily challenges we personally live. We need technology that solves the problem of us being more active & conscious of how our brain responds to time to get the best for me and others. Planning our time that adds best value will be the new revolution in the next 100 years. Joining the movement has a chance of making a difference on whether we will have more engaging technological products that engage our life on taking more risks and less staying idle as passive consumers.

Thanks for reading.

[1] Thanks to the low cost of mobile phones, despite political instabilities and monopolies of the physical infrastructure, a lot of developing countries were able to afford access to the internet and gain the benefits that it could offer.
[2] At the time of writing, we have devices that have 4k video resolution, 360-degree cameras, and early stages of virtual reality. Several countries provide an internet subscription to its users that handle the bandwidth capacity on streaming through these devices.

My Experience With Hemorrhoids And Migraines

Is Stress The Main Problem?

Have you ever had migraines or hemorrhoids? Well, Marvin Grossberg and Mia Fey will let you know they have one! Although they are fictional characters in a courtroom trial from a visual novel adventure video game, we all know how stressful a job of an attorney is. We attribute migraines and hemorrhoids symptoms being aggravated by stress. In addition, lifestyle habits that keep us overweight (Grossberg BMI can be categorized as overweight) and quick temper (Throughout the game, Mia Fey is not your most anal character, but will definitely want you to keep things organized or else) can play a secondary role why you have migraines and hemorrhoids in the first place. Speaking about courtroom trials, it is definitely stressful going with testimonies that contradict with evidence. Similarly, when you work in a white collar job, you have people with different type of business reports that print different results for the same definitions. You have to cross-examine and find out the key piece evidence that makes that contradiction in the first place. A white collar job is no different than a detective saying out loud "There is only one source of truth!". Not to mention, your co-workers may seem that they are in a quick hurry on fixing this thing. Events like these are like a car accident within the main highway, leaving a traffic jam for the rest of the drivers. Conclusively, stressful experiences abound for both your average lawyer and white collar worker.

But is stress the actual cause? And is lifestyle changes and meditation the only way to remedy the effect? Although they can be, my experiences with migraines and hemorrhoids were different. Fortunately, the experiences that I had so far with a migraine and hemorrhoids were very mild. For those people who have severe conditions with migraines or hemorrhoids, it is best to consult a doctor.

Migraines - That throbbing sensation in your head

 When disaster strikes, the helmet will come to save the day.

Most people acquire migraines after they go into an accident. Mine was just your common bike accident. Unfortunately, I didn't wear a helmet at that time. Although I wear a helmet regularly when I bike, I was too confident that I did not need one as I was only going for a basic stroll while doing my normal errands. Nevertheless, the chances of getting injured that day were very high as I was carelessly juggling things by typing messages on my smartphone in my left hand while strolling my bike slowly in the sidewalks of a park. It was my most careless mistake I did ever in my life and I only did it because someone on the other side of the phone was very attentive on getting a response to me over a specific matter. Suddenly, I got a surprise. One of the sidewalk ramps was unusual from the rest I usually encounter. The slope was steep from the rest of them. It was almost like the shape of a spoon. Suddenly, I felt a rush of acceleration from my bike and it was very hard to control it with only one hand. I think I made it worse by hitting hard the brakes immediately after that. Pushing the brakes pulled my body out from the bike, floating forwards in mid-air. Both my body and forehead made an impact on the concrete asphalt. The force of my body was strong enough that my head had to still grind the concrete asphalt road until I got to a complete stop. My forehead was bleeding from the grind. I went to a local restaurant nearby and they voluntary offered me tissues and other first aid kits to clean up the mess on my forehead.

Days forward and I started to have some mild symptoms from the accident. I started to feel disoriented on occasions. Thankfully, that disorientation slipped away after a while. However, weeks later from the accident, I started to have a mild throbbing pain in my head from time to time. And it did not seem that doing nothing would go away over time. I went to a doctor and explained the situation of my accident. I was kind of worried and wanted to know the facts straight whether my accident had any impact on the symptoms I recently had. Maybe an X-Ray could help to diagnose the problem. However, the science of how the brain works to this day in the medical industry is still a mystery. The benefits over the cost of doing an X-Ray to the brain does not give much valuable information as for when doing an X-Ray to your teeth. After all, there are no much practical applications in the fields of neurology. For further enlightenment, you can get a glimpse how the medical industry has done so much slow progress on tackling brain deficiencies by watching the movie Concussion. For many years, it was neglected that multiple head impacts, such as in a game of American Football, were the main cause of the several mental disorders that were diagnosed by Athletes (I do have some personal development notes about that in one of my past blog posts). So like any traditional practitioner would do in our current situation and given my symptoms were very mild, they assured me to be less worried about it unless my symptoms ever got worse. However, some startups, such as Neuralink, are disrupting the industry by finding ways on alleviating the symptoms of dangerous and chronic medical conditions in the brain, such as Parkinson Disease.

I learned a lot from my accident. Besides playing it safe, bike taught me to pay more attention to my surroundings, especially blind spots.

Remedies

1. Not focusing too much on the screen

Spend less time on the screen to avoid getting disoriented

This is not a very easy task if in your daily workplace you have to face the screen all the time. If you cannot avoid facing the screen in your workplace, try to avoid facing the screen after your work. Limit the things that you could do regularly before, such as watching a movie, playing a video game, and surfing the web. Besides screen time gets you overloaded with too much information to process, movies and games you were comfortable with may start to disorient you with its rapid motion. For the first few months, I tried to stroll out to the malls and stores, leaving the video games I used to play for another time.

2. Doing a haircut

Spot the difference

For those who keep their hair long, a hair cut may kind of help. Actually, doing hair cut often for keeping my hair short kept my migraines at bay. Besides lifting off some weight from your head, it helps the skin of your head get more oxygen.

3. Sleeping enough

This is straightforward and important. If you do not sleep, your body will not replenish to its full potential. That includes your head.

Hemorrhoids - The Harlem Shake that is going from behind

I never knew what hemorrhoid actually was until I got one. I thought that I did the best hygiene, diet, and toilet practices for keeping my digestive system in shape. However, something was itching on my back and I did not know what it was. I did not notice I missed some corners after I got diagnosed from a doctor that I had hemorrhoid. Hemorrhoids may be the next irritating thing after migraines and they may get worse the more you neglect and do not treat them properly. Hemorrhoid gets worse the more irritation it gets from friction and pressure from the body. I had to find ways to reduce the irritation.

Remedies

1. Regular hygiene and hemorrhoid positioning

The way I cleaned my back was not thorough enough. During a shower, most of us clean our back in the laziest way possible. Try to find a positioning wide enough that cleans your back properly and thoroughly. Hygiene is very important and it keeps the itchiness at bay.

In addition, hemorrhoid may get irritated from the pressure from the body. Try to position hemorrhoid in a place where it gets less pressure from the body. Tucking it in helped me in the long run.

2. Wet wipes

Buy a stack. Take one along with you.

After going to the toilet, you should clean yourself in the shower instead of wiping it off with toilet paper. Sometimes that is not possible because you are in a workplace environment. Instead, buy some wet wipes that will not irritate your hemorrhoid. This helped me tremendously from having further hiccups of my hemorrhoid being irritated from the use of toilet paper. Buy a stack of them and keep them on your desk and take one along with you whenever you go to the toilet.

