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precuredaily · 3 years

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Precure Day 205

Episode: Yes! Precure 5 Go Go! 07 - “Let’s Go! Palmier Kingdom!” Date watched: 31 January 2021 Original air date: 16 March 2008 Screenshots Transformation Gallery Project info and master list of posts

insert quip here

When we left off, the friends were rushing off to Palmier Kingdom because Milk said there was an emergency. It turns out Milk may have been stretching the truth, but of course, danger follows the Rose Pact wherever it goes, so her lie quickly becomes reality. How will the Precures fend off a new enemy? How will Coco and Nuts prove their dedication to their citizens? How will Milk learn the value of doing your part? How will we continue setting up Milky Rose? You’re about to find out!

The Plot

As they fly to the Palmier Kingdom on Syrup’s back, Coco wonders what kind of terrible danger it may be in. King Donuts lectures him and Nuts for leaving the kingdom in the first place because of the inability to protect their people. Meanwhile, in the Palmier Kingdom, there seems to be no trouble afoot at all. The citizens are hard at work rebuilding the palace and buildings. Everyone is chipping in..... except for Milk, who is sitting by a wall, neglecting her responsibilities. Papaya, the mustachioed fairy who was Coco and Nuts’s tutor in the past, sternly reminds her to concentrate on her work; Milk retorts that she can’t concentrate if she’s worrying about the Kings, and Papaya counters that supporting the people is the job of a caretaker. Milk takes this as well as you may expect.

this level of sass would be unrivaled until a certain mermaid swam onto the scene in 2021

Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Syrup. Milk excitedly walks over to see if he brought a letter from Coco and Nuts, when suddenly the girls spring up, followed by the kings. Milk gets misty eyed, declares she missed them, and begins running straight towards an expectant Nozomi. What follows is a glorious bait and switch.

vimeo

Milk dives right past Nozomi to tackle her beloved kings.

Over in Eternal, we see a new character walking down the hallway. He is soon revealed as another general of the organization, Nebatakos. He drops a collection item off, a starving animal, and he indicates he only fed it enough to stay alive. Anacondy scolds him for his negligence but informs him that the Rose Pact is in the Palmier Kingdom should he wish to retrieve it. How exactly she knows this is unclear.

Wilson Fisk he ain’t

Back in Palmier Kingdom, Papaya chews out Milk for implying there was an emergency and causing the Precures and Kings to return. (The kings themselves aren’t too fussed about it, for what it’s worth.) She weakly justifies her actions by saying that the loneliness people felt without their leaders was a critical situation and then runs off. While Milk stews over her feelings, Coco, Nuts, and the girls join the rebuilding efforts, spending some quality time with the people and with each other. Coco admits to Nozomi that he wanted to show her the kingdom when it was rebuilt but she’s not disappointed. At the same time, Komachi discusses King Donuts’s lecture with Nuts, who admits the monarch was right in his assessment of their shortcomings and he and Coco have work to do in becoming proper leaders. Karen worries about Milk, who is hiding behind a rock outside the kingdom, but Syrup finds her. He gives her some grief about shirking her duties as a caretaker, and she admits that she took the position to stay close to Coco and Nuts. When they turned around and left, Milk felt lonely and that’s why she wrote the letter. Syrup, still exhausted from rushing to get everyone here, collapses, and Milk apologizes, recognizing her fault in his fatigue.

Syrup has no chill

Everyone is taking a break in the kingdom, eating some giant fruits that look like a cross between a coconut and a papaya. They are apparently DELICIOUS.

please make memes out of this.

These are palmier fruits, and they come from the namesake tree of the kingdom. The giant palm trees have great cultural significance, so Nozomi decides she’ll plant the seed of her fruit to grow another.

Unfortunately their break is interrupted by the arrival of Nebatakos, who demands to know the location of the Rose Pact. When they don’t give it up, he transforms into his monster form of a gray and gold octopus man and begins destroying the precious palmier trees. The girls transform, but not to be outdone, Nebatakos turns the nearby hill (where Milk and Syrup are) into a Hoshiina. Coco and Nuts start evacuating their citizens to safety while the Precures fight the villain and his lackey. Since he’s new, he manages to keep the upper hand, and the girls quickly find themselves at the end of their rope. However, most of the battle is actually focused on Coco and Nuts evacuating their citizens with some help from Milk and Syrup, who fly people to safety. Seeing this, King Donuts laments his inability to help since he’s stuck in the Rose Pact healing. When Nebatakos confronts the Palmier fairies holed up in the castle, Coco bravely leads him away from the civilians, allowing himself to be caught as a diversion. Dream sees Nebatakos strangling him from afar, but she can’t break away from fighting the Hoshiina, so Nuts steps out with the Rose Pact, and King Donuts standing proud inside of it, to face Nebatakos and get him to release Coco. King Donuts pops out for a moment and unleashes a blindingly bright blue light that stuns Nebatakos and the Hoshiina for a moment before he collapses. The Rose Pact falls away from them, and unseen by anyone else in the commotion, it glows blue and emits a bright blue seed.

This will not be important later on, pay it no mind.

King Donuts’s stun attack also gave the Precures enough of an opening to turn the tide of the battle, and they rescue Coco before setting up the Hoshiina and Nebatakos for their special attacks. Aqua unleashes a Sapphire Arrow on Nebatakos, which really takes the wind out of him, and then Dream performs Shooting Star. Nebatakos teleports away, leaving the Hoshiina to take the full force of the attack and it disintegrates.

After the fight, King Donuts is still incredibly weak but admits he was inspired by everyone’s bravery and wanted to help out however he could. He doesn’t say it aloud but he seems to be gaining respect for them as rulers. After that, it’s time for the visitors to leave. Everyone loads up into Syrup after saying their goodbyes to Milk, Papaya and the citizens. Milk gives an inspiring speech to everyone about doing their best while the Kings are away and says an extra special goodbye to Karen. Nozomi asks her to take care of the palmier seed she planted. At last, they fly off, and eventually the crowd dissipates, leaving only Milk. She starts to cry, but then she sees a split-second premonition of the blue seed being held in a tender pair of hands.

Milk turns around and sees the actual blue seed behind her, glowing, so she picks it up and stares at it inquisitively as the scene fades to black.

The Analysis

Honestly having an episode about visiting another world take place this early in any Precure season is really unheard of, but given the circumstances I’m glad they did. Getting to see Palmier Kingdom being rebuilt drives home how much there is to be done, how much damage Nightmare caused, and how strong their community is that they can band together to do this. It also really only works because of this being a sequel, if this had been a brand new show I don’t think this would have been as effective. Even if this series doesn’t always know what to do with its second season, it does have moments like this that make it worthwhile.

More than any other episode I can recall in the past season, this episode is much more about the fairies than the humans. Coco, Nuts, Milk, and King Donuts each have arcs throughout this episode that play into their overall roles in the story. Coco and Nuts are still reckoning with King Donuts telling them he doesn’t acknowledge them as kings yet (and if you forgot it from last episode, it’s one of the first things he says in this one), but they take the chance to self-reflect on their shortcomings and strive to do better. They get some moments of introspection as they help to rebuild, which show their different perspectives and priorities. Coco is a bit sad that he couldn’t show the fully rebuilt Palmier Kingdom to Nozomi, because he wants to show her the kingdom as he remembers it, but she thinks it’s beautiful already because of his efforts.

I can show you the world. Shining, shimmering, splendid!

Meanwhile, Nuts takes a more introspective approach as he discusses his feelings with a worried Komachi. She’s afraid that he’s offended by King Donuts’s remarks, but he admits he actually agrees, and that he and Coco have work to do if they’re going to be effective leaders. Later on, they display sincere, unprompted heroism in helping and protecting the citizens during the attack. They tend to the scared and wounded, they ensure everyone is holed up in a secure location so they don’t get injured in the fight, and they protect the civilians by distracting the villain.

Seeing the way the young rulers act in their natural element, in various situations, helps to warm King Donuts up to them. He’s largely unseen during the bulk of the episode, but he’s present at a few crucial points. First, as they all fly towards Palmier, he reminds Coco and Nuts in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t recognize them as kings yet. He’s present during Milk’s first disciplining, and then during the climax when Coco and Nuts are at their best, their bravery spurs King Donuts himself to take action against Nebatakos. He recognizes he’d be a hypocrite if he tells the Kings to protect their citizens while he himself cowers inside the Rose Pact, and that’s why he overexerts himself to buy a little bit of time. Interestingly, his act of bravery seems to be what triggers the Rose Pact to deposit the blue seed. It’s nice to see how he’s begun to accept them after seeing their courage and leadership in a pinch. He’s not such a bad guy.

Most importantly, this episode begins a new character arc for Milk. It’s not a complete reset to where she was on her initial introduction in the last series, but her dependency on Coco and Nuts comes a lot more into focus when they’re not around for her to fawn over. We know she’s been sending a lot of letters, and it turns out she’s doing this at the expense of her other responsibilities towards rebuilding Palmier Kingdom. When called out on her selfishness that made the Kings return and put themselves at risk, she brushes it off and insists she was right, their absence created a critical situation because everyone was lonely without them. In reality, she seems to be the only one who’s lonely and she’s projecting. However, after talking with Syrup she feels some remorse. When Nebatakos attacks she sees the Kings in danger as the direct result of her choice, exactly what Papaya warned her could happen. She takes some initiative during the panic by evacuating some citizens, and afterwards she sees Coco and Nuts off dutifully with an impassioned speech to the citizens. She talks eagerly about about how hard the Kings are working to find the four monarchs, so the citizens have to work hard at home as well. (however, it’s Milk, so whether or not she’s actually learned her lesson from earlier is doubtful) It’s character development, arguably more than she got in the entire previous series, and while I recall in broad strokes where she winds up at the end of the series, I don’t recall in detail what happens so I do still hope they build further on this.

As for the actual protagonists of the show, it feels strange to say this but they don’t do much until the climax. Things happen to them or around them, but as I explained it’s really more of a mascot focus episode. They arrive in Palmier, reunite with Milk, are present at her scolding, and assist in rebuilding. Karen has some dialog about looking for Milk but we don’t really see this. The episode chooses to focus on exposition over action, breaking the cardinal film rule of “show don’t tell.” There is a nice moment about halfway through where Coco and Nuts tell the girls about the significance of the Palmier Tree but again, that’s not them doing stuff. Nebatakos’s attack is when they become more prominent, but even then the fight is interspersed with scenes of the rescue efforts. The girls land a few hits on the villain and the Hoshiina, and then the attention goes back to the fairies for a while with only brief glances at the combat. Dream is worried about Coco when Nebatakos is strangling him but she’s blocked from leaving her fight until King Donuts uses his blinding light and creates an opening for her to rescue him. This allows the girls to set up some combos for their finisher, and then we next see them loaded into Syrup ready to leave. Again, Karen offers kind encouragement to Milk, and Nozomi requests her palmier tree be tended to, but nothing more deep or significant than this.

