Blog – G

Flies and Trains

The “flies and trains” problem is an interesting one. The problem itself is rather complex on the surface: Say you have a train traveling at 30 mph (or km/h if you want. The units don’t really matter). There’s a wall 30 miles (or km) ahead. A fly takes off from the front of the train toward the wall at 60mph (or km/h). When it reaches the wall, it instantly turns around and flies back to the train. When it reaches the train it instantly turns around and flies back to the wall. This continues until the train reaches the wall. How far does the fly travel?

You may start by saying that it takes 30 minutes for the fly to travel the 30 miles to the wall. In the meantime, the train has traveled 15 miles. That part’s easy. But when the fly starts heading back to the train it gets tricky. How far does the train travel before the fly reaches it?

Eventually you end up with a convergent geometric sequence to solve. At that point you can figure out that the fly has traveled 60 miles.

But there’s a far simpler way to approach the problem. If you haven’t spotted it already you’ll likely facepalm when I explain it.

Let’s start with just the train. It’s traveling 30mph and it’s 30 miles to the wall. That means it will take the train an hour to get there. Since the fly is traveling at 60mph and will also travel for an hour, it will travel 60 miles.

Yeah, that’s how simple this problem really is.

Sometimes it takes just a simple change in perpsective to turn something complicated into something really simple.

Jan, 2019

The Scariest Moment Is…

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” – Stephen King

It’s curious that Stephen King would talk about fear this way. We all know him as the man who wrote The Shining, Carrie, and many other scary stories. Surely someone who writes stories about being scared doesn’t get scared himself.

And yet, he does.

The scariest moment is when you think about doing something. You have dreams of success, but there’s the fear of failure as well. That fear swells up the more you think about doing something rather than actually doing it. If you let it go long enough you’ll scare yourself into not doing the thing you once really wanted to to.

Right before you start is when your mind has had the most time to think about what you’re about to do. And it doesn’t get better by waiting longer. Yet, once you start doing, the fear goes down. When you’re taking action instead of thinking about it, your brain realizes that whatever it was so scared about didn’t actually happen. It calms down.

To me it means that right before you start some task or project is when you have the most fear and doubt. You don’t know if you’re going to fail or succeed or if whatever you do will even be worthwhile. That’s where fear starts to take over.

Fear, or more accurately, anxiety, holds you back because you expect the worst when you think about things. You’re thinking about all that can go wrong. People are far more likely to respond to fear than to positive thinking. There’s a reason people say “paralyzed by fear”. And it’s not just super scary things like someone pointing a gun at you. The anxiety of thinking about doing something and not knowing how it will turn out is often worse than having to deal with a real in-your-face situation. Yet not everything you want to start scares you.

The more familiar something is, the less scared you are (usually). If you’re scared every time you make a bowl of cereal then there’s probably something wrong with you. It’s the less familiar or more daunting tasks that cause the most fear. Does this mean fear is a sign you shouldn’t do something?

Not necessarily.

Fear simply means you need to be more aware of what it is you’re doing so you don’t die. But pretty much everything we do that scares us has basically zero chance of killing us. Not to many people die from public speaking (at least not literally – some comedians talk about dying on stage, but that just means their act didn’t do well.)

Personally, I get scared right before I have to make a phone call to someone. Even if it’s someone I’ve known forever, there’s something about that initial outreach that scares the bejesus out of me. Yet I don’t recall every having been told that my outreach was unwelcome. I knowing this I can tell myself that while I’m scared, it’s unlikely to be an issue and that helps me move forward.

This post was also scary. When I thought about writing it I thought, “no one will like it” and “who am I to have an opinion”. There were multiple scary moments. First was the actual writing of the post. The next was publishing it. But the most scary moment was right before posting on social media that I had written it. Once the post had been written, published, and posted on social media, the fear went away. (I’m saying this with anticipation of course since I’m writing this before publishing and posting it.)

However, there’s motivation here. When we want to do something that’s scary, it’s usually a sign that it’s the thing we need to do to change and grow. We have to start. That means getting through the fear and taking the first step. After that, momentum will start and the fear will subside.

Keep going. The more you do and the less you think about doing, the less fear you’ll experience and the more you’ll get done and grow. Momentum is your friend here. I’m not saying that fear will go away completely. It will just go down to a manageable level.

The next time you feel scared to do something, remember that once you start doing you’ll be less scared. Use that knowledge to start. Maybe you’ll be the next Stephen King.

How to Think Backwards

The past few weeks I’ve been learning a new piano piece: The 3^rd movement to Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata. It’s a fairly long piece at 7 minutes and is 10 pages of sheet music; 2 of which are played twice. That’s about 30 seconds of music per page played.

