Recruiting Animal

How To Recover From a Punch

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in face.

Mike Tyson said that and I think it's a great line but after I heard it I asked myself, "What do you then?".

Tyson's remark is obviously another version of the famous military saying that once battle is engaged your strategy goes out the window. The result is that you have to adapt to situations on the ground.

However, I read Tyson as saying that once you get hit you lose your sense of direction. So, pursuing that idea, I did some research online about taking a punch and my conclusion is that pro fighters don't get confused. They train to take a punch and when they get hit they just keep on fighting as before.

For instance, this boxer explains how pros prepare to take a hit without getting totally confused or knocked out.

1. They do neck exercises.

A strong neck keeps your head from being whiplashed too hard which increases the chance of you losing consciousness.

2. They protect the head against the worst blows.

A punch coming from the side will turn your head and spin your brain knocking you unconscious. Boxers are taught to protect their face from the side punches like the left hook. Straight punches can be negated easily by head-movement and ducking movements.

3. They spin their heads.

Pro's quickly spin their head in the opposite direction off the punch and this small movement deflects much of the damage.

4. They see the punch coming.

That allows you to prepare for the impact by bracing to take the punch.

Most people get knocked out because they are swinging wildly and don't see the punches that their opponents are throwing.

It's also why, in a pro fight, you have two highly trained fighters who can hit hard for 36 minutes but still don't get knocked out.

However, this still doesn't tell us how they recover when, as Tyson says, their plans go out the window.

The Wisdom of The Elders

Don't listen to good advice

From: The New York Times

“Somebody asked her the secret of long life,” said Ying-Ying Yuan, a step-granddaughter of Mrs. Koo.

“She said, ‘No exercise, eat as much butter as you like and never look backwards.’”

Shirley Young said her mother also likes pork bellies, “especially the hot part, but she doesn’t overdo anything.”

“And she doesn’t take any medicine,” she said.

“When doctors give her medicine, she usually hides it, or when she takes something, she takes half a pill. People keep on giving her Chinese herbs, things like that. She never takes them.”

Note: Juliana Koo is 107 years old.

How To Write

From: Stuart Schneiderman

Aspiring writers often believe that writing is about expressing their brilliant ideas. Once they have that flash of inspiration, they tell themselves, the words will flow.

Most of them are still waiting for the inspiration. Putting ideas first will guarantee you a lot of blank pages.

Writing is a process. Ideas come to you while you are engaged in the process.

If you know what you are going to say before your start writing and if the idea has not changed as you are writing, then you are doing it wrong.

 

Addiction FYI

A now zuftig Debbie Harry says she was a drug addict of some sort in the late 1980s.

She was depressed because Blondie's record company dropped the group, their manager quit and they had problems with the Internal Revenue.

She went into rehab with Chris Stein and solved her problem.

It's surprising that they became addicts after their popularity faded. It wasn't a matter of too much celebrating when they were at their peak but more a matter of has-been-itis.

Source: The London Evening Standard

Deliberate Practice

Derived from a posting at the Study Hacks blog.

If you want to be a star it takes a lot of work.

But your level of performance does not merely depend on the number of years of experience you have under your belt.

You need to put in a lot of hours to become exceptional but hours alone won't do it. 

The best chess players don't just put in time playing. They study the game for 5000 hours in their first 10 years of serious play. That's five times more than intermediate-level players.

What do they do? They review the past games of better players trying to predict each move in advance.

Deliberate Practice is a techique for skill improvement invented by Anders Ericcson.

It requires a lot of repetition and it's called "deliberate" because you don't go through your actions automatically with your mind on something else but with a conscious effort to improve.

It's a struggle because you are constantly doing something you cannot yet do well.

And you need some way to get feedback to see if your actions are coming closer to your goal or if they need adjustment.

Most people do not spend time on Deliberate Practice. They just try to do their jobs well. Regular work in a specific field will make you better but without deliberate practice it will not make you great.

You'll be an intermediate chess player not a grand master.

Ultra-Learning, Fight Rumination, Professional Strategy

I have made notes about some postings from the Study Hacks blog below. I used the text found on the blog whenever possible but it is too radically changed to be considered a quotation.