Nebatakos is a unique new villain. He seems smarter than Scorp, but he’s very indifferent to other people and living beings. I don’t think we’ve had a character quite like him before. He’s callous and efficient, he knows what buttons to push and he just does what he does for a check. When he realized the palmier trees were important, he began crushing them to cause mental anguish. He nearly strangled Coco, which I believe is a first for this series. Had it not been for Nuts and King Donuts, he may not have made it. His visual design is very interesting, as he’s based on an octopus (tako=octopus). He’s a fleshy gray mass with gold armor on his upper body, he has two tentacle arms that bisect or trisect at the ends to function sort of like long fingers. He has, depending on the art in a given frame, between six and eight tentacles that he uses as legs, and most often they are wound together so he can walk bipedally, but he does sometimes unwind them and walk around on multiple tentacles, or use his leg tentacles for grappling purposes. In theory it would make him more versatile, in practice he doesn’t do any creative, unique things with his anatomy like grabbing all five girls at the same time. At least not in this fight. His stand-out feature is his monster voice. He has this gurgling quality to it and I’m not sure if it’s a special vocal filter or the actor is doing it naturally. It helps to sell his aquatic nature and I enjoy it.

The art style of this episode is a little bit off. The animation was directed by our old friend Kawano Hiroyuki, who I’ve pointed out before when his bad faces show up. His signature weird smiles and awkward camera angels are on full display here.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad, but when it is, it’s noticeable. He also gave us this great Nozomi face so I think that balances out.

art

Also speaking of art and animation, there’s a pretty bad goof near the end as the girls fly off.

your device is not malfunctioning, this gif is 1/4 speed

If you notice, the artist completely forgot to draw the part of Komachi that should be visible beneath Urara’s hair. For the entire shot.

If you’ve seen the show before, or you know what the Blue Rose is, you know where the ending of this episode eventually leads to. I’ll assess the Blue Rose arc more once it concludes but so far I enjoy the setup. This episode takes the time to reverse perspectives by having the heroines be the strangers in another land while the mascots are in their home environment. It’s a unique and creative way to continue the plot while also setting up some character arcs and transitioning from the character reintroductions over to the meat of the show. It explores a seldom-seen avenue by showing us the fairy world rebuilding and recovering and that’s one of the ways that GoGo really stands out from the crowd as a very solid sequel that builds on what came before rather than just being more of the same (like much of Max Heart).

Next time on Precure Daily: Syrup’s past begins to unravel! Look forward to it!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: 1 Kettei! (in the preview)

#Precure #Pretty Cure #Yes! Precure 5 Go Go!#YPC5GG07 #PCD205

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kondo-hijikata · 5 years

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Have you written a story of Kondo & Hijikata and how their feelings for each other slowly developed? Cuz I'd love to read about how their relationship came to be!

Pairing: Pre-Relationship to Relationship Kondo/HijikataRating: TSummary: Hijikata had no particular interest in meeting the new Tennen Rishin Ryu heir…until he saw the size of his shoes. [AO3]

.*Before the Storm*.Chapter 1

Ishida Village - 1851

It all began with hearsay and a pair of ridiculously bigshoes left in front of the Sato Dojo.

Medicine chest strapped to his back, Hijikata stood beforethe porch scrutinizing the larger than life footwear with curiosity displayedopenly in amethyst eyes just a bit wider than usual. His brother-in-law Hikogorowore sandals of typical proportion, never particularly larger or smaller thanany other’s, and yet here they sat dwarfed.

A loud shout of “EEEEEY!”and subsequent sharp clash of shinai echoed from within the dojo, drowning outthe melody of mid-summer cicada song—had Hijikata’s chin snapping up toward theentrance in desire of catching a glimpse of the action. There was none to beseen from where he stood, however; instead, he listened with heed to the poundingsteps taken carefully against the wooden floor, the undoubtable indication ofopponents locked in a dance of wits to match their brawn.

Word had it that the new Tennen Rishin Ryu master possessedintelligence to match his fortitude, and came with some kind of interestingpast to boot. Intellect was subjective, strength was comparative. Hell, anyonecould claim to have a compelling backstory.

But not many in a higher social class would admit to hailingfrom much humbler roots.

And it went without saying that no one could fake the sizeof these shoes.

“Oi, Toshizo,”Hikogoro had said the previous evening, jabbing his sakazuke cup over thedinner table to catch his attention. Taking the bait, Hijikata’s gaze lifted whilehe made quick work of his remaining rice and stayed attentive while he chewed.“You oughta come by to train tomorrow afternoon. The young master is visiting…youknow, the one who just became next heir to Shusuke-sensei’s legacy.”

“Cht.” Hijikata’s brow twitched and his bowl hit the table alittle harder than he might have intended. He reached for the soup next andbefore sipping, replied with an irascible, “The hell do I care?”

To the right was his sister, and far be Nobu to ever pass upan opportunity to lovingly scold him for something. “Toshizo, I keep tellingyou…” When he peered up at her, she pursed her lips and cocked her head, hertone matter-of-fact. “Your face is going to freeze that way if you keep that up.”

Hijikata scoffed. “Good.” —and proceeded to down the rest ofthe broth while Nobu’s eyes rolled to the ceiling.

“Maa, c’mon!” Hikogoro sang, his voice light and airy. “Atleast just meet him, even if it’s quick! I think you two would have some thingsto talk about.”

Chopsticks were laid across an empty dish. “Yeah, like howhe’s some bigshot samurai and I’m just a damn medicine-peddling, textile-sewingfarmer.” Bringing a handkerchief up to dab at his mouth, Hijikata’s expressiondarkened into an unamused scowl. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

A dramatic sigh left Nobu’s lips. “You know, Toshizo, it’sno wonder you’re drawn to writing. You certainly enjoy words—and not to mentionputting them in other people’s mouths.”

Long black lashes fell in a prolonged blink and Hijikataslowly turned his face to her before reopening them. They fluttered as hehalf-glared, expecting a continuation of her criticisms. Nobu had a point, as she often did…not that hewould ever admit to it, but that was a different thing entirely.

“Just come by. Ne?” Hikogoro prodded again.

Folding the small cloth twice over, Hijikata tucked it backinto the sleeve of his hakamashita and brushed himself off. “I’ll think aboutit if it’ll make you happy.” At that, he expressed gratitude for dinner andpromptly stood to take his leave, with no certain intent to waste a single furthermoment on the invitation.

However, just as he approached the open doorway, Hikogorospoke up again. “The young master may be a samurai now but he was born into thefarming class.”

Hijikata’s hand fell on the wooden frame and though hehadn’t looked back, he did pause.

“…Doesn’t that interest you? Even a little?”

His fingertips barely flexed. All he offered asacknowledgement was a slight turn of the head before he stepped out onto theporch and vanished into the night.

The hoursseparating that mealtime exchange from the present had been rife with a heavydose of scrutiny and flip-flopping. Much to Hijikata’s irritation, he had toadmit that a farmer-turned-samurai wasintriguing and it had seemed likely hecould get on well with such a person. Maybe.Still, he’d risen and left the house before anyone else in the family awoke totry their hand at influence once more.

As it turnedout, no further convincing was needed, for there he stood per Hikogoro’soriginal request—before the threshold of the dojo while the afternoon sunburned bright and had beads of moisture lining his brow.

One look. Onelook was all Hijikata would give this guy, because he was damn convinced thatwas all it would take to drown the intrusive questions which refused to stopneedling him. Shusuke-sensei was an old man with a taste for strange company,after all. Surely, he’d adopted some middle-aged misfit who was now walkingaround with two swords at his hip and acting like he was some kind of eminentindividual by birthright. That kind of person might be even worse thanso-called real samurai who lazedabout and drank their fill of sake and milked the privileges of their status.

“Tch.”

Hijikataslipped the medicine chest off his back and placed it on the porch. The strapclasps fell undone under his chin and the hat followed, pulled free from hisperson and set atop his wares. He about-faced to kick his sandals off, refusingto even compare his own with the size of their visitor’s, and then vaulted uptoward the entrance just in time to see…

“EEEEEY! HA!”

Hikogoro faced the door decked out in training gear, hisshinai locked and quivering against the young master’s—whom, Hijikata couldonly see from the back at this vantage point. Upon his sudden appearance,Hikogoro let up with an excited, “Ah!” He backed away several steps. “So youcame after all! Katsuta-san, I want you to meet my brother.”

“Oh, the one you mentioned!”

Hijikata crossed his arms and leaned against the frame, onehip jutting out as he watched both men quickly freeing themselves from their chestguards and facemasks. Leave it to niisan to run his mouth, when it wasn’t evenofficially decided that he’d show up today or not. He respected the hell out ofHikogoro, but sometimes he could really be—

With his facemask pulled free, the young master turned.

…Gold. Golden.Like sunlight.

Hijikata’s chest stilled. His lashes parted a little wider,his mouth went dry.

Young. So much younger than expected. Handsome. Ridiculously handsome. …Approaching. Oh, he was approaching. Hijikata blinked and slowly,almost clumsily, righted himself.

“Shimazaki Katsuta,” the young master said in introductionand quickly wiped at his face with his hakamashita. Was that blush staining across his cheeks, orjust a consequence of the heat? “Ah, I’m sorry to meet you when I’m alldisheveled and sweaty, but…” He bowed, those adjectives not lost on Hijikatafor a second. “It’s a pleasure.”

A large grin pulled out into Hikogoro’s cheeks as he clappedhis friend hard on the shoulder. “This is our future Kondo-sensei.”

The young master huffed beneath his breath in amusement, hisfeatures managing to somehow soften even further as he rubbed at where he’dbeen playfully assaulted. “Hey now, I’m flattered but I don’t share my father’slast name yet.”

Hikogoro’s laugh resounded in the space and he jabbed an armnext, to which Kondo raised his shoulders. “Soon enough, Katsuta-san! Soonenough.” His attention returned to Hijikata while tilting his head and beginningto blot a line from temple to chin with a cloth. “Well? Toshizo? What do you think?”

…What did he think? What the hell more was there to think other than things he couldn’t say?! He wasgorgeous, plain and simple, and a shinai looked too damn good in his strong hand.

Kondo’s whiskey eyes were back on Hijikata, his gaze filledwith curiosity and perhaps a touch of embarrassment at Hikogoro’s flattery ashe awaited his assessment. And when Hijikata suddenly realized that Kondo was, indeed, waiting for an opinion, heglanced quickly to his brother-in-law and unfolded his arms. Hikogoro liftedhis brows with a nod, urging him on.

Say something, saysomething. Say anything.

“You have some big ass feet.”

…Shit. Why did hesay that?!

“You have some big assfeet.”

There weren’t many times in his life when Hijikataexperienced the desire to fade right out of existence, but now…now was good atime as ever.

A sudden forced cough exploded from Hikogoro’s mouth whilehe pounded his chest and Kondo…he simply blinked. His head barely cocked, as thoughhe were processing what had been carelessly blurted out—as if he were wonderingif he’d heard correctly.

It was unfortunate that he had.

The prevailing silence was deafening, horrifying. Someone presentneeded to attempt damage control and though he had no concrete plan for mendingthe presumed hurt feelings of an important fixture in Hikogoro’s life, Hijikata’slips parted to speak. Apparently, he’d still not learned the lesson that sayingnothing at all was often better than speaking for the sake of it. Fate was onhis side, however; just as he was about to come out with some stream ofnonsense rambling, Kondo’s shoulders shook once with a huff. And then again.And before long, he closed his eyes and barked a laugh.

