FUTU-RISK

Extremism is Simple

We all have good and bad attributes to our personalities. One that I have come to accept and lately embraced with myself is my laziness. I am beyond insanely lazy. In fact so lazy that I will not care to remember things people say or things I do unless I know for a fact I will need to use the knowledge within a short future. There is a reason my mom calls me like twice to remind me if we are going to do something on an appointed day.

I say that I embrace my laziness but that is not to say that I just accept that it’s there and that I have to live with it. It is not saying that I like it either, but that I have come to use it to what I believe is my advantage, and especially come to find ways to work around it. You could call it tricks to make myself less lazy. One of those tricks is using a calendar, but another more important trick is what I want to talk about in this post.

Diversity is a keyword in my life. I like to do many different things, see different places and have many different experiences as all people do. But diversity is the opposite of focus, which I believe is key to doing things efficiently and well. To lead a good life one needs diversity, to accomplish and achieve one needs focus. Diversity and focus ties in deeply with my laziness. Being lazy is clearly counterproductive to being focused, but it helps me to be diverse. Laziness breaks focus and allows me to pursue other interests, but it also forces my brain to be occupied by just the important things. As I said: the laziness makes me easily forget that which I don’t really care about.

The laziness thus brings up two clear disadvantages in my life. Sometimes I need to be very focused for long periods of time and sometimes I need to remember things that aren’t necessary to my immediate survival and happiness, like meeting with my mother or other recreational and social interactions. It makes me happy but my brain doesn’t always deem it important enough to remember.

The remedy for loosing focus was very hard for me to track down, but I think I have found it. I found it trough experiencing real pressure from school and work where focus is crucial. The solution, while taking around 20 years to find, is really very simple and can be expressed in the word Extremism. Do everything to the max. Need that report written? Spend 15 hours straight writing it. Now this sounds very much like the reasonings of a procrastinator, and in part it is. To me, procrastination and laziness are synonymous. The difference is that the word procrastination suggests that the task is not one the procrastinator wants to do. I want to do many things but am just too lazy to actually do them.

I’ll give you an example of something I would not have accomplished without extremism and that is not, in my definition, procrastination. I managed to exercise daily for three months in 2009 because I did it to the max, making a challenge of it and working out an hour a day. When I’ve tried working out before with the regular twice a week schedule I end up breaking the schedule and finally quitting after just a couple of weeks. My laziness sort of pushes it out of my mind and makes me forget that it’s important to me, effectively making it unimportant for me. Extremism makes me accomplish things I would otherwise not pursue at all.

People tend to call me disciplined recently, which spurred this post. If they could see the real me, the 13-14 year old Fredrik that still lives inside me, or just see my room, they would realize that discipline is the wrong term to use. I am anything but disciplined. When you see someone spending 12 hours in school 7 days a week, discipline is usually the word that comes to mind. Extremism is the word that comes to my mind. I just know it has to be done and the only way I can do it is to the extreme or it wouldn’t be done at all.

Extremism also helps out with diversity. I have tried combining school and work in an effective manor, but I can’t do it without starting to feel worn out and like I’m not producing good enough results in either thing. But by doing things to the max I’m able to finish one thing in half the time, way ahead of schedule so that I am subsequently focused on the second thing. Extremism makes me in this case be able to do two things instead of just one.

Extremism is what keeps my life going sometimes, shutting of my brain except the one part that needs to focus on the task at hand.

I could continue this post for another thousand words just defining the difference between extremism and discipline. But then no-one would read it, so I wont. I hope I’ve managed to get some sense across of what it is that makes me be able to stay focused even though I’m lazy, and that the laziness actually helps me to unfocus and live.

Extremism is what makes me tick, not discipline.

FFFF05 – Lösningar till uppgifter

Är du så trött på att försöka gissa dig till rätt svar på övningsuppgifterna i Fasta Tillståndets Fysik (i skrivande stund kurskod FFFF05) att du faktiskt tog dig tiden att Googla fram (eller blev länkad till) denna sidan? Då har du kommit rätt.

Jag gillar inte att bli behandlad som en bebis, än mindre av en lärare som anser att det är fullt rimligt att säga “Du har inte rätt att ha tillgång till tillräckligt med material för att kunna studera detta ämne, men om du misslyckas med någon uppgift får du skylla dig själv!”. Därför tänker jag publicera mina lösningar till alla uppgifter på denna sida i hopp om att andra som tröttnat på att försöka lista ut vad alla approximationer är för något kommer hitta dem.