3. Toilet and diet habits

The oil of the digestive system: Blending some fruit with probiotic yogurt.

The last important thing is your toilet and diet habits. I used to force myself going to the toilet instead of going only when I had the urge to and I thought that was OK. I thought that as long as I could do potty with the use of some force, I kept my digestive system in shape and I thought that was OK.

Although it is very healthy going to the potty, it is even healthier if you can go to potty with the least force. The more force you use, the more marginal gains exist on improving your toilet and diet practices. It may be one of the reasons why you have hemorrhoid in the first place. For toilet practices, try to see if you can go to the toilet whenever you have the urge to rather than preparing ahead of time or delaying it for later. For diet practices, try to eat as much fiber and probiotics as possible for keeping your digestive system in shape. You can include in your diet some granola bars that punch a lot of fiber and probiotic yogurt. I started eating once a week some probiotic yogurt with fruits. I can feel my digestive system being much better ever since.

New Vlogcast On Improving Our Economy Better

Hey Everybody. Long Time No See.

It has been a while since I posted on this blog. I finished writing my personal development portfolio #selfdevboostermentalmaptour. It is based on several books that we discussed in this blog.

Focusing On FinTech And Health Tech

My ambitions before was to create the next social network. However, I sense we have not done enough work on improving our own self before we can improve and help others. The quality is not there yet. We need to achieve a lot of intermediate steps before we are able to reach to that ambition in the first place. It is like the game of civilization. In order to advance on our ideal social network, it requires people to be able to manage themselves. Therefore, people managing their resources and health with logic by the applications of FinTech and Health Tech will get us closer to the goal of attaining humans possessing of better qualities to our society. Conclusively, this blog will focus on topics related to FinTech and Health Tech. I discuss the importance of FinTech and Health Tech in the video below

Coming Soon

It is time to hit the rubber on the road. Join me as I bike stroll while talking on better ways of making our economy better: From recycling resources to incorporating FinTech and Health Tech in our personal life.

One Activity. Three Benefits to myself. 

• Brainstorming on our present situation to recalibrate and get motivated in the current trending domains of our society. 
• Improving my speech skills. 
• Getting some essential exercise.

The Grand Tour Of Our Present Economy 

Starring Cycler softdevlife

Warping Between Space & Time

It has been quite some time since I posted on this blog. The main reason for that is I planned to distract myself with my current obsession warping myself too much in time in order to be able to adjust myself be more oriented with space. The words time and space are defined here based on our perception. When we take things in an abstract way, we live in the Perceiver/Teacher world where there are no constraints in time, but space is restricted. For instance, a "word" in our perception can belong to only one definition, it cannot belong to two definitions, but each person can have its own different definition for the same word. Then it is quite possible that each person will create their own set of values and beliefs with the same set of words by assigning each word a different meaning (or space) to allocate with. What matters when we speak with people is not the words that people say, but what meaning these words define behind. Those same words can direct us to a better or worse space analogous to the real world safe and not so nice neighborhoods. Then it is very important the model (or mental map) we have in our mind to be driven by something that is better not only for our own end (as that will ultimately be biased as it distorts what is generally good) but to work in harmony and in order with the fractal world we live in (a nice neighborhood is much better than just a nice house). My view is that people should focus on making the world a better place than just focusing too narrowly on a specific domain that we slip the externalizations that come from it. I am pretty sure that the average person who voluntarily work in open source or similar projects these days, as well people who did scientific breakthroughs and advances in manufacturing and technology in the past could have done so for the wrong motivations (as much as the student who gets a degree for the sake of the degree rather from the knowledge gathered), but I am pretty sure all companies, organizations, and institutions start with the good will of making something better for the world instead of the bottom line of making profit for the sake of recognition and fame. So for that reason, what we set as a destination is very important. To some degree, we have to become ultimately at some point very obsessed with it in order to gain faith from it. I think that is the easiest way for an idea to get stuck in our head so no matter the pressure we get from others, it will still remain stuck in our head (In other words, it remains solid).  However, that is just one step of the whole process, yet an important one, as if we drive to the wrong location, it will feel like a mid-life crisis. The next step is warping more into space. And warping in space has a different frame of looking at things than how we looked at them before (again, I have to re-iterate that the previous way of looking at things, from a time perspective, is very important. It is learning the building blocks to express ourselves, like a kid learning its own alphabet).

An obsession is kind of a very hard thing to get out of the mind. To say the least, it is kind of hard to change an attitude if all your activities you did in the past relate to your past obsession. Definitely, this is how the Mercy mind works in some way. The Mercy mind takes with the very importance the recent actions and experiences the individual experienced within space. In order to not be obsessed with it, you have to avoid those experiences (believe me, a Mercy person by default is very good at using the best strategies for "avoiding" painful experiences). However, we avoid those habits and experiences not for suppressing them, but in our dearest motivation to bring a more balanced mind where we don't let our minds be too dominated into time, but also be dominated in space as well (in other words, for each cognitive style to have its own space to express itself). This will result in past experiences to become diluted, allowing us for more flexibility with our attitude to focus more on other areas we haven't explored yet. My insights about the story allegory of the cave explain that well. Briefly, I was focused too much on a local minimum, when there was a better global minimum that I blindly couldn't see as I was trapped with most of my recent actions.

Sometimes obsessions will not reach us to our best destination. 

It makes us narrow-minded with a tunnel vision.  

I reach enough faith after reading so many psychological and self-help books that are popular, books that people and society agree and "like" with 5-star reviews, that support the statements of mental symmetry, that I cannot find anything else that it can contest against it. Of course, the song of this faith that proclaims is not from rose-colored glasses, but what matters is that it does "fit" with our current situation and those ideas can help us construct a better future.  Even the director of applied machine learning at facebook tells that the future of AI requires knowledge of neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy and even ethics aside only from machine learning and statistics that dominates much these days. In addition, technical specialization is becoming too mature that there is no much more supply for people to engineer on any deep know-how on how to manage resources efficiently. Instead, we have more supply on how people will use existing building blocks to form a better business domain for the employer they are working termed as FINDEV according to this article. Essentially, more developers will involve and tackle in the decisions and ethics behind any project. Most developers will have fewer chances on focusing only on the technical stuff like an old-time hacker used to be. For that reason, subjects like ethics and philosophy are important, for if we don't pay too much attention to them now, we may reach a dead end. The steps of the destination I want to go is fruitless if I cannot give a general tour to you to the internals of this ship that is designed to handle any waves that can withstand to our destination. A tour is a tour, it is not a deep know how or a source to blindly be in faith, as you can tinker around adding and removing stuff on anything that "fits" with the general message of the destination we are heading. That is the reason after I finished writing some sort of "dissertation" about mental symmetry, I dedicated an abstract of that dissertation as a tour called #selfdevboostermentalmaptour. It is a set of 12 small essays discussing the mental map that I follow which mainly all tie in a direct or an indirect way to the theory of mental symmetry (list bellow along with the main extracted sources taken):

