[{"content":"We\u0026rsquo;ve all been there. Standing at the edge of our comfort zone, heart pounding, your dreams so close. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s that book you\u0026rsquo;ve always talked about writing, or the marathon you\u0026rsquo;ve been putting off, or that ticket to a far-off place with a name you can barely pronounce.\nYou can see it, feel it, almost taste it. But when it\u0026rsquo;s time to turn that vision into reality, something strange happens. We freeze. And our dreams? They stay just that - dreams.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s like there\u0026rsquo;s an invisible wall holding us back. Our minds start racing with excuses: \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m too tired\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m not ready\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;What if I fail?\u0026rdquo;\nThat energy that was pushing us forward? It fades away, leaving us stuck on the wrong side of action.\nThis invisible barrier is tricky. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t show up with flashing lights or loud alarms. Instead, it whispers doubts, fills our heads with reasons to wait, to hold back, to stay cozy in our comfort zone.\nBut here\u0026rsquo;s the thing: this barrier, as solid as it feels, is actually as fragile as a soap bubble. All it takes is one bold move to pop it. Yet for many of us, that single step feels as hard as moving a mountain.\nSo how do we break through? How do we cross the gap between our big dreams and the actions we need to take?\nThe answer is in building something powerful enough to smash any barrier: a sense of urgency. As Elinor Smith once said:\n\u0026ldquo;Successful people rarely sit back and let things happen. They go out and make things happen.\u0026rdquo;\nThe Burning Ships Strategy: A Lesson from History It\u0026rsquo;s the 3rd century BC, and the Persian coast is alive with activity. Many ships from Macedonia have just landed, their bottoms scratching the sand as they reach shore. Leading this attack is Alexander the Great, looking out for signs of the enemy.\nBut something is amiss. As reports filter in, a hard truth becomes clear: the Persian army outnumbers the Macedonians five to one. The odds are staggering. Winning battles is hard enough, but winning against an army five times your size? It seems impossible.\nIn the Macedonian camp, soldiers are worried. They look at each other with fear, speaking quietly about their small chance of winning. Military leaders throughout history know a simple truth: when morale is low, defeat is almost certain.\nBut Alexander is not just any leader. In this moment of crisis, he conceives a strategy so audacious it will echo through the ages.\n\u0026ldquo;Burn all our ships,\u0026rdquo; he commands, his voice steady and resolute.\nHis officers stare in disbelief. Surely they\u0026rsquo;ve misheard. But no - Alexander repeats the order, his eyes shining with determination.\nAs flames engulf their means of retreat, the soldiers\u0026rsquo; minds race. They had been contemplating their dire situation, wondering if it might be wiser to turn back, to live and fight another day. Now, that option has literally gone up in smoke.\nIn this moment, Alexander channels the wisdom of Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese philosopher who would write in \u0026ldquo;The Art of War\u0026rdquo;:\n\u0026ldquo;Bring the troops to a point where they have no way out, so that they must die before they can escape. If they are in grave danger, they will lose their fear. If they have nowhere to go, they will stand firm. If they have no choice, they will fight.\u0026rdquo;\nThe message of the burning ships is clear and terrifying at the same time: there is no going back. It\u0026rsquo;s victory or death.\nThis drastic action ignites something in the Macedonian army. The sense of urgency is palpable, electric. It courses through the ranks, transforming fear and doubt into fierce determination. With retreat no longer an option, they turn to face the enemy, their resolve hardened by the knowledge that everything hinges on this moment.\nAs they charge into battle, the impossible becomes possible. Against all odds, the Macedonians emerge victorious.\nBut Alexander\u0026rsquo;s triumph that day goes beyond the battlefield. By creating a situation of extreme urgency, he unlocks the full potential of his army. He proves a timeless truth: comfort breeds complacency, but urgency breeds greatness.\nIn the fires of those burning ships, Alexander forges more than just a military victory. He creates a lesson that will resonate through the centuries - a testament to the power of urgency in overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.\nSteve Jobs and the Power of Urgency: Echoes of Alexander\u0026rsquo;s Strategy The clock ticks relentlessly. One week until the launch of the first Macintosh. The air in the room is thick with tension as the engineering team approaches Steve Jobs, their faces etched with worry.\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s impossible we can make it in one week,\u0026rdquo; they plead, voices tinged with exhaustion. \u0026ldquo;We need one more week.\u0026rdquo;\nJobs stands before them, silent for a moment. His eyes scan the room, taking in the faces of his team. Then, channeling the spirit of Alexander the Great, he delivers his verdict:\n\u0026ldquo;If you can do it in two weeks, you can do it in one\u0026rdquo;, Steve says.\nThe room falls silent. Engineers exchange worried glances, the weight of Jobs\u0026rsquo; words settling on their shoulders. They know what this means - sleepless nights, skipped meals, a mad sprint to the finish line.\nBut Jobs isn\u0026rsquo;t finished. He fixes each team member with a piercing stare, his voice low and intense. \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;re not just launching a computer,\u0026rdquo; he says. \u0026ldquo;We\u0026rsquo;re starting a revolution. And revolutions wait for no one.\u0026rdquo;\nIn that moment, Jobs has done more than refuse a delay. He has created a crucible, a pressure cooker that will either forge his team into innovators capable of changing the world - or break them entirely.\nJobs understood a fundamental truth: to make a revolution in personal computers, intelligence alone is not enough. You need:\nResilience. Grit. A willingness to work incredibly hard. A team brave and determined enough to challenge the status quo. This approach wasn\u0026rsquo;t born from cruelty or unreasonableness. Jobs believed that many of our first impressions are often based on fear - fear of failure, fear of not meeting expectations, fear of innovating and falling short. And fear, he knew, is the great enemy of action and change.\nIn pushing his team to the limit, Jobs wasn\u0026rsquo;t just trying to meet a deadline. He was unlocking his team\u0026rsquo;s full potential, forcing them to confront their fears and overcome them. He understood that true innovation doesn\u0026rsquo;t happen in comfort zones - it happens when your back is against the wall and there\u0026rsquo;s no choice but to push forward.\nA week later, the unthinkable happened. The engineers, driven by the sense of urgency Jobs had instilled in them, met the original deadline. The presentation was a success, marking the beginning of a new era in personal computing.\nThis story illustrates a powerful lesson: sometimes, the limitations we perceive are just that - perceptions. When pushed, when inspired, when filled with a sense of urgency and purpose, we are capable of far more than we imagine.\nIn the end, Jobs\u0026rsquo; strategy wasn\u0026rsquo;t about bullying or unreasonable demands. It was about creating an environment where innovation could thrive, where ordinary people could achieve extraordinary things. It was about understanding that revolutions - whether in technology, business, or society - are built on the foundation of urgency, determination, and the courage to push beyond perceived limits.\nThe Urgency Principle: Elon Musk\u0026rsquo;s Relentless Drive In the high-stakes world of aerospace innovation, a tense scene unfolded between Elon Musk and Tom Mueller, head of SpaceX\u0026rsquo;s Merlin engine team. Mueller had just presented an aggressive timeline for completing a prototype, but Musk, ever the visionary, was far from satisfied.\n\u0026ldquo;Cut it in half,\u0026rdquo; Musk demanded, his eyes locked on Mueller.\nIncredulous, Mueller protested. \u0026ldquo;Such an aggressive schedule can\u0026rsquo;t be reduced any further,\u0026rdquo; he argued, his voice tinged with disbelief.\nBut Musk, unwavering in his conviction, refused to back down. \u0026ldquo;A manic sense of urgency is our operating principle,\u0026rdquo; he declared. It was clear that in Musk\u0026rsquo;s view, they weren\u0026rsquo;t acting with enough of it.\nThe ultimatum came swiftly and decisively. Musk stared Mueller in the face and delivered his final word: if Mueller wanted to keep his job as head of the engine team, he had to find a way to shorten the timeline. Faced with this stark choice, Mueller agreed.\nWhat followed was a period of intense work and relentless effort. The team pushed themselves to the limit, striving to meet Musk\u0026rsquo;s seemingly impossible deadline. As the dust settled and the engine prototype was completed, a surprising truth emerged: Mueller had been right. The schedule Musk had imposed was indeed too aggressive.\nBut this raises a crucial question: Does this mean that a sense of urgency is unhelpful? Far from it.\nThe secret to SpaceX\u0026rsquo;s ability to revolutionize the aerospace industry lies in a powerful combination: first principles thinking coupled with an insane sense of urgency. This approach, while challenging, has made all the difference in the long run.\nMueller\u0026rsquo;s later reflection paints a vivid picture of this paradox:\n\u0026ldquo;Even though we didn\u0026rsquo;t meet most of the schedules and cost targets that Elon had set, we outperformed all of our competitors. We were developing the most amazing rockets at the lowest cost in history, and we felt great about it in the end, even if Elon wasn\u0026rsquo;t happy with us.\u0026rdquo;\nThe Ultimate Urgency: Dostoyevsky\u0026rsquo;s Awakening St. Petersburg, 1849. A cold December morning. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, shackled and disoriented, is led into a square teeming with soldiers and onlookers. The air is thick with tension and the bitter Russian winter.\nOne year before, Dostoyevsky was arrested and imprisoned for the supposed involvement in a conspiracy against the russian tsar. The punishment: jail for a given period of time. But, one day, the tsar changed his plans.\nOn that square, Dostoyevsky suddenly noticed something. A scaffold, a priest, and coffins. His coffin. Time seems to stop as the reality sinks in: he\u0026rsquo;s about to die.\nIn that moment, facing his own mortality, Dostoyevsky\u0026rsquo;s life flashes before his eyes. Not in a blur of memories, but in stark clarity of wasted opportunities and unfulfilled potential.\nBut fate had other plans. Just as the executioner raises his hand, a messenger arrives, breathless. The Tsar has commuted the sentence - life instead of death, Siberian labor instead of the noose.\nIn the echoing silence of his reprieve, Dostoyevsky has an epiphany. He writes to his brother:\n\u0026ldquo;When I look back on the past and think how much time I wasted in vain, how much of it was lost in illusions, in mistakes, in idleness, in the inability to live, how I did not value it, [\u0026hellip;] then my heart shrinks with sorrow. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every moment could have been an eternity of happiness\u0026rdquo;\nAs Confucius wisely noted:\n\u0026ldquo;We have two lives: the second begins when we realize we have only one.\u0026rdquo;\nYour Turn: Embracing Urgency in Everyday Life Here\u0026rsquo;s the thing: you don\u0026rsquo;t need to face execution or launch a revolutionary product to tap into the power of urgency. The secret? Create your own sense of urgency. Light your own fire.\nRemember: inaction has a cost. So, let\u0026rsquo;s start small:\nPick one goal or project you\u0026rsquo;ve been putting off Set an unrealistic deadline for it. Yes, unrealistic Tell someone about your deadline. Make yourself accountable Attack it with a manic sense of urgency Watch what happens Will you hit your ambitious target? Maybe not. But you\u0026rsquo;ll likely achieve more than you would have otherwise. This little experiment can help you shatter those self-imposed limits and uncover reserves of energy and creativity you never knew you had.\nLiving with urgency means truly grasping that your time is limited. We all know this in our heads, but how often do we live it? If you carry the idea that one day it will all end, you\u0026rsquo;ll likely squeeze more life out of every moment.\nIn our fast-paced world, the most urgent thing we can do is stop waiting and start becoming. Your dreams, your goals, your life - they\u0026rsquo;re all waiting for you to take that leap.\nDon\u0026rsquo;t wait for:\nSomeone to push you with extreme deadlines A near-death experience to start living The perfect moment Embrace urgency today.\nAfter all, the clock is ticking for all of us - how will you make your moments count?\nThe choice, and the urgency, is yours.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/a-sense-of-urgency/","summary":"We\u0026rsquo;ve all been there. Standing at the edge of our comfort zone, heart pounding, your dreams so close. Maybe it\u0026rsquo;s that book you\u0026rsquo;ve always talked about writing, or the marathon you\u0026rsquo;ve been putting off, or that ticket to a far-off place with a name you can barely pronounce.\nYou can see it, feel it, almost taste it. But when it\u0026rsquo;s time to turn that vision into reality, something strange happens. We freeze.","title":"The Power of Urgency"},{"content":" \u0026ldquo;Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch small fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you have to go deeper. In the deep, the fish are more powerful and pure. They are giant and abstract. And they are very beautiful. ~David Lynch\nThe goals we set for ourselves are like fish. Do we choose a small fish or a big one? It\u0026rsquo;s easiest to aim for small fish, but I think we should all aim for bigger fish.\nWe should all aim high. Higher than what we first think is reasonable. And there are several reasons why.\nWe do it because it is hard In September 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University in which he promised to put a man on the moon and return him safely before the end of the decade.\nMany of the technological requirements for going to the moon had not yet been developed. Kennedy himself mentioned in his speech that the rocket that would carry astronauts to the Moon would be \u0026ldquo;made of new metal alloys, some not yet invented, capable of withstanding heat and stress many times greater than has ever been experienced, all assembled with a precision better than the best watch\u0026rdquo; and sent \u0026ldquo;on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body\u0026rdquo;.\nThis was an extremely ambitious goal. Not only was it doubtful whether the United States would be able to put a man on the moon, but also why. What was the reason for such a complicated goal? Kennedy himself answered in his speech: \u0026ldquo;We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.\nWe\u0026rsquo;re not doing it because it\u0026rsquo;s easy. We do it because it\u0026rsquo;s hard. Because if we choose to do hard things, we may fail, yes, but we will have more opportunities to improve. We need to set ambitious goals because our goals determine how far you can go. If we set a small goal, bigger goals are automatically out of reach.\nAs James Cameron said, \u0026ldquo;If you set your goals ridiculously high and it\u0026rsquo;s a failure, you\u0026rsquo;re going to fail on top of everyone else\u0026rsquo;s success\u0026rdquo;.\nYour transformation as a person Imagine you have never run before and you decide to set yourself the goal of running your first half marathon within 6 months. But because you like to aim high, you don\u0026rsquo;t just want to run a half marathon, you want to run a marathon. That\u0026rsquo;s your goal.