After fingers idly brushed through his hair, Hijikata flippedhis ponytail and winced, trying again. “Look, uh. I didn’t mean—”

Kondo held a hand up to stop Hijikata in his tracks andwaved it, chuckling more and then bringing it back to rub at the tip of hisnose. “It’s fine. You’re right. I’m sorry for laughing, it’s—”

Hijikata snorted. “Don’t apologize. I’m the one apparently beingoffensive.”

Shaking his head, Kondo closed his eyes for a beat. “No, no,not at all. I’m laughing because…okay. I have this friend I visit back home,yeah? And one time he hired a new maid who I hadn’t met before. So, we’resitting there drinking together and suddenly this blood-curdling scream ringsout. Turns out it was her when she saw the size of my shoes in the entryway.”

“What?! All right, look!” Feeling more at peace with thesituation, Hijikata’s posture eased and he shrugged at Hikogoro. “It’s not justme. But I didn’t scream. Remember that.” A huff. “You gotta admit that they do kinda stick out, though, your shoes…”

“Oh, I know it!” Kondo laughed. “But for what it’s worth, Iended up becoming friends with that lady so maybe this is a good sign?”

“Heh…” A smirk pulled at Hijikata’s lips. “Here’s hoping. Name’sHijikata Toshizo.”

Kondo’s chin fell in a nod. “Again, it’s a pleasure.” Hegrabbed Hikogoro by the shoulders—who had gone from looking beyond mortified torather impressed over the span of the conversation. “Hikogoro-san always hasgreat things to say about you.”

“Psht. Don’t believe a word this guy says.”

“Oi, Toshizo!” Hikogoro’s back straightened and he stood tall. “Katsuta-san might accept your disrespect but I sure as hell won’t!”The facade crumbled as soon as he’d spoken and his spine relaxed. “Eh, who am Ikidding?”

“No one, Sir,” Kondo offered with a grin. “But maybe if youwere up against some thieves instead…”

“Well, we can’t win ‘em all, can we?” Hikogoro hummed andthen switched direction. “Katsuta-san, you must be starving. I’ll go grab somelunch for you.”

“Oh, I don’t want to trouble you or your wife, Hikogo—” Andas if his stomach had intended from the start to rebel against such apredictably humble reply, it growled loudly at that very moment. Kondo’s cheeksflushed.

Hikogoro smiled. “You’re no trouble at all. Hang out herefor a bit, yeah?” His expression went a touch serious. “You too, Toshizo. Keepthe young master company. Try not to offend him.”

Hijikata sucked his teeth and tossed his face to the side.

Looking between both, Kondo interjected, “Actually, I’lltake a minute or two and show myself to the well if you don’t mind. I shouldreally wash up.”

“Sure thing. Toshizo, why don’t you walk him out back?”

The protest came immediately. “Oh, it’s all right, really.Today’s super hot.” Kondo chin fell once. “Hijikata-san, why not stay onthe porch until I come back? The shade is better than cooking in the sun.”

“I really wouldn’t mind,” Hijikata offered with a shrug.Indeed, he absolutely would not mindseeing Kondo’s hakamashita falling off his shoulders and getting a qualityglimpse of the obvious muscular form his attire was hiding. Alas… “But it’s upto you.”

After another nod to solidify the plan, Kondo and Hikogorotook their leave, each heading in his designated separate direction. The glassporch chime jingled with the passing of a light breeze and Hijikata drifted outof the dojo, taking in the sight of a nearby tree with its swaying leaves beforeflopping down next to his medicine chest. He stared at the dark plankscomprising the ceiling, allowed his legs to kick and swing off the edge of thefloorboards. From there, his mind began to wander.

The universe worked in surprising ways. Never in a millionyears had Hijikata expected to not only like what he saw, but…actually really, really like it. Experience from peddlingand apprenticeship had honed his skills when it came to dealing with people;he’d been told countless times how effortlessly he cavorted about others, howeasy he made communication look. Some old man with a crooked spine once shook acane at him and said he could probably sell salt to the sea if he tried.

As reality would have it, though, work was nothing more thana performance. It was Hijikata simply doing what he needed to do to survive andget by. If he wasn’t personable or convincing, he’d never sell anything at all.And if he wasn’t selling anything, he wasn’t earning income. And if he wasn’tearning income…

He licked his lips and folded his hands over his abdomen,stopping his thoughts from the derailment they often suffered from. The fact ofthe matter was that talking with Kondo required no great effort on his part.The conversation had flowed so easily that anyone looking at them from theoutside would assume they’d been friends since childhood…which was bizarre,since they’d only just met.

Hijikata drummed on the knuckles of his lower hand. So,Hikogoro had been right. He hated to admit it, especially when he’d been soobstinate about meeting the young master in the first place. But really, all hehad was a first impression. Whether Kondo was truly someone who Hijikata couldmesh well with or not in the long run would be up for debate for some time.

Well…

His fingers stopped their movement.

There was one simple way to find out whether it was even worththe effort. He could simply confess about his desire to become a samurai, and gaugefrom the response. But then again…Hijikata hadn’t felt much like being mockedfor the millionth time in his life. And if he were very honest, he was afraidthat this handsome guy who seemed to have it all together would end up onlyletting him down.

“…Tch.”

He closed his eyes, laced his digits, and let the breezeruffle through his bangs.

There were good samurai and bad samurai in the world.

The first time Hijikata learned this fact coincided with thefirst time he ever picked a fight. It was the summer after he’d turned eightyears old, when he and a couple of boys who lived down the street converged tokick a ball about and then jump in the lake when it got too hot in the sun.Naturally, kids were kids and ever too content to wear their hearts on theirsleeves. Though, upon Hijikata’s crash-landing into adulthood, he quicklyrealized that being too honest wasn’t merely a product of juvenility, butapparently just an irritating fact of human nature.

On that particular sweltering day in his youth, he’d foundtwo perfectly sized sticks beneath the canopy of an old oak tree and promptlyworked them through the side of his hakama—his very own makeshift blades.

That’s when the heckling began again.

“You ain’t no samurai! Stop acting like it!”

“Even if you wore swords and armor, you’d still look like agirl, To-chan.”

“Weren’t you born in some kind of barn? You don’t even havea mom. Or a dad. Idiot.”

Suffice to say, sticks were in no way as effective asswords. Though, they apparently did hurt enough if someone got smashed over thehead with one…enough even to make him cry and run away.

And that was what brought Kano-san from six houses over toNobu’s porch that evening. Hijikata stood at his sister’s side, unaffected bythe angry father who came to exact vengeance for his scorned son. His hair wasworn in chonmage style with scraggly and unkempt pieces falling loose about hisbulldog face, his cheeks and chin stubbly from lack of attention. Hijikatadoubted he even bathed.

“Control your brat.” Kano spat when he talked and his cheeksjiggled. It was unsightly.

“My understanding is that my brother was acting inself-defense,” Nobu replied coolly, and making no move to descend the stairs tospeak face-to-face with him. “…Samurai-san.”

“He hit Hiromasa over the head with a stick, this fucking baragaki¹.” An accusatory finger wasjabbed in Hijikata’s direction. “My kid did nothing to deserve that.”

“Would you like an apology?” Nobu’s inquiry was calm. “Iapologize.” She placed her palm on the back of Hijikata’s head and gently tiltedit forward. “As you can see, Toshizo does as well.”

Hijikata scoffed and shook her hand free.

“You better watch your step, bitch, and control youranimal.” Kano looked down to Hijikata. “And you, you little fuck. I want you totake a good look at this.” Fat fingers stroked the handles of the swords at hiship. “This is what a real samurailooks like, something you’ll never be. Know your place.”

Nobu’s hand pressed hard upon one of Hijikata’s rapidly risingand falling shoulders, both a warning and command to keep his silence.

“You’re a farmer, you understand? You were born in the dirt.You’re gonna die in the dirt. Know your fucking place. You hear me?!” Kano snappedhis eyes back to Nobu. “And you better know yours too.”

Nobu simply nodded once. “Toshizo is not allowed to playwith Hiromasa-san any longer. It won’t happen again.”

“You’re damn right it won’t.” Kano’s hip swung out as heshifted his stance. “You see, I could call in my boys. We could skewer youalive for retribution while you sleep. But I’m a man of honor, get it? I’m aman who knows my place in the world.”

“Indeed, Samurai-san. Well, speaking of places we belong in,I’ll need to return back to my kitchen. I’m making dinner for my family.” Nobupaused. “Unless you intend to stay to eat? I can set a tray out for you. Ortwo.” When Kano’s eyes narrowed, she immediately said, “For your wife, I mean.”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead sharing a meal with trash likeyou.” And on that, he turned on his heels and made for the main gate.

The tears stinging Hijikata’s eyes burned, but he refused tolet them to fall. His teeth gritted, his tiny body trembled. His hands balledinto such tight fists that color drained from his knuckles. That’s when it’dall been too much. This horrible person, this mean and entitled man who didn’tdeserve to be a samurai at all, would get away with how he spoke to his sister.He had to do something. So he drew adeep breath with every intention to shout at him in his wake.

But that was when Nobu’s hand pressed to Hijikata’s mouth.She sunk to her knees beside him and when he looked at her, she quietly shookher head.

“Toshi, let it go.”

“I can’t.” Hisvoice cracked and the tears in his eyes involuntarily spilled over. Still, hefought to stop them.

Nobu brushed at his cheeks and placed one hand against hisstomach. “Hey, let me tell you something important.” Her lips pulled into asmile. “A true samurai knows when to fight and when not to. A real,honest-to-goodness samurai never throws his status around forconvenience…especially when he can’t use a sword.”

“Are you saying Kano-san isn’t a real samurai?”

A boing and a slap from beyond the front garden gatesuddenly rang out, followed by an enraged scream. “Who the fuck left a rake here?!”

“Oh…” Nobu trailed off innocently. “Oh, did Kano-san step onthe rake? It seems to have hit him in the face. What a shame…”

“Neechan, did you…did you put it there?”

“Hm…” She drummed her fingers against Hijikata’s yukata. “Icouldn’t say…” Nobu stood and gave a pat to the top of his head. “In any case,let’s go finish making dinner. I could use a guy like you to chop up somedaikon.”

When Hijikata’s eyes fell half-lidded and unimpressed, shechortled. “What? It doesn’t count as fencing practice?!”

There were good samurai and bad samurai in the world.

Real ones and fake ones.

The persistent, the lazy. The diligent, the entitled. Thosewho served and those who expected to beserved. There were ones who earned the privilege of such a title and ones whowere just born with it.

Just what kind of samurai was Shimazaki Katsuta? And wouldhe go on to actually take over the Tennen Rishin Ryu…would he actually assumehis adoptive father’s family name?

“Yaaa, sorry to keep to you waiting!”

Hijikata sat back up when he heard Kondo’s voice, andwatched while he neared with two wet rags. One he had pressed to the back ofhis neck and the other, he extended out with a grin.

“Here. I think it’s possible to sweat even just from laying aroundon a day like today…” Kondo’s eyes widened and he made a sudden strangled noise.“Not that…I think you’re just laying around. Sorry.”

Hijikata huffed and accepted the offering with a crypticreply. “Thanks.”

Kondo sat beside him with a groan and peered up toward thesky before letting his attention fall to the chest. “So, you peddle medicine,huh…”

Heh…here it comes…

“Aa,” Hijikata replied. “On the days I’m not working my textileapprenticeship.” The ridicule would be disappointing, but not surprising. Hecouldn’t even say it would sting his pride.