1. The Challenges Of Being Empowering ("Modern Man" by I.M. Panagiotopoulos extracted from 2014 National University Entrance Exams in Greece)
2. Empowering Trait: Psychological Safety in Teams (Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg)
3. Executive Paradox and Mental Symmetry Diagram (Executive Paradox by David G. Jensen)
4. Meeting Tasks in Executive Paradox (derived from my past experiences and my on views of how the economy of Greece was handled)
5. Demystifying the gender gap (The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine)
6. Channels of communication: Writing (derived mainly from my business law classes)
7. Introduction to Mental Networks & Neural Networks (supplementing Clean Language by Judy Rees for understanding Teacher Mental Networks)
8. Tools For Creating Model In Our Minds (derived from the main Three Inputs Of Learning I learned as a tutor)
9. Feedback and Our Obsessions (Feedback Revolution by Peter McLaughlin)
10. A philosophical framework: An introduction to cognitive styles (All Sorts of People: Ordered Complexity by Lane Friesen)
11. A theological framework: Setting our minds not for short term success, but for the ideal (Natural Cognitive Theology by Lorin Friesen)
12. Other important readings (Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhhig, Stopping the noise in your head by Dr. Reid Wilson)

Without this tour, I feel that I would have left most people lost, as an adult knows how easy it is to write a sentence, but for a baby, it will be lost in the mud, as it does not have the starting building blocks to even express even the basic things in life. To get a full overview of the whole subject in the matter, I created a snapshot of the mental map I created. However, I still felt that article was too much for someone to read, and hence, I created a tour so anyone can have an easier access on comprehending the main message that I am trying to communicate. I am creating more bridges for people to understand the message.

However, like I said at the start of this blog, this is just one segment of the whole journey. I think anyone has to cross that path first, but they should not be stuck on this path once they already have strong faith on it. At that point, it requires spending more time warping into space instead. In space, the things are mirrored. We can be in any space, but our time is limited. We cannot do all the actions we envision in our world. For that reason, we have to prioritize which actions are the most important for us to do. We have to sacrifice some of the stuff we like which don't get us closer to the mental map we envision. After all, our happiness will blossom if our actions get closer to what we envision deep into our mental map (and hopefully it is not a short term one that ends us in disappointment, but one with long-term joy). Discarding our goals for substitutes that don't directly touch on what we want to accomplish or procrastinate on it can lead to chronic depression. Research suggests that chronic depression is one of the factors an individual from their own volition acquires mental diseases, such as Parkinson Disease.

To be honest to myself, that leaves me ahead to read "Stopping the noise in your head" by Dr. Reid Wilson (You can read my review of Stopping the noise in your head in order to understand a brief summary of the book before reading on). This book seems that it strikes more closely on changing perspectives between space and time instead of trying to assume there is no problem at all. Although this may sound like I am a person with anxiety, you have to understand the definition of what anxiety really means. Generally speaking, anxiety is an irrational fear of a perceived threat. For example, a person that wants to do something bold in their life ends up to not doing it because of generalizations of the outcome having bad results. Perceiver mode is really good at not letting an idea to run its own course. It will find all the mistakes a theory (=Teacher mode) has to the point it requires endless refinements to it before it can properly rub the wheels to the road. In some sense it gives us worry so much, that it dominates the rest of the mind, that it does more harm than good, letting that great idea we have in our heart get dissolved thanks to Perceiver mode giving us a good reason to procrastinate on it and substitute it with something more safe that can still charm us but very sure not for so very long. Believe it or not, just because we didn't check ourselves, doesn't mean we are fine, as most of us have some psychological problem in our heads that we are very good at covering it up and be in denial at it. It is good to be honest with our self before it is too late with what we do with our minds to the point it becomes irreversible later on. I think this book will help me. I will remove any noise from this book and get the good stuff it covers and may write a summary of what I learned about it later on.

Being honest myself, I need to take a read on this to tackle my deepest aspirations more effectively

So after finishing reading that book, my goals for the upcoming years is to dedicate more time on space, to myself, in this limited time, on this present moment that time ticks on, to be back on the engine as I used to be. However, my focus in this second visit is to find new habits that align with the mental map I created. For now, as FINDEV comes on the horizon, I have found that a focus on learning software-wise on how to develop fast with tools that have the traits of being cheap, flexible, and accessible as a worthwhile investment in the end in order to have more ample time on what business domain problems I want to tackle with. Last but not least, I have some interests as a hobby of what business domains I am interested, such as creating the next social network that helps people contribute to society with the least fuss, understand the obsessions (in a positive way) each person has, assist others clearing cognitive dissonance, a platform that solves problems instead of creating more problems, an attitude where people view others in terms of their potential to personal growth instead as a dead end. I think no business domain exists yet that addresses those problems in a bold way, but somebody has to, in order to avoid this foggy life where every person we meet we cover it up with general formalities like nothing has happened. People should not make relationships based on status and appearances most people these days end up to, but instead of what the character each represents that can assist them off (instead of using them) along with their strength obsessions they carry. There are many ideas that I have for this next social network. So I think I will start to cook some ideas that I have thought and on any further brainstorms I do later on.

The goals I set derive from the idea that if the idea of god really exists, then we live in a world as machine learners. How we treat machine learning to computers may apply to us as well. As we apply machine learning to our world, not all instances we create end up to be useful models. That is because they did not behave as we planned them to do under unsupervised learning. With a bible that exists along with the events of history that reflect the bible, with the contents of the bible discussing frequently the personal development and transformation of our childish mindset from different perspectives, it is kind of hard to dismiss the idea we are machine learners under unsupervised learning on a transformation plan and not test the waters if it is true or not. And of all ideas that try to bring a general purpose to the world, it is the only idea that the idea itself makes it rewarding. For if even if this idea was considered a myth, I would still continue the work of this idea, because nobody else has to prove to me that this idea is fruitful for our current world in order to be better off itself (in the same way our advances within the industrial and commercial revolution). If we have worries (as we always do "naturally", as it helps us in overcoming challenges), I think people should worry more on what deeds they did that reflect their identity as a whole. Our achievements don't matter as much as the good ideas that we give to the world that helps us make better decisions that can last even for new eyes from next generations to see. Each of us come from different obsessions, so it is not the attention of specific ideas that we need to follow, but how we harness our obsessions for the good will of our world.The hard knocks of life may twist us in a world where we lose our origin hope and accept a Medieval or Darwinian theme. That does not mean that an ideal world is much easier to face where everybody gets transformed from their birthright. In actuality, the road of being a better person is a longer and thoughtful road than taking the shortcut of losing hope and keeping our childish mindset intact. It comes at a personal cost from what we represented from the past and requires a lot of time to commit to that. With what business domain we want to marry with our rest of our life, it is better to marry with the wildest horse, as if we can handle that, we may be able to handle any other difficult obstacles that we will have to face in the future.

Mental Map Epilogue: Motivation - The two sides of the coin

Motivation is extracted by the book Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg. You can read my review of Smarter Faster Better in order to understand a brief summary what the book is about before reading on.

The old philosopher Socrates was famous of the doctrine of induction. We form induction from generalities (Perceiver-> Teacher). In contrast, a deduction is based on translating ambiguity and metaphors (Teacher-> Perceiver). Induction is when you create a general hypothesis and test them if they work well or not in statistics. We make a deduction on NPL and artificial intelligence in the effort on decoding the words described by a person to a set of specific, concrete examples that can fit.

