Whenever I learn something new I remember of Starcraft, an old strategy game for PC.

There, the entire map was hidden to you and you didn’t have any idea of what was there until you started walking and exploring that part of the map.

Once you explored it, then it would become part of the map you know.

Learning, to me, is very similar, and it’s both mapping a territory and building structures on it.

We’ve all been there. We are bored while doing something. We would much rather prefer being somewhere else and doing something we enjoy.
We live in the age of boredom, or maybe we live in the age of high entertainment.

Notifications from your app, gamification in anything to create little addictions. 

The boredom in some cases might be artificial. A result of how many of the apps we use now demand our attention.

One of the thoughts that always comes to my mind when I’m bored doing something that I would qualify as “Real, normal life” is to jump onto my smartphone and use some app.

But where’s the pleasure? Being immersed in some kind of digital experience, even though funny or entertaining, is a constructed reward and pleasure. 

There’s no gain, no growth, nothing you learn or live that you will remember.
That feeble moment will disappear in our memories together with all the similar ones.
If you look at it from the outside, afterall, looking at a smartphone is kinda boring.

Yet we can’t do something different.

Want to change? Enjoy the boredom. Don’t escape from it. Embrace it as a way to diminish the habit of using your smartphone to cope with that boredom.

I’m currently trying to live more in the now, this requires (for me) a strikingly high amount of attention and dedication because my mind will always try to move towards the past (things I’ve done) or the future (things I need to do).

One of the side consequences of letting only the “now” in, is how you handle some emotions.
If you are truly devoted to living only in the now, it’ll be hard for you to have resentment over something.
Resentment lives in the past and there is no past in the now.

Past becomes a tool, an amount of information you can use to move forward.

Future is instead only a plan, not a constant plan.

I have to say it’s not easy for me to live more in the now. I fail. And fail. And fail again.

But the rare times when I succeed, what I get back is worth it.

There’s a scene in spiderman: no way home, that resembles how I feel when things work out the way they should do.

Octopus has been healed by spiderman and the first thing he says is something like “The voices, they’re gone”.

That is my experience too, when I am able to live entirely in the present there are no voices, there is no fog. Only now.

If you’ll ever start meditating, even a simple breath meditation, you might notice that you’re terrible at it. That you will fail constantly.

What’s even the use in trying doing it if these are the results?
As you’d expect, though, it’s normal to fail. As we do in many many areas of our life, the first times we learn something we are terrible at it.

But some goals highlight the failure much more prominently.
That’s why you feel you’re stuck in the same place with no results, whereas you’re actually doing small improvements. Those small improvements needed to move forward.

The hard thing about this is that those improvements won’t show for a while. They need some critical mass to show some real results, even if the improvements are real.

FOMO = Fear of missing out.

Did you ever thought “Oh, I wish I could speak like them, or be funny like them”.
Some people in your circle might be better than you at something in the social part.

It could be speaking, making other people happy, etc.
Does it matter? Everyone is different, there is no standard, there is no minimum requirement to be friends, and even if there was, you were already accepted.

Who you are is already more than enough, and what you bring to the table might be entirely different that what other people bring.
Sure, you can wish and desire to be more funny, or even practice it, but don’t forget that you probably already do something else, invisible to your eyes, that other people are also wishing for.

And they probably thing “Oh, I wish I could do that like them”

Everyone is different, that is a fact. We do also know that we all share some similarities, things that we can correlate between each other.

The things we like, the way we think, the way we see the world.
Most people have a similar alignment on these topics.

Some do not, and it’s only by chance, or comparison, that they discover this.
Think about the sight. It wasn’t until the paper (journals, etc) came to be that people realized they were short-sighted. Some could read perfectly, some could not.
Until then, nobody cared and nobody knew because they didn’t have a way to compare (or to say it better: to measure) their sight.

This is true for many things, like how you breathe from your nose, how you think, etc.
It’s not about being special, it’s about understanding that individual differences that are hardly noticeable until you start measuring it.

It’s not always sunny. There will be days when your mind is foggy, there will be days when your ideas won’t be special.

We are not made to reach peak performance every day, to go to the extremes.

Quite the opposite. The shallow days are a fundamental part of having great days because they give space to your mind and body.

Some days you’ll have good ideas, some days you won’t.
Some days you’ll write great posts, some days you won’t.

Managing your attention might require time and effort, but it’s worth it.
In an economy where attention is the new money and the goal is to steal your mind time, then being able to direct your attention correctly is not easy.

It was never easy to begin with, but now, with the increasing technologies that ask us for input, reviews, comments and interactions, we’re left with a new skill to develop in our future: Attention awareness.

Being able to discern and track where our attention goes, what’s requiring it for marketing purposes and where it’s truly needed.

Sounds simple, but depending on how you consume information and use smartphones/apps, it might be not.

You might get lost in the arguments, but there are times when taking a stand is important.

“Have strong opinions, loosely held”, this is key, as it was said many times before. Be bold in your intentions, but kind towards others.

Be open to different points of view and question the assumptions.

And when you feel you ruled out any option, when you feel it’s a matter of values and not ego: in those times, take a stand. 

Make a point, clarify with kindness what you believe in.

You might be tempted to think that the word “healthy” applies only to food.

But if you stop for a second and envision the meaning of what “health” is, it might be possible that you will see other ramifications of that meaning and where it applies.

Once, in a gym, a coach told me: Exercise is like flossing, it’s a way to keep us clean.
I would add that both are healthy choices, since both contribute to our health.

Is meditation healthy? It sure is.
Reducing phone usage? Dressing with clean clothes?

Striving to find ways to care for our healthiness is good, but the word healthy would not express its full potential if we use it only to food.

Food can help, food is critical, but it’s not enough. 
Healthiness is part of our entire system, mental, physical and emotional.