A Personal Notebook

/

Successful people track their progress, set goals, reflect, and learn from their mistakes. And they often use some kind notebook to accomplish this. If you want to get somewhere in life, you need a map, and this notebook is that map. You can write down what you did today, what you tried to accomplish, where you made mistakes, and so forth. It’s a place to reflect. It’s a place to capture important thoughts. It’s a place to be able to track where you’ve been and where you intend to go. It’s one of the most underused, yet incredibly effective tools available to the masses.

Angel Chernoff

Setting Goals

/

Self-regulation begins with setting goals - not big, life-directing goals, but more immediate goals for what you're going to be doing today. In the research, the poorest performers don't set goals at all; they just slog through their work. Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome - win the order; get the new project proposal done. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome. 

The best performers are focused on how they could get better at some specific element of the work, just as a pianist may focus on improving a particular passage.

With a goal set, the next step is planning how to reach it. Again, the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented plans. They're thinking exactly, not vaguely, of how to get where they're going. So if their goal is discerning the customer's unstated needs, their plan for achieving it on that day may be to listen for certain key words the customer might use, or to ask specific questions to bring out the customer's crucial issues.

Geoff Colvin, Why Talent is Overrated  

How do AI Checkers Work?

/

AI checkers will break down text, removing punctuation then use a technique called vectorization to convert it into a mathematical hash code for comparison to other text. Phrases and grammatical structure are assigned weights with uncommon language rated as more likely human-written. The AI detector also looks across the internet for use of the same language. The comparison identifies exact matches and paraphrases. This means data-rich companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are more likely to successfully identify AI-written material. Read more about this process on ZDnet

Setting Boundaries

/

Many people feel that they are “people persons,” able to attract others and connect with them. At the same time, however, people persons often feel overwhelmed, anxious and frustrated about the obligations and responsibilities that their bonded relationships demand.  

Setting boundaries is the primary tool for strengthening your separateness and developing an accurate sense of responsibility.  The essence of boundaries is determining where you end and someone else begins, realizing your own person apart from others, and knowing your limits.  

A good way to understand this is to compare our lives to a house. Houses have certain maintenance needs, such as painting, terminate control and roof repairs. If, however, we’re spending all our time putting roofs on our neighbor’s houses while neglecting our own roof or we run the risk of a leaky roof or worse by the time we get back home.  

Think of all the different caring acts you performed over the last 24 hours. How many did you do grudgingly because you were under the threat of someone’s criticism or abandonment?  How many did you do under compulsion because you feel guilty if you don’t keep people happy?  And how many were from a cheerful heart, from the overflow caused by knowing you are loved by God and people in your life?   

John Townsend

Courses & Guides on Using AI

/

Creating your own misery

/

As long as you live in a society with other fallible humans you will be frustrated and hassled - not merely occasionally - all of your life. The best way to avoid feeling miserable about virtually anything that will ever occur in your lifetime is to admit that you create your own misery.

(Irrational beliefs that interfere with emotional health include..)

  • I must do well... win the approval of others... or else I will rate as a rotten person.

  • Others must treat me with considerately and kindly... Other people must not behave incompetently or stupidly.

  • The world (and the people in it) must arrange the conditions under which I live so that I get what I want when I want it.

Albert Ellis

 

19 articles about using AI to do specific things

/

20 Articles about Amazing Things AI can do Now

/

Researchers say they have developed a machine learning tool that can track the progression of Parkinson’s disease – Decrypt  

This AI humanoid robot helped assemble BMWs at US factory - Arstechnica

USC researchers say have developed an AI model that accurately predicts wildfire spread using satellite data &  Gen AI - CyberNews

AI tool outperforms existing x-ray structure methods - Chemistry World

MIT Researchers say they have developed an AI model that can accurately identify the stages of some types of breast cancer – MIT  

Getty Images Updated Generative AI Pushes Boundaries Of What’s Possible – Search Engine Journal

What It's Like Using a Brain Implant With ChatGPT (Video) - Cnet

Google DeepMind AI system reaches milestone in global math contest – Semafor

How AI Brought 11,000 College Football Players to Digital Life in Three Months – Wall Street Journal  

Is AI funnier than humans? This study says so but you be the judge – New York Post

A Japanese mega-conglomerate says it’s building an AI that manipulates angry customers' voices so that call center employees don't have to deal with drama - Arstechnica