Induction is forming a belief or theory out of evaluating things in the concrete world. Our values are sensitive and to a point emotional when they get contrasted with something that does not fit into our equation. Given this assertion, the easiest way for others to accept an induction is for allowing others on the bias to act. The philosopher Socrates did induction in a specific way. In most cases, he never did the induction of others from his thinking, but instead facilitated others to do their induction themselves when they asked questions to him about the grand explanation of the world (which represent a grand scheme theory or belief). This bias of action, letting others have control of answering their version of faith is easier to do than giving one that may not match (emotional beliefs are paid off considerate attention. Society already understands that perception so much that it protects the beliefs of others - whether they are the right path from the rest is another story - whether they take a high emotional toll on the individual is scientifically evident). The philosopher Socrates was a Facilitator person, and Facilitator people are the ones that can create the most acquaintances. Their ability to delegate, especially in the way induction was presented for others to have control of, made people easier to the debate of philosophical things. Instead of conflicting views to escalate to a dead end discussion, the conversation was able to keep flowing. Maybe it was a way to motivate people to do philosophy. However, whether philosophy was able to transition to the right direction by the way the practice of induction was presented is a different story. When it was time for the philosopher Socrates to address there was one form of God on controlling the system of the world instead of the existing twelve Greek gods ancient Greece had, the conflict was so adamant to society, that society thought that his version of thinking was poisonous to society. He didn't accept the world being of a form of paradox. He didn't believe the world need to rely on the different type of gods for the various needs for different situations. He believed there was one integrated system in place for handling all things. Socrates was a proponent of the unity of virtue. That virtue represents “one and the same” and “parts of a single whole”. If he didn't give up his views, the government warned that it would take his life. In the end, he didn't give up on his views and died for his beliefs.

What can we learn motivation is off? If it is of having control and it doesn't match with what our situation is, when is it appropriate to change plans? The tipping point is motivation alone can lead to a dead end. It indeed leads you to do things correctly on things that are not of complex nature. But if they are too complex, then foundations need to be addressed to tackle those complications. It is like riding on a race track. Nobody will ride a road these days straight out with their legs. They will instead get some form of education to be able to ride some car to get a head start up instead of re-inventing the wheel. At that point, the foundations are competitive enough to bulge into mediocrity and beyond, but maybe not so much to the top. It may be disappointed by the disillusionment that it has the right platonic forms. As Alex Danco paradigm shift machine article resonates me, "But if you don’t get the paradigm right, then you won’t learn the right lessons! 'Fail fast, learn faster' is only truly useful information if you understand how things are arranged—otherwise you’ll draw the wrong conclusions." At the other hand, people who do not motivate to do anything of their ideas about their beliefs will also be disappointed as well. So motivation has a two-way street. More specifically, motivation is the Exhorter mode which has access to Mercy and Teacher mode. Motivation not only addresses on doing things with ourselves (Mercy) but also creating our foundations (Teacher). Creating a mental map resides in Teacher Mode and doing things with ourselves resides in Mercy Mode. Joining them together is technically where the rubber hits the road. It learns the ropes (or foundations to say the least) and puts the tires on the road (applies those foundations in real life). Since Exhorter consciousness overrides Contributor consciousness, the plans are done in a sketchy way instead of being polished. We can see that the material is grasped like "castles in the air", such as the parody theory of "the flying spaghetti monster" (low Perceiver confidence) while the skills shown are sloppy as it is on their first encounter (low server confidence). Some people are good at initiating things (Exhorter mode), and others just like to maintain things being stable and orderly (which represents Contributor mode). We see those two types of personalities often in executive positions. Any work requires those two cognitive styles. Firstly, by creating a prototype and later making that prototype mature. On the other hand, if we have no motivation to start anything, we leave our mental maps in an idle state.

Unfortunate events happen to us when we already have something that we believe, yet don't do any actions on learning how to cross the path,  without creating a mental map. Furthermore, it can lead to the habit of having depression, and ultimately to have higher risks of Parkinson disease as described in one of my past presentations. Creating a mental map either through abstractions (a better path to not re-invent the wheel as discussed before) and concrete experiences (learning from real mistakes - more potent when in a safe environment) is essential. For Perceiver and Teacher cognitive styles, they usually focus on foundations first. For Server and Mercy cognitive styles, they often focus on experiences first. Exhorter, Contributors and Facilitator cognitive styles can both switch to foundations and experiences like turning on and off a switch. Usually, those type of personality types that can swap between the two are the ones that can drive a car earlier. Usually, the passive consumer prefers them to experience life on the "here and now", so they tend to be attracted more on experiences instead. Perceiver and Teacher leave the car in the garage to collect dust and Server and Mercy model a car that can maneuver very well, but is inferior compared to the average leader.

As a Perceiver person, Exhorter motivation regarding foundation had come in good chunks of pleasure every time I supported my mental map that explained existing concepts I knew as stronger pieces that I can replace within my main puzzle. However, the cost and reward of replacing parts are becoming to such a degree that the reward becomes less and less for each learning material. I encounter that there is less gaining something as most of re-inventing the wheel of the best architecture has already been completed. What I am worried is how alienating, and far away I am from the rest of the people who will not be able to grasp it. It is like I am the situation of being the author of Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolutions and you know you won't get out more explaining about paradigm shifts if society does not accept and grasp the concept in the first place. At some point, it becomes depressing focusing more on foundations as there is no intrinsic reward to it. In contrast, the potential of intrinsic motivational rewards on applying that mental map to self is abundant. For the Perceiver person, the path ultimately is to actually drive the model car that you compiled out of your foundation. What the car represents is of great design from the rest of the cars that only did primary education that did not contain much personal development. However, even a great design is still one at inferior state compared to other cars where their model is inferior. That is because those inferior designed cars upgraded all the components to the max and they can maneuver it smoothly. Those are some elements that a Perceiver style may have never touched. With a great designed car, the maximum capacity to outperform other cars is there. To reach there, it needs my effort to get the proper server skills that will give me the upgrades. It needs me to practice a lot to get the maneuverability to ride the car in such a way that it will outperform the rest. I only have the base car, not the details or how to use it properly yet. The real world is messy so on the first tries, I will be a failure, but ultimately, if we have the correct paradigm, we will eventually win after many failed attempts.