Du kan ladda ner en PDF med alla mina lösningar här. Eller titta direkt på lösningarna i den embeddade PDF läsaren här nedan.

Klicka här för att öppna denna läsare i ett nytt fönster. Om du laddar ner PDF’en så syns inte texten igenom pappret, googles reader ändrar kontrasten så att baksidan syns igenom.

Jag ger inte garantier för att alla lösningar och motivationer är helt korrekta, men jag ger full garanti för att du kommer lära dig mer av att läsa detta än att titta i boken (som för övrigt är ungefär som ett 400 sidor långt diskussionsavsnitt i en dålig labbrapport, jag vet; jag har läst den cover to cover två gånger).

Tips till Föreläsaren: Nästa gång en elev mailar dig med förslag; lyssna, istället för att göra eleven pissed off.

Grocery shopping

My dad has done some food shopping, he knows me well.

The books of Ender Wiggin

I read Ender’s Game during my holiday in Egypt and thought was a fantastic book. It left a long-lasting impression on me, even now I think now and then and think about Ender, think about the moral and ethical questions it brings about denying children their childhood. Most of all though I remember Ender and the various characters surrounding his life, and his life in itself. I remember the feelings he brought up the book and connect them to myself. Orson Scott Card is very good at writing character.

I can definitely say that the book is in the top 3 of the best books I’ve ever read. Yet there was this supernatural air to it. It was a little too farfetched in some places. The kind of far-fetched you would see in most Anime’s; the hero is so supernaturally superior that it’s almost ridiculous, but it’s fun to read! With Scott Cards character building and human connections it was made wonderful.

Last night I finished reading the second book in the series, originally thought of before Ender’s Game and originally planned to be a stand-alone book: Speaker for the Dead.

I was at first a bit put off from this book because it starts out with a large family tree over a couple of pages. If there’s anything I hate in book it is having to keep track of complex trees of relations and characters. I don’t know why, that just how it is.

But the book surprised me. It didn’t require the family tree and you could easily get emotionally involved in all the characters. This book however, while fantastical, was not supernatural. All the characters were firmly in the human domain of capacity and competence and it was overall a much more, adult book, for lack of better words.

The book focused more on relations, emotions and character than super-human abilities with a main hero. I thought I was bored at first but when reading it, hours did go by without me noticing.

The book was so good in fact that this Friday I spent 12 consecutive hours in school, from 8-20, came home to and ate and relaxed for an hour than started reading with the intention of just reading a while. I continued reading for 6 hours straight; without so much as eating or even drinking during those 6 hours it took me to finish the second half of the book.

I think you need to understand me to know what kind of achievement this is for a book. Usually I won’t be able to focus for more than 30 minutes unless I’m coding. But now i read constantly for 6 hours without hardly noticing.

This have also left a strong imprint in my mind. I dreamt of it all night (quite nice dreams actually, I was there on Lusitania with them) and I’ve thought of it most of today and am sure I will come to think of this book for years to come in various situations.

I know there are many more books in this series, but I also know that none of them were intended from the start so I’m reluctant to read them in fear of diluting the memories of the first books. It was a perfect ending with Speaker for the Dead so I’m not planning on reading the next, not for a while at least.

I need to put in more time

I’m not fully happy with my previous post. I did the research and found some of what I was looking for and thought I’d do a post on that and then do a follow-up when I’d read the book. But I need to put more time into my posts. The last one was far too long for the information it contained. I think it holds the standard of something I would turn in at school, but there only one person is going to read it and that person is paid to read it. Now I want lots of people to read it and they have no incentive at all to do so.

Anyways, I think I failed at really getting to the heart of the matter and touching what really matters to me.

The question still remains of why one would start a business in Japan as opposed to the U.S. The U.S. has better opportunities, that is why I constantly compare the situation to them. So why not just set up a business there to start with?

I want to get to know more about what Japan can offer an entrepreneur that other countries can’t. It’s a different market, they have different values and different problems. It might be easier to make an impact in Japan? I don’t really know. There might be advantages of lower competitiveness since entrepreneurship isn’t as widespread.

What I do know is that Japan has a huge mobile market. So maybe the best location to set up shop is based on your idea?

I will try to refine my writing and thinking in the continued chase of answering these questions.