Rituals

Today I was thinking about rituals.

It's a known fact that people put themselves in a specific mindset before they start doing their thing.
Kai Greene does a 12 minute warm-up in which he connect his mind with his muscles before training.
I also do a warmup in where I row and try to feel all my muscles working before I start lifting.

Study wise I know I've had different rituals throughout the years but I now think I've found the best one for me. I go to a quiet special place. Before I enter the doors i turn my phone off, as soon as I sit down I block Facebook and turn Skype off. This place is sacred and under no circumstances is any connection like that allowed in here. If I need to I have to exit the room. I can get very deep into my studies here and I use my time very efficiently.

As a student you have this low-level guilt feeling that you should be studying all the time but as I said in my previous post that time to recover is equally important. I know think that if you treat yourself as a company and that you have a designated study time and designated off time then you're fine. You don't have to feel this low level guilt.

Then off course when you've been in study mode for many hours you got to be able to get back into "normal mode".

Sleep deprivation

Another rant about 4th year (which is soon over).

I've tried to cut down on sleep, going on 5-6 hours because I thought I had the capacity to do so.
And I could...but with a price.

That price is:

* Becoming very tired during mid day and not being able to focus on what the teacher says (way to tired to do notes)
* Low motivation to study and get good grades
* Low level irritation

It sucks and if there's anything I could redo it would be to get adequate sleep in. But there's no way of re-doing things so for the 5th and final year I'll make sure to prioritise sleep.

We've been going for 10 months straight with only one 2 week break in the beginning, exams are up in a month from now.
It has been very intense. Intense to the point that 8 people's relationships in our class has broken down.
Although I consider myself very lucky to have the opportunity to go through this hardship now and leaner so much from it. Also lucky to be able to live in such a great part of the world and be able to work towards my dream every day. So much has happened during this year, it has changed my life in many ways.

After exams I'm off to India, two weeks of work and after that I'm going to recuperate in Thailand for two weeks before coming back to wrap the final year up. I'm looking forward with a big smile on my lips!

Clinic entrance

My phone is on flight mode
Skype is off
Facebook is blocked

Today is two days before I sit my entrance exams. I went in and had a look around an hour ago, I'm  still feeling nervous. It's five different stations and everything we've learnt during the last 3.5 years is examined. Will be such a good feeling when I see any letter except F for fail when we get our grades back.

Wish me good luck

My take on Facebook

The world has never seen anything that over just a few years have grown into what will be a billion users later this year. It's hard to even imagine life without Facebook. The world would run ahead of you if you didn't have Facebook.
I don't want to quit it, I think it's fun to connect with people and see what's going on in their life.

There is definitively the addiction part to it though. Your brain badly wants those red dots in the upper left corner to show up when you log in. Some people are so addicted to them they can't enjoy themselves when just sitting around with people. They are agitated and only response to more stimulus. Someone said that the addiction was worse then crack cocaine, however I don't believe that, but it's pretty f%&*ng bad for some.

It's especially bad for people that need to focus. I always take the example of a student. As soon as you get a little tired, two clicks will take you onto Facebook and you get your neuro receptor kick.
Same thing with the phone and Skype or any other thing that could potentially pop-up whilst you're in the zone. IF you ever get into the zone because you're so alert and know that shit can pop-up anytime so you can never fully relax into it. What I've found is that turning my phone to silent without vibration, go offline on Skype and use a program like SelfControl to completely block Facebook has a very profound effect on my concentration.

It's so quiet, nothing can't even potentially bother you and if you just sit there and do the work you eventually get into that zone were things are just interesting and you enjoy sitting there. Not always, but there is something to it that few people will ever experience and the opposite is considered so normal  it's scary.

These are some thought's I had after hearing that 25% of the 1st years failed Anatomy108 and have to redo 1st year. The lecturers are getting worried and wonders what's happening with the next generation.

Free speech and freedom is very good but what happens as we become extremely good at exploiting our own primitive brains search for stimulus that was meant to keep us alive but these days leads to nothing more then an addiction to stimulus and a non-ability to just chill out.

