I'm back in action with my writing. I'm now a contributing writer for Suite101.com, and I've recently completed a $30 freelance writing project. This marks the first time I've ever made money for writing!
Since I have a quota to keep at Suite101, I'll be posting most of my Psychology-related writings there from now on. This blog was originally intended to be a topical one, but it going to be more of a personal blog from now on.
How exactly that plays out remains to be seen.
Read more!
Monday, October 26, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The 10,000 Hour Rule
I recently finished reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. In it, he talks about the 10,000 Hour Rule, which refers to the number of hours required to master any given skill. He cites several examples ranging from professional musicians (The Beatles) to computer geeks (Bill Gates) to show the significance of accumulating 10,000 hours of experience at something.
While it may not be the case that Bill Gates underwent a supernatural transformation when his ten thousandth hour of computing rolled around, it makes perfect sense that having 10,000 hours of experience would make him a beast at programming. Even if he was a complete idiot he would get pretty good.
I've always wanted to be the master at something. So here's the big question: what skill do I have the best chance of mastering through a 10,000 hour commitment? I did some calculating and found that it would take 30 hours of practice a week for over 6 years to start from the beginning!
I'm not sure if I'm that persistent. We know that my record for setting and keeping goals has been laughable this summer (more on that later). So here's a better question: what skills have I already practiced for a considerable number of hours, and which am I most interested in mastering?
Music and writing come to mind. I've been playing music since I was 13, and I've been writing since I've been in school. Yet, in both cases, I doubt I've reached the 10,000 hour mark. The next step is to decide if I have a better chance of becoming a Super Sayan writer or musician.
I'll be thinking about it. What skill do you want to master?
Read more!
While it may not be the case that Bill Gates underwent a supernatural transformation when his ten thousandth hour of computing rolled around, it makes perfect sense that having 10,000 hours of experience would make him a beast at programming. Even if he was a complete idiot he would get pretty good.
I've always wanted to be the master at something. So here's the big question: what skill do I have the best chance of mastering through a 10,000 hour commitment? I did some calculating and found that it would take 30 hours of practice a week for over 6 years to start from the beginning!
I'm not sure if I'm that persistent. We know that my record for setting and keeping goals has been laughable this summer (more on that later). So here's a better question: what skills have I already practiced for a considerable number of hours, and which am I most interested in mastering?
Music and writing come to mind. I've been playing music since I was 13, and I've been writing since I've been in school. Yet, in both cases, I doubt I've reached the 10,000 hour mark. The next step is to decide if I have a better chance of becoming a Super Sayan writer or musician.
I'll be thinking about it. What skill do you want to master?
Read more!
Monday, July 6, 2009
Who I am (According the the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a personality test that describes a person by assigning them to one of two polar descriptors in four different categories. Introversion vs. Extroversion is the first category, followed by Intuiting Vs. Sensing, Thinking Vs. Feeling, and Judging Vs. Perceiving. In all, there are sixteen possible combinations.
The results are coded using four letters, one to represent the dominate trait for each category.
For instance, I'm labeled an INFP. This means that I'm Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Perceiving.
A full description of my personality type can be found here . It's incredible how accurately this describes me. It pinpoints things from my tendency to be a perfectionist to my propensity for writing (and lack thereof for speaking).
The same site linked above contains a list of favorable job fields for people of my type. One of them is journalism, which used to be my major, and which I've been (sort of) pursuing in my free time. Another is psychology, which is my current major, and I 've been considering going to graduate school to become a School Psychologist.
I'm not sure how accurate the results are for others, but in my case its accuracy is almost scary.
You can take an unofficial version of the test for free here. I've taken this version as well as the official test, and my results matched.
Some of the questions are tough to answer, and this test is criticized for forcing people into polar categories, which isn't a precise way of measuring a person. But the test provides a lot of interesting information, and I had a lot of fun reading my results.
After the test, the site provides a list of famous people with the same type. Shakespeare was an INFP just like me (they obviously had to infer that one).