\nThere is a big gap between not running and finishing a half marathon. But there is a huge gap between not running and finishing a marathon. Before you start, you should know that if you aim so high, you will most likely fail. It\u0026rsquo;s that simple. It\u0026rsquo;s also almost certain that many people will try to persuade you to set a more conservative goal, such as just running the half marathon. Or even not to run the half-marathon at all, but just to run occasionally. Should you listen to them? Yes, but I don\u0026rsquo;t think they\u0026rsquo;re right.\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re satisfied with running a half, you\u0026rsquo;re not doing enough to finish the marathon. Arnold Schwarzenegger said, \u0026ldquo;If I\u0026rsquo;m satisfied with being Mr Austria, I\u0026rsquo;m not doing enough to be Mr Olympia\u0026rdquo;. I\u0026rsquo;m not saying that running a half marathon is worthless (of course it is not).\nBut I think that what is really important is not finishing a half or a marathon, but your personal transformation in the pursuit of that goal. And the greater the challenge you set for yourself, the greater your opportunity to improve as a person.\nIf you decide to run the marathon, you\u0026rsquo;re going to have to work that much harder. You\u0026rsquo;ll need to be in better physical shape, which means exercising more, eating healthier and prioritizing your rest even more. And to achieve all this, you will need to be more disciplined, have more self-control, know how to deal with the self-imposed pressure of your aggressive goal, and much more.\nIf you really think about it, whether you achieve your goal or not is a fleeting moment. Once you\u0026rsquo;ve achieved it, it\u0026rsquo;s a thing of the past. But all the qualities you have learned stay with you. If running a marathon instead of a half marathon helps you become more disciplined and confident, the long-term benefits are great because you can apply these skills to other disciplines in your life, such as work or personal relationships.\nA more ambitious goal will accelerate the rate at which you learn these qualities and help you become a more complete person. You may think this all sounds very nice, but setting a big goal is more likely to lead to failure. And nobody likes to fail. That\u0026rsquo;s true, but it doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean that failure doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter. It does matter. But there is something more dangerous than failure.\nThe Italian sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti once said: \u0026ldquo;The greatest danger to the majority is not in aiming too high and failing, but in aiming too low and succeeding\u0026rdquo;.\nWhen Kennedy announced his intention to put a man on the moon, it was such an ambitious goal that it was also a leap of faith. And sometimes that is what we need. To throw ourselves into an ambitious goal, knowing that failure is very likely, and without any certainty about the journey we have to take. And who knows what might happen.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/aim-high/","summary":"\u0026ldquo;Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch small fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you have to go deeper. In the deep, the fish are more powerful and pure. They are giant and abstract. And they are very beautiful. ~David Lynch\nThe goals we set for ourselves are like fish. Do we choose a small fish or a big one?","title":"Aim high"},{"content":"There it was. The blank page. My fingers over the keyboard, frozen by an invisible force that seemed to mock my every attempt at creativity. Words, usually flowing like a gentle stream of through my fingertips, had become strangers in the night – elusive, distant, and maddeningly out of reach.\nThis wasn\u0026rsquo;t writer\u0026rsquo;s block. No. This was war: a daily battle against the twin demons of frustration and self-doubt.\n\u0026ldquo;Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m just not good enough.\u0026rdquo; Click. I close the laptop. I\u0026rsquo;d convinced myself that only more skill could save me, that talent alone would break this cycle of frustration and failure. But I was wrong. Dead wrong.\nEmotional control is key to mastery In his book An Astronaut\u0026rsquo;s Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield talks about how hard it is to become an astronaut. He says that you can be the most talented person in the world, but you won\u0026rsquo;t become an astronaut if you lack certain skills, such as \u0026ldquo;the ability to push yourself to the point of discomfort and beyond\u0026rdquo;.\nIf becoming an astronaut, one of the most complicated jobs there is, requires skills like hard work, what role can those skills play in writing? Can I be good at writing if I don\u0026rsquo;t know how to push myself to the point of discomfort or be disciplined?\nIn his book Mastery, Robert Greene explores what it takes to achieve mastery in any field, using the examples of Einstein, Da Vinci, Marie Curie and many others. And he explains something that I don\u0026rsquo;t think we pay enough attention to.\nWhat separates masters from others is often something surprisingly simple. Whenever we learn a skill, we often feel frustrated; what we are learning seems beyond our capabilities. By giving in to these feelings, we unconsciously give up on ourselves before we really give up.\nThe only real impediment to mastery is yourself and your emotions - boredom, panic, frustration, insecurity. You cannot suppress such emotions; they are normal to the process and are experienced by everyone, including Masters. What you can do is have faith in the process.\nWhen we face a difficult problem, our enemy is not only the problem itself, but also our attitude. And this is interesting because it is often we ourselves who make things more difficult.\nThe Maze of Mastery Imagine you\u0026rsquo;re in a giant maze. The walls tower above you, each path looking deceptively similar. Wrong turns are inevitable, bringing frustration and fear. So you start to try new paths, and, as expected, you get lost. Once. Twice. Five times. Ten times.\nNow you have a choice.\nYou could see each wrong turn as proof of failure. \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;m terrible at this,\u0026rdquo; you might think, letting negativity take over and drain your motivation. If you do this you’re more likely to make the situation worse. Getting out of the maze is difficult, and you need your mind and focus be as clear as possible. So it’s a bad idea letting negative emotions like fear or frustration cloud your judgment.\nOr you can behave like Chris Hadfield. You can view each dead end as valuable information. \u0026ldquo;Well, now I know not to go this way,\u0026rdquo; you might reason. Each wrong turn becomes a step toward understanding the maze better. The frustration is still there, but it no longer controls you. Instead, it becomes fuel for determination. You realize that with each \u0026ldquo;failure,\u0026rdquo; you\u0026rsquo;re actually mapping the maze, getting closer to understanding its layout and finding the exit.\nEmotional control doesn\u0026rsquo;t make the challenge disappear. It prevents you from making the challenge even harder by adding layers of self-doubt and negativity. As Michael Jordan once said, \u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I\u0026rsquo;ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I\u0026rsquo;ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen the greatest player in basketball history comes to your mind, you don’t picture failure. You picture success. Let that sink in. But as he continues,\n\u0026ldquo;I\u0026rsquo;ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”\nEvery lost game. Every setback. If Jordan had let all these mistakes define him, or cloud his judgement, he would not have become Michael Jordan.\nIn writing or learning a new skill or escaping a maze or playing a sport, mistakes are not personal failings; they are necessary steps on the path to improvement. A wrong move is, well, just that, a wrong move.\nIt doesn’t define you. It may well show you the path to go. But only if you allow it. And, as we are going to see now, this is what the examples of Eliud Kipchoge and Novak Djokovic show.\nEliud Kipchoge: Patience in the Face of Pain Eliud Kipchoge, the greatest marathoner, has redefined running. With 18 wins out of 21 marathons, including two Olympic gold medals, Kipchoge\u0026rsquo;s physical mastery is undeniable. But it\u0026rsquo;s his mental strength that truly sets him apart. And the following story illustrates why.\nAfter winning gold in the marathon at the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games, Kipchoge and several other runners were waiting in a hall to collect their medals.\nBut organizational problems meant they had to wait for hours. Tired after the marathon, there was not much to do in the room. Bored, most of the runners did the usual thing: they looked for distractions. They took out their smartphones and spent their time surfing the internet or social media.\nAll except one. Kipchoge.\nKipchoge stood silently, waiting patiently for his medal. No fidgeting, no complaining, no seeking escape from the boredom.\nThis moment, observed by his fellow runners (one of whom joked, \u0026ldquo;Kipchoge is not human\u0026rdquo;), offers a glimpse into the mental discipline that allows him to excel. Think about the challenges of a marathon: the physical pain, the mental fatigue, the doubts that creep in mile after grueling mile. Kipchoge\u0026rsquo;s ability to remain composed – whether waiting for a medal or pushing through the final miles of a race – is a testament to his extraordinary emotional control.\nNovak Djokovic: The Comeback King Switching gears to the tennis court, we find another paragon of mental toughness in Novak Djokovic. The most decorated tennis player of all time, Djokovic has not just broken records – he\u0026rsquo;s shattered them. With the most Grand Slams in history and an unprecedented 400 weeks at world number one, his consistency in a sport as physically and mentally demanding as tennis seems almost superhuman. Asked in a recent interview about the secret to his mental toughness, Djokovic said:\nProbably one of the biggest lessons I\u0026rsquo;ve learnt about mental toughness is that if you lose focus because things start to go wrong for you, that\u0026rsquo;s OK. Accept it and come back to the present moment. How you bounce back is the most important thing.\nI think what separates you from other people is how long you stay in that negative emotional state. Because it\u0026rsquo;s almost impossible to stay in the present moment all the time. We\u0026rsquo;re always thinking about what\u0026rsquo;s going to happen, how I\u0026rsquo;m going to win or whatever. But the speed with which you recover from a loss of concentration and come back to the present is one of the most important ingredients of mental toughness.\nIn tennis, where a single point can change the tide of a match, this ability to reset mentally can be the difference between victory and defeat. It\u0026rsquo;s not just about a powerful serve or a precise backhand; it\u0026rsquo;s about maintaining composure under pressure, bouncing back from setbacks, and staying focused on the present moment. Djokovic\u0026rsquo;s insight reveals a crucial aspect of emotional control: it\u0026rsquo;s not about avoiding negative emotions, but about recovering from them quickly.\nRecap: The Inner Battle As we\u0026rsquo;ve seen through these examples – from the aspiring writer to the astronaut, from the marathon champion to the tennis legend – the pursuit of excellence always involves an inner battle. No matter who you are or what you do, there will always be one opponent you have to beat: yourself.\nDifficult emotions will arise. Frustration, doubt, fear, boredom – these are not signs of weakness or inadequacy. They are natural parts of any challenging endeavor.\nThe key is learning to navigate these emotional waters without letting them capsize your efforts. We all face moments of self-doubt, but it\u0026rsquo;s how we respond to these moments that determines our success.\nThe next time frustration threatens to derail your progress, whether you\u0026rsquo;re facing a blank page, learning a new skill, or pushing your limits in any arena, remember: the true challenge isn\u0026rsquo;t just the task at hand, but mastering your emotional response to it.\nWe are often limited more by our lack of emotional control than by the actual difficulty of the problems we face.\nThe ability to prevent your emotions from overwhelming or derailing you is one of the most powerful tools you can develop, regardless of your field. It\u0026rsquo;s about recognizing that emotions are a part of the process and learning how to manage them effectively.\nSo embrace the challenge. See each obstacle as an opportunity for growth. Remember, in the words of Novak Djokovic, it\u0026rsquo;s not about never losing focus – it\u0026rsquo;s about how quickly you can find it again. Your greatest achievements may be waiting just on the other side of your comfort zone. Each time you face discomfort, you have a choice: let it hold you back or let it propel you forward.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/control-your-emotions/","summary":"There it was. The blank page. My fingers over the keyboard, frozen by an invisible force that seemed to mock my every attempt at creativity. Words, usually flowing like a gentle stream of through my fingertips, had become strangers in the night – elusive, distant, and maddeningly out of reach.\nThis wasn\u0026rsquo;t writer\u0026rsquo;s block. No. This was war: a daily battle against the twin demons of frustration and self-doubt.\n\u0026ldquo;Maybe I\u0026rsquo;m just not good enough.","title":"Embrace discomfort"},{"content":"In the science fiction saga The Hitchhiker\u0026rsquo;s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of space explorers search for the answer to the meaning of life by creating a supercomputer. After seven million years of work, the supercomputer comes up with the answer: 42.\nTo everyone\u0026rsquo;s astonishment, the computer replies: \u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s definitely the answer. I think the problem, to be honest, is that you didn\u0026rsquo;t really know what the question was\u0026rdquo;.\nThe Hitchhiker\u0026rsquo;s Guide to the Galaxy was one of the books that had the greatest impact on Elon Musk as a child. It taught him that it was not about finding answers, but about asking the right questions. Years later, when Musk went on to found SpaceX, a company whose mission is to take humans to Mars and make life multi-planetary, he said one of his motivations was \u0026ldquo;expand the scope of consciousness to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe\u0026rdquo;.\nIf making sure the questions are the right ones before rushing to find the answers has been the key to creating SpaceX, the most important space company today, perhaps there is something we can all learn from asking better questions. But it is not an easy skill.\nWe are good at finding answers. But not good at asking good questions.\nAt school, we were taught that the important thing was to find the right answer. Exams consisted of questions that students had to answer to the best of your ability. The better the answer, the higher the grade.\nThe question was never challenged. Nobody would sit an exam and say something like \u0026ldquo;this question is badly worded\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;there are more interesting questions that could be asked\u0026rdquo;. You just answered. Even if the question was stupid or badly worded, if you answered well, you got the maximum mark.\nBecause success at school was associated with getting good grades, we quickly learned to associate intelligence with the ability to answer questions well. And this works in school because it is a controlled environment. But in the real world, where there are many more degrees of freedom, it often doesn\u0026rsquo;t help much.