Misc.

Reliable Information Sources about the Russia-Ukraine War

by

Drive for about fours hours from my Romanian hometown, and you are in Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Drive for about three hours, and you are in Chisinau, Moldova (another country I fear might be attacked). I never witnessed such grief beyond belief so close to my birthplace. And so, hypocritically, I admit, I am horrified by this war and its unmeasurable loss of human life, although there were and still are gruesome conflicts spread all across this messed up world. For the last few days, I …

Read more

First Night of War

by

Darfur. Iraq. Iran. Yemen. Georgia. Nigeria. Lybia. Syria. And the list goes on and on for wars that began from merely 2003 onwards.  But to see tanks and fights and bombs in the heart of Europe?   William Faulkner said it best in Requiem for a Nun: The past is never dead. In fact, it’s not even past. And this resonates profoundly with a quote from Svetlana Aleksievich’s book The Unwomanly Face of War that described how a Soviet woman soldier during WWII felt decades after the war: what …

Read more

Remembering 2021

by

So much has happened in 2021, so little has occurred.  Coups d’état, lockdowns, controversies, wars, destructive climate disasters, 2021 was a terrible year. There is no denying there were some sparks of hope. For example, we saw the massive collaboration effort that contributed to the delivery of almost nine billion Covid jabs. This endeavour was not without troubles along the way, such as uneven access to vaccines or variants that seem to evade the vaccine. 2021 also brought the world’s first 3d printed school, built in …

Read more

Writing Insights (2021)

by

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…. Do you like sentences?”  Annie Dillard – The Writing Life As I started writing articles for this blog for over a year now, I thought to review the lessons I learned about writing during this journey.  When to Write  What started as stealing time to write, here and there, progressed into a much more organized framework. Most of my …

Read more

End of the Year Favourites (2021)

by

Some of the articles I most enjoy reading are the recommendation articles from the people I follow. So I thought to share my better discoveries of 2021. This article is not sponsored, and there are no affiliate links as I only want to recommend things that I found valuable over this year.  Books  There were quite a few books I marked with four or five stars on my Goodreads profile, but I want to talk in particular about three of them as they made …

Read more

The Exponential Art of Kaizen

by

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.  Jacob A. Riis How are post-war industries rebuilt? Can worldwide poverty be reduced? Can couples divorce rates be predicted?   The answer to such dramatic questions …

Read more

Reading Insights (2021)

by

Finishing a Book is Optional There is a cognitive bias called the sunk cost fallacy. We hesitate to abandon a strategy or a plan because we already have invested time, money, energy in it, even if dropping that specific action would be more helpful for us. With the sunk cost fallacy in mind, we would gain more if we do not finish a book we do not enjoy. Time is non-regenerable and is not worth spending our time on boring or bad books. Usually, after …

Read more

Shoshin, the Zen Concept that Applies to Companies, Science and Personal Development

by

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.”  Zen master Shunryo Suzuki  In Zen Buddhism, “shoshin” translates as the “beginner’s mind”, where “sho” means beginning or origin, and “shin” means spirit, soul, or attitude.  A beginner’s mind is different from being a beginner. Shoshin is about having the attitude and mindset of a novice who learns a new practice for the first time, especially after reaching expert levels in our fields.    In the beginner’s mind, there is a lack of preconceptions, a willingness to learn, to ask and try, …

Read more