What You Can Do

Slavery is Alive and Very Profitable

We all claim to support human rights and social justice, yet our materialistic lifestyles enable the abuse of people worldwide. Perhaps many do not know where their gadgets and stuff comes from, living with the false belief horrible things don’t happen in our enlightened world.

Siddharth Kara’s new book, Cobalt Red, shatters those cognitive lies by detailing the slave labor and horrific conditions powering our devices and “green” electric cars. Listen to his interview with Joe Rogan.

Do we care about Africa and other “third world’ regions and the totalitarian nations that violate human rights to feed our wants?

We talk about the slavery of the past, but do we care about slavery in the 21st Century? It’s alive and worse than ever.

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The Art of Invisibility

No matter how many data breaches there are, personal data stolen, and stories about hackers and government spying, it seems many people still bury their heads in the sand about security in the electronic world now embedded in our lives.

Here’s a couple tips to protect yourself and thwart corporate Big Brother from tracking your every move:

First, get yourself Firefox web browser and use its Enhanced Tracking Protection features (set on custom).

Second, activate its Facebook Container add-on so Facebook can’t snoop on you while you’re off FB.

Then enable HTTPSEverywhere which turns on HTTPS encryption automatically on sites that support it.

Finally, install duckduckgo as your default search engine, one of the few that doesn’t collect personal information, ever.

Of course there are other basic tips, like spending some money on a strong security package, but remember this: Don’t expect someone else to protect you, certainly not the government who spies just as much as the companies they pretend to regulate.

And do yourself a favor, buy Kevin Mitnick’s book, The Art of Invisibility. The notorious hacker who went legit, details in his book what goes on in the shadows of the internet and every smart and connected device you own. If Mitnick’s book doesn’t convince you to pay attention, I’m not sure what will. His tips are priceless for protecting yourself from intrusion, and for those who wave off privacy because they have nothing to hide, consider this:

You may not have anything to hide, but you have everything to protect.

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Don’t be a writer. Be a Storyteller.

Tell your story. Tell that of others. Don’t be a writer. Be a Storyteller.

Consider a tombstone — a monument to one’s life…the inscription typically focuses on the years when a person was born and subsequently passed away, a person’s life is actually represented by the ‘dash’ in between (i.e., 1964-2042).

This dash represents the essence of our lives — the succession of joys, sorrows, successes, failures…If you could write the story of your dash, how would it read? Would it be full of regrets for the things you did or didn’t do? Or would it be a tribute to all that you attempted to do, be, and accomplish while you were alive?

– Anthony Paustian, writing in A Quarter Million Steps.

Find Your Purpose. Find Your Story.

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How Does Working Only 4 Hours a Week Sound?

Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week, has become a classic guide for those trying to blaze their path instead of taking the one others want them to follow. Even if you don’t end up working four hours a week, there is much to learn from this book in fine-tuning your career, and more importantly, your quest to Find Your Purpose, Find Your Story.  This is a book that you will frequently revisit, and start here with some of the many memorable quotes from Tim:

“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

Doing less meaningless work, so you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness.

Focus on being productive instead of busy.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Money alone is not the solution.

Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.

Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but is useless unless applied to the right things.

Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

Lack of time is actually lack of priorities.

Am I being productive or just active?

Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?

“Task creep” – doing more to feel productive while actually accomplishing less.

Be selectively ignorant. Less is more.

Does your life have a purpose? Are you contributing anything useful to this world, or just shuffling papers, banging on a keyboard, and coming home to a drunken existence on the weekends?

More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it.

Learn to be difficult when it counts.

Blaming idiots for interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children – they can’t help it. It’s their nature.

An interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish of a critical task.

Unless something is well-defined and important, no one should do it.

Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30-40 years of tolerating the mediocre.

Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn’t make it productive or worthwhile.

If tolerating a punishing work environment for years at a time is a prerequisite for promotion in your field, could it be that you’re in a game not worth winning?

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Mental Hunger? Here’s Some Brain Food.