You can find an in-depth description of your results here.
Enjoy.
Read more!
The results are coded using four letters, one to represent the dominate trait for each category.
For instance, I'm labeled an INFP. This means that I'm Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Perceiving.
A full description of my personality type can be found here . It's incredible how accurately this describes me. It pinpoints things from my tendency to be a perfectionist to my propensity for writing (and lack thereof for speaking).
The same site linked above contains a list of favorable job fields for people of my type. One of them is journalism, which used to be my major, and which I've been (sort of) pursuing in my free time. Another is psychology, which is my current major, and I 've been considering going to graduate school to become a School Psychologist.
I'm not sure how accurate the results are for others, but in my case its accuracy is almost scary.
You can take an unofficial version of the test for free here. I've taken this version as well as the official test, and my results matched.
Some of the questions are tough to answer, and this test is criticized for forcing people into polar categories, which isn't a precise way of measuring a person. But the test provides a lot of interesting information, and I had a lot of fun reading my results.
After the test, the site provides a list of famous people with the same type. Shakespeare was an INFP just like me (they obviously had to infer that one).
You can find an in-depth description of your results here.
Enjoy.
Read more!
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Time to start making money
I set goals a couple goals at the beginning of this month. The first was to create a blog that is reasonably popular, and the second was to make a decent summer income writing (the two goals are related, as I've been making a small amount of money with AdSense- I've made about thirty bucks).
My original plan was to start pitching stories to the local papers immediately, but I've been procrastinating, and I haven't pitched a single story to the Gazette or the Transcript. So why have I hardly done anything to work towards my goal of making money writing?
I've really been enjoying just hanging around. But I think there's more to it; in my opinion a much less excusable reason.
People procrastinate out of fear of failure. I'm not sure the exact studies that have shown this, but I read it somewhere, and it makes perfect sense. If I put my all into something and fail I look like an idiot, but if I put it off I create an excuse for my failure.
I've always read the paper and said to myself, "I can do better than this," but I've yet to do it. Maybe I'm not as sure of my writing ability as I'd like to be.
It would be a lot easier for me to sit around and not make any money because " I never got around to it," than it would be to have a bunch of article pitches shot down.
That's a weak reason to slack, so I've decided that I'm going to send at least one article pitch on Monday. I have nothing to lose.
As for the blogging goal, its been working its way up. I have almost 600 views on the month, which isn't bad considering this is my first month blogging.
Read more!
My original plan was to start pitching stories to the local papers immediately, but I've been procrastinating, and I haven't pitched a single story to the Gazette or the Transcript. So why have I hardly done anything to work towards my goal of making money writing?
I've really been enjoying just hanging around. But I think there's more to it; in my opinion a much less excusable reason.
People procrastinate out of fear of failure. I'm not sure the exact studies that have shown this, but I read it somewhere, and it makes perfect sense. If I put my all into something and fail I look like an idiot, but if I put it off I create an excuse for my failure.
I've always read the paper and said to myself, "I can do better than this," but I've yet to do it. Maybe I'm not as sure of my writing ability as I'd like to be.
It would be a lot easier for me to sit around and not make any money because " I never got around to it," than it would be to have a bunch of article pitches shot down.
That's a weak reason to slack, so I've decided that I'm going to send at least one article pitch on Monday. I have nothing to lose.
As for the blogging goal, its been working its way up. I have almost 600 views on the month, which isn't bad considering this is my first month blogging.
Read more!
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Happiness
I've been pretty pumped about life lately. I'm on summer break, and I don't have much on my plate that I would consider "chores." I'm enjoying being with my friends, and having time to read, write, and play music. I'm not even dressed right now, and it's noon. I'm about as happy as ever. Being a Psych geek, I like to analyze states like this. It seems to me that since summer break can't last forever, I should figure out exactly why I'm happy so that I can stay happy. Lucky for me, there is a very brilliant man from the University of Pennsylvania who's also a geek for this sort of thing.