\nA good question can almost solve a problem The story goes that in the Middle Ages a Chinese military strategist was the guest of a European prince. During his stay, he had the opportunity to be the guest of honor at one of the many jousting tournaments. These tournaments were no mere pastime. They were often used to avoid further conflict and to decide the future marriage of heirs.\nThe wise Chinese strategist asked his princely friend how the competition worked. He explained the simple rule: each prince would send his three best champions to compete against each other: the team that won the most fights would be the winner.\nThe Chinese master meditated for a moment and then suggested to the prince: \u0026ldquo;Dear friend, allow me to give you a piece of advice: let your third champion fight his first champion, your first champion his second and your second champion his third. You will lose the first match, but win the other two.\u0026rdquo; And so it was.\nWhen we focus on finding answers without challenging the question, we sometimes work inefficiently. The story of the warriors illustrates this perfectly. Up to that point, no European prince had ever thought of changing the order of his warriors. They just assumed that the best fought first. To win the battle, their question to answer is: how can I make my best warrior beat their best warrior? and so on.\nBut the Chinese warrior does things differently. Before focusing on finding an answer, he tries to understand and formulate the problem better. There are three clashes, and the one who wins two wins. There are no other restrictions. And he realizes that if you change the order in which you take out your warriors, you will gain a considerable advantage. Choose your worst warrior against his best and you will lose the first battle, but you will win the next two. And you will win.\nThe advantage of asking good questions Once the Chinese warrior asked the right question, the solution was almost self-evident. In a graduation speech, Steve Jobs said something like, \u0026ldquo;Imagine you were in a city and you could see it all from the 80th floor. While other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B by reading these stupid maps, you can see it all in front of you. You can see it all. And you can make connections that seem obvious to you because you can see everything.\u0026rdquo;\nThere\u0026rsquo;s an idea from Albert Einstein that says: \u0026ldquo;If I had an hour to solve a problem, and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the appropriate question, because once I knew the right question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the power of asking good questions; many problems become obvious and solve themselves.\nElon Musk was once asked what was one of the most common mistakes made by brilliant engineers. He said: \u0026ldquo;Trying to optimize a problem that shouldn\u0026rsquo;t exist in the first place\u0026rdquo;. If the problem isn\u0026rsquo;t right, it doesn\u0026rsquo;t matter how good you are at finding the answer. The search won\u0026rsquo;t get you very far.\nImagine that answering a question is like reaching the top of a huge mountain. Before you start climbing, you have to make sure that the mountain is the right one. Otherwise, you run the risk of getting to the top of the mountain and saying: Wait, what am I doing here? Before you answer a question, make sure it is the right one.\nThe ability to ask good questions will determine not only the difficulty of the problem, but also how far we can go. Arthur Schopenhauer once said: \u0026ldquo;Talent achieves the goal that no one else can achieve. Genius achieves the goal that no one else can see.\u0026rdquo;\nBeing good at finding answers is similar to hitting the target that no one else can hit. It is a good skill, and it will certainly help you go far. But if you\u0026rsquo;re really looking for genius, it\u0026rsquo;s not enough. If you focus only on finding answers, you will only be able to define problems defined by others.\nBy contrast, mastering the art of asking good questions will help you create something new. There are times when the greatest value lies not in exploring what we already know, but in discovering and exploiting what no one else can see. And for that, nothing beats a good question.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/questions/","summary":"In the science fiction saga The Hitchhiker\u0026rsquo;s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of space explorers search for the answer to the meaning of life by creating a supercomputer. After seven million years of work, the supercomputer comes up with the answer: 42.\nTo everyone\u0026rsquo;s astonishment, the computer replies: \u0026ldquo;That\u0026rsquo;s definitely the answer. I think the problem, to be honest, is that you didn\u0026rsquo;t really know what the question was\u0026rdquo;.","title":"Ask good questions"},{"content":"The lake was still, its surface a mirror reflecting the cloudy sky above. A young man sat in a boat, his muscles tense with frustration. This was Bruce Lee, the martial arts prodigy known as \u0026ldquo;Never Sit Still,\u0026rdquo; and he was doing something that felt utterly foreign to him: nothing.\nBut this moment of forced inaction would lead to an epiphany that would change the course of his life and redefine martial arts forever.\nBruce Lee\u0026rsquo;s journey began at age thirteen when he discovered his true passion: martial arts. From that moment on, he threw himself into training with a fervor that both impressed and worried his teacher, Yip Man. Day and night, Bruce practiced his moves, honing his body into a weapon of lightning-fast reflexes and devastating power. His dedication was unquestionable, his potential limitless.\nYet, something was missing.\nYip Man, a master of Wing Chun kung fu, saw beyond the physical prowess of his star pupil. He recognized that true mastery lay not just in strength and speed, but in understanding the deeper principles of martial arts.\n\u0026ldquo;Never impose yourself on nature. It flows,\u0026rdquo; he would say. \u0026ldquo;Never oppose any problem head-on, but counter it by balancing with it.\u0026rdquo;\nThese philosophical nuggets fell on deaf ears. Young Bruce, consumed by his desire to perfect his techniques, dismissed them as irrelevant. There was no time for abstract ideas when there were punches to throw and kicks to perfect. He had adopted an all-or-nothing mentality, believing that any moment not spent in direct training was a moment wasted.\nThe Water Epiphany Yip Man knew he had to act. In a move that seemed counterintuitive, he banned Bruce from training for an entire week. Instead, he assigned his pupil a single task: reflect on the abstract teachings he had been ignoring.\nFor Bruce, this felt like torture. How could he possibly improve by doing nothing? His obsession with constant forward motion had blinded him to the value of stepping back. Restless and frustrated, he took to the water, hoping that the gentle lapping of waves against his boat might calm his racing mind.\nAs he lay back, pondering his master\u0026rsquo;s words, frustration boiled over. In a burst of anger, he lashed out at the water, unleashing a flurry of punches against the unyielding surface. And then\u0026hellip; stillness. Both in the water and in Bruce\u0026rsquo;s mind.\nIn that moment of clarity, Bruce understood. The water, soft and yielding, had effortlessly absorbed his most powerful strikes. It didn\u0026rsquo;t fight back, didn\u0026rsquo;t resist. It simply was. By stepping back from his relentless training and allowing himself this moment of reflection, Bruce had taken two steps forward in his understanding of martial arts and life itself.\n\u0026ldquo;I struck it with all my might,\u0026rdquo; Bruce would later write, \u0026ldquo;but it was not hurt. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest bottle, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substances in the world.\u0026rdquo;\nThis realization became the cornerstone of Bruce Lee\u0026rsquo;s philosophy, both in martial arts and in life.\n\u0026ldquo;Be water, my friend,\u0026rdquo; he would famously say. \u0026ldquo;Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.\u0026rdquo;\nSam Altman and His Gap Year Fast forward to some decades later, and we see an example of how taking a step back can really make a difference. At 26, fresh from selling his startup, Sam Altman made a decision that raised eyebrows in Silicon Valley: he took a year off. In a culture where your job defines your social status, where networking never stops, and where the fear of falling behind is palpable, Altman\u0026rsquo;s choice was bold and, to some, bewildering.\n\u0026ldquo;If you are in the position between jobs where you can take a year off, I highly recommend it,\u0026rdquo; Altman reflects. \u0026ldquo;I think it was like one of the two or three best career things that I ever did.\u0026rdquo;\nBut it wasn\u0026rsquo;t easy. Altman vividly describes the social discomfort:\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s really hard to do in Silicon Valley because like in a place where social status is determined by your job and what you\u0026rsquo;re working on\u0026hellip; when you show up at a party and someone says \u0026lsquo;Oh, what are you working on?\u0026rsquo; and you\u0026rsquo;re like \u0026lsquo;Uh, I\u0026rsquo;m kind of just taking the year off\u0026rsquo;\u0026hellip; you can sort of see in real time their eyes like look for someone else in the room to talk to. Doesn\u0026rsquo;t feel that good.\u0026rdquo;\nDespite the social awkwardness, Altman used this time to expand his horizons in ways that would prove invaluable:\nHe read \u0026ldquo;many dozens of textbooks\u0026rdquo; Learned about nuclear engineering Delved into the emerging field of AI Explored synthetic biology Studied investing \u0026ldquo;I didn\u0026rsquo;t have any idea that they were all going to come together in the way they did,\u0026rdquo; Altman admits. \u0026ldquo;Almost all of it didn\u0026rsquo;t work out, but the seeds were planted for things that worked in deep ways later.\u0026rdquo;\nConclusion: Take a Step Back to Move Forward In our hyper-connected, always-on world, the stories of Altman and Lee serve as powerful reminders of the value of pause. They challenge us to reconsider our notions of productivity and progress. Sometimes, the most productive thing we can do is to step back, reflect, and allow our minds to wander and wonder.\nAnd it\u0026rsquo;s not just Bruce Lee or Sam Altman. Consider some the great minds throughout history who understood the principle of taking a step back:\nBeethoven carried his musical scores on long walks, finding inspiration in the rhythm of his footsteps Einstein played the violin when stuck on complex physics problems, allowing his subconscious to work its magic Nietzsche boldly claimed, \u0026ldquo;Only ideas gained by walking are of any value\u0026rdquo; Quentin Tarantino floats in his pool after a day of screenwriting, letting new ideas bubble to the surface So the next time you feel the relentless pressure to keep pushing forward, remember Sam Altman at a Silicon Valley party, uncomfortable but committed to his year of exploration. Remember Bruce Lee, frustrated but on the verge of a breakthrough.\nConsider giving yourself permission to pause, to reflect, to learn widely and wildly. After all, in that space of apparent inactivity, you might just find the idea that changes everything.\nBe water, my friend. And remember, sometimes the most powerful move is to take a step back, allowing you to leap two steps forward.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/take-a-step-back/","summary":"The lake was still, its surface a mirror reflecting the cloudy sky above. A young man sat in a boat, his muscles tense with frustration. This was Bruce Lee, the martial arts prodigy known as \u0026ldquo;Never Sit Still,\u0026rdquo; and he was doing something that felt utterly foreign to him: nothing.\nBut this moment of forced inaction would lead to an epiphany that would change the course of his life and redefine martial arts forever.","title":"Take a step back"},{"content":"Picture this: It\u0026rsquo;s the 19th century, and the British government has a problem. They\u0026rsquo;re shipping prisoners to Australia, but only 40% are surviving the journey. Humanitarian groups propose improvements, the government tries various solutions, but nothing works. The survival rate remains stubbornly at 40%.\nEnter Edwin Chadwick, a visionary economist with a different perspective. He realizes the problem isn\u0026rsquo;t the voyage conditions - it\u0026rsquo;s the crew\u0026rsquo;s behavior.\nWhy? Because captains were paid for each prisoner shipped from England. Their reward came before the job was done. Result? They had little interest in keeping prisoners healthy on the journey to Australia.\nChadwick, understanding the power of incentives, proposes a simple change: Pay captains for every prisoner who arrives safely in Australia.\nThe result? The survival rate skyrockets to over 98%.\nThe Double-Edged Sword of Incentives As Morgan House says in his book Same As Ever, \u0026ldquo;incentives are the most powerful force in the world\u0026rdquo;. The problem is that, as well as having a positive effect, as in the case of prisoner transport, they can also have the opposite effect. And the role of space regulators is a clear example of this.\nSpaceX is an American company whose mission is to colonize Mars and transform humanity into a multi-planetary species. To achieve such an ambitious goal, it is necessary to act in a different way than the old companies in the industry are used to. For example, you have to challenge conventional wisdom. Often you have to fight to change certain rules because they don\u0026rsquo;t encourage innovation and they\u0026rsquo;re stupid.\nAnd that is exactly what is happening on many occasions between SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the organization responsible for aviation safety and regulation in the US.\nIn a meeting with SpaceX to discuss some routine approvals of a launch, a regulator pointed out some of the rules that SpaceX was in violation of. Elon Musk challenged the regulator\u0026rsquo;s reasoning, saying that some of the rules needed to be changed because they didn\u0026rsquo;t encourage the innovation needed to get to Mars. And then he claimed:\nThere is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they can easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don\u0026rsquo;t even get a reward. So it\u0026rsquo;s very asymmetric. So it\u0026rsquo;s very easy to understand why regulators are reluctant to change the rules. It\u0026rsquo;s because there is a big punishment on one side and no reward on the other. How would a rational person behave in such a scenario?\nCharlie Munger, one of the greatest investors in history, believed that \u0026ldquo;never, ever think about anything else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives\u0026rdquo;.\nIn other words, regulators do not have the right incentives. As Morgan Housel once said, being rational is not the same as being reasonable. Regulators are rational because they behave according to the incentives they have, but they are not rational if what you really want is innovation and technological progress. There is a quote from Upton Sinclair that says: \u0026ldquo;It is very difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it\u0026rdquo;.\nThis problem is not restricted to regulators. Many Fortune 500 CEOs do not pursue innovation because their compensation is tied to short-term quarterly results, and innovation is a long-term bet. It\u0026rsquo;s not that they don\u0026rsquo;t have the ability to innovate, it\u0026rsquo;s that they don\u0026rsquo;t have the will because they don\u0026rsquo;t have the motivation.\nIn the book The 48 Laws of Power, author Robert Greene talks about the importance of interest in influencing others. He tells the story of how Chinese culture was on the brink of destruction in the mid 12th century.\nWhen Genghis Khan, the leader of the Mongol Empire, invaded China, he found a country lacking in the resources he considered valuable. Known for his zeal for destruction, Genghis Khan decided it would be best to raze all Chinese cities to the ground. This would mean the destruction of two thousand years of Chinese culture.