lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

Do Right Now - Draft

Hello friends. We are living in a world that is as meaningful as the things we believe in. Yes we are assigning our own meaning to the world by choosing what we believe in. For the fellows out there that say that they dont believe in anything, well they do believe in lots of things, chances are they are not aware of what their beliefs are. These are not necessarily religious things. There is no such thing as a logical human being. We are all directed by emotions, beliefs and instincts. I have seen lots of people that think that are very logical. Thats until you start asking questions. For instance John may be minimizing his expenses and trying to maximize his income, seemingly in a very logical way. First of all we may ask him, why he even cares about money? He may tell us that he needs money to live. Which is wrong. It is entirely possible to live without any money at all (reference: billions of animals and millions of people in the world). Oh but he needs the money to live a good life. The definition of a good life may range from a tranquil village life (which does not require lots of money) to a luxury celebrity type life. Why luxury? Because it feels good? Because his instincts tells him that excess wealth will bring him lots of opposite sex attraction? So that he can feel safe and important? Any seemingly logical decision we have is based entirely on emotions and beliefs. We believe that our survival is important. Because our old little lizard brain tells us that we must survive. We are trying to avoid something that we dont know anything about. Because we strongly believe that we must do so. We are emotionally compelled to find a spouse, find shelter, eat, live better. Our happiness is always dependent on layers of beliefs built on top of those basic ones. And thats a good thing as long as we are aware of it. Once you aware that everything is based on emotions and beliefs, you can break the walls of virtual logic. You can actually decide what you want, and what you can do to get it. You can embrace your feelings. You can learn to be happy with what you got. Happiness is not something that exists outside us. It is entirely in our mind and has little to do with what we own or how we live, but how we perceive ourselves. Apparently the very poor people in India are much happier than the richest of the western world. The USA citizens protesting the 1% are not aware that the poorest 1% of USA is still in the richest 1% bracket in the world. Everything is relative. The question is how can we change our perception, and learn to be happy. Positive thinking is very helpful here. It does not only make you happier, it makes you more efficient and make you reach your goals too. There are lots of books on positive thinking. Some relates it to some magical mechanisms. I do not, but I do not rule that option out too. However a scientific approach is good enough to explain why it works (more on this later). Some kind of meditation, self-hypnosis or guided imagery is a great way of achieving positive thinking. Such techniques allow you to reach your sub consciousness and clean all the negative biases you may have deposited so far. I strongly recommend practicing such methods. There are also simpler methods, like systematically focusing on positive stuff. Like writing down 3 good things that happen to you each day. There can be lots of variations on this such as:

lker ZCAN good things that happens to you each day most beautiful thing you saw best thing someone said best memory you can remember best opportunity that you have the most relaxed moment you had happiest moment the moment you felt strong/healthy

dorightnow.wordpress.com

You can expand the list as you wish. Have the habit of writing a few of these down every day and soon the way you are thinking will change. Your mind will start looking for these positive things. Another thing to do is not feeding your brains negative instincts with your attention. Having worries is natural, its our brains way of finding solutions to problems. But having too much of them is bad, and especially reinforcing worries and thinking that your problems are solved because you worried is very bad. What your brain should associate is that it is the actions, not the worry itself, that lead to the solution. One story I heard from a great MD that I cannot remember is about a woman who walked around her house 9 times each day to keep tigers away. When someone told her that there are no tigers in that area, she said You see, it works. It is easy for the brain to make such connections if we guide it in wrong ways. If you are checking the door lock 3 times before leaving the house, your brain will form a connection between worrying and the relaxation after the obsessive behavior. And starts thinking that the obsessive behavior does something good. Each such behavior reinforces itself. You need to stop doing it altogether. Why are you checking the door 3 times? Is it that you regularly forget locking the door? Than it makes sense to check it. If not, you are just making yourself a weaker person. Trust in yourself and your subconsciousness. Your subconsciousness is like a great supercomputer in your head. It solves problems, does calculations, recognizes stuff and brings the results to your consciousness. It takes care of locking the door without you actually even recognizing it. It makes you walk and drive. Actually it takes care of most of our life. We consciously do only so many things. We mostly guide our subconsciousness and it does everything for us. The key to a happy and successful life (one not being the prerequisite of the other) is essentially how well we can guide our subconsciousness. I think of subconsciousness as a supercomputer that works inside our head. It works for us at our whim. We think of lifting our arm, it does that. We play chess it calculates the moves for us. While studying at university I focused on the way I was thinking. I was studying engineering and the courses were rather hard. So I thought if I can get how I am thinking I could be more successful. When one monitors the time period between reading an exam question and finding the answer, it becomes apparent that we are not actively thinking in a conscious manner in the meantime. The thing is we actively think till we understand the question, than subconsciousness takes over. While our mind wanders around it makes connections and calculations at a rate and efficiency that will embarrass even fastest supercomputers of this year (2013). Our subconsciousness works on a seemingly infinite amount of information ranging from how we walk, eat, talk, and throw to engineering or medical or theological knowledge. Actually it encompasses all of our life. Our computers have software that is

lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

designed to do one thing and it cannot perform as well as human mind for non-repetitive tasks. Our subconsciousness works on everything. So while solving an engineering problem, our subconsciousness finds necessary connections in its infinite sea of knowledge, makes necessary logical deductions and calculations and gives us results. It can effectively simulate real world in many aspects. It is the master of learning. When solving bigger problems, ones that require a long time and lots of creativity, many people have recognized that not thinking about it, forgetting it is very helpful. You dont know how to make that engine fit that chassis? Bam, two days later the answer comes to you. That is the subconsciousness working in the background. But that happens when it is guided well. If it believes the problem is important. Our consciousness connects our subconsciousness to the world. Subconsciousness understands and reacts depending on how we perceive the reality. If we really think that a problem is important, it works hard on it and finds solutions. If we think its scary, it activates fight or flight response. What we consciously think about becomes its focus. Thus we can guide it by thinking about stuff that we want our brain to work on. One tricky part is, it is thought that subconsciousness does not understand negatives in our way of thinking. So when you think I should avoid falling down the cliff it focuses on falling down the cliff. Or when you think I shall not drink coffee it gets drink coffee. So positive wording while speaking and thinking is very important. Just making this one little change in your life, and starting to word everything positively will improve your happiness and success considerably. You will start thinking about what to do, not what to avoid. Your subconsciousness will work on reaching your targets, not avoiding obstacles. I have researched and worked on optimization in my engineering career. For fellows that do not know about optimization, it is the science of maximizing (or minimizing) outcomes of functions. Or plainly its the science of finding the best. It was estimated that %75 of all processing done in the world was optimization a few decades ago. Still now probably most of the non-entertainment processing done by computers is optimization. Even an important portion of entertainment processing is optimization. For a simple function it is easy to find the maximum. If you can plot it you can see with your eye where the highest point is. If not we have simple mathematical tools that tells us the answer. For more complex, multi-dimensional ones it gets tricky. But we still have good techniques. And with added complexity it gets very very tricky. If you can find a good way to solve some of them you will be rich. But thats not our point here. An optimization problem can be likened to trying to find the highest point of a terrain. But you cannot see the terrain, you are in a box. You can read the height from a device. Also you can get some other local data like slope or the curvature. Thats all. Every time you have to move your box and get new readings. Now try to find the highest point in a mountain range like this, you will see how hard an optimization problem is. But we have very clever people that figured out that we dont need to cover all the points in the terrain (which is impossible) to find the highest point. As we can measure slope, we can just follow the slope uphill and we will end up in a hill. But we cannot know if its the highest hill. Thats called a local optima, meaning that its locally a good solution. Now we can be content with our local optima or we can jump to another random point and start following the slope and end in another hill

lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

top. We can check if this hill is higher than our previous hill. We can continue this process until we are satisfied. For some problems, optimization software work pretty much like this. Its inputs are an objective function and constraints. Objective function is the terrain in our example. It can be the strength of an aircraft component or the speed of a CPU, or the distribution of funds in stock exchange in real life problems. Than we have constraints. In our example there are limits to the mountain range. Maybe the country ends at a point or there is a sea, or a line we do not want to cross. For an aircraft component it can be the maximum size or weight of the component. Or there must be a hole in it for a shaft to pass. For our CPU, we can have limits due to manufacturing methods, size limits and maybe thermal limits. For our stock exchange our money that we can allocate is limited, so is how fast we can react to changes etc. So a combination of objective function and constraints is necessary to find the best solution. I believe that human subconsciousness is like a big optimization machine. By thinking negatively most people give it just the constraints but not the objective function. Now the brain focuses on what to avoid. But as it cannot process negation, it does not know it has to avoid them, so it just works of constraints. When you think I dont want to be poor you give the constraint. Now brain focuses on being poor and you get nothing. But when you say I want to be rich your brain starts thinking about the ways to be rich. And brain being an amazing device, it finds solutions. And it feels good to be thinking about your goal, so you end up being much more motivated. Now that we can guide our subconsciousness and hopefully we can understand the emotional roots of our logic, we shall begin figuring out what we want. Now my dear reader, you should be happier and have more motivation to do the things that you want. The next step is very important: Doing. You should start doing the things that you want. You will get better at whatever you want to do by doing it. You will learn a lot by doing. You will realize your dreams by doing. Now lets say you have decided to be an entrepreneur (which is a great choice). This is one of the most challenging and rewarding paths. It needs lots of motivation and will power to succeed. So being a master of your own mind will help you a lot here. All the successful entrepreneurs out there are every positive people. Why? Because otherwise they fail. Now dont get me wrong, positive people also fail. But they get up and try again. They anticipate the things that they learn, grow and do it again. They do and do and do till they succeed. If you plan to do something big, and dont have the resources, it doesnt matter. Just start by doing something small. Something that you can afford to fail at. Because statistically you will fail in your new venture. Just play around, make experiments. As Seth Godin states: Fail small, fail often. If you are afraid of failing, you will never try new things. Think positive and see the value of your failures. In Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seeking investors start their presentation by telling about their failures. Not every culture is so accommodating. In many countries, including my country, failure is lamented. In time one needs to get away from negative people and surround himself with positive lively ones. And in time one can learn ignoring the trolls. There are people that will tell you why anything will not

lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

work and how everything that can be done is done. Their opinion is of no value and will only slash your motivation. As you have started doing things there is one important point. You need to divide your project to small tasks, each easily completable. As you finish each task you should focus on feeling the fulfillment. The satisfaction will reinforce your will power and desire, it will make you happier. Thus you will turn big projects that can seem overwhelming to manageable, self-motivating projects. This feedback mechanisms is one of the keys to success. You have a potential. Which is actually infinite. You can do anything. Also you have your perceived potential. Which is very likely finite. With every little successful step that you consciously appreciate, your perceived potential will increase. Than you will have the willpower to do bigger things. Your confidence will increase. People like confident people. Your relation with people around you will get better. Your life will improve overall. You will see a better future. Your actual performance will enhance. It is not possible to over emphasize the importance of doing. Doing is what separates successful people from people that cannot realize their dreams. You should take a step, no matter how small to break the inertia. Than you will take bigger and bigger ones. At one point doing will become a natural part of your personality. When researching successful leaders one sees that once they decide they act quickly. They may or may not fail, thats not the point. If they fail, they learn from it. The cycle is decide do observe learn decide do. What ordinary people does is decide think some more find downsides dont act. If you think long enough, you will find downsides of almost anything. So once you have decided immediately start executing your plan, and do not think if it is worth doing. Trust your initial decision, be confident. Instead focus on how to do it better, what kind of value to add. Of course this is for decisions that do not risk your life. For life jeopardizing situations this guide is not valid, your life is the most important thing. However very very few decisions in our life actually involve life-death situations. We face death everyday with ordinary events, you can die while walking in the street etc. But we usually do not care about such little factors. The things we care about, like shall I start a business or shall I move to a new house or shall I use this component in my design are almost never life threatening. But the way we react to them is as if they will kill us. The stress is our bodies reaction to a survival situation. It is meant to be a boost for our body for 5-10 minutes to fight a lion or run from flood etc. In our modern world we very rarely face such situations. But we react so. We are stressed by the fall of stock exchange. No it will not kill you, there is no need for your body to prepare for a war. Fight or flight response shall be spared for whenever it is needed. Some people are constantly stressed, and it deteriorates human body and mind. (More on this later) As the great Seth Godin once explained, we are wired to be pessimistic. A caveman always faces life threatening situations. There can be a tiger behind the bushes, there can be a snake where you step, the food can be poisonous. Every decision he makes can kill him. Thats how we are still thinking deep inside. When a caveman sees something he needs he has to examine his surroundings to check if there is anything that can kill him. We still do that. We are stressed by the university that we will

lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

attend. Can a university choice kill you? No. Than why do we trigger the fight or flight response. Our subconsciousness is still like the one of a caveman. But we can tame it with auto-suggestion. Starting from now do the following regularly. Relax (like meditation or self-hypnosis) and think deeply that you are safe. You are protected. That you will live indefinitely long if left like this. (I am safe. I am protected. I will live a long life) In time this auto-suggestion will sink deep into your subconsciousness. And you will notice that the fight-flight stress will be gone. You will be stress free. The lizard brain is the primitive part of human brain that is rather simple in its focus. When a lizard encounters something its brain categorizes it as such: Can it kill me? Can I eat it? Can I mate with it?

