One of the first statements in the mnmlst blog post on Minimalist eating was that “A minimalist would more likely eat less, prepare food simply with few ingredients, eat mindfully, and eat sustainably“. While this is probably essentially true, eating food with few ingredients is seldom a good idea. A problem in the modern (western) diet is already that we’re eating too few species (of animal and plant), so a suggestion to reduce it even further cannot be condoned. Instead, we should try to eat more species than we’re eating today. The New York Times article named “Unhappy Meals” claims that:

Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and that 3,000 of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the food web. Why should this matter? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100 different chemical compounds and elements to be healthy. It’s hard to believe that we can get everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

However, if we open the floor to interpretation, the recommendation to eat “few ingredients” still holds true in a different way. A quick look at the list of ingredients on a Twinkie, for example, contains the following (according to its Wikipedia entry):

• Enriched Wheat Flour – enriched with ferrous sulphate (iron), B vitamins (niacin, thiamine mononitrate [B1], ribofavin [B12] and folic acid).
• Sugar
• Corn syrup
• Water
• High fructose corn syrup
• Vegetable and/or animal shortening – containing one or more of partially hydrogenated soybean, cottonseed or canola oil, and beef fat
• Dextrose
• Whole eggs
• Color added (yellow 5, red 40)
• Sorbic acid (to retain freshness)
• Caramel color

Twinkies also contain 2% or less of:

• Modified corn starch
• Cellulose gum
• Whey
• Leavenings (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate)
• Salt
• Cornstarch
• Corn flour
• Corn syrup solids
• Mono and diglycerides
• Soy lecithin
• Polysorbate 60
• Dextrin
• Calcium caseinate
• Sodium stearol lactylate
• Wheat gluten
• Calcium sulphate
• Natural and artificial flavors

It doesn’t take long to realize that most of what we see on this list isn’t food, it’s ingredients. The recommendation to reduce the amount of ingredients, if interpreted as not reducing the amount of things identifiable as food, now becomes a rather good piece of advice. I hope this is how they meant it. You can still eat pasta, vegetables, cow, fish, fruit, nuts, ham, and all of the normal foods, but once you start looking at foodstuff that has a long list of ingredients, you’re probably no longer eating food.

Recent studies have shown that while vegetarians are the healthiest people among us, flexitarians are no less healthy. This seems to indicate that eating meat is not a bad thing per se, but that an imbalance in the diet where one eats mainly meat can be quite harmful. As long as meat is treated as one of many pieces of food on your plate, and as long as it doesn’t have to be there, you’re probably eating healthy. Imagine a plate with salad, cucumber slices, an apple, five slices of ham, half a baguette, some carrots, a leg of chicken and two potatoes. None of these foods is the main part of the dish, but all play together to create a whole meal. Now compare this to a BBQ steak dripping with sauce along with some french fries. While you’re getting proteins, fats and carbohydrates, the lack of biological diversity in your meal is staggering.

Lastly, one of the tips from the Minimalist Eating article that I can completely get behind is their suggestion to eat less; to reduce your overall calorie intake – unless, of course, you are underweight. Instead of eating a meal until you feel ready to explode, it is suggested to eat until you are approaching a feeling of being full. Say 75-80% full. This eases the digestive process and is far friendlier on the digestive system, but also reduces the chance for heart attacks, cholesterol buildup and other related problems.

All of this can be summarized in the three sentences that contain everything you need to know about healthy eating.

Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

Minimalist Eating and Nutrition and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

My notes are all over the place. For those of you who remember my previous entry on the subject (and I urge all my new readers to read it first), you’ll remember that I mentioned three major note-taking locations. They were:

• My Moleskine Notebook, where I add new thoughts, ideas, notes, plans, suggestions and other that I need to remember in the future. A short thing will do, such as “Buy Birthday present for mom!” or “Research weaving in mythology” or “Maybe Book Character X should be a veterinarian?”. These ideas will later be made into either notes or tasks by being transferred into one of the following two pieces of software.
• Things is a wonderful piece of software from Cultured Code that I use to handle my tasks. It reminds me 10 days before any of my contacts has a birthday (and again on the birthday, just in case), it keeps track of my work-related tasks, my personal tasks and my more long-term projects. It’s a fantastic piece of software and I would recommend it to everybody.
• VoodooPad is another fantastic piece of software, brought to us by Flying Meat. Basically, it’s a local wiki-type installation where you can create notebook pages that interact with each other. My first page has a number of different topics that then have sub-topics that link back and forth to each other. My book-writing project has a VoodooPad-project of its own where I have notes on all characters, places, religious festivals, seasons and historical events that are relevant to the planning and writing of the book. Again; it’s a fantastic piece of software and I’m only sorry that I didn’t discover it sooner.

