青風難洗舊情濃,問誰山下獨追憶。故人猶如江水逝,歲月無情不留痕。但願山下有情郎,活在當下莫愁容。昔日逝,明日來,時光驟似光來回。把酒談,惜此際,一日難處一日當。莫為昔日未來愁。仰天看,落霞紅,明日愁來明日憂。
–佚名
2008.03.30 Sunday
青風難洗舊情濃,問誰山下獨追憶。故人猶如江水逝,歲月無情不留痕。但願山下有情郎,活在當下莫愁容。昔日逝,明日來,時光驟似光來回。把酒談,惜此際,一日難處一日當。莫為昔日未來愁。仰天看,落霞紅,明日愁來明日憂。
–佚名
2008.03.30 Sunday
Sometimes, you have done something you regret. You want to go to the past to undo what you have done. You cannot do so as you are already your-now-self. You cannot become your-past-self anymore. You cannot send a message to your-past-self.
Sometime in the future, your-future-self would have done something he regrets. He wants to go to his past to undo what he has done. He cannot do so as he is already his-now-self. He cannot become his-past-self anymore.
However, YOU can help him. His past-self is YOU. His past-self is your now-self. You can know what he has done wrongly by receiving the messages from him.
Victor E. Frankl:
“Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now. ”
2008.03.30 Sunday
Sending messages to your future-self is much easier.
Writing.
If your want to send a message to your ten-year-later-self, write it down. Put the message in a drawer. Do not read it until ten years later.
This is the meaning of writing.
2008.03.28 Friday
Extend yourself
To meet your past and future self now, just extend you to other people, e.g. your brother, your grandpa …
The method is to extend your self beyond your personal-self. When you see your younger brother, you may regard him as your past-self. When you see an old person, you may regard him as your future-self.
Learning from other people’s experience can emulate the effect of receiving messages from your future-self.
2008.03.27 Thursday
All life is problem solving.
–Karl Popper
2008.03.26 Wednesday
Ever wonder what the difference is between sales and marketing?
The official definition is that marketing creates demand, while sales fulfils demand.
–Joel Spolsky
2008.03.26 Wednesday
Our only real economic security lies in
our power to meet human needs.
So the worse conditions become,
the more evident human needs become.
Our security does not lie in our organizations or our jobs;
disruptive technologies may simply make them irrelevant.
— Stephen Covey, The 8th Habit
2008.03.25 Tuesday
To learn to think, you need two things: large blocks of time, and as much one-on-one interaction as you can get with someone who thinks more clearly than you do.
–Stephen C. Stearns, Ph.D.
2008.03.25 Tuesday
3.5 Time messenger
A time messenger is someone who can send the receive letters to and from the past and to and from the future.
You are a time messenger.
3.5.1 send messages to your past self
You cannot send message into the past. Even if you can, you cannot receive it, for you have already become your now-self. Only your past-self can receive the message, your now-self cannot.
3.5.2 receive messages from your future self 接收來自未來的訊息
You can receive the message sent by your future self because you are your now-self now.
What if your future self did not send the message you want to receive?
That is nonsense. You are always creating your own future-self. You future-self is under your control.
How to receive messages from your-future-self?
Vision: 先知先覺 洞悉先機
To receive message from your future-self, you need vision.
Vision is a function of common sense. Common sense is a function of vast knowledge and creativity.
How to get such knowledge and creativity?
1. Read
2. Observe
3. Experience
4. Create
Then imagine yourself as your ten-year-later self. If you are yourself-in-ten-year-later, what would you want to tell your now-self?
2008.03.20 Thursday
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
–Arthur C. Clarke
2008.03.17 Monday
I’ve worked quite a few odd jobs over the years. I either choose short engagements that require a lot of brain power and pay well, or jobs that consist of playing outside and pay terribly, so my mind is free to think.
…
This college offered me a full time, tenure track teaching position. It was very tempting, and would have paid well and set me up in Maui for life, but it would have left me no time at all for research. I had to turn it down. That was a hell of a gamble, but it paid off. I love teaching, but I couldn’t give up my research, …
— Antony Garrett Lisi
2008.03.16 Sunday
* Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
* “Psychological Observations”
* Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.
* Our Relation to Others, § 23
— Arthur Schopenhauer
2008.03.15 Saturday
I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
–Paul Graham
2008.03.13 Thursday
In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, —any thing less than all good, —is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
2008.03.12 Wednesday
3.4 Living in now-here, eliminate the passage of time
If you have always unleashed all the potential of time, you will not fear the passage of time. Since rather than being gone, time is transformed to something more valuable.
Just like when you have bought something that deserves much more than its cost, you would not feel that you have lost the money.
.
.
2008.03.11 Tuesday
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.
–Emerson
2008.03.11 Tuesday
3.3 You are nowhere but nowhere
People always have an escape-character.
We often think that the past is better than now (good-old-days thinking); or the future will be better than now (procrastination).
Think in either way is not useful,
for you are always here, you are always in now.
You are in nowhere but now-here.
2008.03.10 Monday
This is a public-domain image from Wikipedia.
— Wikipedia
2008.03.09 Sunday
子曰
吾十有五而志於學
三十而立
四十而不惑
五十而知天命
六十而耳順
七十而從心所欲不踰矩
The Master said, “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning.
“At thirty, I stood firm. “At forty, I had no doubts. “At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. “At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. “At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”
2008.03.06 Thursday
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
–Robert Frost
Wikipedia:
“Explanation and interpretations
The poem, especially its last lines, where the narrator declares that taking the road “one less traveled by” “made all the difference,” can be seen as a declaration of the importance of independence and personal freedom. However, Frost likely intended the poem as a gentle jab at his great friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas, and seemed amused at this slightly “mischievous” misinterpretation. The Road Not Taken seems to illustrate that once one takes a certain road, there’s no turning back, although one might change paths later on, they still can’t change the past. ”
2008.03.05 Wednesday