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Don’t let others rent space in your head by Gary Coxe

E Book

Like all self help books; this one is supposedly different! It is in many ways in fact!

Also, if it is a self help book then there is no doubt that the person who writes it has to have had a major tragedy and then recovered and is now successful at least while writing the book!

Those points are met since the author in fact faces a great challenge at the beginning of his life and then he not only recovers but also becomes really good!

There are so many contradicting things he says in the novel and most of the times it does make sense!

The best parts are the one liners including the title of the book and these are written separate with a summary at the end of each chapter and that it really great for a quick revision!

One of this is the adage that, Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so! This is really true most of the time!

Irrationally Optimistic or Being very confident is also not good! Apparently Positive thinking is like a spray paint on rust!

A goal is just a dream with a deadline is supposedly ridiculous!

First, positive thinking, even if it seems to work, doesn’t last long. Second, positive thinking is absolutely ineffective if you’re not at the right point in your life. Third, when it doesn’t work, people think they’re not doing it right, and they become more discouraged.
Fourth, positive thinking is often presented as the SOLUTION rather than a simple limited use tool!

The amazing story of the friend who bought a hotel, which was derelict and very close to the airport, but he turned it into a profitable venture. His name is Butch Steward! This was mentioned in the beginning and in the end and is an inspiring story!

Then he talks about insurance. People buy insurance because bad things happen. In most cases, insurance is the real-world manifestation of negative thoughts and a plan to prepare for less than perfect outcomes. It is actually a positive plan for negative possibilities.

In one chapter he states how Negative thinking can yield positive results. Planning for failure keeps us from being caught off guard. Too many sales professionals don’t acknowledge failure as a possible outcome, so when it happens, they are devastated. Avoiding negative thoughts can be deadly.

He also states how frustration equals success!! As you overcome challenges and reach higher and higher goals in your business, the number and type of frustrations that arise often grows!


Rewiring your brain- Going beyond positive thinking; the four step process; this is the core of the book in the self help section and it goes in steps. Though I did not do the steps, am sure if you do, it may help!

The first step in this is You must ask yourself ‘Why must I change this behaviour?’ and then write
The challenge or behaviour I want to change or overcome is:

He also states that often the more painful, the right to the Top, the more memorable and motivating it becomes!

Then he mentions an interesting story on how he was almost caught by the DEA on drug smuggling due to a series of confusions and stereotyping! A great story indeed!

He later tells how the nervous system or rather the brain cannot tell the difference between reality and imagination, so imagine more!

Our perception of problems, obstacles are challenges takes on a whole new meaning when we have a goal !

People who would suggest that one should sell his or her aeroplane and give the money to charity, have an incredibly shortsighted view apparently! This is one of the points like Ayn Ryan and was close to my thought process!

The author says that first of all if he didn’t love flying and wasn’t driven to acquire a plane or a helicopter, he wouldn’t have worked so hard, what’s more occasionally, he is able to fly to special needs children to various places for medical treatment at no cost. He could never do that if he had no plane or he had sufficient budget for Travel. He could continue to contribute charities and help deserving families only as long as he keeps his own financial resources in line.

Basically, only the rich can actually do charity, but by doing charity, you must not become poor!

This is so true according to me since I genuinely feel open charity is only to feed your own ego! Nothing is and must be free! Only then both the giver and the taker would understand its value!

All in all a very good novel to read indeed and a little different than the usual horde!

Just remember that, DO NOT let others rent space in your brain! For free! Meaning; Do not let stuff especially of those who cheated you or harmed you to be in your minds and spoil it! Easier said than done! But then nothing good comes easy!

right!?

Read this sentence and think!
‘A Santa dog lived as a devil god at NASA!’
No, I have not gone mad! (Not yet anyway!)

Or how about “sator arepo tenet opera rotas”!

Now now, it is not an ode to the movie Tenet! Or is it!?

Then how about Malayalam?

Well, what about it!?

They are all connected you see!

Forget words and sentences! Even our basic genetic structure is related to these words and sentences!