In most day-to-day cases, this is enough. However, sometimes situations pop up where I need other software. Sometimes I need to save information that isn’t as simple as taking notes. Enter four more applications:

• I use OmniGraffle to help me visualize the family trees of the characters in my epic fantasy series that I’m writing. It makes it easy to add and edit things as I move along instead of having to update multiple pages in VoodooPad every time I make one little change.
• I use OpenOffice when I’m working on my book. It’s a great combination of minimalism (when you turn off enough visible features) and functionality. Unlike Microsoft’s Office package, OpenOffice still hasn’t come to the point where there is feature bloat with features that actually come in the way of your writing and editing.
• I use Evernote when I see quotes or pictures that make me feel “I’m sure I’ll need that in the future”. Over time, as my Evernote Inbox swells, I begin sorting things into distinct categories that may (or may not) crystallize into a blog post, a short story or a new project. Other things are just discarded as their relevance or my interest in them dissipates.
• Lastly, I use Instapaper for all of my “Read Later”-things. I very often happen upon interesting things on the Internet while I’m at the office or just about to go to bed. Using Instapaper, I can queue these things (and get rid of sidebars, advertisements and other pointless trivia) for reading later, usually on my commute to or from work on my iPhone. I’m really looking forward to seeing an iPad version of Instapaper as this would make things so much easier to manage.

What’s beginning to become more and more apparent to me is that all these four main applications have overlaps in functionality and purpose. I open Things for my planning and give myself a schedule of 2 weeks to finish creating the family tree of a certain person in my fantasy series. Then I’d use OmniGraffle and VoodooPad to plan and plot everything. Finally, once the information is available, I’d have it as reference material once I started writing about the relevant people in OpenOffice. There must be better ways of doing this?

That’s why I’m going out to you guys, my readers. Do you have any suggestions for ways that I can improve upon this process? I’m open to the suggestion of trying new software or new ways of using the current software that I’m using. Pitch me ideas and suggestions; I’d love to hear from you!

The Note-Taking Conundrum and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

The books that I’ve been reading have mainly been random books by Philip K. Dick. The latest one I finished was Our Friends From Frolix 8, a story about a man living in a totalitarian surveillance-heavy society containing – in addition to ‘normal’ people – two transhuman groups; the Unusuals and the New Men. The Unusuals have psychic powers in one form or another; they may be able to read minds, move objects with their minds, start fires or something similar. The New Men are like Humanity++, they have the same skills as us, but super-charged. They can do trigonometry before their tenth birthday, look better than the rest of us, are healthier, and so on.

The predictable adventures occur – okay; semi-predictable, actually, since this is, after all, a Philip K. Dick book – and the protagonist eventually gets the girl (no, wait, she dies) and the ruling order of Unusuals and New Men is toppled.

Since Philip K. Dick wrote this in 1970, a number of things we take for granted today weren’t even thought of at the time. The characters in the book actually walk to phone booths to talk to each other; but these booths have video functionality. The thought of picking up a phone that fits in your pocket was so foreign at the time that it didn’t even fit into the mind of this, one of the most visionary of Science Fiction authors of the past 100 years. The Internet didn’t exist at the time, so nowhere do we have any mentions of widely accessible databases of information that are stored and accessible from across the world. Instead, we have filing stations with microfilm that are accessible from anywhere within the building where one is sitting. People travel from one part of the world on flying ships to meet each other instead of engaging in telepresence. Cars don’t just drive on the streets, they can fly now … and they’re called squibs.

While the book was fun and had some very interesting plot twists, it – and the others that I read – have gotten me thinking. A lot of people have wild dreams about the future. They might be technology-optimistic immortality-yearning Extropists. They might be expecting aliens to come destroy the world. They might think feminism, Greenpeace and whale-saving will make the world a fantastic place. They might think overpopulation will ruin all hope for the future. They might be espousing a specific economic or political theory that will change everything, but they all tend to do one thing wrong.

They do it expecting their own paradigm to be the one to dominate in the future.

Imagine, 300 years ago, when a person was asked how the world would look if it would grow to contain nearly seven billion people who all need to travel long distances to get to where they need to be on a daily basis. This person, stuck in their own paradigm, would imagine carriages drawn by horses littering the streets, the masses of farms needed to sustain such a huge population, the complete and utter chaos as the aristocracies of the world try to maintain order. Fast forward 300 years to today and notice that none of this is a problem; science and social progress has created a complete paradigm shift.

We don’t even need to look at centuries as a time scale to see things like this, Moore’s Law can be applied to society as a whole as we see accelerating change all over the world. Only twenty years ago, it was rare for a person to even know what the Internet was. Ten years ago, people had dial-up and ISDN connections to the Internet and were able to do basic tasks over it. Today, most people in the western world carry an Internet connection in their pocket on a daily basis and access Twitter, Facebook and their e-mail from wherever they want to be.

I was recollecting my dreams and hopes with a friend of mine yesterday. We both work within the telecom and datacom industries and remembered how we, ten years ago, dreamed about how Wireless LAN would be rolled out and be accessible to everybody everywhere, with maybe ten or twenty Megabit connections available to all! We can try to imagine what the ruling paradigm will be in ten years, but it’s almost impossible to do so today. We just have to wait and see or try to take part in changing the future.

What I suppose I’m trying to say is this. If you try to predict the future, try to step outside of your current paradigm.

Don’t expect the future to resemble the present in any way.

