Spent too much time playing games? Don't worry about it.

You have spent you entire day, yesterday playing video games or watching TV, or maybe both. Was it a good choice? Was it a bad choice? Does it matter? What ever choice you have made, worrying about it today will not change what has come to pass. Yes, of course, you can take note of it and do better in the future, but right now you should focus on what you are going to do today. It's been said many times that "the rest of your life starts today". Every day is a new start to your life and you should take it as such.

The doctor recommends that you sleep 8 hours. Assuming you do sleep 8 hours, this means you have a good 16 hours left of the day to use as you see fit. Let's look at one of your usual 9 to 5 days:

Yes, I know... I exaggerated on many of these, but even so, every day, you have 240 minutes at your disposal to improve and get better. Timothy Ferris said that you can master anything within 6 months, but he also believed about meta-learning, that is learning how to learn, faster and easier. If you spend 3 to 4 hours to improve yourself for 6 months, what would you be able to achieve? Assuming an average of 3 and a half hours spent per day, within a year you will have accumulated almost 1300 hours or 7 months of working 8 hours per day for someone else. Yes, that is in 12 months of working for someone else, you can also spend 7 months working for yourself at the same time.

"That's almost a great plan", you will say, "but you forgot about leisure time and social time". Actually I haven't forgot about it. You have plenty of time on the weekend to socialize with your friends and family. What about leisure? I want to live a happy life. Well, you should probably remember that that which brings us the most happiness is the feeling of accomplishment. Having a goal and feeling that you have worked towards it will bring lasting fulfillment. Watching TV or playing video games, are an escape, providing you with virtual goals, but they will not bring any kind of satisfaction. The more you escape, the more unhappy you will feel. So, do not worry that removing this kind of leisure from your life will make you unhappy, because working on yourself will give your life a purpose and they will make you happy.

If Google actually bought Spotify...

I came up onto an April Fool's Day prank saying that Google has just bought Spotify. First of all, it would be good and bad.  Right now I have subscriptions for both of them and I actually use both of them depending on what I'm looking for.

Google did not buy Spotify, but such a thing would not be as surprising or shocking as it sounds. Google Play Music exists and functions so well partly because of its purchase of Songza back in the summer of 2014. With Google Play Music, you can get perfectly timed playlists, based on the time, the location, the mood or the activity. All of these playlists are manually selected by Google employees who are experts in designing music playlists. While Spotify, has similar options when you select "Browse", I find that Google does a better job. However Google lacks certain features that Spotify has.

There are a few things that I can do with Spotify that I simply cannot, at the moment do with Google Play Music. With Spotify:

• you can control the music remotely. I can start playing music on my desktop or laptop and while I'm cleaning in the bedroom I can skip, play, pause, change volume, etc. directly from my phone without having to go to the living room, because I don't like a certain song.
• you have a mini social network. Spotify was smart, and rather than trying to build their own social network, they've built it on top of Facebook's existing network adding options such as being able to follow the playlists created by your friends and being able to see what your friends are listening to. Because of the social network aspect you can also search for a playlist and browse through user-generated playlists.
• you have daily mixes. These are never-ending playlists, that are generated based on styles of music. What it does is that it makes 4-5 daily mixes and each playlist contains songs that you liked or songs that are similar to them, grouped around a certain style of music.

Sadly, if I am searching for a playlist, based on my activity, the Google selections somehow seems to be more accurate than Spotify. Since Google uses Google+ social network and Spotify uses Facebook, this merger is likely to never happen.

Whether you like Google Play Music or Spotify, one has to appreciate that such services are out there, because we don't have to buy a CD, or buy an album online, listen to it for 2 weeks and then get tired of it and buy another one. It would be a waste of storage space and a waste of money. With these fixed subscriptions you can get all the music for a certain fee. This way you don't have to spend a large amount of money to have access to a complete library of selections. Whether Google Play Music or Spotify will stand the test of time you can never know, but since I don't see a merger or acquisition happening anytime soon, I suppose I'll keep jumping between the two for the time being.