Dr. Martin Seligman has broken down happiness into three key components:
Pleasure. This is what what we typically associate with happiness. It's feeling good. This summer, I've had a great time joking around about stupid things, hanging out around the fire, waking up late, and basically being free to do whatever I want. These things give me pleasure.
I notice that the previous sentence has all sorts of humorous potential. I could've made it even more so, but I refrained. Get your mind out of the gutter.
Engagement. This is being fully involved in whatever you're doing. Right now, I'm engaged in writing. When I read a good book, I usually forget about everything else that's going on, and become entirely focused on it, which is another example of engagement. When I play music, I'm usually very engaged in doing that. See my post about Flow for more on this idea.
Meaning. This is having a sense of purpose. When I'm at school, this often gets lost. I'm working like crazy to get a degree so that I can get a job to make a bunch of money. I don't really care about having a bunch of money. As I've written before, I like a pretty minimalistic lifestyle, and that's how I like it. You don't need much money to pull this off. But I think the error in this thought process is looking for meaning in something that I'm doing for me.
I feel that I have a purpose when I help others out or make them happier in some way. I've had a few opportunities to do so recently, and true to this model of happiness, I think its made a positive difference for me, too.
Read more!
Dr. Martin Seligman has broken down happiness into three key components:
Pleasure. This is what what we typically associate with happiness. It's feeling good. This summer, I've had a great time joking around about stupid things, hanging out around the fire, waking up late, and basically being free to do whatever I want. These things give me pleasure.
I notice that the previous sentence has all sorts of humorous potential. I could've made it even more so, but I refrained. Get your mind out of the gutter.
Engagement. This is being fully involved in whatever you're doing. Right now, I'm engaged in writing. When I read a good book, I usually forget about everything else that's going on, and become entirely focused on it, which is another example of engagement. When I play music, I'm usually very engaged in doing that. See my post about Flow for more on this idea.
Meaning. This is having a sense of purpose. When I'm at school, this often gets lost. I'm working like crazy to get a degree so that I can get a job to make a bunch of money. I don't really care about having a bunch of money. As I've written before, I like a pretty minimalistic lifestyle, and that's how I like it. You don't need much money to pull this off. But I think the error in this thought process is looking for meaning in something that I'm doing for me.
I feel that I have a purpose when I help others out or make them happier in some way. I've had a few opportunities to do so recently, and true to this model of happiness, I think its made a positive difference for me, too.
Read more!
Monday, June 22, 2009
Cerebral Palsy and guitar playing
Having mild Cerebral Palsy creates all kinds of little problems- problems that aren't enough to hold me back from anything completely, but are just enough to make things really difficult and ensure that I'll never advance past mediocrity in any physical skill. I can't stand mediocrity unless I settle for it by choice. As a result,I often have to come up with creative ways to remedy my natural limitations.
My latest project: playing the guitar. I've been a musician for years now, and I've always been a good singer and an abysmal guitar player. For a while I was content with the hand full of chords I'm able to play, but I recently started thinking. I'm not a bad guitar player because I decided to be. I'm bad because my physical limitations have kept me from getting good. I can't use my pinkie when I play,and I have a hard time switching the formation of my fingers to move from chord to chord.
This won't do.
Today I started learning to play with an open G tuning. I checked out some chord charts, and it looks like I'll be able to play most chords. We'll see where it goes...
Read more!
My latest project: playing the guitar. I've been a musician for years now, and I've always been a good singer and an abysmal guitar player. For a while I was content with the hand full of chords I'm able to play, but I recently started thinking. I'm not a bad guitar player because I decided to be. I'm bad because my physical limitations have kept me from getting good. I can't use my pinkie when I play,and I have a hard time switching the formation of my fingers to move from chord to chord.
This won't do.
Today I started learning to play with an open G tuning. I checked out some chord charts, and it looks like I'll be able to play most chords. We'll see where it goes...
Read more!
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