Enthusiasm

"When there is no emotion, there is no motion either. What is missing is the spiritual energy called enthusiasm.

...
When we are enthusiastic, we develop a determination to equal the endurance of the muscles, a fortitude to match the courage of our hearts, and a passion to join with the animal strength of our bodies. To succeed at anything, you need passion, you have to be a bit of a fanatic. If you would move anyone to action, you must first be moved yourself. To instigate, said Emerson, you must first be instigated."

@ 'The essential Sheehan'

Fellow life wanderer

It is not only me. I guess we are all over the world. A friend of mine living abroad is another perfect example.

I'm still under the jet lag effect. Well, it sucks. I didn't sleep one day, then in the following I overslept and despite that I was sleep all day, and then, when it was time to sleep again I could confortable do it. Seriously, it felt awesome! But!! It lasted less than one hour. I woke up full of energy. Fortunatly, due to the time difference I have people available on skype at that time, so I have someone to spend my energy with. And then, a few hours later, I slept again, this time till 1PM. 

And now I'm writing this. Not that I want to write about the jet lag, I just felt I need to clear all this out.

Living abroad, full of advantages, but also full of not-so-advantages.

On the good side...

→ Language skills, japanese and english (english because I read a lot and restarted watching american tv series), skyrocketed. Though I must admit that I feel my japanese was a lot better some time ago. 

→ Your people skills improve. I might come off as an introvert in Japan, because I don't go out much and my main activities are introvert-ish, but I was VERY MUCH pleasantly surprised when this year, coming back home, people just felt good talking to me. And people want to talk and be with me. Friends I haven't talked to for years, inviting me to go out. I was surprised because if some time ago I would probably feel anxious, now I was just confortable. When I go out with japanese people, I don't know if it's me, or if it's them, but I can't be very comfortable, I mean, I talk a lot yes, but I don't talk like I'd like too. I talk always with the concern of the possibility of being judged or disrespecting the japanese culture. Also, japanese people don't show a lot of emotion, and that makes me a little uncomfortable because I'm always afraid of asking things they might not want to respond and I don't want to make them feel uncomfortable. 

I noticed that portuguese people are extremely expressive (facial expressions, stares, tone of voice), myself included and now having the same behaviour from the other side makes it a little hard to guess what's on their mind. Contrastingly, I like this japanese feature, it show immense politeness, I just would like to break the wall more easily. 

→ Self-awareness! This is great, but it can also be a burden at times though you will have the premise that you can "fix" whatever's wrong with you, because you now know why, and only the period between acknowledging and finding a solution sucks. 

Reading books helped me a lot, as I'm not tired of saying. What's good about self awareness is that you know yourself better, you know where your heart is, you know what you are feeling, you know whether you like it or not, you know what you want and not want to do. Trust me, when your sense of self is inexistant, you can't do those fluently...

→ Self-reliance. You have many times when you depend on no one but yourself. This is perhaps the reason I don't go out much here. I am independent but I like to be within a group, community makes me stronger and happier, it brings the best of me to the surface, In Portugal I'm the wittiest and the most charming person you'll ever know (I miss that). Being alone makes me overthink everything. Yes, you become more self reliant abroad, and that's great, but life is not to be lived alone. If you are confident of yourself and you know you have people there for you you become more self-reliant, but when those people are not present, why bother? 

The disadvantages are:

→ Loneliness. Becoming self-aware made me realize how lonely I feel, specially after coming back from Portugal. My family, pets and friends are not here. And they make all the difference. The.The silence in the first morning after I came back was just terrifying. You feel alone when you can't be yourself 100%. If I knew that even with japanese friends I could be myself, I'd have a lot of friends. It's just that living in a different language makes you use different parts of your brain and you don't have immediate access to them, you need to be aware of that and try to make those traits come to the surface.

Living abroad allowed me to observe life much more attentively, and to appreciate the little things. I realized how beautiful human emotions are.

People are unconsciously sexist about how women should look at work

Article from BusinessInsider.com

http://www.businessinsider.com/women-and-clothing-at-work-2015-2

The clothes you wear have a profound impact on how people perceive you.

Studies suggest that formal dress makes teaching assistants look more capable, wearing thick glasses makes people look smarter, and well-dressed customer-service agents are more likely to score sales.

That's all great.

But the gender implications of dress go even further — and grow toxic. 

