Imagine you’re driving in the middle of the night with no other cars on the road, and you suddenly arrived at a red light. Do you stop and wait for the traffic light to turn green? Or do you slow down and drive past it after confirming that there are no cars?
What would you do if that intersection doesn’t have any traffic lights? Or perhaps the better question is, what are traffic lights for when there are no cars?
Should we be conditioned to always follow the rules (traffic lights) even when they don’t apply to our particular situation? If not, where do we draw the line?
Back in school, I always thought that it was normal not to be able to see the board from the back row. It never occurred to me that some people can see faraway things with good or perfect clarity when all I see is a blur. That is, until I got my eye tested.
From what we actually see, how much of the world do we assume is normal?
Just imagine someone who is colorblind going through their whole life not knowing that red and green are two different colors. How crazy would it be if they found out that most of the world can see two different colors when all they can see is one?
Or what about the ability to visualize mental images? If you assumed everyone can do it just because you can, or the other way around, then I need to introduce you to a new word today. Aphantasia. It’s the term used to describe the inability to visualize something or picture something in one’s mind.
Through our own eyes, we see the world our way. But through the eyes of others, their world can look wildly different from ours. And there’s no easy way to know or compare. Which is why you shouldn’t assume that everything you see is normal.
Ever since WhatsApp updated its privacy policy, lots of people have now migrated to alternative apps like Signal, which is great because I vastly prefer Signal over WhatsApp.
So the funny thing is, I started using Signal as my note capturing app of choice. Let me explain, there are three criteria I look for when looking for a note capturing app.
The app has to be fast.
It has to be able to work offline.
It has to be secure/encrypted and be able to sync between multiple devices or platforms without sync issues or conflicts.
While I’ve tried several note-taking apps in the past, most of them simply don’t work well for quickly capturing notes on the go. Some are slow to open while others have syncing issues when working offline.
Interestingly, Signal satisfies all the criteria I’m looking for. It’s a fast messaging app with a Note to Self feature that lets me send notes to myself. I can send a note from my phone while offline and it will sync to my laptop/tablet later when I’m online. It’s secure/encrypted, and unlike other note-taking apps, you can’t edit your notes after sending, which eliminates sync issues or conflicts.
It’s not perfect since I can’t edit my notes unless I copy and resend them as new notes, and I also can’t sort or organize or edit my notes without first transferring them to a proper note-taking app. But in exchange, I can see the exact time and date for when I took each note, and I can mark each note with an emoji for my own reference.
It’s unexpected but so far, I’ve found signal to be a pretty good note capturing app for my specific use cases. Give it a try!
How do you capture your notes on the go? Do you have any specific workflow or apps you use?
I picked my college, in part, because only one other person from my high school applied -- and I took great joy when learning of their rejection. Total isolation was oxygen for the pyre. The slow-burn of time would have killed high-school me eventually -- but I wanted high-school me to die faster.
Over time, we have all changed in many different ways. You could even say that your past self has died and left this world a long time ago, which means your present self will die soon enough, leaving your future self wondering who your present self is, much like how your present self sees your past self.
The thing about the passage I've quoted above is that I feel exactly the same way. I, too, wanted my high-school self to die a faster death, which was why I initially decided on an unlikely university. Since then, I've long graduated from university and it's been around half a decade since I started working in the industry, and once again, I feel this strong urge to kill myself yet again. To get away from all this and start fresh somewhere else. Perhaps that's why I've always wanted to travel and live in different countries. But for now, I guess this blog will serve as a starting point.
When someone is panicking or asking too many questions, it’s often because they don’t know what to expect.
When something is delayed for an unknown period of time, it causes a lot of uncertainty and anxiety, even if that unknown period of time turned out to be just 15 minutes.
But if the delay is clearly defined and explained, most people will be fine with it, even if the delay is 1 hour long. It’s often the uncertainty that people fear, most people will be fine as long as they know what to expect.
During a war, don’t be the soldiers. Be the one serving the soldiers.
When there’s a big war going on and lots of people flock to a certain field or area, the chances of you joining that war and winning or gaining something is very slim. That’s why you should avoid the war and serve the war participants instead.
For example, during the gold rush where hundreds of thousands of people started digging for gold, the chances of you finding gold as a gold digger is very low. But if you sell gold mining equipment or serve the many gold diggers around you, you will very likely make a small fortune, even if you didn’t find any gold.
Intellectually, we know what’s good for us. But instinctually, we don’t always do what’s good for ourselves.
We know that exercise is good for us and is a key part to staying healthy, but we avoid exercise because our instincts tell us to minimize unnecessary physical exertion to save energy.
We know that it’s better for the world and the community if we donate some of our money or resources to help those in need, but we don’t do it because we instinctively prioritize our own survival and comfort over the lives of random strangers.
Too often, we already know what the correct answer is. We know intellectually what we should do and what’s good for us, but we fail to do it because we instinctively prioritize something else, usually our own comfort and convenience.
Not everyone cares about the process or how things are done. Most people just want the outcome and the results.
When you do a blood test, you don't really care what goes behind the closed hospital doors, you just want your results. When you have a computer issue and visit the IT department, you want nothing else but to get your computer fixed.
The last thing you want is to spend time learning how the process works and following up with a bunch of people from different departments or sections, just to ensure you get what you want. It really shouldn't be the customers job to do that.
Hide how things are done and make them as seamless as possible. That's the experience most customers want. The only time you should ever talk about your process is when a customer becomes so impressed by it that they actually asks for it.
For a really long time, humans lived in small groups as hunter gatherers where, for obvious reasons, food had to be either hunted or gathered.
One day, agriculture happened and humans no longer have to hunt or gather stuff. They can grow all the food they need (mainly potatoes?) out in their own backyard. With this, humans can now afford to live in bigger groups.
As the group gets larger and larger, so does the farm. So large, in fact, that a small city or town was born. And with such a (relatively) large population where the farmers can supply all the food the community needs, some people started specializing in other fields (like politics?) and dividing themselves into classes (like peasants and aristocrat?).
The discovery of agriculture was definitely a fun time for some people, but not so much for everyone else. Back in the hunter gatherer days, we lived in small groups where everyone was more or less equal. But once agriculture came, once we have a method of storing value (i.e. food), it became possible for some to get rich and start hoarding power. Which is probably what resulted in class divide and all that stuff.
If you have trouble accepting or forgiving your past self, it might be tempting to just ignore it or run away from it. But interestingly, we have no issues discussing, forgiving, and even empathizing with someone else’s difficult past. So why not do that with our own past?
See your past self as someone else’s life. You’ve obviously changed a lot over the years so it shouldn’t be that difficult or unreasonable. And once you’ve severed the connection between your present self and your past self, it becomes a lot easier to think about the past without getting too emotional or feeling excessive regret.