The Science Fiction of the Past and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

As some of you are already aware, I’m working on a fantasy series and have gone through several different pieces of software during the course of the past eleven years. My first notes were taken, aptly enough, in Microsoft Windows’ Notepad (back in Windows 95, if I recall correctly), and now writing in OpenOffice and planning in VoodooPad. It’s working out quite well, I think.

Or rather; so I thought. A few days ago, I discovered Ommwriter, and it changed my entire perspective on writing. You see; I’ve always had problems with distractions and jumping from one thing to another while writing. Ommwriter, with it’s minimal layout and Zen-like audio score, does everything possible to remove any distractions you may have. It gives you the text you’re working on and nothing else.

You could argue that it’s the same concept as Writeroom, and you would be right. You would be right in the same way as one is ‘right’ when one claims that McDonalds and Fuddruckers is essentially the same thing. What Writeroom does well, Ommwriter does better.

However, there are a couple of flaws that I feel I have to bring up. For one, there is no formatting. It is, essentially, a more beautiful version of notepad. If I were to want indentation for the first line in every paragraph, a phrase in italics, or something similar, I’m out of luck. Writing a book in this would be impossible due to the extreme amounts of formatting that I would have to do in post-processing. Blog entries also become difficult due to the inability to add links.

What it all boils down to is that Ommwriter is good at one thing – writing text – but it is extremely good at that one thing. Until it gets better at doing other things, I think I’ll continue to write in OpenOffice with Full screen-mode turned on.

Ommwriter and Distraction-free Writing and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

1. When you’re experiencing something or being in a place you’ve never been, try to avoid letting your mind wander to more familiar vistas. Allow the experience of this new thing engulf you and be as full and vivid as it possibly can. Who knows when you’ll experience it again?
2. Don’t bother trying to cater to everybody elses tastes and opinions. If you’ve got a specific opinion; stick with it – even if it makes you unpopular.
3. If you’re ever in doubt about something, just be honest about it – both to yourself and other people. Tell people you’re uncertain or that you have doubts. Over time, this will definitely be a better alternative than not saying anything.
4. In almost every situation, there is a choice between safety and risk. The safe route will usually be easier, less gratifying and have fewer rewards. Try to become more aware of what choices you’re making and when.
5. If you want to do something, then just do it. Don’t dismiss it as frivolous, stupid, pointless or too difficult. The worst that can happen is that you fail, and most of the time that’s not as serious as you might think.

Please comment on this post if you’ve got opinions on these five suggestions. I’m very curious to hear what people might think.

Five Brief Suggestions and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

After giving this some thought, the way I see it is like this. Riches aren’t about having a specific sum of money. You don’t get rich by winning the lottery or by selling your expensive house and moving into a small apartment. None of those sources of money are sustainable. Riches are rather about putting yourself into a situation where you’re constantly living below your means while not having to worry about unexpected costs.

A truly rich person will not have to worry about sudden medical bills or repair costs because he or she will have money set aside in case such an event happens. The rich person will not be spending the extra money every month on down payments, expensive clothes, jewelry or cars. After all, the $19 pair of jeans and the $15 sweater will cover you up just as well as the $500 branded suit. The $9 wristwatch will tell the time just as well as the $1400 one on the ad with George Clooney. Also – buy it in cash; don’t spend money you don’t have yet. I learned that lesson the hard way.

Riches also come from putting your money in perspective, seeing things in terms of their value rather than their price. If a can of Coke costs 10 units of currency and a book costs 200; you can see how they relate to each other. Will twenty cans of Coke or the book give you more value for your money? I’m not arguing that Coke is bad – quite the contrary, I’m still a heavy Coke drinker! – but once you’re done with the 20 cans, they’re over. They are no longer giving you any value. You can’t even sell them to regain some of your costs. The book, however, can be re-read, lent to friends, placed in a bookshelf, sold to others and even gain value if it turns out to be rare at some point in the future.

Once you start to look at things this way, you’ll quickly find that you’re spending money on things when you would be better off spending it elsewhere. Putting so much of your salary on consumables (expensive food, drinks, cigarettes, parties, alcohol, etc) might be a lot of fun while you’re at it but won’t really add any considerable value to your life.

Try it out; write down a couple of things you’ve bought the past couple of days or weeks and see how they compare to each other. See if you can’t figure out a value to currency conversion table for yourself, something like “Ten dollars of price should give me the same value of entertainment/joy/self-improvement as doing activity X”. Later on, if you’re wondering whether or not to buy an energy drink for two dollars, ask yourself if five energy drinks would give the same value as doing activity X which you’ve set as a baseline.

Values, Prices and Riches and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

Leadership, the Category, the Mind, Perception, Focus, Exclusivity, the Ladder, Duality, the Opposite, Division, Perspective, Line Extension, Sacrifice, Attributes, Candor, Singularity, Unpredictability, Success,Failure, Hype, Acceleration, Resources.

Naturally, I won’t be able to cover all of them in this blog entry, but let me go through a couple of examples to highlight the points that really resonated with me.