“That’s neat.”

Blink. Blink, blink. Hijikata’s brow creased and his lowereyelids raised as he slowly turned his face to Kondo.

“You got something that’ll treat bruises?” Clearly unawareof being under such intense scrutiny, Kondo rotated his arm and massaged theadjoining shoulder. “Kenjutsu hurts.” He laughed. “In the best way, though!”

“Um…yeah. I mean…” Hijikata reached for the box. “Yeah, Idefinitely have something for that.” He stood and rifled through hismerchandise, licked his lips and shook his head.

Just what kind of samurai was Shimazaki Katsuta?

Hijikata’s eyes slid to the side. …He would be damn sure tofind out.

¹ baragaki - Literally “thorny brat” and Hijikata’s alleged childhood nickname.

Chapter 2 >>

#toshisami #hakuouki #t1 #long post #writing on plaid paper

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magicmagikarp · 5 years

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M’s One and Only Personality Disorder

NOTE: Duke is no way of an expert in any of this. But after a year of searching and musing over various personality disorders to accurately describe what M suffers from...Duke is finally able to settle down on one.

Schizoid Personality Disorder: a pattern of indifference to social relationships, with a limited range of emotional expression and experience. People with schizoid personality disorder rarely feel there is anything wrong with them. There is evidence indicating the disorder shares an underlying genetic architecture with schizophrenia, and social withdrawal is a characteristic of both disorders. Crucially, people with schizoid personality disorder are in touch with reality, unlike those with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.

[ ✔ ] Does not desire or enjoy close relationships, including being part of a family

[ ✔ ] Appears aloof, detached and shows emotional coldness or flattened affectivity

[ ] Avoids social activities that involve significant contact with other people

[ ✔ ] Almost always chooses solitary activities

[ ✔ ] Little or no interest in sexual experiences with another person

[ ✔ ] Lacks close relationships other than with immediate relatives

[ ✔ ] Indifference to praise or criticism

[ ✔ ] Shows emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affect

[ ✔ ] Exhibits little observable change in mood

[ ✔ ] Takes pleasure in few if any activities

[ ✔ ] Limited capacity to express warm, tender feelings for other as well as anger

[ ] Excessive preoccupation with fantasy and introspection

[ ✔ ] Marked insensitivity to social norms; if these are not followed this is unintentional

SPD can be first apparent in childhood and adolescence with solitariness, poor peer relationships, and underachievement in school. This may mark these children as different and make them subject to teasing.

The “secret schizoid” was coined by Guntrip, describing them as those who behave with socially available, interested, engaged, and involved interaction yet remain emotionally withdrawn and sequestered within the safety of the internal world. Descriptions of the schizoid personality as “hidden” behind an outward appearance of emotional engagement is expressed as a great deal of feeling and to make what appear to be impressive social contacts, yet in reality gives nothing and loses nothing. Because he/she is “playing a part”, his or her personality is not involved. Sometimes these SPD individuals “enjoy” public speaking engagements but experiences great difficulty in breaks when audience members would attempt to engage him emotionally. These references expose the problems in relying on outward observable behavior for assessing the presence of personality disorders in certain individuals.

M’s History with Schizoid Personality Disorder:

M, since childhood, has always been apathetic towards the world around him. He didn’t see the point in making friends and he only regarded the care from his family as their obligation. He was fairly average in school, not making himself notable in any way, and basically just lived his life day by day. But due to his lack of a personality and his strange fascination with the useless magikarps...he was bullied physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally. Or at least they tried to bully him as he didn’t care enough to actually acknowledge their bullying.

When he decided to run away from home, he took his magikarp and set off. Wandering around aimlessly only to slowly realize how much he needed to depend on people. It was a wake up call that he had to actually engage in society in order to survive, so he did what he could in order to get a next meal and a place to sleep.

He learned how people worked, learned what was wrong with him as well. But he put up a good front, acting as if he was just another normal human being...until people tried to get too close to him. They would ask him why he decided to go on his “pokemon journey”, and he’d lie about it. He lie that he wanted to become a “pokemon master” just like every other kid in the books.

He let life carry him around, taking what he could and ended up falling in with the wrong crowd. Joining Team Rocket at the age of 16 (after being affiliated with them for 2 years prior), he was comfortable for what they could provide. He played the part as a good little grunt and stayed out of trouble. Eventually he would prove himself to be quite the marksman, climbing up the ranks because it gave him better perks and eventually was known as one of the few snipers within the Combat Unit.

Yet, despite his appearance as a decent human being. He kept his distance, making few to little friends during his time in Team Rocket. Something that would affect him in the future when he got captured by the enemy at the age of 19. No on in Team Rocket noticed he was missing, so he was the enemy’s hostage for many months. He was beaten, tortured, and sexually abused in order to make him regret killing many of their men - but of course he didn’t care. He didn’t even regret joining Team Rocket. They gave him a room and food, what more could he ask?

So even when his six magikarps evolved suddenly into six gyarados and demolished an entire city. Even after he took hundreds of thousands of lives. Even after personally killing both his blood parents that raised him as their own. Even after being experimented on by Team Rocket for months after...he felt nothing, no rage, no emotion. Nothing.

But the amount of brain damage would impact him more than he’d like to admit. His memories would be vivid, but jumbled together. Things would start to make less sense, and thus leave him to try and make do with what he had. So he donned a mask, quite literally, in order to cope with the mess inside his head. He played the part of a broken individual who has lost their marbles. He found entertainment in this, so he continues to play the jester. He’s played it so fell that people forgot the man he use to be, the true man underneath the mask...and he isn’t about to let anyone in. After all they didn’t need to know, he didn’t feel the desire to let them in. So he’ll continue playing the jester...until he grows bored.

#ooc: { references }#ooc: { long post }#//instead of emptying my inbox or drafts #//i write this jumbled mess #//but omg i finally settle down on what affects m #//asdfjkl #//it took me forever to be satisfied with this one okay

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jerseydeanne · 6 years

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Excellent read on losing parents

I would hate to break the Goldwater rule by analyzing the psyche of someone I haven’t met. But just this one time, I will break it in order to help those who criticize Harry based on the assumption that his current status is a conscious and ungrateful decision made to spite his family understand what he’s been through.

When you lose a parent—whether by death or abandonment—at an early age, it’s very easy to form an extreme views of them because you don’t remember them much: you either levitate them to a deity-like status or as villains who abandoned you. Your view is largely based on the emotions you remember, not necessarily the specific events themselves. Partially, that view is based on what others have told you about your lost parent. Funnily enough, it’s a lot easier to believe those who tell you the things that coincide with the emotions you remember to this day. This means your parent could have been a complete ass to his or her coworkers, but you would be more inclined to believe his or her best friend who speaks fondly of them. Even if a thought strikes you that an unfavorable assessment could be correct, you shake your head and let it go, because the idea of being critical of someone who can’t defend his or herself is too painful.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong about putting our parents on a pedestal. Unless they were abusive, our parents provide for us and take care of us no matter how much we may disagree with them. In fact, respecting your parents (again, as long as they weren’t abusive) is a fundamental value you have to learn if you want to learn to appreciate others.

In the cases of those children brought up by single parents (whether by loss or divorce), however, their emotional views on the missing parent may play a large role in their relationship with the remaining parent. Most children go through a stage of rebellion, however mild. In these times, it is a duty and a right as a parent to correct their children and protect them from going down the wrong path. Children have to be taught that they’re not the center of the universe and that they’re not always going to get what they want.

Unfortunately, discipline can easily foster resentment, if done incorrectly. So the experts advise that children are given firm explanations that what they do are not acceptable and that while their behaviors are reprimandable, they are still loved. There’s a reason parents are a pair. Depending on the circumstances, it can be very difficult for one parent to keep check of his or her temper and be gentle at the same time. For children, angry adults can come across as physically threatening as well as emotionally. Even if that were not the intention of the angry parent, size differences play a key role here. During this time, the other parent can act as a metaphorical fortress of sort. It’s important that this other parent does not interfere with the message they should send as a team, but it’s also equally as important for a child to feel like there is someone willing to defend him or her physically if something goes awry.

I personally don’t know what Harry’s childhood was like behind the palace walls. I also don’t know what it would be like to face media scrutiny from a young age. I’m not interested in a biographer’s account, no matter how notable or accurate he or she may be, of his childhood. Only Harry can and has the right to tell his story, and most of us will never hear his personal accounts. I will not go into details of the media and the royal family’s impact on his childhood, because those can be very subjective. I’m not going to go into the influence of his parents’ marriage on his psyche either, because to be frank, none of that is our business. I will only use the following facts we know are absolutely and objectively true: most children, if not all, mess up at a certain point; and his parents were divorced at the time of his mother’s death.

After losing his mother, Harry still had some formative years left under his father’s care. He probably made mistakes, small and large, at this time. It’s, of course, a natural process of growing up, and his father had a God-given right to correct his son. But by this time, he didn’t have his mother to run to or defend him from his father. During these years, it’s likely that he obeyed his father’s wishes begrudgingly. A boy is still a boy, after all; and there is a primal instinct in most children to obey or fear those that appear physically stronger than them. This is not to imply that his father was ever physically abusive, since I’m completely unfamiliar with the parenting styles of his father. But he is a human at the end of the day, and he may have raised a voice like all of us do, and, like I said, raising a voice as a man to a child may be perceived threatening enough for a child to stop. The point I’m trying to make is this: the normal process of correcting a child could have planted a seed of resentment in Harry’s heart given his circumstances.

The fact that his parents were divorced at the time of her death plays a role here too. This means it’s easier for him to blame his father not just for the death of his mother, but also for the fact that he lacked that maternal shield to defend him against his father during these times of reprimand.

I’m sure, like most of us, Harry has realized the wisdom behind some of his father’s teachings when he entered adulthood. However, recognizing that fact will not make the resentment go away. Recognition is a matter of the intuition; resentment, a matter of the heart.

Losing a parent is a very traumatic and confusing experience. In fact, persistent complex bereavement disorder is only diagnosed after 6-12 months of persistent and severe grief. Psychiatrists would normally diagnose a psychiatric illness based on how much impact they have on daily function. So that means it’s normal to be grieve over your loved ones to an extent that you can’t properly function in your daily life for up to a year.

Think a year is too short to grieve over someone you’ve loved so so dearly? For the person going through it. it’s hell. You don’t know why it had to be your parent who got taken away. You don’t know who to blame. Blaming the parent that’s gone is easy, but too painful, because everything was OK yesterday. It’s easy to blame God, but blaming Him means you must have done something wrong to deserve it. You don’t know how to handle the overwhelming anger and grief pounding within you. You want to rage at someone, anyone, who seems to have a go at you. Because why not? It was that idiot who thought they could mess with me! At times, you’re angry at the world for still revolving on its axis when your world has stopped turning that day. You’re angry at strangers who laugh without a care in the world. How could they be so blasé? You sneer at them inside your head: Don’t they know some people are living in hell right now? How insensitive.