Your brain might sometimes be just a little too intelligent

Did you know that your brain is too intelligent and that it can stop you from succeeding? Have you ever thought that you mind might be too intelligent?

Yeah... Basically your mind tends to protect you from… well whatever it subconsciously considers to be “bad” for you. How does that work? Suppose something happened when you were young and left you a small trauma. You won't remember anything about it and probably you can barely remember it happened, but your mind will still subconsciously associate the elements of that moment which generated the trauma with something that should be avoided and that shouldn’t repeat. It doesn't even have to be a trauma. It can be any simple mental association, where your mind keeps the idea that a certain action will lead to a negative consequence and you will feel strongly towards the idea that you shouldn't do it.

Obviously, you're going to laugh and say that you're an intelligent human being and you use logic and you won’t let such small petty little things from misleading you. Guess again! What happens is that you won’t be conscious that you are avoiding it, you'll just avoid it automatically and barely realize the fact (that you're avoiding that action).

The best and easiest example from a guy’s perspective is working out. Working out provides two contrary feelings. On one hand you have a positive feeling due to certain “pleasure” chemicals being released in your brain when you are working out mix and the release of testosterone in your blood. We call it “getting pumped” and “feeling the rush”. It actually feels really good. On the other hand you have the pain in your muscle, due to muscular fatigue. This one feels really bad. Obviously since there’s a positive and negative aspect, you'll still be okay with doing it, as long as you don't have an alternative choice which will provide only positive reinforcement, without any of the negatives: like eating or sitting on the couch. Unfortunately you always have that alternative so your mind will always try and protect you from getting a mixed feeling and provide you with a solely positive feeling.

I think you get the picture of how this works, by now, but you're probably wondering about how you should go about it. Actually the way to take care of this problem is the very easy and at the same time very cumbersome: you have to be ever-vigilant. Pay attention to every single feeling you have (I said feeling, NOT emotion, use Google to find the difference if you didn't know there is one). Every time you have a feeling (could be hunger, thirst or anything else for that matter) try and quickly see what causes it and based on it’s root you can choose to maintain it (if it’s positive), take an action which will solve the root of the feeling or plan to take an action will solve the root of the feeling.

To go back, to our original example, you will want to work out, but you will feel uneasy about it and you will “feel” like not doing it and doing something else instead. You might find that the root is that you don't like the way your muscles feel after. Remind yourself your goal or why it is you want to perform said action, in order to motivate yourself and as an extra suggestion, picture the way you’d feel if said goal was achieved. You'll feel great about it and it will give you enough edge, to cancel your original slightly negative feeling and you’ll get it done instead. This whole mental process will be done in an instant, by replacing a slightly negative mental image with a positive one.

Your brain may be protecting you, but sometimes it might be working against you. You just have to be even smarter, watch what it’s doing and make sure it does it’s job well.

Every failure is hiding an opportunity to learn, improve and succeed

The summer did not begin as well as I was hoping. I can easily say this much is true. I finished the winter semester at Poly with very poor grades. As I was afraid, this brought my self-esteem and morale down severely. I forgot that every mistake one makes is a valuable opportunity to get better and improve.

Over the past semester I learned a most valuable lesson. I found out that I can be happy and that the only one I need to be truly happy is myself. This is very important because once you depend on yourself for happiness you become a lot more self-reliant.

Back to the recent events, I noticed that I wasted the most precious thing one can have: time. I've been spending my days doing virtually nothing. There is nothing wrong with spending s couple of days with myself, but May flew by like a breeze and I barely achieved anything.

On that note what I want to do in the future is take care of all the pressing matters and focus on making of myself someone I can be proud of. On one hand will look into finding an apartment for July and into finding a better job, something that is more suitable for what I can do. On the other hand I will look into what I want to achieve in the next day, week, month and do my best to accomplish my goals one by one. Most importantly though, if I make any more mistakes I will not let them disappoint me and bring me down. I will learn from my mistakes and use them to learn how to become a better me and make my life as successful as possible.