Why You Should Smile More

It turns out smiling correlates strongly (I'm not sure what the r is, but I'm guessing at least .5 or more) with parameters such as standardized testing scores, financial wealth, longevity, success in life (as best measured quantitatively), marriage well-being (qualitative parameter), happiness (qualitative parameter), and even how inspirational you are to others (again, a qualitative parameter).

Moreover, smiling is naturally contagious, meaning that spending time around people who smile often is literally healthy for you.

Unfortunately, approximately two-thirds of adults smile less than twenty times per day. And guess what? Implicitly, this isn't normal (by normal, I mean that merely because it has its own respective normal distribution, this does not mean we should operate in such a manner), nor healthy. Children can smile as much as 400 times per day!

So smile more often - you'll live longer, be happier, and be more successful.

Quantitatively (see the video below), one smile (your smile) is worth 2,000 bars of chocolate! Or, one smile is worth approximately $25,000 USD.

See the video below for more information.

Behold The Colorful Cube!

I was playing around with SketchBook Express on my Mac and came up with this colorful cube. I don't know why I like it: maybe it's the colors or maybe it's the fact that it plays with your eyes - sometimes it's an open 3-D cube and at other times it's merely a hexagonal rupee.

I Hate Art!

I've never had much respect for art people. I acknowledge that what they do is difficult (the talented ones at least), but ultimately I see it as worthless. After all, there is a reason for the idiom, "starving artist".

When my daughter was born I vowed she would major in something like mathematics and then branch out. After all, with mathematics she could become anything by acing the standardized tests we use to gauge "intelligence" and tertiary prowess. She could get an MBA (GMAT), become an MD (MCAT), be a lawyer (LSAT), or even revel in the social sciences (GRE) - all of these are easily mountable with a strong quantitative background - forget the arts, they are for touchy-feely people who won't amount to anything.

I used to think this, but I was wrong.

You see, the future belongs to right-brained people (i.e., artsy people) because they are irreplaceable. Left-brained people? They are a dime a dozen now (e.g., computer scientists, engineers, and MBAs). And as for those that can fuse quantitative and qualitative endeavors? They will be a hot commodity indeed.

The sad thing is that I am innately a right-brained person, but because I never wanted to be poor I decided to do endeavors such as math, business, and technology; and while I would never divest my background, there isn't a day that I do not sadly and quietly sigh within myself wishing I could draw, write, or compose.

Perhaps the largest realization of this came with the creation of Super TwinBear (my business). Currently, our greatest need at Super TwinBear is a graphic artist: someone who can design Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and purvey 2-D and 3-D animation. Programmers? We have too many.

The good news is that a) I'm a great learner, and b) my wife and best friend are both amazing artists (I guess this should have tipped me off!). Ergo, instead of bringing someone to staff who can do these things for us, how about I figure it out? At least part of it. After all, it is a skill of the future.

(By the way, the future belongs most to those that have a strong foundation in both the quantitative and the qualitative. I still want my daughter to do math, but I want her to pursue the arts just as earnestly!)



If you'd like to learn more about Scott McCloud, I recommend reading Understanding Comics, checking his TED profile, and visiting his online journal.

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VeryJiong International

I just couldn't resist. I had to take a quick print screen before Wikipedia deleted it, but here is the entry Chen (one of my business mates) posted concerning his business.

My favorite part? The brutal (and hilarious) honesty of "It is monkeying around and doing nothing. It has no employee [sic] and no equity."

Freedom.

“To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.”

– George Bernard Shaw

I recently read a book titled Drive by Daniel Pink. In it, the author touts that he has seen the future and that the future works because of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. He cites multiple examples of autonomy leading to productivity and states that scientists have found autonomy to be not just good for human life (e.g., decreases stress), but for productivity in the workplace as well (of course, this has to do with heuristic work and not algorithmic work). For example, small businesses which employ autonomy have only a third of the turnover and four times the growth of businesses which utilize a top-down approach of control. Autonomy works! After all, humans are not human resources; we are more than the sum of our parts. By default, we are born active and engaged, and have submerged our innate nature of self-direction for the sake of economic survival. Ultimately, Pink states that the economy which we have diligently submitted ourselves to has changed, and that a new type of economy has arisen, one that requires freedom.

