Swimming Lessons (on productivity, excellence, and achieving your best)

Robin Schulz (feat. James Blunt)- Ok

GREETINGS after all this time! Happy New Year (sort of)! Happy Winter/Spring! Happy Passover/Easter!

Let me preface this post by saying the lessons below are all from the Harvard Business Review (mainly from Tony Schwartz). I will try to link all the articles that each quote comes from (but there are a lot so this might take time). They are actually more quotes, mottos, credos rather than lessons.

I have missed my maritime adventures! I wish I had been able to write as frequently as a used to, but this blog is far from dead. I have been constantly reinventing myself and I have realized that my life is going to require my ability to reinvent myself over and over again. Thus, I hope to post all of that here and then some with the hopes that the little things I read and experience can help others or at least amuse my readers.

Also, since it has been some time since I have written, I just wanted to note that for most of my entries I have been posting a link to a song at the top. Most of the time it has been thematic, sometimes it was just random. The idea behind this originated from me writing my entries to the song and hoping that my readers can experience what I am experiencing while they read my posts. (Obviously, this is optional.)

Here goes:

1. Absorbed focus lies at the heart of great performance.
2. The simple act of making decisions progressively depletes our ability to make them well.
3. Whatever you feel compelled to do: Don't.
4. If you respond out of compulsion, you have not made an intentional choice.
5. Live, operate, function with intent.
6. Do what makes you feel good about yourself, not what makes you feel good right now.
7. Be consistent with the person you want to be. 
8. The challenge in life is upping our game.
9. Compulsions rarely lead to positive outcomes.
10. Never stop trying to get better. 
11. Resilience is trying really hard, stopping, recovering, and trying again.
12. Find a way to discover equilibrium quickly.
13. Catch yourself when you default to whatever makes you feel good in the moment.
14. Ask yourself "How would I behave here at my best?" 
15. Push yourself beyond your current limits day-in, day-out despite the discomfort it creates.
16. The willingness to endure discomfort and sacrifice instant gratification is the only way to get better at anything and to achieve true excellence.
17. Welcome Discomfort. 
18. Live in discomfort. 
19. Temptation will always defeat you if you expose yourself to it too long. 
20. Do specific behaviors at precise times.
21. Pride yourself on relentless perseverance in the face of obstacles. (also here)
22. You cannot consistently improve your ability to make decisions (or your intuition) without considerable practice, reflection, and analysis.
23. Have grit and grace. 

I have actually handwritten all of these while I was reading the articles (some of them are my own lessons). Enjoy! 

Also, just for fun, I have taken an interest in Goldendoodles and Angora Rabbits. Hopefully, I can own one someday (but that would require me collecting their dander, taking it to my allergist, creating an allergy shot to tolerate the creature). Until then, I just look at the pictures because they make me happy (this is from insta). Happy New Year! 2018 will be great. 

The Comeback: Swimming's Four Step Program for eliminating insecurity!

STEP I: Recognize the general problem. Swimming's first step requires identifying whether or not you are insecure/not confident in general or in a particular instance. We all have insecurities in certain aspects of our lives. Some people are social butterflies, but completely shy in school or at work. Others are the exact opposite and have no issue vocalizing their thoughts in an academic or professional setting but struggle establishing social connections with others in a non-business forum. The first step to eliminating insecurity is to identify when and where it occurs. If you're struggling with identifying it then check out if any of the characteristics of low self-esteem creep into your life/conversation and then back-track to specifying when/where.

STEP II: Identify the characteristics of insecurity. There are some tell-tale signs of insecurity.
-Body language: do you shuffle your steps and hold your head down and look down when you walk? Do you try to cross your arms and legs and make yourself smaller in certain situations?
-Language/conversation: what kind of language do you use to describe yourself? what language do you use to voice your opinions? Is it surrounded by positive language? Or does your language begin with apologies or uncertainty? Do you easily get defensive or yield to/conform with others opinions?
Here are some classic characteristics of low self-esteem:
Heavy self-criticism 
Hypersensitivity to criticism  
Chronic indecision  
Excessive will to please and unwillingness to displease any petitioner. 
Perfectionism, which can lead to frustration when perfection is not achieved. 
Neurotic guilt, dwelling on and/or exaggerating the magnitude of past mistakes. 
Floating hostility and general defensiveness and irritability without any proximate cause. 
Pessimism and a general negative outlook. 
Envy, invidiousness, or general resentment

STEP III: Create an action plan. First practice, then create the habit, then transform into second nature!

Phase 1: Get creative on reminding yourself to be confident. I made cheat sheets to post around my apartment and posted positive words ("Fearless" and "Powerful" are two but there are many more) to constantly remember the mission. I also employed reminders on my phone throughout the day and worked with a few different affirmation apps for iphone along with power posing daily and being aware of when I'd slouch or cross my legs. Whatever mechanism you choose make sure you are constantly reminding yourself of what you want to be throughout the day and set that intention first thing in the morning. Fake it till you make it. 

Phase 2: Hand-in-hand with #2, be constantly aware of language that wreaks of insecurity. These are things that allude to guilt, self-deprecation/pessimism, perfection, appeasing others/yielding to others, indecision, overtly defensive. Create new vocabulary to speak positively about your position, yourself, and others. This is where the real legwork comes in. It's difficult to catch insecure language but it is imperative to change since anything you vocalize is physical energy that is getting sent out to the world and will eventually manifest itself in some way back into your life. I first started with reviewing the conversations I had with people each day, then listing everyday for one month all the things that fit the low self-esteem profile from #2 and then spent the following months attacking each to make peace and finding positive language to displace the insecurity.
-Be certain about what you want. It's infinitely more difficult to vocalize your opinions or thoughts if you are internally unsure of what you want. Be sure to establish real goals and sort out what you want for a certain endeavor and make sure that those things are measurable to some extent so that it can be quantified. (SMART goals!) This will help with indecisiveness.
-Be positive about others. I cannot emphasize this enough and this was something that came easy to me since I love giving kindness to others. In general, be kind, be interested in others, be positive about others. There are many ways to get ahead in life, but I believe that when all is said and done the kindness you share others is everlasting since it also inspires others to pay it forward. Make gratitude and compliments to others a habit to eliminate pessimism. I know many pessimists who masquerade as just being realistic. Truth be-told they may be buzz-kills but to cope with this I do the follow:
-If you find yourself getting defensive, the best strategy is to calmly ask questions and truly understand where the other person is coming from. The ability to empathize with others is important in life (but don't give up your own position on a matter.)

STEP IV: Employ action plan and hop to it!
A major aspect of this is being ok with constantly not being in your comfort zone. Where you are uncomfortable is where real growth is so embrace it. 

Who is the real champion?

Listen to this while reading: Wiz Khalifa-Work Hard, Play Hard

"The real champion practices alone--bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when NO ONE else is watching"

 BE LIMITLESS

Below is a re-post that I absolutely love:

Excruciating effort feels amazing. I found this quote a while back from the abstract of the book Aquarium by Victor Suvorov about Soviet military intelligence. I feel it really captures my current attitude on life:

Man is capable of performing miracles. A man can swim
the English Channel three times, drink a hundred mugs of
beer, walk barefoot on burning coals; he can learn thirty
languages, become an Olympic champion at boxing, invent
the television or the bicycle, become a general in the GRU
or make himself a millionaire. It's all in our own hands. 

If you want it you can get it...

Success comes only when the training, of
whatever kind (memory, muscles, mind, willpower,
stamina), takes a man to the limit of his capacity. When
the end of the training becomes torture. When a man cries
out from pain and exhaustion. Training is effective only
when it takes a man to the very limit of his capacity and
he knows exactly where the limit is...

That's the road to glory. That's the path to
success. To work only at the very limit of your capacity.
To work at the brink of collapse. You can become a
champion only if you are the sort of person who, knowing
that the bar is about to fall and crush him, nevertheless
heaves it upwards. The only ones who have conquered
themselves, who have defeated their own fear, their own
laziness and their own lack of confidence

10 Quotes From Warren Buffett That Will Teach You How To Be A Successful Person

Avicii-The Days

Taken from Lifehack

(1) Know your stuff

(2) Think things through

(3) Tread Carefully in all matters

(4) If things are bad, don't make them worse

(5) Associate with the right people

(6) Don't be too trusting

(7) Appreciate what came before

(8) Know when to jump ship

(9) Habits are hard to break

Now, the most important one....