\nBut a trusted advisor to Genghis Khan, who appreciated the beauty of Chinese culture, convinced him that he would reap riches from the place if, instead of destroying it, he simply taxed everyone who lived there. Khan saw the wisdom in this and listened to his advisor.\nConclusion As Benjamin Franklin wisely noted: \u0026ldquo;If you want to persuade, appeal to interest, not reason\u0026rdquo;\nWhether it\u0026rsquo;s saving prisoners at sea, fostering innovation in space exploration, or preserving ancient civilizations, understanding and leveraging the power of incentives can change the course of history.\nSo, next time you\u0026rsquo;re faced with a seemingly intractable problem, ask yourself: What are the incentives at play? And how can they be changed to achieve the desired outcome?\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/the-power-of-incentives/","summary":"Picture this: It\u0026rsquo;s the 19th century, and the British government has a problem. They\u0026rsquo;re shipping prisoners to Australia, but only 40% are surviving the journey. Humanitarian groups propose improvements, the government tries various solutions, but nothing works. The survival rate remains stubbornly at 40%.\nEnter Edwin Chadwick, a visionary economist with a different perspective. He realizes the problem isn\u0026rsquo;t the voyage conditions - it\u0026rsquo;s the crew\u0026rsquo;s behavior.\nWhy? Because captains were paid for each prisoner shipped from England.","title":"The power of incentives"},{"content":"Nelson Mandela spent his life fighting to overthrow apartheid and bring democracy to South Africa, where all South Africans, regardless of their social status or color, would be allowed to vote.\nHe was imprisoned for 27 years. He endured hard labor, severe isolation and very basic living conditions. He had to overcome internal conflicts within his political movement, whose members had doubts about the best course of action for the overthrow of apartheid. He also needed to fight the racism and colonialism that had been formed for centuries But in the end he achieved his goal. Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and played a key role in the transition to democracy. In 1994, he became the first democratically elected president in South Africa\u0026rsquo;s history.\nWhether it was his visionary belief in a democratic South Africa, his iron discipline to achieve his goal, or his empathy to connect with those who thought differently from him, Mandela is considered a great leader.\nSo you might think that in order to be a leader, or simply a person of value, it is necessary to be a great achiever. But it doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to be that way.\nOn Robben Island prison, prisoners were assigned daily chores. One of the most unpleasant was to clean their chamber pot with their own excrement. All the prisoners hated it. Once, one of Mandela\u0026rsquo;s companions, Daniels, fell ill for a short time. Without the strength to even get out of bed, he decided to postpone cleaning his chamber pot. Mandela cared for all his comrades. He knew his friend was unwell. Daniels recalls that Mandela came to his cell, asked how he was and then set about cleaning his comrade\u0026rsquo;s chamber pot on his own initiative. Daniels was amazed.\nThat is what leadership is about. It is not just about being the visible face of a historic political movement or achieving great feats. Small actions can make a big difference.\nAnd that\u0026rsquo;s something anyone can learn.\nYou can be one of three ways Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut and current commander of the International Space Station, believes that everyone in a new environment can fall into one of three categories:\nAs -1: actively disruptive, someone who causes problems. As 0: their impact is neutral and does not tip the balance one way or the other. As +1: someone who actively adds value.\nIn the case of astronauts, you might think that being competent, intelligent and a problem solver is enough to be categorized as a +1. But being an astronaut also requires teamwork; the most important missions on the ISS always require a crew of astronauts. Those with an individualistic view may think that skills such as teamwork are useless in such cases, but nothing could be further from the truth. As he recalls of the astronaut selection process:\n\u0026ldquo;A chief astronaut used to call the reception of the clinic where the applicants were sent for medical tests to find out which ones treated the staff well and which ones didn\u0026rsquo;t. [\u0026hellip;] A person with a superiority complex could unwittingly, right there in the waiting room, ruin his chances of ever going into space.”\nA person with a superiority complex could unwittingly ruin his chances of ever going into space. Everything counts. If you have the wrong idea of what it means to add value, you may never get the chance to do it.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s why Hadfield believes that one of the best ways to add value is to start by aiming to be a zero, that is, to aspire to have a neutral impact.\nAim to be a zero, at least in the beginning. On one of his first space missions, Hadfield, eager to learn as much as possible, decided to observe the behavior of the most experienced astronaut on the mission. As he recounts in his book An Astronaut\u0026rsquo;s Guide to Life on Earth, \u0026ldquo;I was observing the most experienced astronaut in our crew [\u0026hellip;] and I noticed that he would come into the office an hour early and quietly go through our commander\u0026rsquo;s inbox, taking care of all the administrative details himself so that the commander could concentrate on the important things\u0026rdquo;.\nCommon sense tells us that it should be the other way round. The most experienced should do the most important tasks, leaving the less attractive ones to the newcomers. Everyone wants to be a +1. And nobody wants to be a -1. But it is best to aim to be a zero, at least in the beginning.\nAiming to be neutral may be one of the best ways to become someone who adds value. It may sound counterintuitive, but sometimes it makes all the difference. Doing the dirty work, like Mandela with the chamber pot or the astronaut checking the inbox, may not seem like a useful task, but it really is if it helps others do their best.\nWarren Buffet and Charlie Munger are considered two of the greatest investors of all time. When asked what made them so good, Charlie Munger said: \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gained by trying not to be stupid, rather than trying to be very smart.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen you enter a new environment, such as a new job, you always want to add value. But, as we have seen throughout this article, you have to be careful. If you are desperate to stand out, you are more likely to make more mistakes. As Hadfield says: \u0026ldquo;The ideal entry is not to sail in and immediately make your presence known. It is to enter without causing a domino effect. The best way to contribute to a new environment is not to try to show how wonderful you are. It is to try to have a neutral impact, to observe and learn from those who are already there, and to help with the dirty work whenever possible.”\nRather than actively seeking to add value, seek to do no harm. To paraphrase Charlie Munger, seeking brilliance is difficult, but avoiding stupidity is easier. Avoiding stupidity is analogous to striving to become someone with a neutral impact. If you do that, sooner or later you will be the kind of person who adds value.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/aim-to-be-a-zero/","summary":"Nelson Mandela spent his life fighting to overthrow apartheid and bring democracy to South Africa, where all South Africans, regardless of their social status or color, would be allowed to vote.\nHe was imprisoned for 27 years. He endured hard labor, severe isolation and very basic living conditions. He had to overcome internal conflicts within his political movement, whose members had doubts about the best course of action for the overthrow of apartheid.","title":"Aim to be a zero"},{"content":"Hundreds of millions of people were watching television. It has been an intense decade of relentless work, without rest. Expectation was at an all-time high. Too much was at stake. It was 20 July 1969, and two American astronauts were about to become the first humans to set foot on the moon.\nEight years earlier, President Kennedy had inspired an entire nation by announcing his goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. That same day, by leaving his foot mark on the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong would in turn inspire a whole generation of young people.\nOne of those children was Chris Hadfield. At just nine years old, watching Neil Armstrong on the moon on television, he decided he wanted to be an astronaut. Just another child, one might think, among all those who wished to become astronauts that day.\nThe only thing is that 43 years later, Chris Hadfield was about to make his third space trip, and was also appointed head commander of the International Space Station.\nWhat would an astronaut do? Having watched on television that evening how man landed on the moon, Hadfield decided to become an astronaut. The problem was that, as aerospace interest was relatively new, there was no pre-established path to becoming an astronaut. NASA had been in existence for barely a decade. Hadfield was Canadian, and Canada didn\u0026rsquo;t even have a space agency then.\nMost people would have given up before they started. But not Hadfield. What Hadfield decided to do was quite remarkable for a nine-year-old boy. As he recounts in his book An Astronaut\u0026rsquo;s Guide to Life on Earth, \u0026ldquo;I had only one choice. I had to imagine what an astronaut would do if he were nine years old, and then do exactly the same. Would he eat vegetables or french fries? Would he sleep late or get up early to read a book?\u0026rdquo;\nAt first glance, one might think that there is no direct relationship between eating vegetables or getting up early to read a book and being an astronaut. And that is true. But the benefit of the questions Hadfield asked himself was not about eating healthier or reading more books.\nWhat was really important in that question was the kind of person he was becoming.\nWho are you becoming Becoming an astronaut is a very difficult goal. It requires skills very few people have. There are hundreds of thousands of candidates, but only a few spots. And it also doesn\u0026rsquo;t help that in any goal we pursue, there are always factors beyond your control such as luck or risk.\nYou may not be born at the right time. Or in the right country. Maybe on one of the space programme\u0026rsquo;s journeys there is an explosion that kills the entire crew, as happened with Challenger, and spaceflight would be put on hold for years pending review. Or there could be a war, and space travel would be put on the back burner. Or perhaps the astronaut candidate could be on the verge of becoming an astronaut but suffer an illness that prevents him from travelling into space (Hadfield was very close to experiencing this).\nI don\u0026rsquo;t mean to imply that luck is all that matters. How skilled and competent you are plays an important role. If you are unlucky you may not be an astronaut, but if you have no skill then you will never be an astronaut.\nWhen Hadfield wondered whether to go to bed late or get up early to read a book, he was increasing his chances of being an astronaut. He was becoming the kind of person who is disciplined and knows how to work hard to achieve his goals. He was practising perseverance and self-control. He was aware that being an astronaut was complicated, but every time he asked himself that question and answered it, it was as if he was saying to himself: I\u0026rsquo;m not giving up.\nNo one knows what the future will bring. But in a way your choices determine what you will get out of life. Imagine a future of endless possibilities. You want to run a marathon? You\u0026rsquo;re less likely to run a marathon if you don\u0026rsquo;t exercise or eat healthy. Do you know where you want to work? No, but if you don\u0026rsquo;t spend time learning, you are less likely to get a job you like.\nWe often don\u0026rsquo;t realize that we are constantly changing. Heraclitus once said: \u0026ldquo;No man can cross the same river twice, because neither the man nor the water will be the same\u0026rdquo;.\nEvery decision we make influences, even if only remotely, the kind of person we are becoming. That is why the questions Hadfield asked himself are so important. His chances of becoming an astronaut were negligible, almost zero, but if he didn\u0026rsquo;t ask himself that question and act on it, his chances would be zero. His actions opened up new avenues of possibility.\nStep by step As James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits, \u0026ldquo;Every action you take is a vote for the kind of person you want to become\u0026rdquo;.\nIf the goal you are pursuing is ambitious, it is very likely that sooner or later you will feel overwhelmed. When that happens, remember E.L. Doctorow\u0026rsquo;s insight: \u0026ldquo;Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights can reach, but then you can make the whole trip.\u0026rdquo;\nYou don\u0026rsquo;t need to visualise the whole road to start walking. You just need to see a little further ahead. Like when Hadfield was nine years old and wondered what an astronaut would do.\nIf your goal is to become a healthier person but you don\u0026rsquo;t know what to do, you can do like Hadfield and ask yourself: Would an athlete go for a run or lie on the couch?, would an athlete eat junk food or healthy food? And once you have the answer, act. You don\u0026rsquo;t just lie on the couch, you go for a run. Even if it\u0026rsquo;s just a few meters.\nIf your goal is to become a writer but you don\u0026rsquo;t know how to fight procrastination, you can ask yourself: Would a writer let go of that emotion or would he or she start writing anyway? And once you have the answer, you act. You don\u0026rsquo;t give up, you start writing. Even if it\u0026rsquo;s just a few words.\nIt\u0026rsquo;s like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights reach, but you can make the whole journey.\nOne might think that such small actions are not enough to achieve big results. True, but only if you only look at the short term. A day or even a couple of weeks is not enough time to make a difference, but several months and years will make a big difference. Small actions over a long period of time can lead to extraordinary results. Small actions can help you achieve big goals and, in the process, have the ability to change the kind of person you become.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/who-are-you-becoming/","summary":"Hundreds of millions of people were watching television. It has been an intense decade of relentless work, without rest. Expectation was at an all-time high. Too much was at stake. It was 20 July 1969, and two American astronauts were about to become the first humans to set foot on the moon.\nEight years earlier, President Kennedy had inspired an entire nation by announcing his goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade.","title":"Who are you becoming"},{"content":"This article is about the story of The Choice of Hercules\u0026rsquo;, which is a metaphor for the ability we all have to make choices and the consequences of those choices. The version of The Choice of Hercules presented here is an excerpt from Donald Robertson\u0026rsquo;s book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.\nOne day, as a young man, Hercules was walking along an unfamiliar path when he came upon a fork in the road, where he sat down and began contemplating his future. Unsure which direction to take, he found himself suddenly confronted by two mysterious goddesses.