A while back, Steve Wozniak came and spoke at ACU (2/28/11); unknowingly, he described a little bit of heaven to me. He said that in life he only wanted to do two things: be a great engineer and a teacher. He accomplished these two things via nontraditional methods. For example, he didn't finish school to be an engineer, but is considered one of the greatest engineers to have ever lived. Nor was he educated to teach, but has a heart for teaching and has contributed more to education than most teachers will. Wozniak's circumvention of the establishment personifies George Bernard Shaw's statement that, “to be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer”

I also just recently finished reading Dr. Lytle’s book, Abandon the Ordinary. The book presents various exercises, and in one such exercise he asks us to picture our notion of an ideal day at work. This ideal day at work couldn’t be a list of technical things (e.g., finishing our to-do list); rather, if our lives were a documentary, what would the film crew see? Honestly, I had trouble consolidating what this sliver of heaven would look like; however, I had no qualms picturing an ideal day in hell: a cubicle. In other words, the antithesis to heaven, for me, was the inability to steer, to set my own direction; hell to me is the lack of self-direction, of freedom, of autonomy, of the power to engage in meaningful, creative, imaginative, and life changing work. I never want to be like the protagonist of Joe vs. The Volcano, who yells at his boss, after finding out he has months to live, that he cowardly sold his life to his boss for minimum wage because he was too afraid to live his own life. As Dr. Lytle always says in class, “Don’t prostitute your potential!”

I once read a man’s description of hell, whether or not he was stating the truth I do not know, but he described something truly potentially frightening: in hell, individuals were bereft of the memory of Christ, and as a result, could not even utter the name “Jesus” in the eternity of torment. Frightening (at least to me)! The bereft of autonomy! Think of it this way, autonomy is so potent than even God Himself has allowed us to employ it in whether we choose to believe in his son or not. Satan on the other hand, doesn’t even want us to have the freedom to say “Jesus”. This doesn’t mean that autonomy must be present in all situations, or that lack of autonomy is evil. After all, giving 100% autonomy to my two year old daughter is a recipe for death – literally (so is giving her 0% autonomy)! But this does mean that when we are given the opportunity to employ autonomy we should do so to the fullest! Think of The Parable of The Talents. The Lord gave three individuals full autonomy in terms of their given talents. It was the servant which refused to employ this autonomy to the fullest which was called lazy and evil (i.e., he hid his talent and refused to explore his freedom, his autonomy). And what did the Lord do? He said, “Throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” God knows our potential in terms of autonomy and is saddened when we do not live to our fullest.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.' We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

~Marianne Williamson

"It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; Who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

~President Theodore Roosevelt

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Video Games and Education.

Recently, I entered an entrepreneurial competition and was one of the winners (see here). The idea? Video games meets education (i.e., edutainment). I know many people are turned off by this idea, but I believe that, on account of mobile technology, edutainment finally has the requisite infrastructure to take off.

Therefore, at this point, I'd like to direct you to two sources.

One is the blog of Joel Levin, a computer science teacher at a private school in New York.

And the other is a TED talk video (seen below) concerning boys, video games, and our stagnant educational  system (I say 'our', because I feel boys are treated this way the world over). Ultimately, it tells the tale of why we need entities like Super TwinBear.

Currently, "educational" video games are nothing more than electronic flashcards, but as Joel Levin shows, it doesn't have to be this way; video games can be fun, engaging, and educational. 

By the way, if you'd like to know more about Ali Carr-Chellman (the speaker in the video below) check out her bio here.

Let me know what you think, or what your reactions are in the section below.

Are You A Thief?

Would you walk into a Wal-Mart and steal a DVD or music CD? Probably not. Why? Because it's wrong or because you're more likely to get caught?

If you said it's wrong, yet still illegally download music and videos then you're lying because ultimately it's the same thing - your actions result in the loss of revenues for the creators of the media.

Unfortunately, according to the journal of Psychology, Crime and Law, most students agree that shop lifting music is wrong, yet have little qualms illegally downloading the same music (http://tinyurl.com/3dm6ka8), despite threats from the music industry (http://tinyurl.com/3ms9gvl).

The bottom line: students don't shoplift music because it's right or wrong; they don't shoplift because they feel it has a high deterrence factor (i.e., they are more likely to be caught and punished). Yet they are willing to steal by illegally downloading because it has a low deterrence factor (i.e., they feel they are less likely to be caught and punished). In other words, most people - at least in terms of this topic - are dishonest, lazy, evil, disgusting, trashy and cowardly thieves. 

In the end we have to remember that honest men are better than gold; from them comes life and nations are built prosperously by them, but evil dishonest men, they destroy nations. Which one are you?
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