I still mainly favor for all of you people to learn foundations until you are confident to change the switch where you are sure you can move in your life and start riding the car. There is some few stuff that I wanted to end this year, such as analyzing the book "Smarter Faster Better" by Charles Duhigg and the magazine "Philosophy Now". I also wanted to analyze the two movies Pulp Fiction and Moneyball that I planned to watch. I am afraid that I am planning to cancel them permanently. My aim focus right now is to generate some Server Confidence. That means to use my commanding skill, and ultimately, I think nobody will be able to stop me because I have emboldened my mental map better than others. I do feel that I have the correct paradigm. My paradigm is the following:

There is a need for personal development to happen. The process must be convenient for people. We need to change the attitude for people not setting others as a dead end but instead to see their real motivations, needs, and the progress of their personal growth. The theory of mental symmetry fits the bill. We extract information from others in a messy, unorganized, slow manner. People don't have free time or the efficient tools to express their mental map and their progress or able to identify others mental map and development. We need to make that scarce resource that wastes time with inaccuracies to become seamlessly efficient and accurate. There is a lot of search and social media tools that are either over saturated or under saturated and should be balanced instead where everyone gets enough feedback. There is a lot of unorganized content expressed about needs and the qualities of people these days that we need to transform it or facilitate people to convert it into useful information. We have to understand the situation by comprehending how the current behavior of individuals are first and make conclusions out of it. From there, we can create innovative solutions for improving the quality of relationship and communication. Right now it is estimated that each person has close high-quality relationships down to less than a dozen people because it takes a lot of effort to know them. We want to increase that number from 100 to 1000 individuals with the new model. I am persistent that personal development exists from many accounts and we have to solve this in new radical ways or else we will never solve this problem.

Smarter Faster Better has been discussed in most part on my blog already. I discussed Chapter 8 about breaking down information on my previous blog. We address chapter 1 motivation in this post. Chapter 2 is mainly a mix of my analysis of the book Feedback Revolution and Black Box Thinking. However, I think Black Box Thinking discusses better which organizations progress better. It is true psychological safety may make employees happy, but there is no guarantee if they stray away from the original mission statement of the company to fit their needs. My previous short snapshot blog illustrated my mental map, which represents an example of what Chapter 3 talks all about. Chapter 6 Bayesian thinking is actually how Perceiver Mode works with abstract concepts while placing each a level of confidence. That level of confidence always changes when new samples for the same category come in. I am conscious at this mode. I at some point got fed up evaluating self-development that I want to chip big bets instead of my chips collecting dust or the equivalent of a car collecting dust. Chapter 4 is all about planning and setting closure.These traits are the strengths of Contributor thought. I illustrated Chapter 5 "Managing others" on how an organization can be agile by the use of Executive Paradox diagram.

I can go on about describing cognitive styles. It is already self-evident to me as this is the closest theory to explain everything in general. Maybe it is not self-evident for you. So I leave the work for the rest of you, to test your doubts, whether I played the chips right or wrong, or whether it was all a bluff. At first, I didn't start reading any books to analyze the topic of mental symmetry. I tried to believe them and explain what each cognitive style does. In early stages of my blog, you can see a lot of posts about Mental Symmetry that discusses a lot of topics about it in detail [1]. Most of them are easy to read. The website www.mentalsymmetry.com by Lorin Friesen did the best job of describing those concepts so please go ahead on that site and read them there. My early posts are relevant only to see that you also need to explain those concepts in your context. It helps you start motivating yourself, pushing the button of bias to action, to be more interested in the theory of Mental Symmetry. After that, you can push yourself to correlate that theory with other books. In the end, you have the choice whether you want to stick with this paradigm or believe there is a better theory you know that can address all the problems. Because each person has a different personality, your adventure will have a different style from the mine you see here now. If you have some strong general knowledge from your previous education, this journey takes around 1-2 years with deliberate practice. Consider them as an investment to your future. Know when you don't get more reward out of it after you practiced enough out of it.

Creating a mental map is really like a lengthy side trip climbing a mountain all alone without anyone telling you to do it or anyone able to visibly see the token of value underneath. It is true that I created a mental map. However, the adventure of refining the mental map is not over yet. When driving a car, the fun part is not keeping the mental map frozen, but how to accommodate the mental map in reality to trespass all the challenges that are ahead of you. Trying a lot and failing will work well enough if you have the correct mental map, because one way or another, you will be able to know how to slide in all the challenges ahead of you. Nonetheless, there will always be times where you have to rethink the existing mental map whether something is missing or not. Those will be easy to unfold as having a great mental map from start leaves you out from doing any significant leaps that will be impossible to take head-on. In addition, you also have to acquire the right skills to upgrade the parts of your car and try out as many environments to practice in order to accommodate your vehicle to have better maneuverability and stamina between all situations.

I would like to thank the authors who created the material that helped me create my mental map. I would like to thank a lot the Theory of Mental Symmetry by Lorin Friesen. If the old philosopher Socrates resurrected, we would hope the type of God Lorin Friesen described is the one he would follow. I believe the theory of mental symmetry Lorin Friesen describes and its associations with Theology. Since it is always a challenge to communicate Mental Symmetry to society, I extracted similar content that describes the same concepts from other books. I want to thank the Journalists "Matthew Syed" for "Black Box Thinking", "Charles Duhigg" for "The Power of Habit" and "Smarter Faster Better", "Professor Karen J Pine" for "Mind What you Wear", the practitioner of leadership "David G. Jensen" for "Executive Paradox", "Peter Maclauglin" for "Feedback Revolution", the class of "Philosophy of Values" in my university at "Cal Poly Pomona" that introduced me to philosophers "John Locke", "Imannuel Kant", the national library of Singapore and its curators for placing the books "Black Box Thinking", "Executive Paradox", "Feedback Revolution" in the main highlight shelves. You guys have a great taste. Without all of you, all this amazing work would have been a missed opportunity.

That is it for my journey. I leave most of the rest up to all of you: interpret your story with your context whenever you are stuck, rely more on your internal self-esteem instead of external self-esteem (Chapter 8 Analysis of "The Power Of Habit").

[1] Highlight posts that illustrate are Internal Problems with my existing current job describing the dynamics of mental networks within the working environment, Parkinson Disease in 5 minutes discusses how chemicals in the brain activate specific cognitive styles and a brief description of Exhorter strategy, the interplay of emotion and confidence discuss about the purpose emotions (Exhorter, Mercy, Teacher) and confidence (Perceiver, Server, Contributor) exist and how they interact together, Obstacles of the ideal critical thinking discuss the blind spots and limitations each cognitive style has, concluding that most of us have not a clear visibility or clarity of other cognitive styles which can stray us from ideal critical thinking, Types of Pain discusses the different type of pains (physical, mental networks, denial) and the dynamics of the cognitive styles that happen beneath that process, Visualization and Consequence talks about humans only being limited by mercy mental networks as input and how those can be transformed to a perpetual abstract foundations which we must implement with the help of visualization. Although those articles may be incomplete and I didn't have enough confidence at that time on them because they were not supported by others experiences, they were the supporting pillars for me to motivate myself to research more heavily on the topic of personal development.

Update 

About the movies: Although I am not going to analyze movies I aforementioned, I still advise you guys to watch them. Pulp Fiction illustrates there must be a correct sense of mental map before enforcing righteousness. It is a great watch coupled with Nihilism by Mark Conard & further analysis by idleafterdark. Moneyball is a decent movie. Statistics is valued not for an unfair game, but people not following marginal gains within the rules of the game. There is always an open space in sports and business when people care less when they feel their resources are too abundant becoming an easier victim like the story David and Goliath. Furthermore, it would have been better if people were obsessed with scarce resources and personal development instead of baseball tickets and hot dogs. In addition, both in baseball and business, we see the power of money can kill the motivation of others to innovate.
 
My last words: This is my final words on my mental map epilogue. I am putting my last advice of words as a rite of passage to myself. I hope this helps for others that walk on this same journey.