Now normally when you learn a piece of music, you start at the beginning. You learn the notes of the first few measures and get those down. Then you move to the next few measures, learn those, then continue.

Then somewhere about 2-3 pages in you’re at the point where it takes a while to play the stuff you’ve learned. Then you hit the stuff you haven’t learned yet and it’s like crashing your car into a brick wall. It’s also discouraging.

ADHD is Awesome!

It’s awesome except for the fact that it took me nearly two weeks to really get going on this article.

So why is ADHD awesome? It’s a bit of a story.

In my case, I love my ADHD. Normally, when someone has ADHD, they struggle to fit in with what society considers “normal” for attentiveness. They expect you to sit still and do the same thing for hours at a time and be happy with it. When you have ADHD though, that’s just not happening.

Inevitably you’re labelled as a troublemaker and get yelled at for not focusing or not sitting still. That was me from about age 3 until I realized that I didn’t need to fit in – which was about age 15 or so. Read More

Live in the Moment? Or Plan for Tomorrow?

Tiny Cabin It seems there are two prevalent messages out there these days. And while individually they make sense, when we look at both together, they seem to contradict each other. But do they really?

Let’s start with the one that’s received more attention in the long term: Plan for tomorrow. As a species, we tend to be forward thinking. When we find ourselves in a new or different situation, our brains begin evaluating the options and playing out different scenarios. We do this automatically without conscious thought much of the time.

When we consciously plan, we review options and set course down the path that makes the most sense to us at that time. It’s planning ahead that has resulted in the long-term survival and prosperity of our species. Planning is was brought about agriculture. Farmers plant seeds in the spring and plan to harvest the resulting crops in the fall.

Creativity Is Not What You Think

What do you think of when you think of someone who’s creative? You probably pictured a painter, musician, or something else in the artistic realm. You probably didn’t think of someone searching for the cure for cancer or writing software to beat the stock market. Yet both of those are highly creative tasks.

Definition of create:

To cause to come into being, as something unique that would not ordinarily evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes
To evolve from one’s own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention.

It’s true that when many people think of creative work, they think of artistic professions – painters, sculptors, musical composers, and the like. Basically if you have to buy a ticket to see it, it’s a creative endeavor.

But is that really the case?

Why Do We Please People We Don’t Like?

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The other day I was thinking about how I was going to miss a self-imposed deadline that I had told a lot of people I was going to meet. As I started thinking about how I was going to tell them I would miss it, I started thinking about what their reactions might be. In my mind, everyone except one person would say something like, “it’s ok. At least you’re making progress and moving toward something you really want.” But one person would say something like, “I knew you couldn’t do it.”

Whether these reactions are real or not, it bothered me that this one person would say something so negative. Then it dawned on me that I don’t really like this person much. They’re friendly and can hold a decent conversation for a while, but I don’t consider them anything more than an acquaintance. So why would their reaction bother me so much?

Talent is Overrated! Use This Instead

When you see a great athlete or musician or mathematician, do you think “wow, they’ve got talent!”? You may wonder how some people – other people – got their talent. I mean surely they have some innate gift that allows them to be so good at what they do, right?

You, on the other hand, couldn’t throw a ball or play an instrument or calculate a square root if your life depended on it. After all, you’ve got no talent.

This is complete and utter bullshit.

The only reason those folks can do what they do is because they spent a lot of time practicing and improving themselves. We get a glimpse of this when sportscasters do the stories of Olympic athletes. They’ll tell about how the person spent 4 hours every morning before work practicing and training. Then, after they were done working, they spent another 4 hours training. And if they’re lucky enough to not have to work, they’ll spend 10-12 hours per day training and practicing.

How to Get S**t Done (Even if You Don’t Feel Like It)

We’ve all been there. You need to do something, but you have no motivation to do it. You just don’t feel like it. So you put it off until later when you’ll “feel more motivated”. But secretly you know that you’ll never actually be motivated. What’s a poor unmotivated person to do?

The obvious answer is the right one – do it even though you don’t feel like it.

It doesn’t matter what “it” is, just that it’s something you need to do.

How To Discuss Politics Without Losing Your Mind

In the U.S., discussing politics is a national past time. Unfortunately, it’s getting more difficult to have any sort of discussion with someone who disagrees with you without the whole thing blowing up. This is especially true of debates over Facebook, Twitter, blog comments, etc.

So how do you have a debate with someone who disagrees with you without the whole thing exploding and everyone ending up angry? The following points will help maintain a lively discussion without ending up a shouting match. Read More