Before you get a syndrome! Let me ease your mind by telling you that these are Palindromes!

A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward, such as madam or racecar or the most famous one in this part; Malayalam!


Dating back to about 70 AD—the first palindromes were found as graffiti at Herculaneum and was written in Latin and dates back to Roman times. It read “sator arepo tenet opera rotas”, which could be translated two ways:
“The sower Arepo leads with his hand the plough”.
or
“The sower Arepo holds the wheels with effort”!

Other sentence “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”, “Mr. Owl ate my metal worm”, “Do geese see God?”, or “Was it a car or a cat I saw?”.
Punctuation, capitalization, and spaces are usually ignored. Some, such as “Rats live on no evil star”, “Live on time, emit no evil”, and “Step on no pets”, include the spaces!

Apparently there’s even a new word, “emordnilap”, inspired by palindromes!

According to Guinness World Records, the Finnish 19-letter word saippuakivikauppias (a soapstone vendor), is the world’s longest palindromic word in everyday use!

The longest single-word palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary is the 12-letter onomatopoeic word tattarrattat, coined by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) for a knock on the door!

The 9-letter word Rotavator, a trademarked name for an agricultural machine, is listed in dictionaries as being the longest single-word palindrome.

The 9-letter term redivider is used by some writers, but appears to be an invented or derived term; only redivide and redivision appear in the Shorter

Of course our most famous and known Palindrome is the 9-letter word Malayalam!


Palindromic motifs are also found in most genomes or sets of genetic instructions. The meaning of palindrome in the context of genetics is slightly different, from the definition used for words and sentences. Since the DNA is formed by two paired strands of nucleotides, and the nucleotides always pair in the same way (Adenine (A) with Thymine (T), Cytosine (C) with Guanine (G)), a (single-stranded) sequence of DNA is said to be a palindrome if it is equal to its complementary sequence read backward. For example, the sequence ACCTAGGT is palindromic because its complement is TGGATCCA, which is equal to the original sequence in reverse complement!

So as you see is what you get! From back or front, it is the same! That’s Palindrome!

‘now u won!’

No! Not yet gone mad! That’s also a Palindrome!

Now try to make a big one and maybe win a Padma! For time being though it’s for those who do real ground work like Padma award winner Chaitram pawar!

‘Now sleep eels won!’

Yeah! That another one by me!

This may be one of the most costliest photographs ever! Second only to a very controversial photo apparently!

There would not be many who have not seen this photo!

Even if you were an Apple fan! Not the fruit by the way!

The picture is called BLISS!

It was originally titled Bucolic Green Hills!

Ok now have some patience while the system loads!

Yes! It is the default computer wallpaper of Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system and is a virtually unedited picture of a bright green hill and blue sky captured by Charles O’Rear in 1996.


Apparently microsoft not only paid a bomb for the snap but also there is a back story which involves insect infestation!

Napa Valley spent most of the 1990s trying desperately to curb the spread of phylloxera, a microscopic pest that was devastating its grapes. By the time the epidemic had run its course in 1999, some 50,000 acres of fields had been decimated!

Although the cost for growers was astronomical—half a billion dollars in total—the landscape of Northern California had never looked more idyllic. Endless rows of grapevines had been replaced by a lush carpet of grass, dotted here and there with wildflowers!

It was this vision of Sonoma County that flashed by Charles O’Rear’s car window as he drove down Highway 121 in 1998. Although he was a professional photographer, with work featured in National Geographic and the Los Angeles Times, O’Rear wasn’t on assignment that Friday afternoon.

But he still had one eye on the region’s rolling hills. It was January, and after the winter rains, “the grasses turn green and I know the chances of finding these beautiful hillsides are really good,” he recalled. “I’m going to be more prepared. I’m going to be more alert.”

And then, he saw it. “My God!” he thought. “The grass is perfect! It’s green! The sun is out, there’s some clouds.’”

So he stopped his car, pulled out his medium-format camera, and took a few photos using color Fujifilm! Yes! Film and not digital! Irony!