Let’s take the first two laws, regarding Leadership and the Category, for example. In these two laws, we learn that to truly reach out to your audience and to capture their attention, you need to be the first. It’s not enough to just copy somebody who is already doing a good job, you have to be the first one out there. If you can’t be first, then find a new category within that group to be in. Charles Lindberg was the first person to fly across the Atlantic, but nobody remembers the second person to do so, even though the second person to do it actually did a far better job of it. However, everybody knows the third person – Amelia Earhart – because she was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

Another important law is the Law of Duality. You have to set your self up to have an opponent or a reasonable opposite. It may seem strange and counter-intuitive at first, but it doesn’t make sense to market your new drink as “the best drink in the world”. No company in their right mind would want to take a contrary position and market theirs as the worst. Instead, you want to find a feature that one can take an opposite point of and market your drink as, for example, the most sugary drink, the saltiest drink, the most caffinated drink, or something on those lines.

The Law of Line Extension is equally interesting. It tells you, basically, to find one thing to be good at and stick to it. Too many companies have failed because they’ve tried to expand their horizons too wide and tried to do too much. IBM is a perfect example of this, but there are plenty of others. If you have a brand name that’s closely associated with frozen foods, don’t try to expand your business into drinks and plastic utensils. If you really feel there’s a market for these things, use completely different brand names so that people won’t make the connection.

It’s a great book, and definitely one that I would recommend to anybody that is interested in marketing.

On a side note, this blog may experience some slow update times over the next two weeks. I’m flying off to Tunisia tomorrow and will be going straight to South Africa from there. I’ll try to write something from there, but I can’t be sure if I have the time, energy or motivation. We’ll see.

Laws of Marketing and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

My home office as it looked a few months ago. Click to see it in all of its horror.

A couple of days ago, I decided that I probably needed to (re-)organize all my stuff. Things were piling up again and nothing seemed to be in the right place anymore. I had books piled on other books on my desk, pieces of paper where I’d taken important notes here and there, clothes, empty boxes, receipts, magazines and plenty of other things.

My first instinct was, as I said, to organize everything. After all, the books belong in the book shelves, the magazines in their own folders, the receipts need to be cataloged, the clothes put into the closet and so on. It wasn’t until I picked up one of the magazines that I took a good look at the front cover. “May 2009″, it claimed, talking about the fantastic advances going on in computing at the time. I looked at the cover again and asked myself: “Will this ever be news again? Will this ever be as interesting to read as it was the first time? Will I ever need to refer back to this magazine?”

The answer was, of course, “no”, so I threw the magazine into the garbage can, where it should have been put long before.

Next up, I grabbed a receipt for a book that had also joined the rest of the detritus on my desk. It was for a book I bought in June. Will I ever need the receipt?

Nope, into the garbage can it goes!

Before I knew, I discovered that I needed to empty the garbage can in the home office, something I usually only do once every two weeks. It didn’t take long for the garbage can to fill up a second time, either. Old magazines, receipts, notes, bills and even clothing that I never actually wear all wound up being sorted into the same garbage can. I know I should probably have recycled, but I was on a roll and just needed to get things out of the way. I’ll sort my trash properly next time.

When I finally finished cleaning out the room, it seemed almost empty. By eliminating before I started organizing, I had suddenly made my job so much easier. It got me thinking; if I could do this to my desk, why can’t I do this in other areas of my life? Instead of organizing my schedule and trying to fit everything in, why not just eliminate the things that didn’t have to be there?

What I’ve now done is create two lists of things and events. They are:

1. Things that cost money (bills, consumables, habits, clothes, everything)
2. Things that cost time (work, hobbies, friends, reading, bathing, everything)

These lists will then be sorted in order of relevance and importance to me. Things that don’t need to be there will simply be removed from the lists as I decide to restructure my life. I won’t tell you exactly what’s on these lists, but I will post the results of this experiment as I’m done with it.

To follow this experiment and the many more that will follow, I have added a page to this weblog where people can quickly see what is happening. The page can be found here: http://www.lonelysavage.com/experimentation

Don’t Get Organized. Eliminate! and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

• Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome – For the past few years now, I've been trying to convince people that, left to myself, I would have a perfectly normal balance of sleeping and waking. However, since I go to sleep way past midnight most nights and act like a zombie in the mornings, they don't believe me. Now I finally have an explanation for them: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. Sleeping 10 PM to 6 AM is natural, but only for some people. For others, getting their eight hours from 3 AM to 11 AM might feel better. Even 5 AM to 1 PM isn't unheard of.
• GdWZY.png – I like Obama.
• Violence erupts after attempted dog-euthanization – Stories involving animals – especially dogs – affect me more than any random "Man kills other man"-story. In this one, a man hits a dog with his car and decides that "Oh well, better kill him and put him out of his misery", so he sets to beating the dog with a machete and a hammer. The dog's person sees this, does not take kindly to it and proceeds to assault the person trying to kill his dog.
• The Holy Trinity – Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Yup, doesn't get more holy than this!
• Religious Belief No Barrier to Teen Pregnancy – Imagine that. Religious people aren't less likely to get teen pregnancies. And here I was, thinking abstinence-only educations might actually be useful and may account for some hindrance to overpopulation. I mean; it looks like abstinence-only education and the banning of condoms is working fine in Africa, right? … *end sarcasm*

Bookmarks for October 16th – October 20th and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

Photo by horizontal.integration on Flickr

Few things are more depressing than negative statements about ourselves. “I’m too fat”, “I’m not outgoing enough”, “I’m not smart”, “I’m boring”, “I’m too impatient”; all of these become self-fulfilling prophecies if we only repeat them often enough. It’s a shame that so many people go around and indoctrinate themselves like this throughout their lives, as it is so easy to change your perspective and reinforce positive beliefs instead!