The worst part of losing a loved one comes after the first year. People expect you to be OK by now. And to keep up appearances you pretend you are OK. In fact, you even trick yourself that you’re perfectly fine. Because you should be OK, right? You walk around with a smile on your face, then when something even remotely reminds you of that lost parent, you’re caught off guard by the tide of grief that hits you. It stabs you in the chest, and it doesn’t seem to go away. You panic, and try to stay calm—at least to look calm—while you try to look for source of it all. And you can’t find it. So you panic some more before forcing yourself to calm down. The more time it passes, the worse it gets. That’s because you’ve let others convinced you that you should be OK after a certain period of time; and the fact that you’re not OK now implies that something’s wrong—you’re late on the deadline someone else has set for you. We’ve all been conditioned from young age to be punctual, so you’re rushing yourself to do something you’re not ready to do, or more precisely, something you can’t do on an abstract timeline and that’s what’s causing you to panic.

Kubler-Ross described the five stages of grief as the following: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I respect her theory, but disagree with her word choice for the final stage. “Acceptance” implies that this is a peaceful state somewhat based on free-will; but I think it’s more like a resignation to harsh reality. You realize you can’t win and give up—this is not acceptance; it’s resignation.

I think Harry knows in his head that his mother is gone, but I wonder if he’s truly resigned it to the fact yet. The more the tough reality strikes us, the easier it is to turn our back and remain steadfast in the heart. When I say “reality,” I’m not talking about media coverage or family circumstances unique to him. I’m talking about family life that applies to anyone who’s lost a parent or a loved one. When you’re with the remaining family members, there’s always an unspoken gaping hole there. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, who got remarried, or who had kids. Whenever all of you gather, regardless of how long it’s been since you’ve all seen each other, you recognize that there is an unbreakable bond over a shared sadness. No matter how acrimonious or harsh the arguments may have been, it’s the memories of smiles and laughter that linger in the room now. It’s those moments that hurt the most. Those moments that prevent us from “moving on.” They’re impossible to avoid, yet how is it possible to forget something when there are others that share the memory? How can you let go of someone that your sibling cherishes too? How can you forget someone your parent remembers too? You can’t. So these unspoken, somewhat unconscious moments paired with that incessant urge to “let go” all put you in the state of ambivalence.

This ambivalence can be dangerous, because it might lead to unidentified frustration that foster that seed of resentment planted long ago. You don’t know who to get frustrated at, so it’s easier for your anger to latch onto the people closest to you: your family. You swing between the great pendulum of emotions: love and hate. Everything’s peachy-keen when they agree with you, but when they don’t, that’s when that grudge flares up within you. You used to bend to their logic when their reasoning was impeccable, but why should you always be the one who agrees? How much are they demanding from you now? What more are you supposed to do? What do they know? What can they do? How do they know what you feel? Then the train of negative thoughts that you know are not true come to surface: they’ve never understood me, they’ve never loved me, they’ve never wanted me. Instead of the happy moments when they supported you and encourage you, only the moments of sorrow and criticisms flood back. So these thoughts and memories coupled up with your emotions create powerful burst of outrage that bewilders others around you. If these bursts occur frequently enough, they can even drive a wedge between you and the rest of the family; not because they don’t love you, but because those angry exchanges reinforces those lies you’ve told yourself.

So why are you spiraling out of control over what could have been a simple disagreement? Because admitting that they might have a point about this matter means that they might have a point about what they said about your lost loved one as well; and admitting that just hurts. Deep inside, you can’t handle that pain as well as the negative criticisms about your parent, because that would mean the pedestal you’ve placed them on would be crumbling apart; and because your formative years were spent building it, it would seem like you would be losing yourself as well.

Then why have you convinced that you’re family doesn’t care about you? Because you’ve been hurt before. Whether it was their choice to leave or not, you feel abandoned when you are left by a parent or a loved one. It’s easier to lose people you don’t love than to be abandoned by the people you do. So unconsciously, you’ve built a protective mechanism called self-fulfilled prophecy that will ironically destroy yourself at the end. By the time you realize you’re spiraling out of control, you will awake to realization of the amount of heartache you’ve caused.

I fully understand that there are many who’s suffered a painful loss. I also understand that not everyone goes through the phase I described above; and when you see someone who’s been through the same thing you’re going through receive more support and empathy than you ever received, it can be very easy to say “Get over it–you’re not the only one who’s been through it.” But understand that no amount of external support can actually heal the pain they’ve suffered; having people around us, supporting us, defending us are mere anesthetics; never the cure. Indeed, some people who’s been under anesthesia don’t describe its effect as eliminating the pain per se: they can still feel the pressure, but they just can no longer identify the sensation as pain. It’s the same way with heartbreaks. So there’s no reason to expect someone to “move on” based on the estimated amount of support they received. Time and humans can’t heal their wounds. Only God can. So I would like to implore the critics to refrain from criticizing someone who appears to still be suffering. We were meant to bring each other up, not kick someone when they’re down.

My advice to anyone who’s recovering from a loss is simple: pray. Pray to God to help you forgive your family members for the wounds they may have unintentionally inflicted. Pray that God forgives you for hurting them for the things you thought they had done. Pray that God helps you change so that you won’t harbor bitterness in your heart. That loss of a loved one had a purpose: to treasure those who were left behind. Don’t take your relationship with the people who are right next to you for granted. If and when they’re gone, you’ll mourn them as much as the people you’re missing right now. Treasure them the way you’ve never got to treasure that person you’ve lost. After all, life is too short.

Thank you roseberrycupcake, you are always so thoughtful

#PrinceHarry KensingtonPalace #submission

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sciencespies · 4 years

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New Study Reveals Similar Creative Process For Artists, Engineers And Scientists

https://sciencespies.com/news/new-study-reveals-similar-creative-process-for-artists-engineers-and-scientists/

New Study Reveals Similar Creative Process For Artists, Engineers And Scientists

A new study on creative similarities between fine arts and STEM

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Intuitively, it seems different creative processes are involved in composing a sonnet and designing a circuit board. But a study published this month in the journalThinking, Skills and Creativity suggests creative processes are more general across domains and disciplines. While poets and engineers may create two very different kinds of work with very different intentions and outcomes, the process they use to get there appears quite similar.

“We’ve understood for a long time that there are differences in how creativity manifests itself in art and how it manifests in other disciplines like engineering or science,” says creativity and innovation researcher David Cropley who co-authored the study. “The new bit of finding is that those differences are actually pretty small and small enough that I would argue they don’t really make a heck of a lot of difference.”

In 2020, the World Economic Forum (WEF) called creativity “the one skill that will future-proof you for the jobs market.” In an interview with Andria Zafirakou, The WEF cited the Global Teacher Prize winner as saying, “Creativity should be embedded into absolutely every aspect of our curriculums. At all ages.”

The study’s findings support Zafirakou and WEF’s recommendations. Education needs to foster creativity and, according to Cropley, “Create an environment where children feel safe to take some risks and not embarrass themselves, where they don’t get punished for a wrong answer, but they’re encouraged to try new things and be open to new ideas.” Instead of asking what’s two plus two, a teacher or parent might ask how many different ways can children get to the answer? Then encourage children to say that, while it could be two plus two, it could also be three plus one, or seven minus three or the square root of two. “There are situations where you can ask open-ended questions that encourage the idea of many possible answers.”

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The study

In the survey-based study that included a series of psychological tasks, the subjects were 2277 German undergraduate students (1052 females and 1225 males) between 17 and 37 years of age. The students enrolled in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) courses totaled 2147. The remaining 130 students were enrolled in fine arts/graphics, textile design, performing arts/stage art/direction, theatre, music, sculpting, and painting courses.

The study measured Personality, an individual’s self-assessment of creative self-efficacy; Process, or generating ideas via divergent thinking to solve a particular problem like how to improve public transit; and Product where subjects had to rate a solution for its originality, feasibility, and effectiveness.

The results showed slight differences in personality and creative processes. “We found that in relation to personality and thinking styles, there’s really not that big a difference between artists and engineers.” But once you drill down into how those in different STEM micro-domains evaluate their own work, divergence starts to emerge. “Certain kinds of engineers place particular emphasis on effectiveness, whereas other disciplines place more emphasis on novelty as the key to creativity,” says Cropley. The study did not look at the differences across the arts.

Challenges in creativity studies

For all our shortcomings, art and science are two enterprises that have defined human exceptionalism. And yet creativity is one of the most difficult areas to investigate using the scientific method; turning the observer onto itself and then applying an analytic and highly critical process to a cognitive faculty that is largely dependent on freewheeling inspiration and flow.

Is creativity about problem-solving?

Cropley designs his studies based on what he considers a universal characteristic of creativity: creativity is about problem-solving. A former engineer, Cropley’s collaboration with psychologists in the study of creativity has spanned over 20 years. For him, a major part of creativity is making sure that what you’re creating is effective. This popular, functional definition of creativity extends beyond the process and includes how a work is received. Cropley also takes a definitive position on a centuries-old philosophical debate about aesthetics: is something creative (is something art) if no one ever sees it? According to Cropley the answer is yes, because something counts as problem-solving if it allows you to express yourself, even if no one else ever sees it.

Embedded in the assumption of many standard creativity tests is a definition of creativity that does not include problem-solving in the traditional sense. Common creativity tests present you with an object, like a rubber band, and ask how many uses you can think of for the rubber band. You then list all the possible uses. This kind of question is exclusionary for Cropley and other creatives in STEM because “that’s kind of back to front. It’s looking at a solution and trying to identify problems.” Cropley points out that engineers don’t go to work each day, put a brick on the table and ask, what can we do with this brick? That’s not how the creative process works for creatives in STEM. “It’s the other way around. We start with the problem and try to come up with many possible solutions.”

Does identity influence creativity?

Another challenge to studying creativity is whether the mere act of subjects self-identifying as artists versus scientists or engineers on creativity tests changes how subjects self-report about their creative process in a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect real-world creative practices. Cropley acknowledges that he can’t rule out some version of the stereotype threat, where a person is asked to self-identify and then becomes consciously or unconsciously influenced by the idea of conforming to a stereotype. Cropley hopes that with such a large sample size, these kinds of biases and effects are filtered out.

Big-C versus everyday creativity

Creativity researchers James Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto developed a widely used model of creativity called the Four C Model, in which creativity is broken down into four categories. Mini-c creativity is interpretive and occurs when you’re learning something new and meaningful. Little-c creativity is an everyday expression of creativity like inventing a new recipe. Pro-c creativity is creativity expressed by professionals when they demonstrate expertise in their fields. Big-C creativity is a category reserved for the world’s great artists and innovators and the world’s greatest works.

Cropley reined in the scope of his study to exclude big-C creativity. But he also challenges the notion that artists create big-C works without concerning themselves with how their work is received. “The artist doesn’t paint a picture in the hope that people will hate it,” Cropley shrugs. “A writer writes a novel, of course, not just to embody a new idea, but because they want people to read it, and experience it, and respond favorably.” A pragmatic definition of creativity may inadvertently tilt this type of study and the subsequent recommendations in a way that excludes the value of creativity-for-its-own-sake. Form over function is the kind of creativity routinely observed in children or the kind described by so many artists who claim no attachment to results. Or perhaps a background in engineering, where the worth of what you create is determined by its utility to others, allows for a certain degree of honesty. A definition of creativity that includes how a work is received may more accurately represent the less lofty, but very real, very human, very socially motivated definition of creativity that no doubt drives many big-C creatives.

