Recruiting Animal

Assuming Without Experience

From: Christine Cavalier, Fear of Facebook (edited)

In her Hearts and Homes column on page 18 of Wallace’s Farmer periodical published on October 23, 1908, Mrs. Henry Wallace of Des Moines, Iowa, writes about her change of heart toward automobiles:

“At one time I was foolish enough to say I would never ride in an automobile.

"It is an illustration of the fact that we sometimes say things do things and later find we were mistaken.

"The time came when an automobile came into the family and I was invited to share a seat.

"It was not long until my ideas of automobiles and automobile riding were entirely reconstructed. …

"It is another illustration of the fact that we live and learn.”

 

Clean Up After Work

From: Thanh Pham

In restaurants, cleaning the grill is very important.

Before the restaurant closes, the cooks always clean the grill so the next day when they come in it is ready for use.

When you clean up your work space, the next time you use it there will be no obstacle to clear before you can start work.

Comment: Pham gives this a fancy name: Clearing To Neutral. I suppose a novel frame might encourage people to see something humdrum as intriguing.

 

 

Meet Extremism With Toughness

From David Frum. (edited)

In any conflict between extremists and non-extremists, the non-extremists start with one serious disadvantage. They tend to be conflict-averse.

Moderate-minded people tend naturally to be people of moderate temperament. When they encounter rage, hate, and paranoia, they flinch.

Extremists, on the other hand, delight in conflict.

Simply by being louder and nastier, they bully the non-extremists into silence, acquiescence, or exit.

What America needs now are moderate-minded people who are also tough-minded - who won't be shrieked down and who won't be intimidated.

Civility cannot mean: you yell, I yield.

It's not enough to have greater wisdom and greater tolerance if you don't also muster courage, endurance, and the will to win.

 

Hitting Bottom

From: A Lie about My Father by John Burnside - review by Hilary Mantel

The road of excess leads not to the palace of wisdom, but to the psychiatric ward.

What a long time the slide to oblivion takes. . .  It is a comforting lie, he says, that an addict hits the bottom and then bounces back. You can bump along the bottom for years.

 

User-Documented Exercise Program

This is an amazing product of the internet age.

An ordinary couple decides to do an exercise program so they document it on video from start to finish and put it online.

First they buy it online

They tape themselves doing the full program day by day and although they are not in bad shape to begin with they don't look cool like the trainers do.

So, while they seem to be in Mayberry (small town USA) you can find out how the program works for ordinary people no matter where you are.

It's useful and it just wasn't possible to get this kind of review and guidance in the past from ordinary people who are not advertising the product but using it.

They have a number of intro videos. I've included a few. You can find all of their videos in reverse order here.

They appear to have stopped posting after Day 20 but it's still a very interesting idea.

Intro 1 - Intro 2 -- Intro 3 -- Intro 4 - Day 1 - Day 2  - Day 3 - Day 4 - Day 5 - Day 6 - Rest Day - Day 8 - 1st week Review - Day 9 - Day 10 - Day 11 - Day 12 - Day 13 - Day 15 - Day 16 - Day 17 - Day 19 - Day 20 

In the videos you can see the couple unboxing the CD's and now that I think of it this brings to mind many videos I've seen of people unboxing their electronic equipment and commenting on the parts.

This is an incredibly useful sharing of information by ordinary people.

There is a problem for people outside the USA, however. One commenter said that the Insane Exercise Program is not shipped outside the USA and I noticed on ButiFitness.com that you have to email them for shipping rates outside of the USA.

See also: BUTI Fitness Training

 

BUTI Exercise Plan

Basic Moves Video

Basic Moves - Slideshow

Sample Tone Workout

Tone Workout B

Sculpt Workout

Instructor Training

Video Ad

News Report 

Real People - doesn't look the same

Company site - You can buy videos of the program - or you can sign up for live classes and participate virtually from your home. I find that totally amazing. I'm familiar with Google Hangout and webinars and Skype but not fee-based participation in physical education.

Plyometrics - Explanation - This is one of the sources of her program

See also: User-documented exercise program

 

Success Without Talent

From: CNNmoney Why talent is overrated. Geoff Colvin, October 21, 2008 (edited)

Deliberate Practice is a skill-improvement technique. It's creators claim that success is not based on talent but intensive practice of specific skills. Here's how you do it.

1. Isolate one aspect of performance.

Identify a well-defined element of your performance that needs to be improved. Be very specific and focus on that one thing until it improves.

Good Grooming and Success

From: Voxxi

Comment: That's an incredibly shallow comment. If she's a good person, it shouldn't matter whether she has "sex appeal".

Comment: We want to have sex with good looking persons, not with Mother Theresa, it is a fact of life.

Comment: If I were Holly Petraeus, I would consider this affair a wake up a call and take action. I would:

1. Get on the elliptical machine daily.

2. Hire a trainer and get on an exercise and healthy food regimen

3.Go to George of the Four Seasons in DC (or another top hairstylist) and get a plan for my hair cut and color and implement it how he suggests. Get a French manicure while you're there.

4. Find a great makeup artist and implement a plan for day and evening makeup

5. Hire an image consultant to do a complete wardrobe redesign. You can make some immediate impacting changes and then more as you see the results from the work out plan . Even conservative clothes manufacturers like Talbots have great looking, eye catching outfits.

I would implement all five steps immediately - you can afford to do it.

Genius Doctors

From: More than You Wanted To Know About My Heart Attack (edited)

Two doctors and an emergency room visit later, I still had no answer to why I was shaking, short of breath and could barely walk at times from weakness.

One emergency room doctor refused to look at my abnormal EKG when I came to the hospital; he was too busy dealing with a female coke addict and decided that I was another example of an anxious woman having a panic attack.

I finally persuaded my regular doctor to quit prescibing me Effexor (an antidepressant) and to look at my heart. He finally sent me for tests. He called back and told me to get to the hospital.

Split-Shift Sleep

From: New York Times, Rethinking Sleep by Dave Randall Sept 22, 2012, (edited)

History prof Roger Ekirch noticed references to split-shift sleep in historical literature. People would sleep for awhile then wake up for awhile and then go back to sleep again.

A character in the “Canterbury Tales” decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.”

A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection.

A 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love.

At the same time, Tommy Wehr, a psychiatrist, was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light.

At first, the subjects slept through the night. Then they began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern Ekirch saw in historical records and literature.

Subjects grew to enjoy the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity.