چرا تغییر نمی کنی؟

 چرا آنطور که دلت می خواهد زندگی نمی کنی؟

یکی از دلایلش انتظار است. 

انتظار برای تغییر قانون اساسی مملکت

انتظار برای پولدار شدن پدر خانواده

انتظار برای پیدا کردن یک شوهر خوب

انتظار برای قبول شدن در دانشگاه

انتظار برای فارغ التحصیل شدن

انتظار برای بزرگ شدن بچه ها

انتظار برای عوض شدن رئیس اداره

انتظار برای تمام شدن قسط 

انتظار برای مهاجرت به جایی دیگر

انتظار برای آدم شدن همه آدمها
انتظار برای باریدن باران

انتظار برای تمام شدن تعطیلاتی که یک سرش اسفند است و سر دیگرش فروردین 

آنکس که منتظر می ماند نا امید می شود.

 یک ضرب المثل مکزیکی

No true Scotsman fallacy

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." [Brighton is not part of Scotland.] The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. [Aberdeen is part of Scotland.] This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing."
—Antony Flew, Thinking About Thinking (1975)

Antony Flew was a philosopher who advanced this logical fallacy. When we face a counterexample, intead of accepting or rejecting it, we change the subject to exclude the specific case or similar cases.

A recent example:
"The protesters had been given drink and drugs." ( no true libyan protests)
Muammar Gaddafi

As everyone knows, no true Christian supports legalized abortion (or opposes it), no true muslim supports suicide bombings (or opposes them), no true Democrat supported the Iraq War (or opposed it)… etc

How do we get out of our comfort zones?

There might not exist a single straight forward answer to this question but one sure way for creating a path out of our comfortable assumptions is to make errors, to be wrong. 

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore. As William James put it, “The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.”

Beyond google

Recently I came across two Search engines which are unique and noticeable. The first one is Wolframalpha.com, a computational knowledge engine it claims. You can ask many scientific questions on this website and get a direct answer on one page instead of receiving gooooooooooogles of result pages and having to find your real answer through. Your question should be somehow scientific and specific and the engine is pretty good with numbers, statistics and probability. You can ask questions like:

What was the weather in London on the day Prince William was born?

Price of Nike stock on the day Wayne Rooney was born

Total length of all roads in Spain

10 smallest countries by area

I challenged Mr. Wolfram's engine a little bit more by searching the word knowledge, this is the answer I got:
"the psychological Result of perception and learning and reasoning"

And then I looked up "computational knowledge", I got:
"that which I endeavor to compute"

And then "computational knowledge engine", the answer:
"an engine that generates Output by doing computations From it's own Internal knowledge base instead of searching the web and returning links."

Next time you find yourself looking up a fact or computational knowledge! make sure you visit WolframAlpha.com too.

The second website is called Quora.com. I like this one better. It's a well designed web 2.0 question/answer website or I should say question engine and of course tag enabled. The best thing about a question engine is that it helps you find a lot of good questions when you don't know what to ask and you know this happens a lot!

This was my first experience on Quora:

I entered "coaching" in the box, it gave me a bunch of questions, I selected
"What are the differences between a coach and a mentor?" this question was tagged by Leadership, coaching, learning and mentoring. I clicked learning and of course more questions. This time I selected "what are the emerging alternatives to universities"

One of the answers suggested iTunes university which I totally agree but I think "search" is the best teacher and also the best university.

Serendipity

The word derives from a Persian fairy tale titled “The Three Princes of Serendip,” the protagonists of which were “always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

“You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously"

John Barth

 

Atlas shrugged is a 1080 pages 4 decades bestseller novel about Ayn Rand's Philosophy: Objectivism.

The name "Objectivism" derives from the principle that human knowledge and values are objective: they are not created by the thoughts one has, but are determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by man's mind.

Atlas Shrugged was inspired by the author’s fury that people wasted the one capacity distinguishing them from other animals: reason. Those who no longer asked “Why am I alive?” or “What am I going to do or create that can justify my existence?” were to Rand as good as dead.

Here is the way she defines her philosophy in the book Atlas Shrugged:
"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

This book may be a very long one to read but like other great novels its a world you enter rather than a book you read. Atlas Shrugged holds a person’s greatest duty to be the appreciation of the joy of being alive.

Reading and Writing

"Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts.

Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality."

Robert Darnton

For the readers unlike modern readers there is Gmail, social bookmarking and so many other tagging and personal information management tools.

Click to LOOK INSIDE!

The number is overwhelming!

I mean the number of new books which are published everyday plus the number of books which you have not read plus the number of books which will be published and there is a high chance that you ignore them. It's just overwhelming! (only if you love reading books)

There are books to buy and read cover to cover but there are also books to take a look at the table of contents and their covers. You can learn a great deal about a book and its message just from its table of contents. Well I am not revealing a secret here, many people do this naturally when browsing a bookstore and many people don't.

You can get many ideas and forage many keywords just by visiting amazon.com ( I am sure there are other ones too) and browse hundreds of books if not thousands and click on the  LOOK INSIDE! icon. It's actually called "Click to LOOK INSIDE!"

No need to say that the books on Amazon are not the only things you can look inside them for free.

So keep looking inside!

Context

The late Harvard professor Alan Watts, in a lecture on Eastern philosophy, used the following analogy to introduce the subject of context:

“ If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball.  Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside.  But actually these two sides go together—you cannot have what is ‘in here' unless you have what is ‘out there. ' ”

A similar reaction occurs when we hear the word “search. ” We tend to think inside the box. We forget that the search “in here” is made possible by the structure “out there. ” Every little search box you find yourself typing in, is like the hole in the wall. It's always helpful if you consider the context of your search.

Expressing yourself

Tagging allows you to express your opinion about content and make your judgments, opinions, and identity part of the system.

In social tagging systems, some tags serve a dual purpose. Take the tag “funny,” for instance. When you use it, you've created a way to re-find something you thought was funny. But you're also telling other users of the system about what you find humorous, and you're communicating something about who you are.

At the music-sharing site Last.fm, many people use the tag “seen live” to identify the artists they've seen and, presumably, to tell other users who they've seen as well. It's like the online version of wearing the T-shirt you bought at the gig.

capacity to tolerate error

Our capacity to tolerate error depends on our capacity to tolerate emotion. virtually all of our emotions require us to feel something: a wash of dismay, a moment of foolishness, guilt over our dismissive treatment of someone else who turned out to be right

Our resistance to error is, in no small part, a resistance to being left alone with too few certainties and too many emotions.