I started writing this when I saw a meme floating around saying ‘I am neither a night owl nor a morning lark, I am a permanently exhausted pigeon’. I see a few people this way anytime I meet them.

More and more work has become brain based and less muscle based, brain based work also keeps increasing in complexity. Not alone that, even the entertainment and pastimes seems to cater only to the brain.We have not been built this way, we were built over 1000’s of years to rely on muscle strength and only recently it has shifted to mind. Numerous studies show the link between exercises and brain function. If we want a sound mind, it is better we have a sound body to support it. There is also a theory that brain evolved to be complex  as humans took more and more complex muscle tasks. Brain is a physical entity, mind is just the arrangement of molecules in a certain way. Without the fitness of the physical ones, the volatile mind has no option than to mirror the physical state.

Monica Seles was the best player in professional tennis until someone stabbed her, from there on she never went to recover her form. Nobody relaxed the rules because she was stabbed, fitness is never an optional item in professional sports even when things happen that are not in our control, it adversely affects. Desk jobs may not require athletic fitness but everyone should take care to avoid preventable diseases or over exertions.

Eating right, maintaining fitness, not over exerting unnecessarily is all a matter of self discipline and desire to pace one’s life well. The saying ‘Health is wealth’ is still applicable, the progress made in career and life is directly related to how fit someone is. The 20s and 30s are supposed to be a human’s peak health and if people are exhausted most of the time at this age, then should be prepared to lose out and settle for less.

A nice life is result of a healthy mind, healthy mind is possible only if we can manage to have a good career and to have a rewarding career health is very much necessary.

Though there are exceptions to this, if you ignore good health then be prepared to ignore a nice life.

We will always try to make meaningful perceptions in a seemingly random setting. This is one thing that is right now a major differentiator between humans and bots, so that captchas rely on how well we can perceive something in an image. Gestalt in German language means shape or form and a branch of psychology that deals with perceiving things is called Gestalt psychology. Due to this ability, we have grouped random set of stars in different places as constellations; we perceive a human smile when we use a colon and a bracket.

When we take an eye test, the optometrist writes down the values for how well we can see. It is technically called visual acuity test. Visual acuity values determines what glasses you need to wear to have a normal vision. Similar to visual acuity, our ability to perceive things from seemingly random settings is called perceptual acuity. Sadly there is no way to measure one’s perceptual acuity but increase in that is directly related to business success.

On our day to day life our ability to form hypotheses based on our perceptions, testing it out and holding on strongly to validated hypotheses contributes to our growth. Our ability to come up with hypotheses is directly proportional to the way we perceive our world. Our perceptions become better only when we expand our interests to a wide variety, not just the in the field of work we are involved.

All the time we spend time on sports, current affairs, politics, technology, music and many more will collectively help improve the way we perceive our world. Of course spending dedicated deliberate effort on a field makes one an expert in that field, but that makes someone a doer not a creator; we need to be an expert in a field as well as be able to create something. Our world is a perpetual puzzle, those who solve larger pieces gets the better reward.

Image courtesy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/double-m2/

Too often I come across in discussions where the listener does not accept a view point from a person but accepts the same point when someone else says it.

Example: There is a conversation in the team about ‘Is September a good time to travel to coorg’? Novi  says strongly that it is generally misty and rains a bit but not to the extent to spoil a good vacation. The others in the team quickly look up weather patterns in the internet and conclude what Novi said is not right, it is not easy to travel in rains to hill stations. Novi tries hard to convince about the previous visits but no one is in the mood to listen. At this point Ivon an avid traveller enters, looks at the argument and says Novi is right, it is a good time to travel. No one refutes, they agree to Ivon.

Why did they agree to Ivon but not Novi when both of them are saying the same thing?

Dave Gray explains in his work ‘Liminal Thinking‘ that we carry a lot of beliefs from what we observe from our experiences; we then keep validating that our beliefs are right by choosing only the relevant data from experiences that will validate our beliefs again and again in a vicious cycle. This vicious cycle creates a shortcut in our brains so that we directly map the experiences without a conscious thought to conclusions. The example I had given about Ivon and Novi are very small in impact compared to what we encounter every day.

What we perceive as ‘I am saying that the same thing as the other person, but they trust the other person’ is nothing but people’s mental model about us is different as they do not know what our experience has been. This is the reason that more the people in a group are willing to understand each other’s experiences and talk out loud about their beliefs and assumptions, the better they communicate.

The video below is a nice explanation on why our experiences shape our beliefs. The narrower our experiences are, the narrower our beliefs will be. If we are not able to communicate right, first we should expose our experience; no one will buy our beliefs. If we need to understand someone better, we should have had similar experiences that have created their beliefs or we should be exposed to their experiences by suspending our judgements.