Passionate Living

Plenty has been said about how TV is bad for you. In the modern Web 2.0 era, several digital media experts even say that broadcast is obsolete. With the advent of online programs, now you can choose what to watch, when to watch, and where to watch it.

Fatty watching himself on TV by Cloudzilla

The generation that grew up sharing a culture – everyone watching Happy Days or The Brady Bunch – doesn’t apply any longer in the digital era. Each person tailors her own consumption of entertainment, everyone having their own versions of top hit singles and favorite TV shows. The possibility of us all going “Hey, I haven’t heard that in a long time!” in the future is a small possibility.

Yet, in the middle of this rapid digital distribution, TV can be good for you. The uncontrollable aspect of major broadcasting can sometimes lead to serendipitious discoveries. The things you discover while watching uncurated programs or mindless browsing through the channels just might inspire you with something new.

Here are 3 ways that we can all do to make watching TV in an internet era be good for us:

1. Keep an open mind

The basis of this is for us to be open to new possibilities. TV programs are less specific than niche websites, but they are diverse enough to display several topics within one hour of programming. Simply tuning into several different channels for 30 minutes or 1 hour and interpreting it with our own minds can lead to some interesting discoveries of our own.

2. Don’t watch the news

The programs produced on TV can open our eyes towards new things and new information we might else not discover in our curated internet world. Yet, the danger of uncurated information is that it can be negative and affect how we feel throughout the day. Therefore, it’s better to avoid definite sources of negative information, such as news channels, and spend time on the positive information channels, such as:

3. Watch community programs

This is the most important aspect of watching TV: if you have a local channel, or at least one that is broadcasted by your city for your city, community programs are an excellent way to learn about what’s happening in your neighborhood. You can learn much about your environment, what is the primary concern of the moment, what kind of hobby groups and activities are going on at the moment, and whether you are interested enough to join in the activity or not. Also, plenty of entrepreneurs can make a comfortable living establishing a community based business: a small business that caters to the need of a limited community. Therefore, knowing about the needs of a community is important if you are interested in developing a business.

Serendipity is the name of the game. You can do this also with magazines and radio. Just because the internet is there, doesn’t mean we should abandon all other media channels, even though we could. The curated nature of broadcast programming subjects us to the personal flavor of the program producer, music director, and magazine editor and can expose us to new information that can be good for us.

So, start exploring today: watch a little more TV, buy one or two local magazines, and listen to the radio on your mobile – you’ll never know what you’ll discover.

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How many times have you been worried about being ill?

Having a health condition can be nasty because it interferes with your productivity. You spend time and probably money in order to gain your health back. Not only that, you also need extra time to regain the balance you had prior to falling ill. Falling ill is not a good business.

Sunrise on the Boardwalk by Arturo Donate

Or is it? There’s a lesson behind every disaster we experience as human beings. There’s a benefit to every adversity we endure in the journey of our lives. Humans grow from these difficult times, although we would mostly rather avoid them.

During the recovery process after falling ill, you develop a more delicate sensitivity and objectivity towards what you see and hear with your senses. You are more open and appreciative of the small details in life, and you can absorb the moment with greater proficiency than when you are in full health. In fact, sometimes being in full health can make you drown in your business and take the finer details for granted.

There is a TED talk but I fail to remember the title or the speaker. In it, she mentions the importance of disease. Would she rather have people stay healthy and disease free all the time? Not necessarily. She says that it is because of these diseases, these life changing maladies, that occur in the first place, that have made most of the greatest people in our society become great people: after their heart attacks or cancer diagnoses or other life threatening illness, their priorities were shocked into place and they pulled their act together. Lawyers become social workers, engineers become designers, accountants become community managers, and other more fundamental changes of characters.

This story shows, that although we might prefer to have a smooth and happy life all the way, it is the tough times that make it all worth while. No life was ever worth living if it never was worth fighting for: the struggles, the (non-personally invited) drama, and the battles that need be fought are the ones that make us change to be a better person. It is during hindsight, that we gain the clearest perspective and know then which step to take next.

Therefore, there is a benefit to falling ill: you stop being busy, you stop being part of the beehive, you stop being distracted by the hustle bustle and noise of city life. You start to notice the stillness of the clouds, you start to see the light of the sun, and you start to stand still be one with nature as you ask yourself, “Where have I been all this time? What have I been doing? It feels like I’ve done a lot but accomplished little in reality.”

Enjoy the process, absorb the experience. Before you lose grip of it and fall into the vortex of superficial living again.

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[1] Photograph by Arturo Donate

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of information you have to learn? Ever desire to be fluent on a subject but don’t know how to start? Accumulated a wealth of information from magazines, websites, blogs, and twitter feeds more than you can digest?

St Margaret's Steps by Neosnaps

The world wide web is the one stop shop for finding anything and everything on any subject that might be your recent fascination. From fashion to food, cars to cooking, music to self-motivation, the web provides us with more information that we can shake a stick at. The problem today then isn’t lack of information – as it maybe was back in the pre-web eras – but management of information.

You’re a sophomore student majoring in biochemical engineering who also has a serious hobby in digital photography; so you subscribe to a physical biochemical journal and also several free photography tutorial blogs from various great resources on the web. But between the time you need for actually attending class, digesting the journal, being involved in social activities in campus, you may end up using more time reading than you do getting things done like photo hunting or making a discovery in your experiments. The old adage – take things one step at a time – then becomes a serious application that holds true today than it did centuries ago when it first came up.

You might think “Yeah sure, I know to take things one step at a time. What’s new huh?”. But are you sure you actually apply what you know? The mistake with most of common knowledge today isn’t the effectiveness, but the efficiency of all the famous sayings that have come into our collective consciousness: we are lacking in the execution of our knowledge (also known as xQ: Execution Quotient).

Taking one step at a time does sound easy, but how can we truly apply it to our daily activities? Here are 3 tips to help you be more efficient in learning things one step at a time:

1. Decide on 1 source. Period

Yep. Not exactly the easiest thing to do, but it sure get’s the job done. Humans have the tendency to collect things, so practicing limitation is going against your natural inclinations. By limiting your source to 1, it doesn’t mean 1 for the rest of your life, it means 1 for a certain limit of time: for example, go over to Digital Photography School and spend maybe 2 to 3 weeks just learning from that site alone.

2. Practice 3 to 4 tips every 2 weeks

When you’ve decided on a source, make sure you practice at least 3 to 4 of the many tips contained in that site. The above site is one of the leading sources for digital photography, so there are abundantly more tutorials than a couple. But in order to not overwhelm yourself, just choose a few and practice them out in the course of 2 weeks. You might think this is getting little done, but in the course of 3 months, you’ll have developed 48 new techniques! If learning piano is your pursuit, you’d have mastered all the basic chords on all the white scales! Huge improvement!

3. Be involved in the community, if there is one

The DPS site is community powered: it’s huge because it has one of the largest web communities around (for any kind of site, not just photography!). Granted, participating in an online community takes more of your time than simply reading, but the rewards and lessons you acquire are worth the time invested . You might even be able to get a quick tip or two, speeding up your learning curve greatly! Humans learn best from each other, so talking to a fellow enthusiast or professional is often the best way to go.

An adage is an adage because everyone needs to re-learn it as a principle for themselves. This is called here Re-Incarnation: or why we need to learn things for ourselves, even if it has become common knowledge. Taking things one step at a time is old advice, yet it is always new in application. So let’s get started!

What’s your take on the old adage? Are there other principles you’ve rediscovered for yourself in life? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments:

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[1] Photograph by Neosnaps