\nThe first appeared as a beautiful and alluring woman dressed in fine clothing. She was called Kakia, although she (falsely) claimed that her friends called her Eudaimonia, meaning happiness and fulfillment. She barged before her companion and earnestly pleaded with Hercules to follow her path. It led, she promised, to the easiest and most pleasant way of life, a shortcut to true happiness. She told him that he could live like a king, avoiding hardship and enjoying luxury beyond most men\u0026rsquo;s wildest dreams, all delivered to him through the labor of others.\nAfter listening to her for a while, Hercules was approached by the second goddess, Arete, a less boastful and more modest woman who shone with natural beauty. To his surprise, she wore a grave expression. She warned him that her path led in a very different direction: it would be long, challenging, and require much hard work. Speaking plainly, she told Hercules that he would suffer. He would be doomed to walk the earth in rags, reviled and persecuted by his enemies.\n\u0026ldquo;Nothing that is really good and admirable,\u0026rdquo; cautioned Arete, \u0026ldquo;is granted by the gods to men without some effort and application.\u0026rdquo; Hercules would be called upon to exercise wisdom and justice and to face mounting adversity with bravery and self-discipline.\nOvercoming extraordinary obstacles through courageous and honorable deeds, the goddess said, was the only true path to fulfillment in life. Hercules famously chose the heroic path of Arete, or \u0026ldquo;Virtue,\u0026rdquo; and was not seduced by Kakia, or \u0026ldquo;Vice.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen you need to make a decision, think about whether you’ll choose the easy path or the difficult path.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/the-choice-of-hercules/","summary":"This article is about the story of The Choice of Hercules\u0026rsquo;, which is a metaphor for the ability we all have to make choices and the consequences of those choices. The version of The Choice of Hercules presented here is an excerpt from Donald Robertson\u0026rsquo;s book How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.\nOne day, as a young man, Hercules was walking along an unfamiliar path when he came upon a fork in the road, where he sat down and began contemplating his future.","title":"The Choice of Hercules"},{"content":"SPOILER ALERT: This blogpost is based on the book Lessons In Chemistry and contains spoilers.\nElizabeth Zott hated being in class, sitting at a desk listening to monotonous teachers talking about boring subjects. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t that she didn\u0026rsquo;t enjoy learning. She loved it. But all the learning there was based on memorisation, and Elizabeth liked creativity. Elizabeth also disliked her classmates who did not share her hobbies. And all this made her suffer. A lot. She was a ten-year-old girl and everything was supposed to be fun. But it wasn\u0026rsquo;t. She hated school, had no friends and never felt like she fit in.\nThe nightmare didn\u0026rsquo;t end when school ended and she came home. Her parents, especially her father, were not kind to Elizabeth. But there was always a light at the end of the tunnel: her older brother John. John was the opposite of what she didn\u0026rsquo;t like about her life. John was always there, always kind and protective, encouraging Elizabeth to question things and learn for herself.\nTheir relationship was amazing and grew stronger as they spent more time together. Elizabeth felt that everything could be terrible, but with John by her side, things would somehow work out. And then everything changed.\nElizabeth\u0026rsquo;s father was extremely intolerant of people who were different from him, and when he found out that his son John was gay, he harassed him. He thought it was a disgrace to have a gay son and decided to make his life impossible. Since then John has felt trapped, as if the day had come when he decided it was time to end it all. He committed suicide. When Elizabeth found out, she was alone and devastated. She felt hopeless, convinced there was nothing she could do to improve her life, and all she could see was darkness.\nA few years later, when she was about to start university, she realised that she liked science because it gave her certainty. Specifically, chemistry. Atoms and chemical reactions were easier to understand than people. But it was the 1950s and women were not considered good enough. Women were mostly housewives and secretaries, not scientists, engineers or pilots.\nShe completed her undergraduate and master\u0026rsquo;s degrees with honours and decided to do a Ph.D. But soon after she started, her tutor tried to sexually abuse her, and because the professor was very powerful and women were treated unfairly, there was not even a trial. Elizabeth was forced to leave her university and drop out of her PhD. She looked for other PhD programmes but found none. The only way she could do science was to join an institute that offered an assistantship called Hastings, where she would work in a lab with scientists.\nConditions were far from ideal. She was not treated well at her new job and had to fight for everything, but at least people let her work on science, her passion. One day, while eating lunch in the cafeteria, she met Calvin Harris, one of the world\u0026rsquo;s most celebrated scientists. They quickly became friends. Harris, who also had a terrible childhood, was intelligent and kind. He was always supportive of Elizabeth, as was her older brother John. They spent a lot of time together, sharing many ideas and working together on research projects. It was the first time in a long time that she felt deeply understood. They quickly fell in love. She was happy. But one day everything changed.\nHarris died in an accident, leaving her alone and devastated. Hastings stripped Harris of everything connected with him, including his lab team and funding. And because Elizabeth was dependent on Harris, she was fired. Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully to find another job, and as a result she ran out of money. She discovered she was pregnant and would soon be a single mother. Things were looking bleak, but giving up was not in Elizabeth\u0026rsquo;s nature. Her daughter, Mad, and her love of chemistry would save her. And also cooking, which had always interested her because she believed it was the same as chemistry. With no job and a lot of free time, she did what different and innovative people do: combine unrelated ideas in unexpected and never-before-seen ways, resulting in original creations. Using unexplored techniques together with her in-depth knowledge of chemistry, she created new recipes that had never been seen before.\nAfter catching the eye of a friend who worked as a television director, Elizabeth was offered to host a cooking show: Dinner at Six. She would cook one meal a day and discuss the importance of healthy eating with potentially millions of people watching. Elizabeth didn\u0026rsquo;t like the idea, but she needed the money, so she accepted. When she was at school, no one knew her. Now things were different. At first the show did not do well and was on the verge of being cancelled. But people began to love the originality of Elizabeth, whose recipes and analogies between chemistry and cooking blew the audience away.\nAgainst all odds, the show became a national success and Elizabeth was deeply admired. But after several successful years, Elizabeth decided to quit the show because she never wanted to be a national TV star. All she wanted was to do science, her true passion. Elizabeth occasionally sent encouraging messages to the audience, and on the last day of the show she sent a special one:\n\u0026ldquo;Whenever you start doubting yourself or feeling afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change, and change is what we\u0026rsquo;re chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to other\u0026rsquo;s opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion. Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies. Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what you will change. And then get started.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen we feel inspired by someone, it is not just because of what they do or how they do it. It\u0026rsquo;s also because of why they do it. Elizabeth was excellent at cooking and used innovative techniques, but the most important thing was the principles and values she embodied. She didn\u0026rsquo;t accept the status quo, rejecting and challenging all preconceived notions about what women could do. Elizabeth believed that there is hidden potential inside every person, and she used cooking to help people discover how to unleash it. Elizabeth experienced many setbacks throughout her life but didn\u0026rsquo;t get stuck in the past. That\u0026rsquo;s what all her audience saw, making Elizabeth so admired. She knew it was not what happens to you that matters but your reaction to these experiences. That means the key is your willingness to embrace and adopt change and get started, no matter what.\n\u0026ldquo;Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what you will change. And then get started.\u0026rdquo; ~ Elizabett Zoth, Lessons in Chemistry.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/create_future/","summary":"SPOILER ALERT: This blogpost is based on the book Lessons In Chemistry and contains spoilers.\nElizabeth Zott hated being in class, sitting at a desk listening to monotonous teachers talking about boring subjects. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t that she didn\u0026rsquo;t enjoy learning. She loved it. But all the learning there was based on memorisation, and Elizabeth liked creativity. Elizabeth also disliked her classmates who did not share her hobbies. And all this made her suffer.","title":"Create your own future"},{"content":"This is a excerpt from the graduation speech that John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, delivered at his son\u0026rsquo;s high school in Cardigan on 3 June 2017:\nFrom time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice.\nI hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty.\nSorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted.\nI wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either.\nAnd when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship.\nI hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion.\nWhether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/i_wish-you_bad_luck/","summary":"This is a excerpt from the graduation speech that John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, delivered at his son\u0026rsquo;s high school in Cardigan on 3 June 2017:\nFrom time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice.\nI hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty.","title":"I wish you bad luck by John Roberts"},{"content":"Edith and her sister Magda achieved what seemed impossible: to get out of Auschwitz alive. They survived the most lethal Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where nearly one million people died. But they were not free. Not yet. When Nazi Germany was on the verge of defeat, the SS organized “death marches”, forced evacuations of concentration camps over long distances under guard and extremely harsh conditions.\nEdith and Magda were moved to other concentration camps like Mauthausen, where prisoners were made to hack and carry granite to construct Hitler\u0026rsquo;s desired new capital for Germany. Mauthausen was also known for the Stairs of Death, where prisoners were forced to climb 186 with 110-pound granite blocks on their backs. Here, Edith came very close to death.\nAfter Mauthausen came another concentration camp, Gunskirchen. It was less fearsome than Auschwitz or Mauthausen because it was not an extermination camp, and there were no crematoria or Stairs of Death, but prisoners there were on the brink of collapse. The many years of war, the inhuman conditions under which they were held in the concentration camps, and the brutality of the death marches began to take its toll. It was just too much. They were almost living corpses, and it was just a matter of time before they would die.\nIn Gunskirchen, things started to get very ugly for Edith. She couldn’t do it anymore. Knowing that the end was near, she lay down on one of the many piles of corpses and waited for the end. But then something remarkable happened.\nThe Americans liberated the camp, and a soldier, almost by chance, found Edith half-dead among the pile of corpses. Edith was rescued and taken safely along with the rest of the survivors. The moment Edith had been waiting for since she entered Auschwitz almost one year ago had come. Freedom. She was free. And on top of that, her sister Magda also survived! Both were free.\nHowever, their situation was far from ideal. When Edith and her sister were liberated, almost everyone they knew and loved had died. Both were starving and severely malnourished. Edith later discovered that, due to physical abuse, her back was broken. She had tiffus, pneumonia, and pleuritis. The shock had been so great that she even had to relearn how to write and read. Only seventeen years old, she and her sister had lived through one of the greatest atrocities in human history. Edith was free, but healing would take much longer.\nAnd now what? In a recent podcast interview, Edith was asked about Auschwitz. She said, “Auschwitz was an opportunity for an opportunity. An opportunity to discover the power within me, that no Nazi could ever take away from me.”\nThat’s quite profound. Part of the admiration that I feel for Edith comes from the fact that she went from experiencing such terrible things to seeing Auschwitz, almost 80 years later, as an opportunity to improve as a human being. I want to understand what it takes to get to that level of wisdom, and that’s why I recently wrote about Edith’s insights about the power of choice and the difference between victimhood and victimization. In this blog post, I will discuss one idea critical to understanding Edith’s healing.\nSurvivors don’t have time to ask, Why me? For survivors, the only relevant question is What now?\nIt doesn’t matter if you are a survivor; this question affects you because it is about the difference between living stuck in the past or focusing on the present and future. This distinction is crucial because it will define the type of person you become and what you get out of life.\nAs Edith says in her book The Gift, “We ask \u0026lsquo;Why?\u0026rsquo; over and over, believing that if we could figure out the reason, the pain would lessen. Why did I get cancer? Why did I lose my job? Why did my partner have an affair? We search for answers, for understanding, as if there’s a logical reason to explain why things happened the way they did. But when we ask why, we’re stuck searching for someone or something to blame—including ourselves.”\nWe all have experienced at some point something that sucks, and we all have regrets and could name a few things we would do differently today. Sometimes, it’s gone too far, and we feel like we need time to process these negative experiences, and that’s fine. But don’t take too much time because being stuck in the past wishing things to be different doesn’t help. There is a Buddhist parable that goes as follows:\nSuppose a man is struck by a poisoned arrow and the doctor wishes to take out the arrow immediately. Suppose the man does not want the arrow removed until he knows who shot it, his age, his parents, and why he shot it. What would happen? If he were to wait until all these questions had been answered, the man might die first.\nThat’s what happens when we get stuck in the past asking, “Why me?”. This short story perfectly illustrates the consequences of being stuck in the past and how pointless it is to care for things that don’t matter.\nThink again about Edith. With all she had to go through, she could have let hate or fear consume her, or she could have been stuck in the past, blaming Hitler for all the problems in her life. And it would be understandable, but she did the opposite: she realized the past can’t be changed and that sometimes there is only one thing you can do: focus on the present moment and look ahead.\nAs she says in her book The Gift, “When I ask, \u0026lsquo;What now?\u0026rsquo; instead of \u0026lsquo;Why me?\u0026rsquo; I stop focusing on why this bad thing happened—or is happening—and start paying attention to what I can do with my experience.”