In her 1990 study, Auburn University professor Sandra M. Forsythe asked 109 respondents who worked in marketing and banking to watch four videos of female applicants interviewing for a management job. Applicants wore outfits with different degrees of masculinity. 

For Forsythe, "masculine" dress featured straight silhouettes, angular lines, and dark colors — as in a dark navy suit — while feminine dress featured rounded silhouettes, curved lines, and light colors — as in a light beige dress.

The respondents rated each applicant on their management abilities and their hireability. 

The result? The more masculine the clothing, the more likely the applicant would be recommended to be hired — regardless of whether a man or woman was making the recommendation. Coincidentally, the women who were more masculinely dressed were are also seen as more forceful and aggressive — qualities that predict climbing the corporate ladder.

Forsythe's study shows how cultural associations produce a bias in hiring. Masculinity is equated with leadership, so women who dress more masculinely are seen as better leaders. 

Cultural biases show up in many contexts: 

• Just holding a beer makes people look dumber, thanks to how closely associated drinking and foolishness are in our culture.

• People who wear white labcoats — associated with doctors and chemists — actually perform better on concentration tasks, showing that presentation-based biases don't just affect the viewer, but the person wearing the clothes. 

• Men who talk a lot at work are seen as more competent, while women who speak up at work are seen as less competent. 

Frustratingly, more recent research suggests that the biases that Forsythe examined are with us today, especially in regard to gender. Female scientists with identical resumes to male scientists get lower initial salary offers, women are less likely to pursue "genius"-driven fields like engineering, and successful women are generally perceived as less trustworthy than successful men. 

Maybe that's why it's still tall, deep-voiced men who are seen as CEO material.

2015 resolutions

2015...a year of major changes for me. From student to 社会人.

→　Read 60 books:
- a russian classic
- a book series (still not sure which, probably something on zombies or spies)
- 3 japanese books (I can read in japanese without much problem, but I just don't feel like reading in it, dunno why...)
- get hooked in one genre (other than dystopian)
- read a bunch of business books to get fired up for 就職活動
- read a book in spanish (100 years of solitude)
- read more books in portuguese (mother language)
- continue reading genre and literary fiction, but mainly read non fiction (lately the opposite is happening...)
- experience more physical books and not only ebooks
- read a book on a completely random subject (I seriously doubt I can do this)
→ continue learning new japanese words
→ graduate
→ get a job (either in japan, or back home or some other country, the world is mine)
→ get into some sort of combat sports gym (wanna release all the bad emotions and feel alive fight club style - that is after I get a job)
→ use facebook less (I read the news through facebook, need to start reading them though other place exclusively, like feedly - seriously, you should see how I have my facebook organized...#highmaintenance #neatfreak)
→ play a shoot'em up to enhance my focus and speed of thought
→ change to a more mature look and not the western college student archetype
→ find more inner peace by facing my fears and taking more risks. There are no negative implications, so why the fear/anxiety? (probably from things I was used to feel anxious for that no longer exist, but the head is still set up to fear them)
→ get back to organizing my life with notepads
→ be confident on a daily basis and not sporadically, feel good and get better everyday (改善)

dog → wolf

 Reading this baby. Really good and insightful book! More than I expected! I love it when books do this. Just as this book explained, this feeling of novelty, of mindfuck, changes our perception of the world for a moment.

"your awareness sharpens and your attention zooms in on the unexpected scene - "what the hell!" your preconcious brain utters, and in that very instant your world morphs from an indifferent and impressionistic background into a scene of hyperrealism".

Interesting...

 

 Morning ritual :-)

Story of my life. Let's change it.

7 Stupid Ways Smart People Sabotage Their Success

hey hey hey

Nothing new, but still worth the mention.

Pokem'ambition

Where does your fire, your passion, your ambition, your mindset, your self come from? 

Lately I've been in a pokemon mood and a while ago I was listening to pokemon songs. And check it out. I like all the songs, they're obviously catchy (otherwise wouldn't be appealing). I saw the TV show in portuguese and the songs were in portuguese, but the lyrics were very similar. And I would often listen to the english version in the pokemon official website.

(I LOVE THIS ONE)

 

I could make research on this...how the Pokemon tv series was culturally adapted to the English and Portuguese versions. How the Japanese values were adopted by the English/Portuguese dubbing.