This lizard brain controls stress. When it decides that something can kill you, BAM stress. The way it interacts with the surroundings is through your consciousness. So if you can consciously tell it that you are safe, it wont trigger. So do this auto-suggestion. In time your lizard brain will learn that you are not being threatened, you dont need to fight now, you are safe. It will feel safe and relax your body. Before discovering this technique I my stomach was burning with acid whenever I had a stressful event. Now none. It is just gone. I became a more relaxed and healthy person. It is such an easy technique just try it for some weeks. Do it whenever you are free or bored. Do it whenever you feel stressed. In time stress will fade away. While developing this technique I was inspired by the presentation of a MD, that described how stress worked etc. and I thought why dont we directly target this feeling safe state? and it worked great for me. I hope it will work for you folks too. The benefits of doing also includes the fact that it kills procrastination. Procrastination is a problem that haunts the modern world. By constantly doing, we dont leave any room for procrastination. One shall be aware that there is no right time for doing something. Waiting for the right time is just wasting time, unless there is a real predetermined event you are waiting for. Like you may wait for the schools to be open for a project that targets students. But never vaguely wait for a time that feels right. Life is not always fun. There are many difficulties. But you know what? There are always difficulties for everyone. If you ask a billionaire he will not tell you that his life is easier than yours. If you ask a Hollywood star her life is probably very hard. But I believe there is a fine line here. You get to choose the difficulties that you will live. Will your problems be: -Will I be able to buy a new Ferrari? -Can I complete my world tour with my yacht this year? -How can I increase the turnover of my company? Or

lker ZCAN -Will I be able to pay my rent this month? -What will happen if I get fired? - How can I increase the turnover of my bosses company? -Will I be able to pay for my medication?

dorightnow.wordpress.com

They will both feel equally bad. I think we humans have an auto-adjusting scale of pain and happiness. You will feel that your problems are very important in both cases. But somehow I believe most of my readers will choose the first set of problems. And yes, it is up to you to choose which set of problems to face. The way that leads to the first set has other problems of its own, e.g.: -How can I found a new company? -How can I expand my network? -How can I innovate in this industry? I believe chasing your dreams will be beneficial for both you and humanity. And contributing to humanity is one of the biggest joys in the world. If the problems you will face will be as hard no matter what way you choose, why not go after your dreams? No matter what your dream is, chase it. Maybe you want to be the best violin player in the world. Maybe you want to build the next generation of transportation. Maybe you want to build a system that will connect all humanity. Just go, start doing something now. It may not be directly related to your final goal, but every step counts. If you don't build your dream someone will hire you to build theirs -Tony Gaskins One caution, if your goal is merely to be rich, revise your dreams. Practically, all successful people have a solid goal (thats not being rich). If your motivation is just money, you may lose your willpower in the way. But if you have other dreams, like being the best chef in the world, every step will motivate you, every satisfied customer will make you happy. As with everything in our life, balance is essential here too. You should seek a balance between chasing your dream and relaxing. You can think of this like a game. You have so many will power points. So many decisions you can undertake. And a certain rate at which you gain points. If you overexert yourself you will be left with no points, no will power and probably frustrated. You can force yourself to work very very hard without resting and relaxing. But you can do that only for a limited time. Afterwards you will be damaged and tired. I have seen people that I like do that and damage their psyche. You may think that you can work 16 hours a day and get twice done, but no, that will not happen. You will be so tired and inefficient that you will not get what you can do in a regular day done. But as you are tired you may be illusioned that you worked so hard and mentally feel good. But if you can measure how much work you have done, you will see that you did very little indeed. In the current world order, how much time you put in your work rarely matters. What matters is creativity, innovation, connection. And those cannot be achieved by working long hours.

lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

If you have 1 week to publish a project, and if you feel that you have to, go on and work all night. Otherwise dont ever do it. For a creative project that needs lots of mental power, you can work 3-5 hours a day efficiently. The rest is drinking coffee, chatter and doodling. So be aware of this and try to work very efficiently in that 3-5 hours period. But dont be fooled, your subconsciousness will be working on it all the time. So just relax and let your brain work for the rest of the day. It makes sense to spare 8 hours to working and leisurely working in that duration, when you feel bored or tired do something that will inspire you. Than spend the rest of the day by relaxing, reading, socializing, exercising or doing whatever you like. This way you will be happy and energetic. Your work will be better. Also there is the issue of automation. As Tim Ferris has shown us, automating uncritical tasks will earn you lots of time to do whatever you want. Per our will power points analogy, this will save you will points. The less decisions you need to make, better you will be at making decisions. So dont spend too much effort on making small decisions. Dont think a lot about where to eat lunch, what to wear or which way to take to work. Dont direct your attention to such trivial tasks. If it doesnt matter just choose randomly. Just flip a coin. This is true for seemingly big decisions too. One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I dont know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesnt matter. -Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland Such a great quote from Lewis Carroll. Many people tend to overthink the future. If we dont know which way to go, it really doesnt matter. Also its a fact that we cannot control most aspects of life; we are more like a leaf drifting in the river. Accepting this makes one much happier. We have to focus on the things that we can control. We cannot change forces of nature or the way governments work (usually that is), so its no good worrying about such stuff. But its not the purpose of this book to make you achieve such a state of mind. Just as a principle do not worry about things that you cannot do anything about. For decisions, regardless of how important they are (other than life-death situations of course), if you have spent sufficient time on thinking and cannot decide between a few of them than trust yourself. Trust that you have decided that you cannot distinguish between them, practically they are equally good. Just roll the dice and stick with it. Making decisions fast is a great trait.

EMOTIONS Emotions may seem like something that belongs to us humans. It may seem like they dont belong to a logical mind. The Delta character in Star Trek didnt have any emotions. Spock had little. So it seems like if we can ever make a full blown Artificial Intelligence (AI) it wont have any emotions. That is not quite true. An AI without any emotions or instincts wont have any purpose. It will just be still. It wont be curious or it wont want to survive. It wont be happy or sad. It will be empty, actually quite like our current computers. We will have to give it emotions and instincts for it to do anything at all. We will code it in such a way that it will try to survive and learn and find some things pleasant. AI being AI, this will to learn is necessary otherwise it will not be able to expand its knowledge.

lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

How do we make the AI want to learn? If you remember the optimization stuff we discussed earlier, we can think of AI as an optimization machine and its objective function is its happiness. It tries to maximize happiness. It tries to minimize pain. Now how we structure the objective function determines its emotions. If we say: Objective Function (OF) = Rate of learning Damage to self + Battery charge Its instincts will be to learn and avoid damage and fill its battery. But in this state they are equally important, but animals tend to avoid damage more than they seek learning. Thus they will have coefficients: Objective Function (OF) = Rate of learning 5*Damage to self + 2*Battery charge Now avoiding damage is 5 times more important than learning. We can expand: Objective Function (OF) = Rate of learning 5*Damage to self + 2*Battery charge + Seek new friends 3*Damage to others + 2* Repair self + Use knowledge to derive useful things Now our AI has a range of emotions or instincts. It has a will to do things. It will learn, survive, have friends avoid damaging them etc. When in conflict its coefficients will guide it. Seeking new friends is less important than filling the battery. I will give an engineering example, we are trying to make a car and we want it to be as stiff and light as possible. It can be made of one of 1000s of materials. We eliminate most of them due to high cost or manufacturing constraints. Now it can be made of steel and be very stiff but heavy, or made of aluminum and be rather less stiff but much lighter. There is no engineering calculation that will tell you which one is better. This is multi objective optimization. We are trying to reduce weight and increase stiffness at the same time and we dont have any guide that tells how much stiffness is worth how much weight. We use emotions here, in the form of coefficients. An engineer or manager decides that this much lightness is worth how much stiffness. Thats why we have very light cars and very heavy cars in the market. It is up to the emotional decision, guesswork. Our AI also has this guesswork. No one can tell us how much more important avoiding damage is than learning. There is no possible way to calculate it. And we humans are just like that. We have emotions and we do everything based on them. Each one of us has different coefficients. For some the joy of learning is worth damaging his body. For some money is beyond all. For some socializing has no importance while for others its the most important thing. One has to understand that all our superficial logic is based on our instincts. Thus the next time you are trying to do something accept thats it is not purely logical, but it is your emotions guiding you that way. Once you are aware of this, you are a freer human being. Making money is not the logical thing to do, it is something you choose deep inside. Avoiding embarrassment is not logical, it is what your emotions tells you to do. Buying a house is not logical. They are all based on emotions. You know what? You can change your emotions. You can decide that its not money that you want but freedom. That you dont want an house, you want to tour the world. That you actually dont care about being embarrassed. They are all rooted in your subconsciousness and you can change them with self-hypnosis or meditation.

lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

There is always risk associated with rewards. The word risk originates from Arabic word rzk that means food, drink and opportunity to find those. It kind of means reward. It is interesting that something that means reward turned into risk. The association between risk and rzk is deep. The more risk you take the more rewards you can get. Risk being risk, you can also get nothing or worse loose what you have. We are treating ordinary risks as if we are risking our lives. No, most of the time we are just risking our time or money. For most opportunities there is no considerable downside at all. Risking half of your monthly salary for a considerable opportunity to earn 1 million USD is not a risk at all. Do you think that there are no opportunities like that? In this day and age, one can turn an app idea to reality with little money and time. You can write a book. Start a movement. Build a website. Start selling something handmade. How will you exactly do these? I cant tell you. But I can tell you how you will learn to do these things. By doing. Start now, contact some people, make a sketch, find some freelancers. You will be amazed how much work you can get done in a week. Start with small steps and you will soon be running. You will fall but you will learn invaluable things. I was born to make mistakes, not to fake perfection. -Drake When you see mistakes as lessons, you will find the power within to go and do things. When you fail you will learn, get up and try again. As long as you believe in your ability to move forward, you will soon be running. A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because her trust is not on the branch but on its own wings. -Anonymous Thinking positive will help here a lot. Just focus on the things that you have learned, the people you have met, the unique experiences, these are invaluable. Focus on what you will do next. How much you will benefit from your experience. Think of your rewards, what you will get, how your life will become. Envisioning the future that you want is a great way to boost your motivation. I would suggest doing it regularly. Dream about what you will be doing, where, with whom etc. DONT WEAR BLINDERS In my opinion knowledge is equal to prejudice. Every time we learn something, we are limiting our world view. For thousands of years, humanity believed that we could not fly. Not only that they didnt even consider if we could fly or not. It was just a fact that we were born into. If you asked to a wise person from 1000 AD, he would happily tell you that we cannot fly. But we can. Thanks to a few visionary people, that did not accept that fact. Human mind is limited and is being slowed by its own limits. In the last decade we saw an explosion of technologies entering our lives. In 2000 few people had cellphones or internet connection. In 2010 the world became a big connected mass. Now in 2013 we are more and more connected and technology is entering every aspect of our lives. Our culture is barely adapting to our new ways. We will see lots of change, this is just the beginning.

lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

But there was no big key inventions that led to this explosion. None. Everything was already here for some time. We had CPUs touch screens, flash memories, LCD screens. Yes, they evolved but there was no revolution. The thing that changed was cultural. It became normal to use such devices. It became hip. It was more of a marketing movement than a technological one. The explosion is still happening , there is a revolution going on. Every day we see new devices new apps. New ways to use existing technology, new ways to connect us. Kickstarter, Indiegogo and likes were possible 20 years ago, but happened now. Smartphones? We had the technology for a long time. Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter and thousands of them brewed by entrepreneurs, supported by Venture Capitals? Nothing new. All that happens is in our minds. The revolution is happening one step at a time. No one knows what will be accepted and what will fail. Every new idea, every new application has a chance. There was a video of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates talking at a conference some years ago. Bill Gates stated that he knew that there will be many new form factors, many new devices but no one can foresee which ones will succeed. Same is still true. Just remove your blinders. Look at the things that others cannot see. See the opportunities and act on it. Go out and do it. As Seth Godin usually says, connection is very important. Facebook connected friends. Twitter connected in a different way. Smartphone connected us when a computer is not available. Kickstarter connected maker with supporters. Google connected us to data. Find what you want to connect. Maybe you want to connect school children to their parents. Maybe you want to connect artists to inspiration. Or homeless people to sheltering. Our lives are forged into molds from the day we are born. We have to study at a good university and find a good job and a nice spouse. We have to buy a house and renew our cars and smartphones regularly. These are all blinders on us. I am not telling you not to study or not to find a job or buy a house. The important thing is comprehending the alternatives, than deciding for yourself. Do not accept the decisions made for you by the society or ancestors. Do not ask me what lies beneath the seven colors of the rainbow behind the rain. You see this coming ship, ride it and dont look back. See it for yourself, understand for yourself. -Ete Kurttekin This wearing blinders business is tricky. Every time we learn something, we get new blinders. The cure is maybe wild, creative thinking. Brainstorming is very useful. Just think without limits. Disregard what your logic or emotions dictate. Take concepts to limits. For example lets choose a topic. Lets say I am working on notebooks. Now lets think freely. I am writing these as they come to my mind, without editing: A notebook should be as small as possible It should be big enough to take lots of content Invisible Indestructible Maybe a hologram Foldable

