Tag: dailyprompt

Learnings from relationships

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Which relationship has taught you the most about yourself?
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In order to answer this question, I need to remove a word from it – the word “yourself”. Sure, I learned stuff about myself when facing moments of struggle, suffering, risk, or terror. But the learnings in general are far more interesting and readily available than learnings from nearing breaking points. And you can learn from anyone.

I read this concept from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People where he makes a point that you should listen to people so they like you more. There is a quote predating his work and I think it’s cleaner than Carnegie’s as it means that you should just listen to understand with no particular goal. Here it is:

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

So, you can learn things from almost everyone, as long as you listen. Listen with curiosity and no judgement, as Ted Lasso says.

Eating habits

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What are your best healthy eating habits?
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Eating and drinking too much can undo any fitness progress you can make. Sooner or later, adults reach the point to try to put eating under control. I love food. I can eat more than I should. I can say that I reached that point years ago. I’ve tried a bunch of things and am currently following only two.

  • I do my best to not drink alcohol. The rule I follow is very general – don’t drink calories. If it has calories, not a good drink. There are exceptions, I let myself drink beer during meetups and our traditional summer vacation in Greece. I also drink Ayran when attempting to climb a peak. Otherwise, very strict with that. I don’t even drink coffee anymore.
  • I (do my best to) eat salads. I don’t like salads but here we are. Every single healthy living manual says eating salads is important. I mostly do it because salads make me less hungry for sweets but I know the health benefits are elsewhere.

I know that the real thing I need to do is to stop eating chocolate but I’m still hoping that the salads will somehow be sufficient.

Me, going after green salad.

A life hack to increase my daily steps

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What are some life hacks that you practice?
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I found that doing an average of 10k steps, counted as a weekly average, is good for me. My goal is 8k on a work day and 15k on a weekend day. But that’s a lot of steps, and it is quite challenging to fit them in the schedule. I do about 1000 steps per 10 minutes of walking, which means 8k is about 1 hour and 10 minutes of time I need entirely for myself.

So, my trick is that I use the budget for regular activities to do steps.

For example, going to the shared office space takes 30 min. Using the shortest route, I can walk for 5 min, wait for a bus for about 5 min, and then and ride the bus for 20. Or I can walk for 35 min, wait for a more frequent bus, and ride it for 5, for a total of ~42. The second route is about 12 min slower, but I make 3500 steps, using 15 min of my commute time for walking. I also do some loops while waiting for the bus to arrive a few hundred extra steps. By doing this, most of my daily steps come from the budget for getting to work and back.

This kills multiple birds with one stone. I see many cats and get enough photos to keep the cat section of my blog well supplied, and the cat section keeps my blog alive on days with nothing good to say.

Best way to battle negative thoughts

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the best way to deal with negative thoughts?
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Okay! We all live on a tiny piece of dust next to a very old star that’s eventually going to consume Earth. We’ve not be informed about our purpose but we know we’re all going to die. It’s not easy to deal with all of that and the other reasons to feel bad about the future. Negative thoughts use periods of vulnerability from stress, health, or other misfortunes and just penetrate the walls and take space we can use for, pretty much, anything else. By the time they reach us, it might already be late to act in the most efficient way.

Here’s my short list, listing multiple items that have helped me over the years.

  • Walking. 1h outdoors is like 2h of meditation. Also helps with sleep. I didn’t start the 10k/day to improve my mental health but after doing it for several years, hard to not put it on top of my list.
  • Sleep – the brain just works better when properly rested but it can’t do that if it’s fed with coffee and alcohol, or you’re not physically tired. So…
  • No alcohol or coffee. I’ve experimented in this area and no amount of alcohol or coffee is good.
  • Planning positive events ahead, just placing good things in the calendar. Planting them like seeds to grow in anticipation.
  • Cats (and dogs btw) but cats work for me. Cats don’t care.
  • Religion and spirituality – after all, we need a way to accept defeat.
  • Awareness about thinking errors. Most of our fears are about stuff we have no control over. I think superstitions can be particularly harmful. People are universally afraid of black cats. Why?
  • Reading books, fiction in particular.

None of that counters negative thoughts at the moment, and none of this is a measure against moments of grief and loss. But it helps over the long run.

I re-read some of my old posts in preparation to publish this one. I think they still hold.

Books I regret reading

~ Veselin ~ 16 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?
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I have this rule that if a book doesn’t go well, I just stop reading and move it to the donations pile. This rule prevents 1* reviews and makes my life a tiny bit more positive. I also don’t suffer through bad fits for too long, as I clearly don’t like what I’m seeing. This rule got me from 30~ish books read/year to over 50.

However, there are at least two ways to get to the end of a bad book without realizing it’s that awful.

  1. It can be a good book with a terrible ending. Like, it looks like a great thriller or crime, and they kill the main character, the main supporting character, or it reveal the main character as the killer. John Grisham does that often. Sooley is a good example.
  2. It can be a passable book with hints it might contain AI slop or really poor ghost writer work. I complete it and then the memories about it sit less and less well, and what was once a 3* book turns into a 1* slop in the weeks after. The most recent works by Lee Child and Harlan Coben fall into that category. I recently had a thriller where the main character was misgendered in the text and a very suspicious stats book, with issues hinting AI use.

AI doesn’t produce readable books for me, also doesn’t produce readable chapters, paragraphs or blog posts. It can turn a perfectly fine paragraph into a grammatically correct and unreadable slop. I wouldn’t even be able to point my finger at what’s wrong with it.