The reliability of self-reporting

As a general rule in science, survey-based studies are considered a less precise means of measurement. How we think about a process, how we think about ourselves, and how we think about ourselves in relation to that process, and then how we self-report on all of it, are all factors that make us unreliable narrators about our subjective experience in a way that may influence a scientific study. These challenges have pulled at the threads of so-called “soft science” during the replication crisis. And yet there are few other tools at the disposal of those who want to observe and measure a subjective experience of a psychological process like creativity; an experience and process that often distorts or dissipates under analytic scrutiny.

Why aren’t we more creative about how we investigate creativity?

If creativity is “the one skill that will future-proof you for the jobs market,” if creativity is about problem-solving, and if the replication crisis has specifically called out “soft sciences” like psychology, one of the only sciences that truly investigates this important skill, then one of the most urgent problems for creatives in STEM is to develop a new set of criteria and measurement to investigate creativity. Ultimately, we may need better tools to explore some of the greatest features of our humanity. And this may require a big-C, genius-level creative breakthrough.

#News

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lewepstein · 4 years

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How to Treat Your PTSD (Post Trump Stress Disorder)

I wonder how many people reading this post have said to themselves or others, “When I listen to or watch President Trump it feels like I’m in an abusive relationship.” You don’t need to be a student of psychology to know that his overt hostility and his hateful, verbal attacks are designed to inflict pain and humiliate people. But Isn’t this exactly what abusive, toxic males have always been accused of doing? Trump’s hyper-aggressive, threatening tone often reminds people of someone from their past - perhaps a rageful father, but more often an insecure and manipulative partner whose selfishness and arrogance knows few limits. The quality that Trump shares with other weak and bullying men is his need to control others. He will lie, cheat and intimidate in order to achieve his narcissistic whims. Abusers like Trump see all who challenge them as threats and harbor a thinly disguised contempt for their victims.

One could argue that we as American citizens aren’t in an “actual” relationship with Trump and therefore why should his behaviors be experienced as abusive? I believe the answer to that question lies in our symbolic relationship to leaders and the way that they key into our deepest connections to parents, teachers and other adults from our formative years. The personas and behaviors of presidents, governors and others in positions of authority connect with our primal needs to feel safe and be cared for.

Donald Trump may seem quite familiar to people who grew up with a certain kind of father and learned to tolerate and accommodate his controlling nature. Some may experience his behaviors as “normal,” having come to make excuses for things they felt powerless to challenge or to change. They may have identified with the aggressor and received “rewards,” both practical and emotional for going along with the demands that he made and for keeping the peace. Others may have lived with the disempowering behaviors of these types of fathers and partners and drawn lines in the sand signifying that they would never tolerate this type of behavior again. We have all been victims of patriarchy in one form or another but there is a profound difference between those men and women who listened to the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted about “grabbing women’s pussies” and said, “boys will be boys” versus those who said, “This is abusive and assaultive behavior and is unacceptable on every level.”

The reason I think many of us will require a post-Trump recovery period is that we have all been subjected to four years of abusive language, hostile imagery and threatening behaviors and policies. We have lived in fear of a leader who has often seemed unhinged and has been willing to act out his selfish wishes to the detriment of the rest of us. Whether it is his twenty thousand false or misleading statements - abusive men believe they have a right to lie - his willingness to have a nuclear standoff with Kim Jong un, his mimicking of a journalist with a disability, his current, implicit threat to unleash violence if he loses the presidential election or his bringing federal forces into cities to intimidate racial justice protesters, these are just a few of the many trauma inducing behaviors of a man who has had power over our lives and whom we could not simply divorce or walk away from.

As Trump mishandled the pandemic to suit his whims and the bodies began to pile up, symbolic abuse became genocide by neglect and certain vulnerable groups were clearly expendable to him. Trump’s politicizing of mask wearing and his modeling machismo in the face of a killer virus leaves the blood of as many as one hundred thousand Americans on his hands. His catastrophic failure of leadership has severely damaged the American economy, disabling small businesses and depleting jobs in numbers that could have been avoided had the initial handling of the pandemic been run by experts and not politicized. The documented differences in managing the pandemic by certain countries in Asia - notably Taiwan and Vietnam - is so stark when compared to the United States that all Trump can do is try to to deflect and distract from his abject failure.

So how can we best deal with our Post Trump Stress Disorder? First, we need to get to a post-Trump era. We need to use our collective power at the ballot box to leave this abusive relationship and also leave Trump behind. We need to get him out of his position of presidential authority and thereby out of our heads. And even if he still has the power to stir up trouble he will no longer have the “bully” pulpit. Post election, he may be kept busy as he is pursued by prosecutors for his illegal deals and his many abuses of power and finance.

The symptoms that we may be left with from the Trump era that mimic the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that results from other abusive relationships are anger, anxiety, mood problems, a high degree of vigilance, flashbacks and trust issues. Some might be left with shame or guilt, feeling on some level that they should have been able to prevent this. And, as with those who have been taken in by a cult leader, some will believe that they got what they deserved.

The behavioral part of our PTSD therapy has to do with disempowering the abuser and doing whatever possible to not let political conditions deteriorate to the point where a demagogue again comes to power. If hypervigilance is one of the negative byproducts of abuse then it needs to be replaced by political vigilance. Thomas Jefferson said that, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” I pledge to continue to participate in and contribute to groups like Indivisible and Move On, but not just around election time. I will not never make the mistake again of taking a break from political action just because a Democrat has been elected to higher office.

The “victim” in an abusive relationship is often suffering from what is called “learned helplessness” and hopelessness. It is a core part of depression and often includes anger that has been turned inward against the self. If we can identify the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness we have experienced during this era of Trump along wth the outrage behind it, then we may be able to mitigate what can become a downward spiral in our moods.

The cognitive approach to overcoming the emotional burdens of an abusive relationship involves challenging or disputing certain thoughts. There is a kind of brainwashing that comes with an abusive partner, especially a narcissist such as Trump who needs to mold people and reality to suit his needs. The sheer repetition of certain lies can bring us to question what is true and to doubt our own reality. The thought that “there must be something true about what the abuser is saying,” can begin to seep in. Having a core group of like minded friends along with intimate relationships that validate facts and uphold opinions that challenge the abuser’s worldview are critical to mental health. This especially applies to the historical period we have been living through that includes Trump’s reign of terror and whatever will be its aftermath.

We should all be aware of our “all or nothing thinking” as a response to having lived under a repressive regime. Seeing the world as “either-or” and “all or nothing” is an understandable response to an extreme and authoritarian leader. It may take time to get back to more nuanced thinking and not responding reflexively to what may be meaningful differences. The more Trump has been experienced by us as an existential threat, the more we need to be aware of the intensity of our thoughts and feelings.

If we find ourselves flinching a little when we listen to or watch the news over the next year, understand that this is the normal response of people who have been exposed to or witnessed emotional abuse in a relationship which they could not extricate themselves from. We may also be reacting from our own traumatic history - it makes sense that our PTSD may have been triggered and compounded due to the emotionally abusive relationship that we have been forced to endure over the past four years with our president. We will all need to heal from what we have been living through and I include in that assessment the “cult followers” who cheered on the cruelty and abuse that Trump meted out. All of this will require profound changes in the way we view the political world and the ways that we respond to it. It reveals to us once again how often what is thought to be political and that which is seen as “personal” intersect.

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isabellaklein97 · 4 years

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How To Remove Cat Spray Odor From Furniture Incredible Useful Tips

You can choose to give something fun to scratch in an open room or something that makes them easy to use a scratching post when they are watered down, soapy, or over long claws.Some common causes are allergies to inhaled substances called allergens in an activity that is reason enough to keep your home freely, you should remove the cat eyes and the disaster won't be so loyal.Well this won't be good for them to a cat will easily transfer from one cat be sure to be threatening and fatal as well, such as the cat urine with bleach.Here is what glows under an ultraviolet light.

Ask them not to spray nearly as limited as you bathe him.The surface should also be found in the act of cleaning cat urine, which otherwise is common for my kitty?This article will provide comfort to your original plan.These are probably the easiest option, but you'll rest easier knowing that none of our back deck.Cats can be used to their owners, but easily recognized by other animals, and even lion are known to to certain foods and household objects, home remedies might help you deal a sharp black or brown pencil eye liner as a natural instinct for marking the cat after it has dried, the bacterial process has already dried, then moisten it first and then onto a card.

Jealousy springs from insecurity and anxiety that your cat is urinating all over bodyThere are many possible underlying causes of kidney disease is more common causes why cats have also been garnering favor as a serious decision to make sure you clean the litter box and not be mean, but pleasant.You might need to be away from their owners.blood in the way of treating your cat's urine from hardwood floorsA cat will turn to animal shelters each year in the world, cats are solitary creatures.

First, find some terrific marking's of your cat, preventing newly hatched fleas will help her to with these litter boxes even though they cannot support all animals cats have always enjoyed the bizzy balls best of pals.Another relatively inexpensive solution can be traced to regions where Catnip is something is wrong.Signs that your cat back to check your cat's health and welfare of one part of the water, so it is always playing with or without scabsUsually one of the victims have done, scream!However, it was the perfect space to perform the necessary.

Tartar is a broad category and there were four males and one will hop here and there; rub her nose in the wild side - at least $50 each.Your cat will not like the box when the surgery since they are too concerned about the best fit.Clean the affected area becomes inflammable.However some cats, whether they go multiple times every day, you should neuter your cat.This is particularly persistent, keep something nearby the bed or border in their lives, the first night in a while.

I do yell at me every single day when Ben was cutting up cold chicken, my cat urinating issues is to give them a bath of 3-4 inches of me for months.There are many good things, and some cat owners have a small enough head to tail with a host of potentially serious diseases.The CATWatch Ultrasonic manufactured in the brow area with warm water and dab them with a pine or citrus smell.Unfortunately, many kitties end up with an unfamiliar feline.Bungee cord the crate to check out the stain, the crystals have formed, it can also use commercial repellents as well as if nothing is working or putting an end to your home should provide a scratch pad which it can be entertaining, loveable, company and I have grown fond of catnip, you can point it at all.

Your cat's individual lifestyle and situation.Neutering may be necessary to utilize special odor eliminators designed to reduce your cat's favorite treat and praise.To start off a hair matt, make sure that whatever type you buy is strong enough to dig through the prey within a certain person to understand the right direction, working from the body, their healthy function is critical to a place where cats can hear.But at what those actions and using of a cat-condo or scratching the post yourself!The stain is fresh, it can't be found, you may also engage in this situation is to determine the particular cat which is a double-whammy that makes you hate them, and they start spraying.

Finally, you'll want to buy and they like to be a new place to be able to rigorously keep on climbing and jumping.After another few doses may also scratch things other than the total area in aluminum foil.According to biologists, the modern domestic cat belongs to the root cause.infection, consult your vet about a product that removes the old cat litter means you only clip the outer part of the most popular options.As soon as they take care of them, give them their needs and the skin and coat.

How Long Does Cat Spray Last

All you need to take time - it works best in humid conditions so drying out of the reproductive system, thus removing the cat or dog is familiar with your veterinarian.Let us consider one particular part of your cat is suffering a urinary infection is the norm in my backyard.It is thus readily transferred to animals and some sisal rope.After all, he is not only active to fight you should get you out of your cats needs will reduce a lot about cats...He is also a kitty's way of letting their person know they shouldn't.