I’m not the type of person that believes in positive affirmations in the mornings. You won’t find me in front of the mirror, convincing myself that “I’m getting stronger and better every day! I’m going to accomplish great things today!”. Even though many people swear by this method, I’ve found that there are other ways that work better for me. However, one thing is for sure; I’m not going to risk failure by talking myself down a negative spiral of self-abuse.

I happened upon the question “what is your greatest weakness?” the other day and have spent some time considering it. In fact, I think that I have three weaknesses that are all equally great; it’s difficult for me to chose one of them as the greatest weakness. These are:

• I can be horribly impatient.
• Ignorance and stupidity frustrate and anger me.
• While everything starts off as interesting; things, people, places and concepts quickly become boring.

These three weaknesses all tie into each other in several ways, of course. If I’m introduced to a new concept, it’s fascinating at first, but then becomes boring as soon as I feel like I’ve learned enough about it. If I’m not able to leave the subject at that time, I become impatient – especially if I can’t leave the subject behind because somebody else is too slow to have figured it out yet! … You see where I’m going with this.

As I was thinking about these three weaknesses, I realized that they all came with their own associated strengths. There were actual features hidden in the bugs in my personality, to borrow some engineering-speech.

• I can be horribly impatient -> I tend to move past failure quickly and find new and exciting challenges when others would be worrying about the past.
• Ignorance and stupidity frustrate and anger me -> I surround myself with smart and intelligent people that challenge me and motivate me to aim even higher.
• Things, people, places and concepts quickly become boring -> I’m never stagnant but always expanding my horizons by learning new things and exposing myself to new experiences.

I started thinking about other “weaknesses” that people talked about having and came to the conclusion that there seemed to be bonuses hidden within each and every one of them!

Try it out; write down what you consider to be your greatest weakness and then work out how this actually helps you. It may not be as horrible a feature as you may think.

From Weakness to Strength and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

• 15 Ladies Who Look Better In Mustaches – Sometimes the Internet is weirder than even I could imagine.
• We Face an Aggressive Secular Attack – It's one thing to hear that atheism is spreading in the world today. It actually gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling. It's another thing to hear religious people, in the comfort of their religious groups, saying that this is a bad thing. It's a third thing altogether when Tony Blair, the favorite candidate for the first "President of Europe" claims that the world faces "an aggressive secular attack from without". He even had the audacity to compare atheists to terrorists when he said that "those who scorn God and those who do violence in God's name [...] offer no hope for faith in the twenty first century". I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have a world without faith than with this sort of lunacy.
• The Angry Evolutionist – Richard Dawkins, one of the more aggressively atheistic atheists out there has written yet another article in Newsweek. It's a wonderful defense of evolutionary theory and ends with a statement that sounds very much like something that I've thought many times in the past: "It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing."
• Courier: First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet – I hate saying this about anything coming from Microsoft, but this actually looks like it could be pretty damned good. I just hope Apple releases something equally nifty.
• Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011 – Looks like the major music companies are well aware that their business models aren't working and that music will be spread for free on the Internet – but before they have time to reorganize (around 2011, perhaps as late as 2013) the tactics seem to be to just sue everybody, be strict and completely ruthelss.
• Why I will steal music – Every now and again, we get a person defending Music Piracy, but seldom have I seen one do it so passionately, adroitly and and elegantly as Jan Rychter.
• a/lt-debugger – Huh. It turns out Linus Torvalds, the Linux guru we all praise to high heaven, is actually a real elitist bastard.
• Old age begins at 27 – Huh. It turns out that I actually am old; not just imagining it.
• XKCD – Bored With the Internet – The sad part about this comic is that I can identify with it.
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates – These two seem to be gunning for winning "The Most Forced Smile" competition.

Bookmarks for September 10th – October 9th and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

The thing about motivation is that it’s a little bit like self-esteem; people tend to define it only in its absence or in its excess. Nobody really thinks about it when motivation is there in normal and healthy amounts, but when people lack it altogether or have so much of it that you worry they might explode, we start discussing it. Nobody’s 100% motivated all the time, but we can make wonders in our lives if we just managed to motivate ourselves a little more when it came to the things that we’re working on and doing. Even things like work-out plans, quitting smoking, eating healthier foods and sleeping better tend to fall to the side mainly because we have problems motivating ourselves. That said, here are my ten favorite ways to keep yourself motivated – or get motivated if you aren’t already.