I read

Books are so fascinating. I would want to think that everyone reads a bit here and there.

How cool isn't it that I can pick up a book and find out in a few days what it took some really smart person a lifetime to figure out!! 

It's like when the internet came and you can look things up on wikipedia instead of having to use an encyclopaedia. It's almost like cheating but BIGtime cheating.

Six years ago I heard this quote by Jim Rohn: "you're the average of the five people you spend time with and the books you read".

Since then I've read about 25 books a year and I've written them down. A few I haven't liked at all but others have really resonated with me.

Lots of books I've read since I started Uni has been on motivation and how to stop procrastinating and just do what's in front of you. These are five really good books you want to read if you want to take the step to becoming a PRO. In no particular order.

Driven from within - Michael Jordan

This was kind of the first book I read on the subject that changed of I thought about studies. It's a book that describes Michael Jordan's life from a teenager up to now. Before I read it I had a distorted vision on what it took to be good and that to be good on something does not equal boring.

The power of full engagement -Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

This was a ground breaking book on how we humans work and why some people seem to have all the energy whilst having a very busy life and why others burn out very easily. Easy to understand and apply with relevant and interesting research that backs it up.

Mastery - George Leonard

When I was done with the last word I went online and ordered another 3 copies and gave them away. I often go back and think about the concepts in this book. Its a thin book of a 180 pg's and is worth is weight in gold. He talks about the process of learning new skills and how the world we're living in impacts on this.

Art of War and Turning PRO - Steven Pressfield

These books are pretty short and so cool. It's fascinating to feel that little bit of resistance in yourself that wants you to put the book down and burn it but you know it's too late. You've already taken the red pill  and there is no going back. 

Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman -Richard Feynman

Guys like him are the solution. He didn't care about what should be right or what people said. He only wanted to find out how things worked. Not to brag about but just because he was so curious in how things really worked. Truly an inspirational character that stands as a contrast to various people who present their subjective opinion as absolute objective facts by using voice tonality and authority to get it through. Remember that whatever they say - it still moves

The need to be right

I thought Universities was a place were knowledge, even common knowledge was supposed to be questioned. Only a minority of lecturers operate like this, you find them if you listen closely because from time to time they say things like...

- Do not blindly believe in what anyone says and do not believe what I say, go and look it up yourself and only after meticulous research place it on a scale of certainty in your head. Because in the future only 50% of what you learn here will be shown to be true. Be comfortable with doubtful facts and realise that most facts sits on a scale of certainty from 1-100 and most things do not sit at a hundred.

And then we have the majority of lecturers AND students. They don't care what the fact is, it can be anything they've read out of a ding ding newspaper as long as they said it, it's true and they will defend it to their death.
Their need to be right, to look good, to have respect is so much greater then their thirst for truth.

Can you now imagine how bad this yucky characteristic is in a politician?!
It makes me sick to the core.

5th year syndrome

Something I observed quickly when I came to Uni was that the 5th years were so distant.

They were not happy it seemed like. They never spoke to anyone and if they did it was very formal.

They didn't joke around and it seemed like they really tried to suppress that kid inside of them whilst trying to look really important.

It's a fact that after five years of Uni you're probably very tired of studying and so on but I think there is another factor to it.

The University is trying to develop a proffessional side to you and that is just great. I agree that it is super important to have that professional side. But I do think that many people lose the other side of life, the fun relaxed side. 

Many people form strong opinions and they become very sure of themselves and a bit closed minded but in my view they are just building their own prison. I think this is a shame and I don't think this applies to just Chiropractic, I've heard that Law is supposedly really bad, yuck!

We study for five years and learn heaps of stuff but if the person can't enjoy life after Uni something is just not right. I think it has something to do with the fact that people feel that from now on they can not risk looking like a fool. It's a shame because then you fit in and feed to the illusion that to get somewhere you have to look and act important and work long days and never enjoy yourself. 

That is bad, studying for 5 years is something we should be proud over and subsequently we should be role-models to younger people. Show them that you can work hard AND have lots of fun and relax.

Aww shit, no more toilet paper...

- KellybaNOAAAAA