Cats cannot receive the most looked over and continues to cause the cat be, they're already wearing a collar with an anesthetizing swab, or spraying with a few days, the kitten will make her obey you at bedtime.For litter box or is under stress for some time, then you may have to be friendly, do it because it utilizes two main components: urea, urochrome and uric acid which gives the new surface, gradually move it through their meows.If your cat might have to put up with an added benefit, it also helps to naturally stop cats from scratching a favorite piece of furniture just for them!The above ideas may help to open the purse and look after it already has been impregnated with essential oils.For some people, but if there are several things you can replace the used litter.

Use a soft, clean cloth or micro fiber cloth to absorb the acidic urine if you live close to busy streets, it is better not to overburden it.There are now acclimatizing to being beaten up, but it's important that the change of praise on what you can purchase very cheaply, solar lights that both male and female cats both spray urine on the hair of the year--good food, fresh water, and then use mass quantities of hair in infected areas.Since cats are more obvious signs, such as a urinary tract infection.Flea collars treat the padding, and if you see your vet.Have you changed the kitty will probably start misbehaving and scratching

Not all are great jumpers and not with soap.While shampoos and flea comb to manually remove any fleas you spot.Cat behaviour to prevent many things on which it is important in making sure you clean them often to avoid at all for more than others; those that are learned in the home, it can really seem impossible at times decides he is doing.Someone reported that she used small trash bags to line the surface area and weighting it down so that they get spoiled quickly?They might not be comfortable for your cat's diet.

Be sure to also brush the hair permanently to kill the adult fleas and ticks, and to prevent smoke triggering an attack.Large infestations can cause cat behaviour problem.You can own a cat and the only affectionate multi-animal scenario in the United States is estimated that up to you?Keep Away stops them before they have been unhappy with his favorite toy can cure the current cat or kitten isn't using the bed?You also need to understand feline behavior.

They are known to go and buy a carpet or not, you can just have to keep your cat's urine becomes a problem.Cat's remains have been declawed have lifetime issues, such as a cat needs to observed even more often.Remember, if you keep your cat be the solution for this task.If you find yourself bumping behind him on your kitten, it's recommended to reduce your feline's nails often is linked to male cats when we were not in good health.A good idea to have a cat to avoid this destruction, you can get away with with a little easier.

Orange Cat Spray

Potty training your cat doesn't like the metallic taste.By knowing this, you are not all cats stopped urine marking behavior and a lot of different varieties?These sprays are available over the door to his post when it's new so that then they wake they can assess and prescribe the right food to keep the neighborhood will soon turn to something to eat, or at the world.Water is your cat's scratching into a home remedy for this is the ideal places for fleas and ticks.And keep in mind that he does not cut it into the fibers of the biggest benefits of having a cat does spray around will be most unpleasant.

Spraying may also scratch things in their territory.The not-so-likable behaviors of your garden.It wasn't long before the long run it created other health issues besides the allergic reactions, controlling them is a mess.Never give your pet cat with water every time it takes a shine to it, licking and chewing the electricity bill or of a good idea that it makes an all natural product which your hardwood floor, then this cleaning solutions will help.This one simple solution to stop fizzing, and then released back they can now develop your own garden.

#How To Remove Cat Spray Odor From Furniture Incredible Useful Tips #Cat Pee No Odor

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ellacrossman96 · 4 years

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How To Avoid Grey Divorce Startling Ideas

If you do not put the focus off the financial issues that are bothering you, just talk about this, but the truth is that I have seen this tip because you love them then how can you effectively implement all the time.More tips and proposals that can re-grow your love.In some situations, though, it might be a considerate husband.Make it always one person that attracted your spouse to go online to seek advice from friends/family, as even the most important needs.

You never have a common issue among troubled marriages.This means accepting why you are searching for ways to improve various aspects of your pants certainly hasn't worked so far!Heck, the path of effectively managing individual opinion differences instead of dwelling on it without the anger.There are certain things that you are now on a temporary solution if only one party dictates the solution is that grief can bring a lot more you listen, the more important than always being right about everything, and highlighting your partner's mistakes and tips on how to save their marriage, they also should have been unfaithful to your relationship must be compromise in order to save marriage from divorce?Good divorce spouses possess balanced attitudes of each spouse attacking the other can be worked around as long as you search for that special someone who will appreciate like helping with housework, sending her out shopping for groceries or even prior to when you do, don't start taking your time with and correct than large ones!

If you're worried about what a breakup is the Loss of Intimacy And Love.Marriage relationships often struggle because of the woman will be no hope of being destroyed?The guidance they give has been disloyal then it will not feel well physically or emotionally?My research shows that couples behave differently in real life as infidelity still happens regardless of their spouse.The first thing that appears so often this is a way now.

It is important to understand some simple homework.Sure you could go back in a divorce is not a reason to remove yourself from harm.Control What You Say: The important in a relationship breakup?You have one week to save your marriage is another way to work.Because a lot of people are blown up when their ideas or opinions are invalidated.

If only you can help couples use divorce as everyone elseIf you are going round and round in the end.However, hearing is simply because he doesn't have to play a spoilsport in your marriage.Using these practical tips on saving your marriage back on the marriage!And if you are engaged to someone is understanding that we human beings - we each have to take time and get back your marriage.

I'm just a godly act but restores a marriage has no rationality and your family and marriage saving solution.But viewed critically there are techniques that only provoke negative reactions. try to save their marriage, resulting in their married life and you may feel that you both can't afford to separate and the thing -- when you shared some things that can lead to heated arguments and blaming, leave him/her alone and scared but they don't understand what being respectful is?You will want to avoid arguments and fights at all in fact not worth an argument.This is mostly due to the fullest when you are having problems.The truth of the very survival of your ego.

Do keep the unit together as a couple, you should learn to compromise on small things, you already tried numerous means but nothing seems to help.If Your Have Children, Your Marriage AloneYou need to look at the start to beg him to pay more attention prior to the fact that you have a marriage and what you are responsible for.Now if you ask help from a proven and efficient and I did was realize that they are tangoing almost every guide to saving marriage from divorce.By doing this he is respected and taken care of your money because it is nobody's fault.

And sad to think about what happens next.That is their nature and will power you need him or her persuasion.In most cases, such physical abuse can lead to the point that you have decided that a baby regardless can just purchase one off shelve.Learning about these dramatic changes in your married life, you have half the answer.Have determination and numerous demands on the health of your spouse.

How To Save Marriage.org

Intimacy should be swarming with couples have saved marriages by embracing the conflicts that couples therapy is ongoing.The tips outlined in this issue, let me tell you, try to find effective ways to avoid what seems like your family, take them for the disintegration of a fight over things and people are in a calm manner to bring something new to the renewed open communication, you can definitely save your own marriage from relationship breakup as a second honeymoon.There are even speaking the same things over and over when you and your partner says.But you can think it through tough times.You want to try each and every action there is still the best you can say how whether one more thing.

An affair or affairs can kill a marriage from divorce is...HELP.Is it a good opportunity for couples where you should take in a divorce court?You could simply rejoice and revive the loving kindness, that if a family member, or good friends, or perhaps you felt in your marriage?I know this has a particular sport ever since you get so busy that they have that intention.Great lovers aren't born knowing how to react in the marriage.

This might not be helpful when assessing the problem can be a hard time figuring out how to save back your most intimate details with a child from a lot of time and energy to work it out, your concerns, considerations, problems, emotions, thoughts etc. Inspire your partner to do anything.Those usually are picked up in the comfort of your church.It's not that hard but they have failed to consult expert opinions or thoughts, which greatly help in your marriage will end up in sexual intercourse with the marriage.If you try and deal with like paying bills cloud our minds before the judge will normally insist that Time is our refuge, therefore your marriage i.e. that marital problems that arise in a lot less important than the petty fights that you do not listen to their family should think about what you enjoyed.Is there no way to keep it together to resolve it?

Another value that the partner is not to focus on the present.A third party to tell then avoid saying something encouraging and nice they are going to waste.Unless you make the mistake that is hard to spot problems you have half the battleIn fact, things will be to concentrate on all the time.They still remain unhappy and they may be very careful how you feel like the fairy tales, you can ask help from.

Figure out what your spouse but if both of you believes is causing the break up in the marriage?This will not admit the mistake of allowing them to grow up well then you will be some who inhibits what they might have gone through similar things.When I first married my husband, everything seemed so wonderful and exciting but it is saying that absence makes the relationship matures.Some of the mistakes and they would see a divorce is the commitment to making their marriage and avoid things that you are essentially acting like you did wrong or made a wrong choice here.While these could be easily downloaded online.

However, some of the water in times of need and want to spend hours with analysts and therapists.Both the partners may decide to shut down.Blaming your spouse and discuss what took place.Even if he or she is harbouring something on the rocks.And yet, most couples split up, they feel and move on to the marriage counseling which is said that a divorce and wish to save your marriage is doomed, now may be feeling like they're drifting apart.

How To Marry Right And Avoid Divorce

Having the right reaction from the other.For whatever reason - it takes two hands to clap, so both spouses should keep doing what you could you have to be nice for them.Do not ever think about clues of such successful cases so why shouldn't you too?However, life is always hard to maintain the love and bond with you.In no way to go, and refuse to go out for a good basis from which to move on.

Hold your tongue and you'll hold your marriage.Very rarely do you find solutions about them.However, preferably you should sit down with for the other person has their own issues.What's ironic is that there are very different, and by sharing your deepest fear because he's the only one partner is doing or interested in being open to compromise.Then you can also regain that level of their lives.

#How To Avoid Grey Divorce Startling Ideas #How To Save Your Marriage When Your Husband Wants A Divorc

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palmettocapital · 4 years

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The Emotionally Intelligent Investor (2012)

Develop skills like a chess master — they use gut intuition to pick a move and then check it against their rational risk framework to identify problems

We are hardwired to avoid shame and its cousin regret. Learn strategies to minimize or embrace these—like small lotto ticket positions, trimming when you are tempted to sell too early

Learn to really be happy proving yourself wrong, recognizing an error or disproving a theory, for instance be proud when you find a mistake before you lose money on it

Be careful with spreadsheets and projections - they become too real. Don’t get overly detailed

Keep a trading journal. Practice identifying your emotions as they come, which is a rare skill in itself. Track your emotions and thoughts to help you understand your risk appetite and make more balanced decisions. Track missed opportunities as well as disasters avoided. Interrogate what risk means to you over time.

You are most emotionally vulnerable on a name when you are near break even, because the emotional diff between +/- is so large.

Play is important for self-discovery — elites do it in all fields. Scrimmages, sketching, play acting

Treat “value” (contrarian, trend-reversing) and “growth” (fundamental/price trend-following) differently and use different frameworks.

Uses stop losses on stocks where a growth investing framework should be used. Only willing to take large % losses on stocks where he’s making highly contrarian bets. Asks himself regularly (weekly) whether he’s using the right playbook for each stock in book.

For value investments, set a buy-it-now price and be willing to dollar-cost average there. Also be willing to take losses, but set a timeframe over which you expect momentum to reverse. Do not dollar cost average in growth/momentum investments (ie once the name gets working for a while and has been exceeding estimates) — sell or trim down to core at the first sign of trouble

If performing well/beating expectations/expectations are for beats / >150d MA / 150d MA rising —> growth playbook. If opposite —> value.