(10) Be certain of your success even when no one else is

Happy Fourth of July!---On Resilience

First off, Happy 4th of July! I've talked about this before, but one of the most pivotal books in my Comeback has been Dr. Alex Lickerman's The Undefeated Mind. I found that he wrote a fantastic Huff Post article on how we can learn resilience that I'm going to print an excerpt from here. (Here's the full version)


Sometimes such a victory requires a single dramatic intervention fraught with risk; at other times, a series of multiple, small interventions whose individual effects may be minor but whose collective power is vast...Learning to accept pain, for example, really does make pain easier to withstand, yet sometimes only slightly. But when added to a fierce determination to accomplish an important mission, as well as to an expectation that accomplishing that mission will require the feeling of even more pain, strength often appears that makes large problems seem abruptly small. Though the effort required to maintain a high life condition often seems great, in reality it only needs to be wise...sometimes we only need to pull a lever a few degrees to move our lives in a radically different direction.

For resilience really can be learned. As amorphous as the concept of "inner strength" often seems, our ability to survive and even thrive in the face of adversity, our ability to push on through disappointment and discouragement when obstacles arise in the pursuit of our goals, is as measurable a quantity as is the strength of our biceps. And like the strength of our biceps, it can also be increased.
This, then, is what it means to possess what I call an undefeated mind: not just to rebound quickly from adversity or to face it calmly, even confidently, without being pulled down by depression or anxiety, but also to get up day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade -- even over the course of an entire lifetime -- and attack the obstacles in front of us again and again and again until they fall, or we do. An undefeated mind isn't one that never feels discouraged or despairing; it's one that continues on in spite of it. Even when we can't find a smile to save us, even when we're tired beyond all endurance, possessing an undefeated mind means never forgetting that defeat comes not from failing but from giving up. An undefeated mind doesn't fill itself with false hope, but with hopes to find real solutions, even solutions it may not want or like. An undefeated mind is itself what grants us access to the creativity, strength, and courage necessary to find those real solutions, viewing obstacles not as distractions or detours off the main path of our lives but as the very means by which we can capture the lives we want. Victory may not be promised to any of us, but possessing an undefeated mind means behaving as though it is, as though to win we only need wage an all-out struggle and work harder than everyone else, trying everything we can, and when that fails trying everything we think we can't, in full understanding that we have no one on whom we can rely for victory but ourselves. Possessing an undefeated mind, we understand that there's no obstacle from which we can't create some kind of value. We view any such doubt as a delusion. Everyone -- absolutely everyone -- has the capacity to construct an undefeated mind, not just to withstand personal traumas, economic crises, or armed conflicts, but to triumph over them all.
Attaining this state may seem impossible, an ability granted only to an extraordinary few like Viktor Frankl or that great champion of freedom, Nelson Mandela. But the tools those luminaries used to achieve their goals are available to us all. Extraordinary people may be born, but they can also be made. We need only look around at the number of people in everyday life who demonstrate the same resilience as a Viktor Frankl or a Nelson Mandela for proof that an undefeated mind isn't nearly so rare a thing as we think.

Europe Lessons Learned

(1) Climate change is real and if we do not do something to deter the rate at which we are destroying our planet we will be all gone very very soon.

(2) Eating well is very important to me. More important than any luxury or frivolity. You are what you eat!

(3) I'm big in Europe. I mean really big. I think my use of broken french was found to be endearing. Au revoir Geneve! (Clearly this is sarcastic, but lesson learned is that in a foreign country at least try to make an effort to use the language.)

(4) Traveling with different people and big groups of people is very difficult.

(5) Take responsibility to make things happen and get things done. I'm so glad that I avoided the stress of losing my luggage by making sure I got my things on my own.

(6) I'm excited to be a vocal person now. I'm glad I made lots of new buddies at the UN!

(7) WE are so lucky to be living in a country that has a stable infrastructure. Let's do our parts to make sure that we don't destroy this world.

(8) Some people are totally ok with not showering for 2 weeks. I cannot relate to this but had to live with the ramifications of this and it was smelly.

(9) If you want to do something, there is nothing in this world that can stop you. Take ownership of your own future and make it happen!

(10) Having the ability to empathize with people starkly different than me is something I pride myself in and treasure.

(11) Take responsibility for your own happiness!

(12) Paris is and probably always will be my absolute most favorite place in the world. Paris, I will return!