1. Talk about it! By talking about the project you’re working on, you’re making a form of a commitment. You’re telling your friends and family what it is that you’re doing, which will make you feel accountable if you stop doing it or fail in doing it. Also, who knows, maybe your friends and family can help out?
2. Don’t pile more on! This is one of my greatest problems in this field. When I’m working on one project, I suddenly think of thirty new things that are far more exciting than this boring old project that I’ve already spent hours working on. Why shouldn’t I reward myself with these new exciting things? At least until the next couple of ideas show up, right? No; by focusing your attention on one project at a time – or dividing your time very fairly between multiple projects, you will be rewarded by getting far more done and feeling happier about yourself. Use tools like Evernote to save your ideas for future projects until you have time for them.
3. Read success stories! This one sounds a little silly, I know, but who can resist being motivated about creating passive income streams when they read about people who are pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a month while they do more or less nothing? Who can resist wanting to travel the world when they see Where the Hell is Matt? Motivation comes from the strangest of places, but success stories have to be the most obvious.
4. Return to your goals! Anything important enough for you to feel you need to motivate yourself about has to have some pretty clear goals, right? No? You mean you’re trying to motivate yourself about “Get in shape and sleep better and stop eating so much crap”? Really? What you need to do is figure out what this goal means to you? How many hours is “sleep better”? Does it even have to do with the hours? Maybe it’s the quality, not the quantity? What about “get in shape”? When are you in shape? Is there a specific metric that you can measure to see your progress? Do this with your goal; make it measurable so that you can tell how far along the way you are, how you’re doing and what steps need to be taken next.
5. Reward yourself! This is an important one that people often forget about. When you’ve passed a milestone in your project or whatever it is; reward yourself! Did you lose half the weight you’re aiming to lose? Reward yourself with something (non-fattening) that you love! Did you earn your first thousand dollars using passive income streams? Reward yourself by buying that thing you’ve been thinking off. Rewarding yourself for your success will tell your brain and body that it’s doing the right thing and will motivate you on a subconscious level to keep up the good work.
6. Just because you’re doing it doesn’t make it important! Many people try to motivate themselves when they should really be dropping the task altogether. It’s one thing to feel the desire to motivate yourself to solving the problem of world peace; but when you’re trying to motivate yourself to running face-first into a brick wall, maybe you need to rethink your goals.
7. Challenge yourself! If you’re having problem getting to goal, try to challenge yourself! See if you can’t use the competitive urges we all have to your own advantage. If you are trying to motivate yourself to write an e-book, for example, set yourself the challenge of writing 1,000 words every day for four weeks. Then write exactly that amount; end mid-sentence if you so have to! If you manage to do this, you’re going to have 28,000 words in your e-book and will feel successful because you passed the challenge! Enter step 5, reward yourself by doing something great – maybe taking a few days off from writing before issuing an even harder challenge; 1,250 words a day for 4 weeks?
8. Take a break! Now, you really don’t want to be doing this too often, but it’s not good to sit and do the same thing for several hours in a row. Even the most motivated office worker is getting a little tired and sloppy at the end of his eight-hour shift. Take a break, stretch your legs, try to get some fresh air, food or liquid into your system. Do something completely unrelated for a few minutes before returning. You’ll feel fresher for the effort and maybe have some sudden new insights into the project.
9. Ignore everything else! Similar to point 2 – don’t pile more on – this point is about not letting yourself be distracted. A lot of people like to work with some music on in the background, which is all well and good, but when they try to follow the latest episode of NCIS while writing poetry, one of them is bound to distract you from the other.
10. Lastly, and probably the most important one on the list, which will earn it boldface and underlining, learn what distracts you and avoid it! This one’s so important that I can’t state it often enough. Learn what it is that distracts you, then avoid doing that. For me, distractions come from Instant Messengers, TV-series and web browsing. The best thing I can do if I want to get an hour of undisturbed writing is to take my MacBook Air, turn off the Wireless LAN and start writing. That way, none of my ordinary distractions will be in my way.

Motivation is a tricky subject, but it is ultimately one of the most important ones we have when we want to get things done.

10 Ways to Keep Yourself Motivated and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

Picture from ★ spunkinator on Flickr

The Internet is full of lists, and this blog is no exception. I’ve written about the 10 things I wish I knew earlier, the top 5 reasons never to become an expert, 15 ways to help you wake up and 25 ways to become more productive. I find these posts to be interesting to write and plan for as they force you into finding exactly that amount of things on the subject you’re writing about. In this entry, I’m going to focus on the ten things that I believe anybody can do to improve the quality of their life. Feel free to comment with your thoughts and ideas about this.