Bored at work? Need something to listen to in the car other than mindless babble? Well, I have been collecting interesting podcasts over at Soundcloud. In particular, give a listen to my selection on books, writing and learning.

Reclaim lost minutes of your day, shut down the Facebook feed, and exercise your mind. You’ll feel much better…

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Listen, then Read

Here’s our first installment of Podcast Roundup with selection of fascinating  interviews with authors that will teach you and most likely have you ordering their books:

Daniel Mendelsohn, author of, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, tells us how ancient works like the The Odyssey “…always somehow feel present and real…[the] kinds of experiences they describe, are the kinds of experiences, in many cases, we have.” In particular, he looks at the father-son relationship in The Odyssey and how we look at — and if we really know — our parents and family members.

Tristan Gooley is the author of several books on the lost art of reading nature. Listen how you can can be more observant in our world, and relearn the skills that will allow you to travel and explore anywhere — no gadgets required.

Self-defense expert Tim Larkin, author of When Violence is the Answer, wants us to know that “sometimes violence is the answer, and that when it is, it’s the only answer.” Unfortunately, not everyone knows the difference between “antisocial aggression and asocial violence” and how to respond to each. A very important message for our time.

 

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What is Important to You?

After watching Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, I was reminded of one of the most memorable lines in The Lord of the Rings:

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Each generation in the modern era has faced the specters of busyness, materialism and deciding what is truly important. Arguably, at no other time in history, have societal forces have been so powerful in telling us how to live and what to become. It’s as if we’ve given up in finding out what we are truly meant to be. We’ve abandoned our intellectual ability to make our own decisions. Then one day, we wake up, wonder where it has gone, and wish we’d set out and found our own story, not someone else’s.

Continue reading

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When Fiction Warns Us

A human darkness with a vast appetite for chaos and violence.

That is what simmers in the background, waiting to be released, which is exactly what unfolds in Steven Konkoly‘s The Perseid Collapse and William R. Forstchen‘s One Second After.

Unfortunately, what they write about in fiction is all too real a threat.

A Dangerous Situation

An aged power grid is becoming increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks or natural or man-made EMPs. This really isn’t a secret to the powers that be. In fact, if they truly cared about people, they would have taken measures to shore up the grid years ago. They’re too busy figuring out how to buy votes and bail out their buddies. If this is all new to you, check out the latest threats to the grid here. A decade or so ago, the United States finally began deploying a missile defense system to protect us from human causes. Again, politics continues to threaten expansion and upgrades.

National Geographic aired the docudrama American Blackout which showed what could happen with the grid down for a few days. What would happen if this lasted weeks or months? Many people think (or hope) disasters like these won’t or cannot happen. Ask people who have lived through hurricanes and tornadoes or earthquakes. Fiction can remind us what is really important in life. It tells us action is better than hoping for the best.

Should protecting the country from nuclear holocaust or complete collapse really be a political issue? I’m thinking most would rather not be vaporized or watch their cities self-destruct. Sooner or later, disasters will come, whether natural or man-made.

Ignoring this is beneath human intelligence. Let’s do something about it.

EMP Missile Defense

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Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator

Check out Tim Urban’s TED talk here as he delves into his procrastinating mind. Read the blog version and then how to beat procrastinating. After you watch and read you’ll see how procrastination is a subtle, subversive disease that attacks us all and keeps you from your true Story.

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Healthy Reading

If you haven’t checked out the Hero’s Journey interval training program yet, why not? Training or working out doesn’t have to be boring or something you have to do, it should be something you want to do. Add these two to the mix: the Legolas Workout or the Shieldmaiden Workout or any of the other dozens of themed workouts at Darbee.com. Training, however, is only half of the equation.

The other half is nutrition. Sure, working out out will reduce the weight, just as only “dieting” will, but focusing on only one makes long-term maintenance difficult and gains often temporary. If you have decided on a commitment to better health, you also have to commit to some studying. Knowledge has many benefits for your lifestyle change, such as: Continue reading

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