Those brilliant greens and pure blues were totally unedited when O’Rear uploaded them to Corbis, a stock photo and image licensing site founded by Bill Gates. A few years later, he got a call from Microsoft asking to use his shot of Sonoma County as the default background for its newest operating system!

And by the way he had to personally hand deliver the photo since the cost of insurance (because of the high price of course!) was so high that FedEx refused to deliver such a huge responsibility!

Now no one knows how much Microsoft paid for the snap but it is the second largest sum received by a living photographer for a single photo!

I know! Even I would not get sleep if you do not know which is the first! That is apparently a photo of Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky!


Hope that makes you sleep! Or not!

Shubh ratri anyway!

Drew the sketch only because the outline of his face in b and w was so good! Loved sketching it in spite of less time and so much work!

This is the word which is so common now that it is a part of our life!

You know, the question as well as the answer to this word is the same word and the word is the word!

In fact in our emergency training called the BLS, we also use this word first after ‘ARE YOU’!

It has been described as the most frequently spoken or written word on the planet. 

Now now! Do lot get mad and force me to ask you that question!

Well, the question and the word is, “Are you OK!?”

So ‘OK’ can denote approval, acceptance, agreement, assent, or a even sign of indifference!


It’s very probably the most widely recognized word in the world. And its origin story is literally a joke!

The 1820s and 1830s shared a linguistic fad with today! an appreciation for deliberate misspellings (DOPE ain’t it!?

Of course I can literally see the fans of the ‘Victorian’ language cringe when someone writes DUNNIT or DAT or DUNNO! The would joke on what all things you could have done by saving so much time!

Now this trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go into know go and no use into know yuse! Of course it was only for those who were liberal and free! Those who played around with the rules!

Apparently even abbreviations were not immune, and no go became K.G!
So too all right became O.W., as an abbreviation for oll wright!

And finally our dear friend OK was actually an abbreviation for Oll Korrect! A joke gone too far! Of course it would have been forgotten then and there are a joke which must not have been repeated if not for a presidential election!

In this almost funny incident, a nickname became the fad!

In the presidential election of 1840, Martin Van Buren was given the nickname of “Old Kinderhook” because of his hometown of Kinderhook, NY!

The Van Buren supporters who joined “OK Clubs” nationwide were themselves, they proclaimed, “OK.”
Their campaign was memorable enough to have both popularized the word and to have hijacked the story of its origin: there are many who still believe this to be which is “Old Kinderhook” is the original meaning of OK!

In fact there are other proposed origin of this word one of which was OKEH!

This most persistent of OK ancestors was a Choctaw word. This etymon was suggested in 1885, with Andrew Jackson supposedly having borrowed the word from members of the Choctaw tribe. Woodrow Wilson was a believer: he wrote okeh on papers he approved. He was asked why he did not use O.K. “Because it is wrong,” he replied!

Of course he was OKEH not OK!

Now whatever be the history, it is never a bad time to ask anyone this question! It may be your old friend going through challenges or your partner feeling dull or your children being quiet or even your doctor who is having a hectic life!

Simply ask, are you OK!?

Also not only was he OK, he was one of the best singers! That was Bhupinder Singh!

Now listen to some of his songs and you will definitely feel OK!

The majority makes the decision is the biggest lie ever! Forget about a country or a continent; even in a small whatsapp group, the decision is done by a few while others simply follow it!

In fact most of the decisions of the planet are done by the species which by number is not only a minority but a very small number! Now now! The blog is neither political or religious! Its practical!

Now if you study the actual number of beings or species living in the third Rock from the Sun, you would be surprised to find that if you count the number, then you are a small entity!

Yes! We are of course speaking about the Homo Sapiens!

Now you would think that the microscopic life forms such as Bacterias are the major life forms! Well, you may be partially correct, but (yes, what is a blog without a but!); they actually form only about 13% of everything!

Luckily over 80 percent of all living matter are represented by the one species which are the lifeline of our planet! Without them no one can live and in the end everything is possible because of them! The mighty plants! 

The amazing overshadow everything, representing 82% of all living matter! Just imagine that! It is this majority which keeps the earth going! Just like any country or even a company! 