Back to where all begun, just this time looking things through new perspectives: Putting Server skills in the right direction.

It is interesting how all this blog started. The creation of my blog was just a reaction to a dream while I was sleeping. Maybe it was just a sign that:

• The way I thought and did things did not align from the observations of the external world.
• My thought and skills were inadequate to correspond appropriately and effectively to observations that I faced all the time.

What I ended up with this blog was to create a mental map where my thoughts could fit with my past observations I had trouble to cope with. I motivated myself to create the mental map by doing the following:

• I created a page on my blog named "Direction to this blog" which addressed that I wanted to transition my mental map from only fulfilling my profession to an interdisciplinary one where it could tackle any observations that were out of my professional skills.
• I tried to be more honest in one of my blog posts, associating my direction to align with the direction of my blog. After setting that direction to myself, even if it was not detailed enough, it promoted me to create a mental map (by reading and analyzing books, such as Executive Paradox) that it was impossible later for me to put that mental map down out of sheer low confidence.

Now I am trying in this blog post to motivate myself honestly to learn and apply server skills that fit with my mental map in order for "me" to become "part" of the mental map. However, learning any skills is not efficient. I have to set some rules and concepts that should be respected when learning and using skills. All of this will become clear soon.

But before looking on how we process things, let us start to address the 2 main problems of individuality: personal ease and development. If we use Maslow's Pyramid, we can self-actualize by fulfilling our personal ease and development. Personal ease corresponds to the basic needs of Maslow's Pyramid, such as basic and safety needs and being accepted as a member of society. Personal development corresponds to our self-esteem.

From Maslow's Pyramid, we classify Physiological, Safety, Belonging to Personal Ease and Esteem to Personal Development

Society in the past tried to fulfill both types of personal needs at the same time and it always created a stall. What eventually happened in almost all cases was personal ease was always an obstacle to society to have the free time to think clearly in personal development that forced people to ideologies of personal development that were inadequate, such as raging war by comparing other races inferior and classifying people wrongly in the days of eugenics and slavery.


I kind of agree that personal ease becomes a big bottleneck for personal development to have a clean mindset. For that reason, the inception of society to wear the attire clothes of professionalism, to ignore personal development ideologies and to instead attach fixated on improving society on its personal ease. The theory of evolution was created to support people to run their course on such direction. Ironically, this lead later for people to have a more clear mindset in incorporating concepts of personal development within organizations as described by the book Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhhig. That was due to  people having most of their personal ease fulfilled with the help of science and technology . Now a lot of attention has been focused on the philosophy of the mind and artificial intelligence emulating the mind of our own species.

At the time of writing this, the latest magazine of "Philosophy Now" discusses Philosophy and Science merging together. Times are changing like the library of Alexandria in Egypt. Just this time, instead of books curated to our personal ease, there are books addressed to personal development.

Science branched out from Philosophy to study the objective world.
Why not use scientific thinking for personal development as well?

 
If we want to illustrate where personal development and personal ease location exactly are, we can demonstrate it by the bellow diagram. In contrast with personal ease, personal development has a long road left to still ride. One of the main problems is due to people not placing  personal development as their core strategy to the product. It is true that the new lab these days that effectively find insights to personal development have changed hands from governments to organizations. However, these insights are later long forgotten. These concepts are used only in peripheral ways throughout the organization in order to only gain competitive advantage. It is true that these principles can become the envelope of a company's culture. However, these forms of good can fall in tragic ways when they are not re-enforced to be more thoroughly developed. A platonic form of an ideology cannot sustain itself when we do not put enough effort on constantly getting more closer to it. That is an example of how hospitals ideal foundation (i.e. hospitals mission to save people's life) to become fragmented (i.e. the norms of the hospital on how they reacted to mistakes lead for hospital mistakes to be one of the top 3 causes of people's death). Shouldn't we embrace the attitude of improving our personal development as long as we can?


 
My thesis is that we should put personal development as our core strategy for adding value to our society. All these books I read and analyzed so far were supporting material on creating a mental map for my thesis. That does not mean though that I will ignore projects that improve our personal ease. There is always the danger that we won't have as much personal ease as much as we have today. However, I am sure we will recover those pitfalls faster as we embrace the paradigms of science and technology. In contrast, there is no much attention paid to personal development. There are chances that the days we live  is a period where personal development can blossom. One of my economy teachers always advised us to look at the diagram of the supply and demand. He told us that many people pay attention to exemplars of our world that consist of high demand. A smart person instead will focus his attention on exemplars that consist of low supply. If that is the case, should we not pay more attention to personal development? Profit companies need to think of being a non-profit organization with some of their leftover net revenue instead of giving it to charities or being socially responsible beyond their core product. They need to think how their product interacts in overall within the big picture instead of attracting people to their product limited to a specific domain.

Now let us use the diagram of mental symmetry and executive paradox to see how far I reached and where I have to go.

At first starting this blog, as an individual, I was an entity that used skills with no purpose. I consciously knew that there was a framework in life on how things work. However, since I didn't explore it myself consciously, it was easy to get drift apart from society's emotional pressure that other matters in our day to day life are more important to focus than to ponder deeply to that question. Whichever represents more emotional and the peer pressure from external self-esteem is what takes us in control in order to neglect anything beyond the normal boundaries of current social norms.

One of the things a Perceiver person has an advantage compared to other personality styles is it contains the starting bridge to personal development. In detail:

1. The Perceiver is the only mode that can see most clearly the Mercy cognitive style and at the same time not be attached to it.
2. The Mercy cognitive style contains the derived product of a Teacher's theory. For the Perceiver person, that figure is a state that needs to be measured on how close it represents to the ideal platonic form. The Perceiver person is at best at self-reflection.
3. The Perceiver person can force to create a new theory from an existing one and then Server mode will subconsciously aid in filling the required mental map.
4. The Perceiver person can force to use an existing theory that is not used to be applied to personal identity and then Server mode will subconsciously aid in integrating them together.
   

The interesting thing is while doing each of the steps discussed on point #3 and #4, the Perceiver can reflect clearly whether it is going farther or closer to those goals due to point #1 and #2. That reflection lets him adjust and improve the steps required for point #3 and #4 to become accomplished. Even when Perceiver has no direct contact or influence to Server mode, the results of Server actions are stored in Mercy mode which the Perceiver has access to. Unfortunately, I have no guide how other cognitive styles can gain the same results as I do. I think the Contributor person can achieve this path faster than a Perceiver does, but not as very accurate as the Perceiver does.

Contributor and Perceiver have a bigger flexibility on personal development in terms of speed and accuracy correspondingly

Forcing the Perceiver to be interested in creating a new framework from existing knowledge can lead as a strong motivator for the Perceiver to force itself to implement point #3. That lead me to create a mental map by associating the framework of mental symmetry with other self-help books.