Ultra-Learning (edited)

He needed to learn about X so he built an annotated bibliography on a web page.

It took two hours of hard work to describe the information in his own words and organize it.

Fight Anxious Rumination (highly edited)

He would notice a flaw in his work and worry that his future would be ruined if he didn't find a solution for it.

He would begin obsessively seeking a fix making relaxation impossible.

To calm down he created a ritual to end his day. He would say "shutdown complete".

Then whenever he started thinking about a fix after work he would say.

“I completed my work today. I trust that I have a way to deal with this problem in the future. Therefore, I’m not worried.”

The key point here is that he didn’t try to ignore the urge to ruminate — which rarely works — but also didn’t engage rumination.

In less than month, the urge to ruminate on these issues had become almost non-existent. So long as he did my shutdown each day his mind had been trained to release work-related anxiety.

The Craftsman Philosophy

Focus intently on developing a small number of valuable skills.

 

Don't hold on to the past

From: Lester Bangs: John Lennon Obit (highly edited)

I don't know what is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who will snatch any shred of a dream that was over ten years ago.

The Beatles were a moment and to keep turning the embers of those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker up again in the eighties is a futile pursuit.

In some of this last interviews, John Lennnon said, "We were the hip ones of the sixties. But the world is not like the sixties. The whole world has changed. Produce your own dream. It's quite possible to do anything."

 

Hearing Dramatic News

From: Barry Rubin

Nothing is stranger than having a normal life and then within a few hours knowing that it might end at almost any moment. That’s what happened to me when I was just diagnosed with what is called inoperable lung cancer.

From: James Kugel, Valley of the Shadow (edited)

The main change in my state of mind was that the background music suddenly stopped. It had always been there, the music of daily life that's constantly going, the music of infinite time and possibilities; and now suddenly it was gone replaced by nothing, just silence.

This was definitely a different perspective. But how could I have ever thought that life would just go on forever? I did, of course; that's what the music does, and everyone is caught up in it.

Willian Saroyan is reported to have said: "I know everyone has to die, but somehow I always thought an exception would be made  in my case." It's what we all think.

 

Chaos Requires Order

From: An Ape With Angel Glands

By 1923, Germany was bankrupt and a sinister political movement was well on the way to seizing power in Europe.

This hardly sounds like an argument in favour of adversity, but the crucial point is that the Nazis – in common with all totalitarian movements -  pursued a strategy of imposing order on the chaos of the time, and of imposing consent where there was dissent.

From: Radio Free Europe

"In southern Afghanistan, there was a law and order crisis. There was rampant warlordism, and the Taliban came in as a cleansing force to establish law and order and wipe out the warlords and impose Islam, which they did. And they were quite popular doing it, initially."

The Taliban's efforts were initially embraced by the war-ravaged Afghans. But soon their promise to end the chaos of war and warlords resulted in the imposition of a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

 

The Value of Routine

From: Defiant Normality by John Derbyshire (edited)

I am a big fan of normality and I can personally testify that the affirmation of routine, of normality, is psychologically beneficial.

There was a point in my own life when I was wretchedly unhappy. I moped, I drank, I sank deep into self-pity — the lowest and least attractive of all states of mind. The consequence of all that was, that I ran out of money.

Dragging myself from my den of misery, I got a job, the least mentally demanding job I could think of. It involved a full nine-hour day of washing dishes, scrubbing food-preparation surfaces with green plastic scouring pads and mopping floors with a boot-rotting mixture of ammonia and cleaning fluid, all at minimum wage.

The boss of the establishment had served in one of the more rigorous branches of the military, and considered he was being cheated if his employees stood idle for more than fifteen seconds. If there was no work to be done, he found some.

I have always felt very grateful to that place. The sheer forced routine of getting myself down there by seven-thirty every morning, carrying out my assigned tasks, not being able to smoke except at prescribed times, and not being able to drink at all until evening, straightened me out.

I got my head together, as the saying went: attained a clear view of things, or at any rate a much clearer view than I'd had, kicked the stupid drink problem, saved a little money, found a decent place to live, stopped feeling sorry for myself, and got my sense of humor back.

By the time they fired me, I was already thinking: "What am I doing here?" I rested up for a week, then put on a suit and tie and got a job that matched my qualifications.