\nThat’s one of the reasons why she’s so inspiring, and I believe Edith is the standard for how anyone should recover from hardship. Pause for a moment and reflect on how far you could get if you started paying attention to the present moment instead of wasting time and energy on the past. If instead of trying to change what can’t be changed, you focus on what can be done to improve the situation at hand. I would say you could achieve things you now consider impossible.\nDo you know Amelia Earhart? She had the dream of becoming the first women aviator. But being a woman in the 1920s was not easy, especially if you wanted to become an aviator. She had to overcome gender stereotypes, financial constraints, and even several flying accidents. She was mocked, denied, and underestimated.\nBut in 1932, after years of defying the odds, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. This was an incredible feat, accomplished only by a select group of people. She went on to broke different world records, becoming a historical figure in aviation. And more importantly, Amelia Earhart became an iconic figure for her determination and courage to push boundaries, her fight for women’s rights and her contributions to humanitarian efforts.\nBut what would Amelia have achieved if she had only focused on complaining about the unfair situation for women at that time? What if she had accepted the roles imposed by society and assumed that women could never fly? What if she had doubted herself?\nShe wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have achieved what she did and wouldn\u0026rsquo;t be Amelia Earhart. Imagine how mentally strong a person must be to do what she did. You can\u0026rsquo;t be normal and achieve what she did. When Amelia had to overcome challenges, what do you think she was most likely to say to herself: “Why me?” or “What now?” I think the answer is clear.\nOn the side of her plane Amelia Earhart painted the words, “Always move with your stick forward.” That’s it. Don’t ask why me. Don’t get stuck in the past. Ask what now. Always move with your stick forward.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/edith_4/","summary":"Edith and her sister Magda achieved what seemed impossible: to get out of Auschwitz alive. They survived the most lethal Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where nearly one million people died. But they were not free. Not yet. When Nazi Germany was on the verge of defeat, the SS organized “death marches”, forced evacuations of concentration camps over long distances under guard and extremely harsh conditions.\nEdith and Magda were moved to other concentration camps like Mauthausen, where prisoners were made to hack and carry granite to construct Hitler\u0026rsquo;s desired new capital for Germany.","title":"Edith Eger (IV): And now what?"},{"content":"Right after arriving at Auschwitz, Edith and her mother and sister were waiting in the selection line. They didn\u0026rsquo;t know it, but this would be their last moment together. While Edith and her sister Magda were sent to the left, their mother was sent to the right.\nWhen Edith, just sixteen, entered the camp and asked where her mother was, one of the women dressed in striped dresses pointed to the smoke rising up from one of the chimneys in the distance. \u0026ldquo;Your mother is burning there,\u0026rdquo; she said. \u0026ldquo;You better start talking about her in the past tense.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, Edith was found under a pile of dead bodies. Although she survived, almost everyone she knew and loved had been killed. That really hit me, and even more because when she experienced that, and I read her book, we were about the same age. It made me reflect a lot on everything that I had.\nI had never been very grateful. As a driven person, I always focused on what I didn\u0026rsquo;t have. Forget anything that means slowing down, I thought, because it\u0026rsquo;s an obstacle to getting more done. I never liked gratitude. I believed that being healthy or having family and friends were things I was supposed to have, as if they belonged to me. I was wrong.\nWhat happened to Edith opened my eyes to the fact that everything you have could disappear at any moment. I realized I took many things for granted, and I felt regret. What if I lost a loved one, or became terribly ill? Appreciating something only after losing it is terrible, and I felt shame. I needed to learn to appreciate what I had, so I became interested in developing a gratitude practice.\nPracticing gratitude is an ongoing process that requires daily work, but it is worth it. Shortly after arriving at Auschwitz, Edith understood, for the first time in her life, that she had a choice: to pay attention to what she lost or to pay attention to what she still had. Gratitude is also a choice, and I decided to practice gratitude every day. After several years, here\u0026rsquo;s what I learned.\nGratitude has improved my interpersonal relationships, especially with family and friends. That you have them shouldn\u0026rsquo;t be considered as something ordinary, but rather exceptional. Feeling grateful has motivated me to treat them with love and kindness and to try to help them when needed. It doesn\u0026rsquo;t have to be something extraordinary; small details are enough to make a difference. Gratitude has also made spending time with my loved ones, especially family, much more enjoyable and meaningful. And this is priceless.\nIt has also changed my relationship with myself. There are several ways to practice gratitude; one is to visualize losing what you have. I like memento mori, an ancient practice of reflecting on your mortality. It sounds scary, but I believe awareness of death can improve your life.\nFor example, now I\u0026rsquo;m more conscious that my time is limited, so I treat it as a gift. Once you realize how valuable time is, not wasting it becomes easier. Another consequence of memento mori is that I live more with a sense of urgency. Reflecting on your mortality also helps you to distinguish between what is important and not, and living a more fulfilling life is easier when you can focus on what truly matters. And finally, because you always have in mind that your life will end one day, you are more likely to live with more meaning and purpose. As Confucius said, \u0026ldquo;Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one.\u0026rdquo;\nI like to see my life as a candle that could go out at any moment. I carefully hold it in my hands. It\u0026rsquo;s fragile. And I look at it with amazement. Gratitude has shown me it\u0026rsquo;s a gift. After all, being alive is truly a miracle. One day, the candle will go out, but until then, I want its flame to shine as brightly as possible.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/edith_3/","summary":"Right after arriving at Auschwitz, Edith and her mother and sister were waiting in the selection line. They didn\u0026rsquo;t know it, but this would be their last moment together. While Edith and her sister Magda were sent to the left, their mother was sent to the right.\nWhen Edith, just sixteen, entered the camp and asked where her mother was, one of the women dressed in striped dresses pointed to the smoke rising up from one of the chimneys in the distance.","title":"Edith Eger (III): Gratitude"},{"content":"When I started university, I met a girl. She was funny, pretty, and kind, and I completely fell in love with her. It was an amazing feeling. The problem was that I was very shy and introverted, and sometimes connecting with others wasn\u0026rsquo;t easy. Because I didn\u0026rsquo;t have confidence in myself, and I was the only one who seemed to have this issue, I assumed that something was wrong with me.\nAll these insecurities, and the fact that it was the first time I fell in love, made everything difficult. Our conversations were boring and superficial, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t find the way to get to know her. I wanted, but I didn\u0026rsquo;t know how. It was frustrating. A time later, I decided to tell her I was in love. She didn\u0026rsquo;t seem interested in me as much as I was in her, but I did it anyway. She said no, and that hurt.\nThis experience worsened my insecurities and led to me rejecting some parts of myself. Several months later, I was reading Edith\u0026rsquo;s book The Choice and found this.\nSuffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to be victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from outside.\nIn contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim\u0026rsquo;s mind – a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim\u0026rsquo;s mind.\nHer words about victimization and victimhood helped me understand myself better. I realized that part of my shyness came from caring too much about what others thought about me. That\u0026rsquo;s a victim\u0026rsquo;s mentality. Being hard on myself when I failed at something is also a victim\u0026rsquo;s mentality. Being stuck in the past, wishing that I did things differently, or when I blamed others when things didn\u0026rsquo;t go as I wanted, is also a victim\u0026rsquo;s mentality.\nEdith has another definition for developing a victim\u0026rsquo;s mind, \u0026ldquo;when we put the focus outside of ourselves,when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.\u0026rdquo; When that girl rejected me, I thought the main problem was that she didn\u0026rsquo;t love me, but I was wrong. I was putting the focus outside of myself. The desire to love and be loved is human, and there\u0026rsquo;s nothing wrong with that. But I realized that the only place where I was looking for affection and approval was on the outside. The most important relationship is the one you have with yourself, and I completely neglected this. That\u0026rsquo;s what I believe Edith meant when she said that we develop a victim\u0026rsquo;s mind when we place the focus outside of ourselves.\n\u0026ldquo;No one can take away from you what you\u0026rsquo;ve put in your mind.\u0026rdquo; These were the words Edith\u0026rsquo;s mother told her when they arrived at Auschwitz. These were also the words she repeated herself again and again when she needed to find strength under those terrible conditions.\nWhat happened to Edith was unfair and shameful. But in a situation where most people would have broken down, Edith persevered. She was victimized, but she refused to act like a victim. Somehow, she realized she had something that no one could take away from her: to give meaning to her own experience.\nEdith\u0026rsquo;s insights about how to deal with suffering are profound. They made even more sense to me when I discovered the story of the professional boxer Rubin Carter. In 1966, Rubin Carter was wrongly accused of a crime he did not commit, and after a biased trial, Carter was convicted of triple murder. Nineteen years and two trials later, he was released from prison.\nCarter, too, knew the difference between victimization and victimhood. Later in his life, he explained what he thought about his time in prison: \u0026ldquo;Go beyond yourself in these arduous conditions. Don\u0026rsquo;t give in to your captors. Realize this is an opportunity, instead of a tragedy. It\u0026rsquo;s an opportunity because now you don\u0026rsquo;t have […] all the trappings of civility. You have time; you have space on your hands. Use it.\u0026rdquo;\nEdith and Carter\u0026rsquo;s stories show that you may be experiencing something that sucks, but that doesn\u0026rsquo;t mean there is nothing you can do. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. That no one can make you a victim but you is a powerful idea, one like finding a retreat inside yourself. You are not powerless. You can choose how you respond, and this is always within reach.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/edith_2/","summary":"When I started university, I met a girl. She was funny, pretty, and kind, and I completely fell in love with her. It was an amazing feeling. The problem was that I was very shy and introverted, and sometimes connecting with others wasn\u0026rsquo;t easy. Because I didn\u0026rsquo;t have confidence in myself, and I was the only one who seemed to have this issue, I assumed that something was wrong with me.","title":"Edith Eger (II): The power within you"},{"content":"Edith Eger is a hero of mine. She was born in 1927 and grew up in Nazi-occupied Europe. When she was sixteen, Edith and her family were sent to Auschwitz. She and her sister Magda survived, but their parents and nearly everyone she loved did not. When the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, she was discovered under a pile of dead bodies. Edith was severely malnourished, and had a broken back, pneumonia, and typhoid fever, among others. After the war, she moved to the US and earned a degree in psychology. She went on to earn a Ph.D. and became an influential psychologist.\nShe is the author of two books. First, The Choice: Embrace the Possible, a memoir in which she tells her experiences during the Holocaust and how she was able to overcome trauma and find meaning in her life. And second, The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life. I read Edith\u0026rsquo;s book The Choice when I was nineteen, and it had a profound impact on me. Edith Eger is an inspiration to me. She is someone I deeply admire and who I look up to every day to improve as a human being.\nIn this series of this blog posts, I share some of the most valuable lessons she taught me, and how they have helped me. I write about gratitude, the power of choice, and the difference between victimization and victimhood. There are several more lessons to come, and I will upload them as I write them.\nThis series of articles on my blog is also my attempt to show my admiration and appreciation for her.\nYou have a choice Throughout my teens, I loved playing football, and I was in a club where I would train and compete every week. I have lots of beautiful memories of it, but competing was not easy. When the stakes were high, I would feel nervous and afraid to make mistakes. Pressure and expectations worsened things, and I couldn\u0026rsquo;t perform at my best or enjoy myself. I thought these situations meant something was wrong, and that the solution was to avoid them. But Edith\u0026rsquo;s story showed me the opposite.\nEach moment in Auschwitz was hell on earth. It was also my best classroom. Subjected to loss, torture, starvation, and the constant threat of death, I discovered the tools for survival and freedom that I continue to use every day in my clinical psychology practice as well as in my own life.\nI could focus on what I held in my mind. I could respond, not react. Auschwitz provided the opportunity to discover my inner strength and my power of choice. I learned to rely on parts of myself I would otherwise never have known were there.\nEdith taught me that we always have a choice. She says, \u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s not what happens to us that matters most, it\u0026rsquo;s what we do with our experiences.\u0026rdquo; And that\u0026rsquo;s a choice. I believed that the pressure I felt while playing important matches was an obstacle, but I realized I could choose to see pressure as an opportunity, an indicator that I was doing something difficult and worth it. Instead of running away from it, I could embrace it.\nThis idea doesn\u0026rsquo;t only apply to sports but to life in general. If Edith saw a place like Auschwitz as an opportunity to discover her inner strength, maybe I could also choose to embrace any painful experience. This insight was empowering, but when I was under pressure or paralyzed by fear, the idea that we have a choice was not enough to change my behavior. Going to the places that scare you takes courage, and I lacked something. One of the main reasons why Edith believed she survived Auschwitz was hope, which she defines as \u0026ldquo;the awareness that suffering, however terrible, is temporary; and the curiosity to discover what happens next.\u0026rdquo;\nHope was all I needed. Now, I can choose to see obstacles as opportunities and consider any experience, painful or not, as my teacher. This will cause me to suffer, but meaning and purpose are within reach if I embrace whatever happens without fighting or resisting. That suffering is temporary, and more manageable because it has meaning. I can choose what I hold in my mind, I can choose to approach whatever happens with curiosity, and I can choose that my source of wisdom is the present moment.\nThe foundation of freedom is the power to choose. – Edith Eger\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/edith_1/","summary":"Edith Eger is a hero of mine. She was born in 1927 and grew up in Nazi-occupied Europe. When she was sixteen, Edith and her family were sent to Auschwitz. She and her sister Magda survived, but their parents and nearly everyone she loved did not. When the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, she was discovered under a pile of dead bodies. Edith was severely malnourished, and had a broken back, pneumonia, and typhoid fever, among others.","title":"Edith Eger (I): You have a choice"},{"content":"In 1914, Ernest Shackleton chose one of the most audacious goals at that time: make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. It was inconceivable that a group of people could do that. And they failed, but are not remembered as a failure—quite the opposite.\nJust a couple of months after their departure, Shackleton\u0026rsquo;s trip, the Endurance, became trapped in ice and eventually sank. They spent several months in the harsh Antarctic, isolated from human civilization, trying to survive under extreme conditions with temperatures reaching minus 40º and winds reaching up to 200 km/h. Their food and supplies were limited, forcing them to rely on hunting and foraging. Survival was almost impossible, and the physical and mental strain compounded over time. They also had to deal with the incredibly tough circumstances of the Antarctic Sea, one of the most dangerous on Earth. And these only represent a small portion of the obstacles they overcame.\nDespite all of it, Shackleton and his crew managed to survive. Shackleton\u0026rsquo;s Endurance Voyage is considered one of the most epic survival stories in the history of exploration. Not only that, but their story is also an example of leadership, resilience, accountability, and attitude, among others.\nHere are some ideas that struck me while reading the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing, which tells the story of Shackleton\u0026rsquo;s Endurance Voyage.\nHope After the Endurance sank, everyone felt discouraged because the chances of survival were very low. I couldn\u0026rsquo;t stop thinking about how the crew would respond, and I asked myself repeatedly: most people in their situation would have given up, why did they keep pushing?\nThat is the same question I asked myself while reading the stories of Viktor Frankl or Edith Eger when they were in Auschwitz. They also endured the impossible, and yet, they survived. In his book Man\u0026rsquo;s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl discussed how hope influenced prisoner\u0026rsquo;s life at the concentration camp.\n\u0026ldquo;The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year\u0026rsquo;s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance, and a great number of them died.\u0026rdquo;\nHope was vital to surviving in the concentration camps. And hope also played an essential role in the survival of Shackleton and his crew because it helped them to keep going despite the extreme circumstances. They were very close to death a couple of times when the weather conditions were terrible or food was lacking, but they always expected things to improve. They never lost hope, which I think partially explains why they survived.\n\u0026ldquo;The quality I look for most is optimism: especially optimism in the face of reverses and apparent defeat. Optimism is true moral courage.\u0026rdquo; – Ernest Shackleton.\nLearn to deal with uncertainty Another thing that struck me was that their survival didn\u0026rsquo;t depend on them. Under these extreme circumstances, there were too many variables outside their control. They would eventually die if they needed food and did not find penguins or killer whales. If the ocean was rough and they didn\u0026rsquo;t find any igloos to take refuge, they would also die. And on and on.\nYet, they persevered. Did they feel overwhelmed or scared? Yes, of course. But they focused on what was under their control and tried to make the best out of every situation. They would not have survived if they hadn\u0026rsquo;t accepted uncertainty.\nHave plans and expect them to fail Not a second went by without them thinking about reaching human civilization. But as with any audacious goal, they needed to break their plan into smaller ones and work on them step by step. Because of the harsh and unpredictable environment they were in, their plans almost always failed.\nShackleton would not waste a single minute complaining. He would immediately create another plan and work on it. It struck me because, in our daily lives, when something doesn\u0026rsquo;t go as expected, we often get stuck in the past, complain, and wish things to be different. If we do that, the plan was probably useless because the unexpected usually happens. As Morgan Housel writes in his book The Psychology of Money, \u0026ldquo;Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan, not going according to the plan.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen a new problem appears, focus on solving it. As Shackleton once said, \u0026ldquo;Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.\u0026rdquo;\nBe accountable As the head of the crew, Shackleton knew he was responsible for the crew\u0026rsquo;s safety. His decisions could mean the difference between survival and death. The point of view of the rest of the team was indeed considered, but he was the one who had the last word. He knew some of his decisions would be wrong and others would be seen as risky. This could create problems inside the crew, which is a big problem under their circumstances, but he was very good at dealing with people and keeping them motivated.\nLeadership implies accountability, which involves an amount of pressure that very few people can handle. It is mentioned in the book that this pressure affected Shackleton, who seemed to be mentally exhausted. That\u0026rsquo;s why being a leader is a role not everyone wants to assume. But someone needed to do it, and Shackleton did it exceptionally well.\n\u0026ldquo;If you\u0026rsquo;re a leader, a fellow that other fellows look to, you have to keep going.\u0026rdquo; – Ernest Shackleton.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/shackleton/","summary":"In 1914, Ernest Shackleton chose one of the most audacious goals at that time: make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. It was inconceivable that a group of people could do that. And they failed, but are not remembered as a failure—quite the opposite.\nJust a couple of months after their departure, Shackleton\u0026rsquo;s trip, the Endurance, became trapped in ice and eventually sank. They spent several months in the harsh Antarctic, isolated from human civilization, trying to survive under extreme conditions with temperatures reaching minus 40º and winds reaching up to 200 km/h.","title":"By endurance we conquer"},{"content":"Do difficult things every day. Step out of your comfort zone daily because that will callous your mind. Sounds good, so I researched cold showers and discovered they have been shown to have several benefits, including reduced inflammation, reduced stress levels, boosted energy, increased immunity, and enhanced focus, among others. And because I considered them as self-imposed torture, I decided to take cold showers every morning. Then, everything went differently than planned.\nThe first cold showers were manageable, but after a few days, they were getting progressively hotter and shorter. Mental discomfort increased, and the initial excitement I felt after discovering the benefits of cold showers morphed into self-doubt. My list of excuses to give up piled up, and as usually happens when creating new habits, I was about to quit.\nReaching our limit is not some kind of punishment. It\u0026rsquo;s actually a sign of health that, when we meet the place where we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling. A further sign of health is that we don\u0026rsquo;t become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it\u0026rsquo;s time to stop struggling and look directly at what\u0026rsquo;s threatening us. Things like disappointment and anxiety are messengers telling us that we\u0026rsquo;re about to go into unknown territory.\nPema Chödron, When Things Fall Apart\nResistance I would define my experience before the cold shower as a state of agitation that biased me toward inaction through excuses, self-doubt, anxiety, and procrastination. A voice that prevented me from behaving differently, which is not specific to cold showers at all. It also appears when you decide to take on a new challenge but wonder if it is too audacious, when you need to work hard on a project and don\u0026rsquo;t feel like it, or when you consider asking someone out and fear of rejection stops you. So, you\u0026rsquo;d better learn to deal with it.\nSteven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, gives that voice a name: Resistance. He defines it as a force within you that prevents you from showing up as your best self. From working on a personal project. From doing things differently. From taking risks. According to Pressfield, Resistance is your greatest enemy, and the difference between amateurs and professionals in any endeavor boils down to beating it.\nHow it manifests is different for every person. For Pressfield, Resistance is \u0026ldquo;a voice in my head telling me why I can\u0026rsquo;t do something or why I should put it off for another day.\u0026rdquo; For others, it can be procrastination, self-doubt, fear of failure, inaction, ego, excuses, etc.\nAcknowledging the negative consequences of procrastination or fear of failure is an excellent first step, but that knowledge is not enough to beat Resistance. We need something more. We need to encounter that voice every day, and this is where cold showers help. As you may have guessed by now, this is not about cold showers. Cold showers are just a means to meet Resistance.\nOvercoming Resistance When things don\u0026rsquo;t go as expected, keeping the focus outside of yourself is easier. In the beginning, I believed cold showers were the problem. That\u0026rsquo;s Resistance. But after weeks, I decided to change my approach. When Resistance appears before and during the cold shower, it\u0026rsquo;s all about observing. My thoughts, my reactions, and how I deal with the situation. Some days I complain, argue that it doesn\u0026rsquo;t make sense, or get paralyzed. Some days I\u0026rsquo;m driven and find it easier. Other days I\u0026rsquo;m not motivated at all, and it feels painful. Why do I behave so differently from one day to another?\nObserving made me realize that it was more about me and my expectations than about cold showers themselves, and that we all have blindspots. Today I woke up and didn\u0026rsquo;t want to do it. Resistance told me it was cold and that there was no reason to do it. But I did it and felt good. It turns out I was wrong! Today, what drives me to take a cold shower every morning is curiosity; curiosity to discover how I misunderstand reality.\nWhat started as cold showers became something more profound and interesting. The idea of leaving space for the possibility that you are wrong and trying to observe rather than running away from painful feelings turns out to be the basic idea of meditation.\nIn practicing meditation, we\u0026rsquo;re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal—quite the opposite. We\u0026rsquo;re just being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that sometimes we have some kind of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then that\u0026rsquo;s our experience. If sometimes we can approach what scares us, and sometimes we absolutely can\u0026rsquo;t, then that\u0026rsquo;s our experience.\nThis very moment is the perfect teacher, and it\u0026rsquo;s always with us is really a profound instruction. Just seeing what\u0026rsquo;s going on—that\u0026rsquo;s the teaching right there. We can be with what\u0026rsquo;s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.\nHow we regard what arises in meditation is training for how we regard whatever arises in the rest of our lives.\nPema Chödron, When Things Fall Apart\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/cold_showers/","summary":"Do difficult things every day. Step out of your comfort zone daily because that will callous your mind. Sounds good, so I researched cold showers and discovered they have been shown to have several benefits, including reduced inflammation, reduced stress levels, boosted energy, increased immunity, and enhanced focus, among others. And because I considered them as self-imposed torture, I decided to take cold showers every morning. Then, everything went differently than planned.","title":"Why I take cold showers"},{"content":"You who are passing by\nI beg you\nDo something\nLearn a dance step\nSomething to justify your existence\nSomething that gives you the right\nTo be dressed in your skin in your body\nLearn to walk and to laugh\nBecause it would be too senseless\nAfter all\nFor many to have died\nWhile you live\nDoing nothing with your life\nAuschwitz survivor Charlotte\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/charlotte_poem/","summary":"You who are passing by\nI beg you\nDo something\nLearn a dance step\nSomething to justify your existence\nSomething that gives you the right\nTo be dressed in your skin in your body\nLearn to walk and to laugh\nBecause it would be too senseless\nAfter all\nFor many to have died\nWhile you live\nDoing nothing with your life\nAuschwitz survivor Charlotte","title":"You who are passing by"},{"content":" Feeling ready to do something does not mean feeling certain that you\u0026rsquo;ll succeed, though of course that\u0026rsquo;s what you are hoping to do. Truly being ready means understanding what could go wrong – and having a plan to deal with it.\nChris Hadfield, An Astronaut\u0026rsquo;s Guide to Life on Earth\nEliud Kipchoge is considered the greatest marathon runner of all time. As with the most iconic athletes, the principles and values they embody are far more relevant than their achievements. In a speech at the Oxford Union in early 2018, Kipchoge said, \u0026ldquo;I believe in a philosophy that says to win is not important. To be successful is not even important. How to plan and prepare is critical and crucial. When you plan very well, then success can come on your way. Then winning can come on your way.\u0026rdquo;\nIt\u0026rsquo;s natural to feel inspired by him, but how can we prepare and become more competent? It depends on what we want to accomplish, but we can follow some general guidelines. In this post, we will explore the practice of thinking negatively.\nThink negatively In his book, An Astronaut\u0026rsquo;s Guide to Life on Earth, retired NASA astronaut Chris Hadfield explains that one of the best ways to prepare is to practice \u0026ldquo;The power of negative thinking.\u0026rdquo;\nAs he mentions in his book from his training program at NASA, \u0026ldquo;trainers in the space program specialize in devising bad-news scenarios for us to act out, over and over again, in increasingly elaborate simulations. We practice what we\u0026rsquo;ll do if there\u0026rsquo;s engine trouble, a computer meltdown, an explosion.\u0026rdquo; These simulations play a significant role in Chris Hadfield\u0026rsquo;s understanding of competence. He continues, \u0026ldquo;Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on-to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences- really works. After a few years of doing that pretty much daily, you\u0026rsquo;ve forged the strongest possible armor to defend against fear: hard-won competence.\u0026rdquo;\nWhen the stakes are high, as with space exploration, nothing can be left to chance — every detail matters because the mission\u0026rsquo;s success and the astronaut\u0026rsquo;s survival depends on it — and these simulations made astronauts more competent.