So now this blog post is all about doing point #4. Eventually, the trigger of point #4 is when a mental map becomes so strong done from point #3 (the more connections or associations, the stronger the mental map becomes) that it can defy or make itself immune from being affected by existing social norms that oppose your views. In a matter of fact, why on earth would you approve existing social norms that have less correlation to the new framework you already have? At the same time, the Perceiver Person has the biggest horror to his own self: "All this time, I was deceived by wrong facts? I really do things still the old way. Does that make me a hypocrite? There is an alarm beeping me that I do not reflect the new framework I didn't pay attention before. Okay, I acknowledge the contradiction. Give me a break. This is too much for me to digest right now"

 
Whenever I have to give radical new orders to Teacher, I always do a rite of passage. I had to write an extensive blog in detail before I decided to leave my job. I had to make a detail explanation on how to approach point #3 and now I am doing a blog post again on how to approach point #4.  I expressed within my rite of passage that I am now a Philosopher and Theologist so I can now move on to be practical to these disciplines. I usually do a rite of passage associated to my internal self-esteem instead of my external self-esteem. For instance, I never celebrated my achievements of my university. Even when I received a CGPA of 3.95, I didn't attend the graduation ceremony because I didn't feel anything special yet on me that made me become radically different. Every rite of passage is created due to a self-crisis. We all deal with suffering when we walk mindlessly on a path with no deep thought until we end up in a mid-life crisis. There is another way to learn the same lessons faster by the virtue of patience. In this case, you create artificially the crisis to your own self to jump through the hoops within a safe environment. It takes a lot of time to see the benefits. It requires a lot of willpower and patience to stick to the plan when present life looks stable.
 
Does all the material look so familiar with you so far? Great, that was the main thesis of this blog: Our ultimate goal is for our identity be part of personal development. Now I have to give steps to Teacher on what recipe the Server should follow for achieving that. Ultimately, in some way or another, I am confident that I will be able to progress myself as I used to do before. However, this is an endless journey. I am not sure what awaits after that, but here goes nothing:

1. Do not re-invent the wheel yet try to break things down you don't understand.

One of my teachers in community college that taught programming languages had the mantra "Do not re-invent the wheel". The world is richer if we continue what others have left so far behind instead of doing copy work of others. Beyond understanding the work of others, we have to create new insights in order to make progress to our society. If we all only just copied each other, then what will be ahead 200 years will be the same as what we had 200 years before. We will be in a stall state within our civilization as we didn't establish closure and move on to progress beyond the existing stuff. Besides clarifying stuff, it is greater when we create more abstractions with the existing stuff, more achievements that get us closer to the platonic forms we want to ideally be.

In contrast, we should also break down things we don't understand, as illustrated in Chapter 8 "Absorbing Data" from the book "Smarter, Faster, Better" by Charles Duhigg. Absorbing data was a think I always did the first thing when encountering a new environment. As I illustrated the algorithm competition I entered in my previous blog, I avoided figuring out which algorithm I had to use to solve the problem and how it worked. Instead, I tried to figure it out myself. Although my attempts failed, I think I got a bigger appreciation of algorithms than if I just plugged and play with the algorithm immediately to solve my problem. Furthermore, I didn't use any libraries for my solution. Although my solution was not the best in performance, this helped me to understand very precisely what the algorithm did in detail. Another example is the ritual I do whenever I am in a new work environment. I always do the following for the first months: I open my notes or my text editor and write down how all the components of the system work. I try to make explanations and correlations with diagrams and notes out of my own context to grasp the material faster. Although for some people this may seem stubborn like I am re-inventing the wheel, I had known I could grasp the material more clearly and faster from just the usual observation. Lastly, I wanted to learn more about personal development. That is one of the main reasons why I kept contributing to this blog. That was the only way for me to grasp the material better. Besides that it is also to set goals for myself, I hope others can extract valuable information out of it.

In order for any material to be grasped, we need to have access of how all the components work together. The stuff that we create should be tools where anyone can see underneath how it works instead of being stuffed in a locked black box. For without being able to put the material in our context, how can we be sure when we do stuff, we do it in such a way where we didn't miss any of the stuff on how the model works in the first place? Let us also iterate that one of the ideological principles of the "hacker manifesto" is for all software to be free. Free not in terms of price, but in terms of able to access the source code.

2. Constantly aim the goal of personal development but in small risks

Obviously, the goal is to add some value to personal development. Of the variation of many paths that exist, re-inventing the wheel should only be considered on topics that have extreme importance, are underestimated, and for learning purposes. After all, we only live once. From our own willpower, we should strive to replace old work to be replaced with new ideas. Let's make a role model example of ourselves for others to see that people are more than just a commodity that runs only by values from our present times. However, this is a video game where you have one life, not a thousand. Thus, it makes sense to make risks with lower probability of failure or risks where failure can be easily recovered. We discussed in Black Box Thinking that failure is the only way to success. However, that does not mean to relentlessly do something stupid when you could have planned ahead to eliminate most of the risks. Secondly, although society ideally should not judge people mistakes as a dead end, current mindset of the average person does. For that unfortunate reason, it is ideal to do most of your mistakes in a safe environment. Lastly, risks that harm or neglect your body substantially cannot be recovered. You have "statistically" higher chances of having some success with your goals by placing a dozen of small risks within your lifetime instead of placing one or two big ones that can succumb your rest of your life. The importance is to constantly think about your goal instead of snapping about it on the last minute. For me, I will always appreciate doing works of personal ease. I cannot imagine the many benefits it brings and how critical it will be in the times where human resources become limited. However, I will always try to find small opportunities or how to turn things around in front of me on the attention of personal development.

3. It is very easy to lose track out of over-confidence and peer pressure. The last thing we want is being in a stall state or going backward.

There are two types of confidence: Perceiver Confidence (point #3) and Server Confidence (point #4). In point #3, we created a Teacher Mental Network as a separate independent entity so powerful that the Perceiver can see the contradiction with his own identity. In point #4, Server tries to do personal actions that correspond with such independent entity created in point #3, imposing new habits over old ones, affecting our existing identity. 

Perceiver Confidence and Server confidence can be confused with one another. They may think that their own version of confidence represents the only type of confidence that exists. Feelings behave the same way too. Feelings of external self-esteem (Mercy) can have the same fulfilling experience as internal self-esteem (Teacher). It is only when you explore and master the two type of feelings that you can explicitly sense they are different from the cause they are originated from. The same can go with Perceiver and Server confidence. It is easy to do generalizations that Perceiver and Server confidence are the same. However, if we look at the details on how they operate and where the confidence originates from, then it easy to distinct them apart. In the book review "Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy by John Dewey", "But a problem arose when the medieval philosophers and theologians adopted the radical split between Plato’s higher (Perceiver->Teacher->Platonic Forms) and lower (Server->Mercy->Merging platonic forms with Identity) without recognizing the cultural cause of the distinction...They adopted the earlier model where all that was lower was fallen, and all that was higher was divine. Truth, beauty, and reality were to be found not in the fields or mines, but only in heaven (=our actions became irrelevant in most philosophy, it was considered unfeasible to reach closer to Platonic forms)." That is also one of the main reasons the scientist Feynman disliked much about the current state of philosophy entrenched only in Perceiver confidence. Without lower motives, we can never put more effort into reaching to a platonic form, to get things clearer, as I quote in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. 1", "We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into the paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers... one saying to the other: you don't know what you are talking about! The second one says: what do you mean by 'talking'? What do you mean by 'you'? What do you mean by 'know'?". Science is lectured only by facts, only by Perceiver mode. It does not have the process of Server mode, on unraveling better understandings of the universe by trying to comprehend uncertainties and unexplored territory. As in Issue 114 Philosophy Now article "Richard Feynman's Philosophy of Science" I quote "Understanding, for Feyman, is a much deeper relationship with the world than knowing what gets taught as facts... for science is a lived activity and has an inexpressible aspect. I can write down what it is for me to ride a bike - describe it terms of bio-mechanics or highway code rules - but none of this is how I do it, nor will it teach you how to do it...Science is not merely its form, method, past examplars, or the beliefs and knowledge it generates, for these change when great discoveries are made." Philosophy (Perceiver) lives in the abstract while poetry (Server) looks at the perils of actual life and expresses the day to day emotions. In the book review "The Philosophy of Poetry" I quote... "philosophy & poetry to be mutually alien...De Sousa outlines a project of bringing philosophy and poetry closer together, but this may be something of a forced alliance...the result may merely be more bad philosophy on the one hand and more bad poetry on the other." In overall, we see that Perceiver and Server confidence are completely alienated. We see that when Philosophy is stuck on Perceiver mode, they stray away from reality and the new paradigms that they have to stroll.