1. First and foremost, I think, is that it’s important to chose the people you spend time with. They say that you can’t pick your family, but that’s about it – you can pick everybody else. Don’t spend too much time on people who bring you down, who take far more than they give and who are far below your intellectual level or your energy level. These are people who will slow your momentum or stop you from becoming all you can be.
2. Always give people more than they are expecting. When you regularly out-perform people’s expectations – and do so with an honest smile on your face – people’s opinions of you will rise. No doubt about it. They will, in fact, become so used to your over performance that their requests and demands of you will, in fact, drop.
3. Forgive yourself and others. This is, in the minds of many people, one of the most important things we can learn. If we hold grudges and stay angry at people, we’re building emotional blocks that hinder us from becoming truly happy. Is there really a reason to be angry at that ex-girlfriend who hurt you seven years ago and whom you haven’t even talked to any more? I know that I, for one, have spent days of my life being angry or annoyed at people who I had no real reason to be angry or annoyed at. If I had only known early enough that it would have been so much easier to forgive them and move on with my life.
4. Be brave. Tricky advice, I know, but very important, too. Never be afraid to try out a new venture, a new restaurant, a new drink, a new friendship or anything else. If you settle with what you have for long enough, you’ll stagnate and nothing new will ever enter your life unless it’s forced upon you.
5. Most of the things you worry about never happen. Also, most of the bad things that happen are things you never thought to worry about. Worry is – most of the time – quite a pointless venture; the things you worry about probably won’t happen. I know that some people excuse themselves with things like “Well, then at least I can be prepared if it does happen”, but I believe they’re fooling themselves. Worrying takes up way too much of the time that could be spent getting somewhere useful in life. Take risks but don’t worry about what might happen if things don’t work out.
6. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is the Golden Rule, and well named. There are those who say that the main topic of the Bible is this one sentence and that the rest is commentary. If you consistently treat people as well as you want them to treat you – or better! – you will invariably have good results. When some people will walk all over you for being so pleasant and kind around them, refer to point one on this list.
7. Be decisive. This is important. Even if you’re wrong, at least you made a decision and stuck to it. Nothing is worse than sitting with your friends and doing nothing because nobody can make up their mind. “Should we go to a movie?”, “Hm.. There’s this movie, this movie and this movie”, “We could go to a pub?”, “Which one?” and so on and so on. Just stand up and say “We’re going to do this!” and start walking. People will follow you and they will appreciate that you made the decision. If the movie you decided that everybody should go see was awful, just apologize and move on with your life. Decide to do something better next time.
8. Surround yourself with happiness. Remember, happiness does not come from the things you own, the power you have, the position you have at the office, the prestige people shower upon you or the amount of money you’re earning every month. True happiness only comes from the relationships you have with people whom you love, respect and honor. Your closest friends will always be your most direct source of happiness.
9. Take care of them. This ties in with point 2 above, but deserves a point of its own. Take care of your friends. Many of them will not be around in a year for reasons entirely unrelated to anything happening today; make sure that the reason they are no longer in your life is not something you did. Don’t anger them, don’t upset them, don’t provoke them needlessly, and don’t insult them. These are the people who give you your most important commodity; happiness. Thank them for it and treat them well.
10. Improve yourself constantly. Never let a day pass that you’re not improving something in your life. It may be something as silly as getting a new record in a computer game or something very important. At the end of every day, you should be able to fall asleep knowing that your day was useful because you improved yourself in one way or another.

Please take the time to comment this entry, I’m very curious to hear what other people believe about these points. Have I missed anything important?

Ten Suggestions For The Good Life and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

Like so many others, I first became aware of the term Lifestyle Design in Timothy Ferriss’ book The 4-hour Work Week. While the book itself didn’t promise to automatically create gold and riches for any of us, it asked a series of very relevant questions and showed us by means of an example how people can make a good life for themselves. It was inspirational, to say the very least.

To me, the term Lifestyle Design comes from the observation and recognition of a flaw in the old philosophies of how to make a good life for yourself. In the past, people (and I was no different) would focus on the goals they had. They would set up targets and milestones and eventually the results they were going for; something similar to “I want to earn $200,000 a year” or “I want to own a beach house in Malibu”. While the actual contents of these goals are all fine and good, I think that by doing this, people were avoiding the main issue and what their actual goals were. While I am sure it’s well within the reach of many people to earn $200,000 a year, I am equally sure that most people would need to be working double or triple shifts, have no family and no social life to speak of if they wanted to pull it off. If people want a beach house in Malibu, I’m sure that if they save money for long enough – or take a large enough loan – they can afford the beach house.

What these people actually want, and what they’re failing to ask for in their wishes, is the lifestyle associated with that beach house or the money. Instead of working 40 hours a week – or more – and feeling like there is no sense of control and direction, the Lifestyle Designer will set out to actively control the way that his life looks and works. We want to be able to spend hours of quality time with our friends and families, pursuing our hobbies and catching up on reading. What we usually don’t want is to be waking up early, hurrying to eight hours of sitting in the office waiting to go home for the day. We want to have the benefits of working five hours a week without the disadvantages. Enter Passive Income.

The first step towards Designing your Freedom is, unfortunately: Money, money, money. To be able to design an optimal life, we need to be able to afford to do this. Since most people are already earning money in one way or another, it is usually not enough to just find a new job. What Lifestyle Designers usually look for is a passive income. This usually falls into one (or more) of these categories:

• Advertisement revenue on a homepage
• Selling a product of some sort
• Affiliate marketing
• The inevitable “other”

I don’t need to spend much time on these, as they are so well covered in other places. For example, Pat and his Smart Passive Income Blog does a great job at covering the way he set up his very own group of income streams. The important thing to note here is that the various passive income methods are not goals in and of themselves. The goal is not to be earning large sums of money without any major effort but to be enjoying the life that the money permits.