Carrots, Eggs, Coffee

Arianna Grande-Problem
Here is a wonderful metaphor:
http://www.soulcast.com/post/show/59487/A-carrot,-an-egg,-and-a-cup-of-coffee


A young woman went to her mother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and wanted to give up She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed as one problem was solved, a new one arose.
Her mother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Soon the pots came to boil. In the first she placed carrots, in the second she placed eggs, and in the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them sit and boil; without saying a word.
In about twenty minutes she turned off the burners . She fished the carrots out and placed them in a bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl.
Then she ladled the coffee out and placed it in a bowl. Turning to her daughter, she asked, "Tell me what you see."
"Carrots, eggs, and coffee," she replied.
Her mother brought her closer and asked her to feel the carrots. She did and noted that they were soft. The mother then asked the daughter to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard boiled egg.
Finally, the mother asked the daughter to sip the coffee. The daughter smiled as she tasted its rich aroma. The daughter then asked, "What does it mean, mother?"
Her mother explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversity: boiling water. Each reacted differently. The carrot went in strong, hard, and unrelenting. However, after being subjected to the boiling water, it softened and became weak. The egg had been fragile. Its thin outer shell had protected its liquid interior, but after sitting through the boiling water, its inside became hardened. The ground coffee beans were unique, however. After they were in the boiling water, they had changed the water.
"Which are you?" she asked her daughter. "When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg or a coffee bean?
Think of this: Which am I? Am I the carrot that seems strong, but with pain and adversity do I wilt and become soft and lose my strength?
Am I the egg that starts with a malleable heart, but changes with the heat? Did I have a fluid spirit, but after a death, a breakup, a financial hardship or some other trial, have I become hardened and stiff? Does my shell look the same, but on the inside am I bitter and tough with a stiff spirit and hardened heart?
Or am I like the coffee bean? The bean actually changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst, you get better and change the situation around you. When the hour is the darkest and trials are their greatest, do you elevate yourself to another level? How do you handle adversity? Are you a carrot, an egg or a coffee bean?


“In life, things happen to us and things happen around us, but the only thing that truly matters is what happens within us."
"What Lies Behind Us and What Lies Before Us are Tiny Matters Compared to What Lies Within Us" ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Swimming's Safari Adventures!

Simon & Garfunkel-At The Zoo

Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo....
What a peculiar day it was for Swimming this past Sunday. Easter Sunday coincided with Swimming's Birthday! To celebrate, she and some buddies decided to head out for a little safari at the zoo. Oh my ears and whiskers the things we saw! I must admit that I am very impressed with the high-profile animals that are staying at Cleveland Zoo. They don't give many facts about them so I decided to look up some facts and posted some below. Here are some pictures of the amazing creatures. Disclaimer: all pictures are zoomed, I was not actually that close to the animals.

Here are some lions. Did you know that Males with darker manes are more likely to attract female lions (lionesses)? Also, they only live to about 12 years old in the wild. I used to think that lions might be my spirit animal and like this woman they'd see me and want to give me a hug. From these ones, however, it does not seem like they want much to do with me other than to eat me.

How good-looking are these elephants? The African Elephant is the largest land mammal. Did you know that an elephant calf often sucks its trunk for comfort like a human baby sucks its thumb?

A Malayan Sun Bear and little baby bear. They have gorgeous long fur and really like honey! They are the smallest of all bear species. These folks are mainly living in Southeast Asia.

Here is Sir Tiger. Most tigers have yellow eyes except the White Tiger which has blue eyes. Also apparently their urine smells like popcorn!

Here is a Giraffe Family. Giraffes usually sleep for 1-12 minutes! They also have very pretty eyelashes. Surprisingly, I felt these creatures were very serene and could easily slide into first place as my new spirit animal.

I'll end with sleeping Koala. Koalas have two thumbs to help climb trees and eat eucalyptus. Along with the kangroos, their babies are also known as Joeys! Here's a great Koala survival story. Apparently they have the best insulating back fur among all other marsupials. This fur is highly resilient to wind and rain and their belly fur can reflect solar radiation. Amazing!

Lastly, as a Birthday present, I've adopted a panda from the WWF. Here is the photo I received--I like how my panda is posing, so chic! In keeping with ancient Chinese tradition I will be naming my panda after 100 days, but look how pretty it is!

All-in-all, Swimming had a very interesting birthday, filled with fun and a few mishaps and a wonderful video card from one of her best buddies playing one of my favorite tunes on the violin! After noticing that I've sprouted a few new gray hairs I've also come to embrace becoming older and transforming into a Golden Girl. 

Some nice quotes today

Ed Sheeran-Sing

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 is 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 is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.  
Marianne Williamson