The majority of people are not involved in making any decision! But they are the ones who are carrying the whole country or the company! Silently and effectively!

Ok now let’s not get carried away! So all other creatures, from insects to fungi, to fish and animals, make up just 5% of the world’s biomass!

Now I am sure this is being read by a human who wants to know his or her representation of the living being! Do you know where humans are? 

The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things! 

Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants! The species had made sure so many species have got extinct! 

The most intelligent and talented species is also the most dangerous! That is the actual MAJOR truth!

Since compassion and talent is also minority, when I see padma award winners especially those who get it by sheer talent and not by applying the ‘butter’ it feels nice and gives me hope for the humane person inside the human! 

Shubh ratri!

The other day I was waking up my son in the morning and he immediately was unhappy to be woken up from a good sleep! The human is the only being in the universe who will keep an alarm to shake him or her out of a sleep!

Many times if you also feel like that then it is ok since according to Dr Ellis Silver; we are not meant to be tuned to the 24 hours! We humans are more tuned to 25!

According to him the problem is that we don’t fit in on this planet!

We are so out of place! The days are too short and their length keeps changing, meaning that our body clocks are permanently screwed up.
Apparently the gravity is too strong so we feel heavy and strong and it makes us sick. Anyone who goes for a long walk and is not used to it would tell you! Or when you see him or her holding his or her back in a bent posture then you will automatically know!

In fact if you analyse, the whole world is not suited for the average HUMAN! The Earth is trying to harm us in one way or the other! Of course some may say the opposite! So we cannot drink the natural water! They aren’t what we’re used to, and the food doesn’t contain enough minerals!

The summers are too hot, the winters are too cold, and we either want to migrate or hibernate! Of course we cannot do either!


An interesting observation is also on how most animals wake up when they are exposed to increased levels of carbon dioxide. Now This is a useful response as it allows them to flee from things like forest fires!
But it is no surprise that Carbon dioxide has opposite effect on us, it either sends to sleep or puts us into a deeper sleep!

This Could be one of the worst possible responses which kills millions of people, especially before the advent of smoke alarms! Thousands of people owe their life to the pets such as dogs and cats for waking them up when their house caught on fire!

The crux is that our body’s natural (circadian) rhythm doesn’t match the Earth’s 24-hour clock!

This is simple enough to prove apparently!
If you just deprive people of external stimuli, such as daylight and clocks, and let them wake and sleep and turn the lights on and off whenever they like. After about two weeks they’ll settle into their body’s natural sleep-wake cycle, completely out of step with the outside world, where each day lasts around 25 hours!

We aren’t usually deprived of external stimuli, of course, and our biological clocks reset each morning as soon as the daylight hits our eyes. But as we’re an hour short, we feel pretty rotten when this happens. Many of us feel a massive resistance when it’s time to get up in the morning! This is especially true for some people like me who are not ‘morning people’ who every morning feel that they do not belong in this Earth!

Then again those people like me could just be plain lazy! Just look at the hard working birds! Thinking of birds and nature reminds me of Padma award winner Maruti Chitampalli!

Now enough excuses of getting up early! Just sleep early!
Shubh ratri!

The biggest issue with English is the fact that is a very unscientific language! What you read is NEVER what you say! You have to know the word before and that includes the pronunciation for you to know the word properly!

Most languages including Hindi or Sanskrit and many others, you write what you say! If you know the basic alphabets then you can read the word! More importantly you will read how it has to be told or pronounced! Of course the famous line that even Pronunciation is not the correct pronounciation of pronouciation!

This is because Eventually, the noun standardized to pronunciation, but because of influence from pronounce, occasionally we still see pronounciation in print, and encounter a corresponding pronunciation for pronounciation! The actual Pronounciation is ProNUNciation!

This is so because English spelling can present problems for writers, even for those who are born into English-speaking cultures!

There are a number of letters in English that are not pronounced or pronounced differently in certain words.

But do draw little comfort from the fact that, had you lived prior to the 18th century, your “poor” spelling might have gone unnoticed. Until that time, there was considerable flexibility in the way people spelt words!