lker ZCAN Projected Has a million pages E-mailable Can fly Can correct my mistakes Plays music Feels great to write on Can inspire me Can read my mind

dorightnow.wordpress.com

As you can see these are beyond logic. Afterwards you can start inspecting them with logic. But this list will let you remove your blinders temporarily. We have lots of blinder, some easier to remove, some harder. Genius probably lies in ones ability to remove hardest ones and see the splendor lying ahead. There are lots of rules. Rules of society, rules of physics, rules of government, rules of religion, rules of your family, rules of your friends. In time we tend to believe that they are absolute facts of life. But actually they are not. Most of them are made up by other humans. I believe that one shall obey two sets of rules. 1. Rules of Physics. We just cannot disobey them. But most of the time we can find a workaround to get what we want. (We can fly, you see?) 2. Rules that you actually choose to believe in. If you believe that some are really important for you, that they are defining your personality and life obey them. Maybe you are a religious person or you believe in your family values. Go on honor them. Other than what you really believe in, know that those rules are artificial. You can bend them or change them or remove them under some conditions. I am not suggesting anyone to harm anyone or conflict with the government. Rules of governments may change, you can make them change or they may not be applicable elsewhere. Rules of the society are usually more restricting than others. You may feel forced to do whatever the society wants. I came to believe that this is the biggest force on human mind. It can even overcome the desire to survive. Why do we have soldiers? Because the society believes it is necessary and honorable. People have faked faith in religion to conform to society. (I am pretty sure people are even faking faithlessness right now) People have married, divorced to make society happy. They even made children to conform. They bought houses, cars and yachts. People even kill others yielding to the pressure of society. I am not telling that everyone is doing these things to conform. But everyone do something that they do not want, just to conform. Me, you, everyone. Our social instincts are very powerful. You may be combing your hair just to comply. You may be giving a party. You may be working at a company because if you left people will think that you are dumb. It is natural that we let society effect our small decisions. We are social creatures, social approval makes us happy. Actually socializing is central to our mental health. But for bigger decisions, we have to be in charge. Your job, your partner, your number of children, where you live, those should be

lker ZCAN

dorightnow.wordpress.com

determined by you. Of course you should take societies view to account but the final verdict should be yours. If what other people will think is a big part of your life, I have bad news. You are not living your own life. You will not be happy. You should not be afraid of standing out in the crowd. You should be able to go against the will of the society. And these are once more done with doing. Start doing now. Be slightly different today, more tomorrow. At one point you will not be doing things because others think that its right, but because you have decided so. As I have stated many times, doing is the most important factor in success. It is more important than resources or intelligence or skill. There are loads of clever, rich or very skilled people that just cant succeed. But people that can be deemed dumb by others become very successful by trying a lot. Persistence is the key. Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent -Calvin Coolidge, 30th President of the United States There is an excellent story, attributed to Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan. This can be the first time it is translated to English: In 14th century, Genghis Khans army way defeated and scattered by a strong enemy. He hid in a barn to avoid enemy soldiers searching for him. He noticed an ant trying to carry a grain of corn bigger than the ant itself to a hole in the wall. Each time the ant tried to carry the corn, it fell down. Genghis Khan counted 69 times that the corn fell down to floor. On the 70th trial, the ant succeeded. The emperor inspired by what he witnessed shouted and stood up. He swore that he will never give up. He gathered his soldiers and won the war. Later he became one of the biggest emperors ever known.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Introduction There are difficulties in the World. Choose your own difficulties. Write 3 best/happiest/peaceful things in your life/day/year. Think positive analogy with optimization and AI & emotions Do it Do / Observe / Appreciate / Do End of stress Seek balance Flip coin Genghis Khan