Last but not least, there is always the power of peer pressure for holding us back to get closer to our goals. Sometimes in life, we have to hold back and appreciate what civilization has achieved so far. We have to do small risks in our goals, not big ones. However, let us not be too comfortable from that where we forget our original goals.

Conclusion

We can have a more conclusive balance we individuals should aim in the world. I attributed before my vision of HPLR (Health Planning Learning Relationships) Ethics. More specifically, we can deliberately say:

• Health: Beyond that we learn scientific thinking is the most effective way recovering our maladies statistically, it is one of the most important elements to balance well our personal ease. As we have seen, keeping personal ease in an uncomfortable situation can create inadequate personal ideologies that keep personal development in a stall state. As the development of personal development only progresses with a clear mind, we should be pro-active and supportive on supplementing initiatives for learning and keeping healthy our well-being.
• Planning: Whether we will be controlled by the one that has the biggest force or we control to shift our perception for other less existing choices to control us is up to us. In many times, whatever is in front of us, it may not be the most optimal solution. It may just be a coincidence that it is in front of us to think it is the right thing or the a priori may be a dead end as we have seen from many mainstream ideologies throughout history that ended up to be proved as inadequate. Planning is a very powerful force and is the only path to achieve our actual effective personal development within the theory of this blog and according to the theory of mental symmetry. The plans I placed before aided me to create a mental map and my plan to associate it with my identity now requires to again also plan about it. We will see that planning a mental map is related mostly to learning while planning your identity to merge with a mental map is related to creating new relationships and changing your attitude on existing relationships. 
• Learning: We make better choices if we have a better mental map. The best mental map is created when you can create a framework on interdisciplinary sources that can apply to us. The best grand explanation that can bring the least contradictions to the way we do things in life, the better. As Einstein said, "A theory is the more impressive...the more different the kinds of things it relates and the more extended the range of its applicability". Our main goal is not to just find some finite content that can explain the meaning of life, but also having a great tool by forging it like a sword. It is having a mental map that creates a mental map, understanding how the mind works, as we have done in this blog, in order to create with our effort the best possible content in any situation. A meta-theory facilitates into creating new paradigms that can fit into specific variables of our current situation. That makes a meta-theory to be immune from any influence of existing variables. As in Issue 114 "Philosophy Now" article "Chaos & An Unpredictable Tomorrow" states, "A complex system evolves over time, each iteration of the system - each of the system's cycles or outputs - provides a new condition that feeds back into the system." However, this complexity can be handled by not having a fixed mindset on a particular paradigm, but relying upon a paradigm of a paradigm. If we reference a star as a theory and a dancing star as meta-theory, then this resonates well on the article "Nietzsche and the Problem of Suffering" article quoting "Zarathustra comes down and preaches... to become an Overman (Ubermensch). But 'One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.' One has to suffer anxiety in oneself to become creative. Zarathrustra fears that the day of the 'Last Man' is coming, a day in which men shall not want to give birth to a dancing star, men who will ask 'What is longing? What is a star?' They will just want to be a part of the herd. They will have their little pleasures for the day and those for the night. They will claim, 'We have invented happiness.'" This is more easier to grasp and more self-evident for people who read self-help books, do leadership, study social sciences. However, it is evident that many people are not motivated to learn more about personal development. In contrast, our motivation is captured by other things that look more entertaining to the eye that require less thinking. Even when people access to content which requires less critical thinking, most of us do not engage in depth, do not assert the feedback of others, and do not give helpful feedback to others. A huge progress will be made if people become more engaging critically on the content they see and start appreciating more on content that fastens their self-development. 
• Relationships: Relationships are the whole purpose our life is meant to be. That is no different with what Buber has said in "I and Thou". However, we all have a different interpretation on how we should approach relationships with others and when to step more away or closer in an existing relationship. For Perceiver people, creating new relationships start when they feel confident their mental map is stable and mature. A Contributor person can create these relationships at a faster pace. In all cases, creating new relationships means their identity is progressing to a different location than it used before. It is the same story when an individual hangs with a bad gang and then learns his mistakes and hangs with a good community. Thus, if we want our mental map to match with our identity, we have to match them with the proper organizations of subjects of interest, people, and social groups. Our relationship with the work we choose to contribute to our society must also fit in a role where the responsibilities match closely to our mental map. There is a lot of limitations based on our situation. It is impossible to find all or any of our relationships that match perfectly with our mental map. What all matters is to find the closest one and constantly do small risks on it. That shows you put all your effort on it and that is what all matters. What matters is whether there is high probability you did the best instead of whether you had bad luck. If all followed your path, society would have progressed more already. You should give a pat on your back for your effort. On the other hand, make sure the mental map you cover is one that is in short supply and adds a lot of value to society. In addition, there is always the temptation for your identity to feel safe in a constant location with existing people and groups that you are surrounded with. Do not let that safety make you forget to still aim closer to the mental map you embrace. Besides learning stuff relative to what you are doing in your day to day life, always re-evaluate your mental map on new insights that you may have missed before. I have to add that my next ambition I am focusing is creating the next social network prototype. I want to understand the current situation and to know more details about the many ways external and internal esteem work in order to have a better clear model of how I can incorporate a personal integrated system. All these are in my hopes that it will give us a concrete solution on how to improve the quality of relationships among society.

Some pictures I created on how to tackle Server:

And so the direction of my blog has steered to a new direction. I now have an interdisciplinary map where I can navigate wherever I want. My goal is to lift up personal development from its current trenches.

Right now, I set myself a goal to learn more skills in statistics and machine learning in order to derive conclusions of external self-esteem. That will help me to have a more clear picture of the personal integrated system I discussed before, which will be a component of the next social network prototype. My course can change over the course of time on what I will tackle next. However, whatever it will be, it will always be related to personal development in some way.

Expect my next blog posts to be technical related to data, as I venture to acquire the right skills to sail smoothly into new continents others haven't explored yet. As for now, I think this is the end of the main story line on transitioning from Phase 2 to Phase 3.