That, I suppose, is the key issue here. So many people start trying to earn extra money from blogs, micro-niche pages, affiliate marketing and typing up a simple e-book, so why aren’t all of them earning massive amounts of money? While I don’t have any proof on this, I feel that many people fail because they focus too hard on the actual earning of money. I’m not ready to accept many of the old axioms – “If you build it, they will come” or “If you write good content, you will get readers” – but I do believe that trying too hard quickly becomes transparent. Nobody wants to click the affiliate advertisement of the guy screaming the equivalent of “CLICK HERE SO I GET MONEY”, but they’d be happy to click a link if it appears in combination with something that they find interesting.

Generating a passive income is, for many people, the first and only step in their Lifestyle Design. They feel that if they only had the money, everything else would be great. In a future entry, we’ll look at how important it is to have something to fill your new-found freedom with.

Designing your Freedom: Passive Income and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.

Let me paint you a picture to make a little bit of a comparison. If I were to market a mixture of asbestos, heroin, cat feces and old milk as a perfume that sold at $40 a bottle, I doubt I’d get very many buyers. People would be more likely to look at the product once and then run away screaming. It would be overpriced, it would smell bad, it would – if you got past the disgusting part and continued to consume – be addictive and over time cause cancer and several other health problems. Even though we all know instinctively that the perfume is a lousy idea, many of my readers will still go out and buy cigarettes.

I’m sure part of the reason people start smoking is because of peer pressure and the fantastically clever marketers at the major tobacco firms. It’s easy to blame the image that smoking has; a lifestyle choice that makes people look more mature and grown-up, something that screams to the world that they are rebelling against authority and deciding for themselves. However, I’m also convinced that a large part of the reason that so many people start – and continue – smoking today are all the quick-and-easy cures being peddled in bookstores, on the Internet and in magazines. Because they’re being exposed to these miracle cures, people are getting emotional support for the fallacy that “I can quit whenever I want to”. In their eyes, smoking suddenly doesn’t seem as bad anymore. After all, if I can quit smoking overnight, as some gurus claim, then what’s the problem? I’ll just quit some time soon, but not now because …

… because what, really?

It’s been around five weeks since I last smoked a cigarette. I can’t guarantee that I’ll never ever smoke a cigarette in my entire life, but at the moment, I don’t think I will. It doesn’t feel like I will. I don’t miss smoking in any way and actually feel a little sick when I feel the smell of cigarettes. Still, I’d be lying if I said that getting here was easy. In fact, the time it took me to quit smoking is longer than the longest time that I’ve ever held a job. The time it took me to quit smoking is longer than my longest relationship to date was. It look me longer to quit smoking than it took me to learn to juggle four-ball showers.

All in all, it took me just over five years to quit smoking, and here’s how I did it:

I quit over and over and over and over again – and again. I failed at quitting smoking so often that I eventually got it right. I lived the famous statement by Mark Twain, “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times”. I made so many mistakes that eventually I fell upon the method that worked for me.

You see; I don’t believe that there is a miracle cure. I don’t believe that there is a surefire way for everybody to stop smoking. I don’t believe that every smoker out there can read a book and then be cured of the demon named nicotine. The reasons that we started smoking and the reasons that we continue to smoke are all individual to us. Instead of finding some general rule that works for everybody, we all need to find our very own reasons to quit. That said, however, there are four things that I feel are more general than others and that I would like to bring up:

• Cutting back on cigarettes gradually still means that your physical abstinence will be just as bad – but it will last much much longer. Quitting cold turkey is far faster. Also, cutting back will make every cigarette during that period feel more like a reward for enduring. We definitely don’t want to be associating smoking with the feeling of rewarding yourself.
• If you crave a cigarette, it usually doesn’t take more than five minutes until the craving is over. If you just endure those five minutes, you should be fine. Chewing gum or eating a carrot helps with the oral fixation.
• Get some exercise. Jogging, push-ups, sit-ups or even a nice brisk walk will do the trick. You’ll notice the effect of not smoking much faster in this way and have an easier time motivating yourself.
• Don’t be afraid of failure when you decide to quit smoking. Almost nobody manages to quit smoking and get it right the first time around. Keep at it and eventually you’ll get there.

If you’re curious as for what eventually worked for me after so many years of failure, it was the decision to stop buying cigarettes. I would instead bum cigarettes off of friends, family and colleagues until I felt like I was such a cheapskate that my sense of honor and integrity outweighed my need to smoke.

In short, I suppose I only have this one suggestion to people out there who smoke cigarettes. Quitting smoking is hard work, but it’s definitely worth it. Your wallet, your health, your friends and your loved ones will thank you for it.

How I Quit Smoking In Just Five Years And How You Can Too! and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Please show your appreciation by digging this article.