Shakespeare, for example, spelt his own name in several different ways and did not think this was remarkable. The invention of dictionaries in the 18th century “froze” the language. Thereafter, a line was drawn between “correct” and “incorrect” spelling.

Often when people correct your pronounciation and spelling, you can ask them what is the correct spelling for Shakespeare!?

Which is why Bill Bryson in his novel called ‘The Mother tongue’ explains how there were a group of great leaders and thinkers who wanted the pronounciation oriented spelling of words! This was really advanced thinking!

This group included greats like Napoleon and more recently George Bernard Shaw!

In fact Shaw’s property and will was to have used in the development of a method of Pronunciation in which you would write the spelling as you would utter the word!

Like if you want to say Deaf then the spelling in direct pronounciation would be DEF! Psycho must be Siko! This would have actually been a great endeavour! Or rather ‘GRATE ENDEVER!’ But sadly the ‘revolution’ lost its steam due to the influence of many who thought knowing the correct spelling and pronunciation of English is a ‘prAYVALEDGE’ or rather; privilege!

To know English you must learn the proNUNciation and not just read (REED!); which is maybe when you know English well you are called LEARNED! Then again that is a matter of OPEENEEYAN!

For now though there is no hope! You must learn to pronounce the word before you read it! Luckily some words are simple enough to pronounce and read! Like the name of Padma Award winner Sally Holker!

Now try to close your ‘iis’ and sleep!

SHubh Ratri!

Years back when we used to see our professor try to put the small Piston in that little ‘Hole’, we used to think, “Why is he taking so much time!?”. Then when we started doing the same procedure; we finally got it!

Trying to do that with one hand holding the endoscope and then slowly placing that almost microscopic piston into the correct position, I would not have been surprised that any junior watching would have also thought the same thing!

That is when you must think about Dunning-Kruger effect!

But (he he!); before that you must know about; Déformation professionnelle (French: [defɔʁmasjɔ̃ pʁɔfɛsjɔnɛl], professional deformation or job conditioning! Now this is a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one’s own profession or special expertise, rather than from a broader or humane perspective. The implication is that professional training, and its related socialization, often result in a distortion of the way one views the world.

This is basically a cognitive bias that restricts a designer’s view of the world. Where most people will see things from a more general point of view, designers—and other specialists, for that matter—run the risk of sticking only to the views offered by the lens of their expertise. Being so biased by their professional backgrounds can trap designers and ‘experts’ into limited viewpoints, and they may therefore overlook vital points about a design problem or proposed solution. This of course is a symptom of “over-specialization” in one field.

A corollary to this is the Dunning-Kruger effect!

Now this is a cognitive bias that occurs when someone overestimates their knowledge and abilities. It was first coined by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, both psychologists at Cornell University, in their 1999 paper.

The psychologists conducted four different studies that each tested participants on humor, grammar, and logic. Participants weren’t just evaluated – they were also asked to predict their own performance. The participants who scored in the bottom quartile of the tests had grossly overestimated their own abilities. Their actual performance, on average, put them in the 12th percentile, despite the fact they self-estimated they’d be closer to the 62nd percentile.

In case that stumped you; think of the typical ‘dad’ who does not ask for directions on a road trip and gets the family lost or who sees a video on making a birdhouse or shelf in the Television and ends up with a shelf made in a quake! In this case he or she for that matter grossly overestimate his or her competence!

It is like how many ‘uncles’ sit on the couch while watching the cricket or any other game and give ‘professional’ opinions on how to play the game! Of course sometimes it may be right but exceptions are not examples!

Now if you think that the above implies that the Dunning-Kruger effect relates to basic intelligence and only happens to the most bumbling and inept among then you are wrong! In reality, the Dunning-Kruger effect can happen to all of us!

So decisions and work in an average life must have a balance between Déformation professionnelle and the Dunning-Kruger effect! Then it should be ok!

Of course some people like padma awardee Gokul Chandra dey are the real deal!

Read about him!

Shubh Ratri!