\nOne could argue that these simulations are not critical for competence because reality is very complex, and sooner than later, unexpected things happen. If that\u0026rsquo;s the case, what\u0026rsquo;s the point of devising bad news scenarios? The key is to see beyond the simulations themselves. The most interesting lesson was not about learning to deal with a computer meltdown or an explosion (which, by the way, was extremely important because it could be lifesaving) but the learning process that came after that.\nOnce the simulations were carried out, astronauts could analyze their decisions, listen to feedback, and look for areas of improvement. Maybe they performed poorly under pressure, or the crew could have cooperated more efficiently. Or perhaps these simulations made astronauts realize that making good decisions with limited information in a hostile environment is highly complicated. These lessons could be the key to competence; they apply to a specific simulation, and any challenge astronauts may encounter during their future missions. When the unexpected happens, not only in space exploration but also in life, knowing how to thrive under pressure or make good decisions with uncertainty could make a difference.\nThinking negatively also teaches you another critical lesson: the obsession with detail. When simulating bad scenarios, you are constantly looking for potential problems, which can also be considered areas of improvement. This mindset is what it often takes to achieve competence in any endeavor and is what NASA trainers were seeking when making up simulations for astronauts.\nThe practice of negative thinking is not specific to astronauts. For Marcus Aurelius, being a roman emperor was not easy. He faced war, disease, and even a full-scale civil war. In addition, he was surrounded by senators and military members who didn\u0026rsquo;t share his values, didn\u0026rsquo;t want him as emperor, and even wanted him dead.\nIn his Meditations, he tells himself: \u0026ldquo;When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can\u0026rsquo;t tell good from evil … And so, none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him.\u0026rdquo;\nNothing was more important for Marcus Aurelius than what the stoics call the four virtues: courage, discipline, wisdom, and temperance. In the face of chaos, it is straightforward to be carried away by negative emotions and respond irrationally. By planning his day and recognizing the problematic people he would encounter, he was in a better mindset to react rationally and calmly. He practiced negative visualization not because he was pessimistic but because he wanted to be better prepared for difficult situations.\nThinking negatively: running a marathon Consider a non-experienced runner training for a marathon. Marathons are demanding, both physically and mentally. They require mental toughness, discipline, good physical health, and hours and hours of training. Injuries are one of the most common drawbacks when training for a marathon; no one is immune to them.\nHow can we think negatively to avoid getting an injury? Before starting your training regime, consider the possibility of you getting injured. Assume the usual thing is to get hurt somewhere along the way, not the opposite. And once you have visualized how things could go wrong, act out and try to prevent them. To do so, you could start with the following questions:\n• What are the most common injuries among marathon runners?\n• What are some leading causes of injuries, and how can they be avoided?\n• How can we reduce the probability of getting injured?\n• What will you do if you get injured?\nAnd then, act. Study the most common injuries among marathon runners: shin splints, back pain, stress fractures, or Runner\u0026rsquo;s knee. Second, try to understand why they happen; they may be due to a combination of different factors: improper running technique, lack of body mobility, insufficient muscle mass, inadequate running shoes, or overtraining, among others. Then, work on them one by one:\n• Add strengthening exercises to your routine to become stronger.\n• Add mobility and stretching exercises.\n• Schedule your workouts, leaving time to rest\n• Sleep well and eat healthily.\n• Make sure your running shoes are adequate.\n• Improve your running technique.\nYou may follow these rules and get injured, or not follow them and run a marathon injury-free. Does it mean you wasted your time? Not really. We can never be sure what will happen; some things remain outside our control. If you acted in a way that helped you move in the right direction, it\u0026rsquo;s okay.\nConclusion Sometimes visualizing how things could go wrong is complicated: we may feel fear, lack imagination, or prefer to assume things will always go our way. Don\u0026rsquo;t let all that stop you! The lessons you can learn from visualizing negative scenarios are definitively worth the effort. If astronauts, a roman emperor, or athletes can benefit from devising bad news scenarios and acting out, then the rest of us can. We all have room for improvement, and if there is something we can learn from these examples is that we are only limited by our willingness to improve.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/posts/think_negatively/","summary":"Feeling ready to do something does not mean feeling certain that you\u0026rsquo;ll succeed, though of course that\u0026rsquo;s what you are hoping to do. Truly being ready means understanding what could go wrong – and having a plan to deal with it.\nChris Hadfield, An Astronaut\u0026rsquo;s Guide to Life on Earth\nEliud Kipchoge is considered the greatest marathon runner of all time. As with the most iconic athletes, the principles and values they embody are far more relevant than their achievements.","title":"Thinking Negatively"},{"content":"Edith Eger \u0026ldquo;Our painful experiences aren\u0026rsquo;t a liability—they\u0026rsquo;re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s the first time I see that we have a choice: to pay attention to what we\u0026rsquo;ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Survivors don\u0026rsquo;t have time to ask, \u0026lsquo;Why me?\u0026rsquo; For survivors, the only relevant question is, \u0026lsquo;What now?\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo;\n“A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.”\nSuffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from outside. It\u0026rsquo;s the neighborhood bully, the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital.\nIn contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim\u0026rsquo;s mind \u0026ndash; a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim\u0026rsquo;s mind.\nViktor Frankl “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”\n“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”\n“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”\n“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”\nMarcus Aurelius “You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”\n“Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not \u0026lsquo;This is misfortune,\u0026rsquo; but \u0026lsquo;To bear this worthily is good fortune.\u0026rsquo;\u0026quot;\n“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”\n“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”\n“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”\n“Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”\n“Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.”\n“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”\nPema Chödron \u0026ldquo;It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving.\u0026rdquo;\nIn practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal—quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that sometimes we have some kind of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then that’s our experience. If sometimes we can approach what scares us, and sometimes we absolutely can’t, then that’s our experience.\nThis very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us is really a most profound instruction. Just seeing what’s going on—that’s the teaching right there. We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.\n\u0026ldquo;The point of meditation is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion—not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;How we regard what arises in meditation is training for how we regard whatever arises in the rest of our lives.\u0026rdquo;\nEverything that occurs is not only usable and workable but is actually the path itself. We can use everything that happens to us as the means for waking up. We can use everything that occurs—whether it’s our conflicting emotions and thoughts or our seemingly outer situation—to show us where we are asleep and how we can wake up completely, utterly, without reservations.\nThis is a very encouraging teaching, because it says that the source of wisdom is whatever is going to happen to us today. The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant. If there’s any possibility for enlightenment, it’s right now, not at some future time. Now is the time.\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/quotes/","summary":"Edith Eger \u0026ldquo;Our painful experiences aren\u0026rsquo;t a liability—they\u0026rsquo;re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;It\u0026rsquo;s the first time I see that we have a choice: to pay attention to what we\u0026rsquo;ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.\u0026rdquo;\n\u0026ldquo;Survivors don\u0026rsquo;t have time to ask, \u0026lsquo;Why me?\u0026rsquo; For survivors, the only relevant question is, \u0026lsquo;What now?\u0026rsquo;\u0026rdquo;","title":"Favorite ideas"},{"content":"This is Andres. dekfksdskdfndkn\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/about/","summary":"This is Andres. dekfksdskdfndkn","title":"Me"},{"content":"2024 01 Nov \u0026ndash; The Power of Urgency\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Aim high\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Embrace discomfort\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Ask good questions\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Take a step back\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; The power of incentives\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Aim to be a zero\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Who are you becoming\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; The Choice of Hercules\n2023 18 Nov \u0026ndash; Create your own future\n03 Oct \u0026ndash; I wish you bad luck by John Roberts\n27 May \u0026ndash; Edith Eger (IV): And now what?\n16 Apr \u0026ndash; Edith Eger (III): Gratitude\n16 Apr \u0026ndash; Edith Eger (II): The power within you\n16 Apr \u0026ndash; Edith Eger (I): You have a choice\n14 Feb \u0026ndash; By endurance we conquer\n13 Feb \u0026ndash; Why I take cold showers\n07 Feb \u0026ndash; You who are passing by\n04 Feb \u0026ndash; Thinking Negatively\n","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/archive/","summary":"2024 01 Nov \u0026ndash; The Power of Urgency\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Aim high\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Embrace discomfort\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Ask good questions\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Take a step back\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; The power of incentives\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Aim to be a zero\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; Who are you becoming\n01 Jan \u0026ndash; The Choice of Hercules\n2023 18 Nov \u0026ndash; Create your own future\n03 Oct \u0026ndash; I wish you bad luck by John Roberts","title":"Posts Archive"},{"content":"Next Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell Outlive: The science and art of longevity by Dr Peter Attia The beginning of infinity by David Deutsch The Artist\u0026rsquo;s Way by Julia Cameron Books read Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish Awaken your genius by Ozan Varol Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol Elon Musk by Walter Issacson Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke Courage is Calling by Ryan Holiday Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday Crea y Divaga by Jeff Bezos Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzennegger Same as Ever: A guide to what never changes by Morgan Housel El arte de la estratagema by Giorgio Nardone Mastery By Robert Greene The science of storytelling by Will Stor The Song of Achiles by Madeline Miller Meditations by Marcus Aurelius When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödron How to meditate by Pema Chödron Can\u0026rsquo;t Hurt Me by David Goggins The Gift: 12 lessons to save your life by Edith Eger The Choice: A true story of hope by Edith Eger Atomic Habits by James Clear Be Water, My Friend by Shannon Lee Man\u0026rsquo;s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl The War of Art by Steven Pressfield The Midnigth Library by Matt Haig How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robertson The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday The Art of a Good Life by William B.Irvine How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov AI Superpowers. China, Silicon Valley and the new world order by Kai-Fu Lee Seven and a half lessons about the brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett The Art of War by Sun Tzu The Proof is in the Plants by Simon Hill Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari 21 lessons for the 21st century by Yuval Noah Harari Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz Factfulness by Hans Rosling Siddhartha by Herman Hesse Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 1984 by George Orwell Animal Farm by George Orwell The Code Breakers by Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson The Innovators by Walter Isaacson El día que se perdió la cordura by Javier Castillo Endurance: La prisión blanca: El legendario viaje de Shackleton al Polo Sur by Alfred Lansing Bajo el Aro by Pau Gasol El libro Negro del Emprendedor by Fernando Trias de Bes Iwoz. Steve Wozniak, De Genio De La Informática A Icono De Culto by Steve Wozniak An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield The future of Humanity by Micho kaku Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie The future of Humanity by Micho kaku The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel Elon Musk: El empresario que anticipa el futuro by Ashley Vance El legado de Mandela: Quince enseñanzas sobre la vida, el amor y el valor by Richard Stengel Zero To One. Notes On Start Ups, Or How To Build The Future by Peter Thiel The Myth of Artificial Intelligence by Erik J Larson ","permalink":"https://andresruizc.github.io/andresr/reading_list/","summary":"Next Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell Outlive: The science and art of longevity by Dr Peter Attia The beginning of infinity by David Deutsch The Artist\u0026rsquo;s Way by Julia Cameron Books read Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish Awaken your genius by Ozan Varol Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol Elon Musk by Walter Issacson Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke Courage is Calling by Ryan Holiday Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday Crea y Divaga by Jeff Bezos Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzennegger Same as Ever: A guide to what never changes by Morgan Housel El arte de la estratagema by Giorgio Nardone Mastery By Robert Greene The science of storytelling by Will Stor The Song of Achiles by Madeline Miller Meditations by Marcus Aurelius When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödron How to meditate by Pema Chödron Can\u0026rsquo;t Hurt Me by David Goggins The Gift: 12 lessons to save your life by Edith Eger The Choice: A true story of hope by Edith Eger Atomic Habits by James Clear Be Water, My Friend by Shannon Lee Man\u0026rsquo;s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl The War of Art by Steven Pressfield The Midnigth Library by Matt Haig How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robertson The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday The Art of a Good Life by William B.","title":"Reading"}]