AI model harnesses physics to autocorrect remote sensing data - Phys Org

Meet Kenza Layli from Morocco - the winner of the world's first Miss AI beauty pageant – Euronews

‘We don’t want to leave people behind’: AI is helping disabled people in surprising new ways - CNN

NBC will use AI version of Al Michaels’s voice for Olympics coverage – The Hill

Hong Kong researchers say they have created a machine learning algorithm that processes satellite data to more accurately and efficiently predict space weather conditions caused by solar activity - Techxplore

Smashing, from Goodreads’ co-founder, curates the best of the web using AI and human recommendations – TechCrunch 

AI is upending search as we know it – Venture Beat

Generative AI Speech-to-Speech Systems and Their Applications – Datanami  

How AI is helping judge Olympic gymnastics – The Verge

Closed Doors

/

Houdini was a master magician as well as a fabulous locksmith. He boasted that he could escape from any jail cell in the world in less than an hour, provided he could go into the cell dressed in his street clothes. A small town in the British Isles built a new jail they were extremely proud of. They issued Houdini a challenge.

"Come give us a try," they said. By the time he arrived, excitement was at a fever pitch. Houdini rode triumphantly into the town and walked into the cell. He proudly walked into the cell and the door was closed. Houdini took off his coat and went to work. Secreted in his belt was a flexible tough and durable ten-inch piece of steel, which he used to work on the lock.

At the end of 30 minutes his confident expression had disappeared. At the end of an hour he was drenched in perspiration. After two hours, Houdini literally collapsed against the door--which opened. Yes, it had never been locked--except in his mind. One little push and Houdini could have easily opened the door. Many times a little extra push is all you need to open your opportunity door. Most locked doors are in your mind.

Zig Ziglar, See You At the Top

Is Talent Overrated?

/

It is mid-1978, and we are inside the giant Procter & Gamble headquarters in Cincinnati, looking into a cubicle shared by a pair of 22-year-old men, fresh out of college. Their assignment is to sell Duncan Hines brownie mix, but they spend a lot of their time just rewriting memos.  

Neither has any kind of career plan. Every afternoon they play waste-bin basketball with wadded-up memos. One of them later recalls, "We were voted the two guys probably least likely to succeed."

These two young men are of interest to us now for only one reason: They are Jeffrey Immelt and Steven Ballmer, who before age 50 would become CEOs of two of the world's most valuable corporations, General Electric and Microsoft. Contrary to what any reasonable person would have expected when they were new recruits, they reached the apex of corporate achievement.  

The obvious question is how. Was it talent? If so, it was a strange kind of talent that hadn't revealed itself in the first 22 years of their lives. Brains? The two were sharp but had shown no evidence of being sharper than thousands of classmates or colleagues. Was it mountains of hard work? Certainly not up to that point. And yet something carried them to the heights of the business world.

Which leads to perhaps the most puzzling question, one that applies not just to Immelt and Ballmer but also to everyone: If that certain special something turns out not to be any of the things we usually think of, then what is it?

If we believe that people without a particular natural talent for some activity will never be competitive with those who possess that talent - meaning an inborn ability to do that specific thing easily and well - then we'll direct them away from that activity. We'll steer our kids away from art, tennis, economics, or Chinese because we think we've seen that they have no talent in those realms.

In our own lives we'll try something new and, finding that it doesn't come naturally to us, conclude that we have no talent for it, and so we never pursue it.

A number of researchers now argue that talent means nothing like what we think it means, if indeed it means anything at all. A few contend that the very existence of talent is not, as they carefully put it, supported by evidence. In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians, and others.  

Such findings do not prove that talent doesn't exist. But they do suggest an intriguing possibility: that if it does, it may be irrelevant.

Geoff Colvin, Why Talent is Overrated

The Lessons of Elders

/

Being unwilling to accept defeat—is a guarantee that one will never learn the lessons that must be learned if one is to mature. That is why the elders that we need so badly in our success-obsessed society are not the natural-born winners who rose to the top without a setback. Such people are easy to idealize, but they have little to teach us. What elders need to help younger people learn is that without releasing the fruits of one season, they cannot blossom into the next. Such elders can show us, because they have done it many times, how to let go of who we have been to clear the ground for the growth of who we are becoming. They can help us to understand the transition-related emotions of grief (sadness for what have let go of), disorientation (when we are lost in the neutral zone), and fear (when the challenges of the unknown new beginnings are overwhelming).

William Bridges,  The Way of Transition