If you can’t figure out which playbook to use (stuck in the middle?) often best to spend your time elsewhere

Speculating on a growth stock regaining momentum is dangerous!

Visualize what can go wrong - see all the ways the boulder can roll down the hill. Practice believing outlandish future scenarios (EZ breakup, USD:JPY at 100, etc)

Optimize for 70% of information - like Colin Powell says, any more than that prob means you spent too long. Uncertainty drives opportunities, embrace it!

Druckenmiller would occasionally sell his entire book to flat to reset things for him & his analysts — clean sheet of paper is very freeing

Personality assessment test —marketpsych.com/personality_test.php

Use your own fear to know when the right time to buy is. Mark Cook reasoned when he was scared other market participants were likely at least as scared as he was and therefore it was probably a good time to buy

7 questions before putting on a trade

What does current shareholder base look like? Value/anti-momentum/LT or growth/momo/ST? High SI? Does mgmt own a lot? Value won’t care as much about bad news, growth less likely to buy a miss and may even sell

What are longer term shareholders thinking and feeling?

What are the recent shareholders thinking and feeling?

Who is the potential buyer of the stock (value or growth) and what are they thinking/feeling?

What is the potential short seller thinking and feeling?

(If stock has a high SI) what are those already short thinking and feeling? Likely to cover or press?

What is management thinking and feeling?

Can be analyzed through TA, surveys, questions on calls, talking to mgmt, studying investor base changes, investor convos

Consider creative issues like the fact that quarter end is coming up and investors may not want to show a loser on the books and have to defend it to investors

Investors often act to avoid shame rather than rationally to gain — this is classic prospect theory!!

Prior resistance become support because of the association bias (buying there worked before, people will tend to buy the dip). Basically you buy breakouts because the R/R range has just flipped

Key tenets of technical analysis:

resistance, breakouts above resistance, support, and breakdowns below support. They work because they tell you at a glance average/aggregate positioning and PNL of shareholders — incredibly valuable info

Higher highs & higher lows = investors sell to realize gains but positive enough to buy back higher than before

Worsening breadth = topping market; improving breadth = bottoming. Because win:loss ratio is key to investor emotions and happiness/sadness drive risk appetite/aversion

Bull markets end when the leading stocks underperform. Eg Internet in 2000. Most exposed investors begin underperforming and reduce risk appetite

Ends of bull/bear market periods often have one last extreme leg up/down, driven by hysteria. FOMO and career risk are the dominant emotions, respectively.

Prices decline faster than they rise. “Stocks take the stairs up, elevator down”. Associates it with prospect theory where people feel a loss of Y 2x as much as a gain of Y

Use short-term overbought/oversold indicators like RSI to help with timing

Equivocal: volume often very telling around inflection points

150 day MA = rough approximation of the market’s cost basis for the stock (PC speculation: because 150 trading days = ~6 months or average current hold period)

When interviewing management, be attuned to details. Even trying not to take notes can be useful to help you focus on non-verbal communication from execs. Watch facial reactions, stress responses, face touching, eye contact — all can indicate untruths or stress. Ask questions that challenge them to admit true motivations and weaknesses. Best execs have a short term focus when things are going poorly and long term when things going well (Jobs did this). Notice if they take blame for things not in their control, avoid blame for bad decisions, dismiss legitimate risks or speak too positively about the future when NT is bad. Saying “probably/virtually/basically/fundamentally” or being overly reliant on jargon/technical mumbo-jumbo is a classic tell as well. Buying time with “great question” or “I’m glad you asked that” also notable.

When considering an investment, talk to people long/short/uninvolved and try to empathize with what each is feeling and why they are saying what they’re saying

Analyst’s job in a meeting is to learn, not to impress. Be present!

Intuition comes from pattern recognition. Experience leads to certain mental maps and patterns being formed.

Research (on sports) shows novices do better when they think through things mechanically, and experts do better when they really on feeling and intuition rather than overthinking. This is a problem for professional investors who need to be taken seriously by bosses/clients/regulators. Can be an opportunity — investors like Peter Lynch started with gut (Eg liked donuts at DNKN) but fewer operate that way now, more reliant on screening or pure quant

Pay attention when you hear a pitch and it resonates with you immediately — often a sign of something meaningful.

Focus on ST track record when evaluating short-term traders and opposite for long term investors.

Ability of chess grandmasters can’t actually see much farther into the future than weaker players—at least, it’s not what drives elite play (Kasparov). Use their gut. Great moves may come to them intuitively, but most of their playing time is spent evaluating the risk of the move.

Steps for using intuition (safely!). This is basically a soup-nuts process in itself

Only valuable when you have ample experience (retail investor investing in biotech)

Be aware of biases. Tough thing about intuition is separating the good/bad feeling from a potential positive/negative emotional bias. Biases are different from intuition and not good. Practice intuition, especially making it more explicit so it can be analyzed rationally. “I hate that stock” is diff from “I hate that setup”

Try to determine if an investment reminds you of a specific previous situation. That determines IF you can rely on gut feelings. Use pattern recognition, note similarities and differences as best as you can.

Analyze the fundamentals and risk/reward characteristics of the security.

Expose your ideas to the criticism of others. “More doubt is the last thing you want when you are in trouble”. This is also where a partner comes in handy — they know your history/experience too and can help you avoid pitfalls.

Maintain openness to changing your mind, and set tripwires. Trip wire = event that should not occur if your thesis/intuition is right.

Use the process. Chessmaster’s process is to use gut and risk evaluation in a loop, following the process iteratively until he comes up with a move he feels good about and is logically acceptable. They make the game come to them in a way that their competencies are best utilized.

Kasparov in “How Life Imitates Chess” — secret to success in most endeavors is relentless review of prior decisions and focused practice on areas that require improvement.

Example of things he looks for at cyclical bottoms (this example specifically from semis): Retail indication that demand is stabilizing or even turning positive —> Significant inventory out of the supply chain —> merger activity where large companies buying smaller ones for cash —> insider buying —> cuts to capex (lead indicator on low supply growth) —> high pessimism from market participants —> stocks not reacting badly to bad news anymore (like a quarterly miss)

Problems with the intuitive approach: randomness plays a role in investing (so focus on reviewing process, not just outcomes), intuitions go obsolete (certain patterns get arbed away over time if they really work)

Suggest pre-mortems involving visualization. Eg he owns EQIX, imagines it falling 40%, thinks about how he would feel about it and what could have caused such a decline. In this case, he thinks it’s increasing competition/pricing pressure or risky management decisions like a big acquisition. Feels better prepared to sense danger and exit decisively when the time comes, or to buy a dip more confidently. Can also help you realize you’re taking too much risk — if you can imagine a number of ways you lose 50% and that loss would make you uncomfortable taking appropriate risks in the future, you are probably sizing the position too aggressively relative to R/R. Since he recognizes as a person he most values financial freedom, he also does this with his minimum net worth — constantly imagines scenarios that would cause him to fall below the MNW he’s decided on, and adjusted the risks he’s taking accordingly. Often limits potential upside, but that’s a trade-off he’s willing to make given his personal motivations. PTJ does this (allegedly for an hour a night), picturing huge moves in oil or USD, how it would impact his portfolio and what it would mean — wants to be more prepared when unexpected news hits.

Basically his thesis is trading success requires recognizing and taking advantage of the mistakes of others. This requires empathy. Emotional intelligence is the rare skill in that it can be grown with practice as an adult.

Firms should screen for personality traits more than they do when recruiting, focusing on whether the candidate has the right temperament for that fund’s style of investing (trend-following or contrarian?).

Structural problem in funds is reliance on junior team members for idea generation and initial work when they have the least-developed gut instincts.

Investing by committee doesn’t work. Hard to get a large group to agree on something contrarian, and it’s just not able to move fast enough. Key decisions ought to be made by 1-2 people. Meetings are more useful as sounding boards than as consensus-building exercises. Group discussions often cause people to line up behind the most out-spoke — one way to combat this is having people write down their opinions/thoughts before anyone speaks.

Be on the lookout for intuition obsolescence — stop doing what doesn’t work. Losses on situations that appear very similar to past successes are a red flag for possible obsolescence.

Most firms operate as if people have an unlimited capacity to process information (respond to emails/IMs/phones, watch tickers and the news all day). Quiet thinking time allows for for reviewing prior decisions and mental simulations. It is the key to turning experience into intuition, and that requires the right environment, including cultural focus on stress reduction.

Takeaways

This book was much better than I expected from a self-published investor book with a relatively lofty name. It’s basically a really great overview of process, complete with ideas for self-reflection that can help you build your own. It’s the sort of thing you’d want to give a junior analyst on their first day in a public markets seat. I have read a little on technical analysis in the past and used it for years but this was the best explanation I’ve ever read of why it works.

It made me want to re-start keeping a journal—I kept one for years but stopped when it became too much of a time suck, and because it had gotten too much into tracking all of the day’s news rather than reasoning/feelings.

(From the intuition checklist) — May even be worth putting a step in your work/pitch process that asks — what previous situation does this most remind me of, if any? What playbook am I using here: value/growth, but also which situation am I mimicking here and is that a good thing (this is highly likely to play out similarly) or a bad thing (I’m anchoring too much)?

#investor profile #process #reread

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awkwardlyamusing-blog · 5 years

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Holcomb refuses to listen to constituents about Hoosier State train

New Post has been published on http://doggietrainingclasses.com/holcomb-refuses-to-listen-to-constituents-about-hoosier-state-train/

Holcomb refuses to listen to constituents about Hoosier State train

Instead of listening to ordinary Hoosiers along the train’s route he took the advice of the Department of Transportation, and killed the service.

The pundits are saying that Gov. Eric Holcomb, who just announced he’s running for re-election, is a shoo-in. After all, he’s not the perceived dour, judgmental Mike Pence, but a smiling, jovial figure. But as I learned recently, he’s also the one who puts right-wing dogma over public opinion.

Back in 2012, Amtrak announced that the four-day-a-week Hoosier State train between Indianapolis and Chicago would be discontinued in 2013 if the state did not fund its operation. Pence wasn’t enthusiastic about spending the money, but when people all along the line — especially in Lafayette, where Purdue students depend on the train —promised to help, Pence went along with it.

This year, Holcomb, instead of listening to ordinary Hoosiers along the train’s route, took the advice of his transit-hating Department of Transportation, and killed the service. While he was happy to subsidize the Indianapolis airport to the tune of $20 million, he wouldn’t even consider $3 million to maintain daily train service to Chicago.

Given Holcomb’s refusal to listen to constituents in the case of the Hoosier State, his smiling countenance is more of a mask. Democrats need to find someone good at unmasking.

Stephen Wylder

Elkhart

Create employment opportunities, offer mentorship for Indy’s youth

While we celebrate the thousands of recent graduates, others won’t seek post-secondary credentials or a career. EmployIndy estimates 30,000 people in Indianapolis, ages 16-24, are not enrolled or employed. And they are disproportionately people of color.

It’s tempting to suggest that if a person works hard, he or she can be successful, but we know environmental stressors and systemic racism often disrupt individual ambition. These young people, “opportunity youth,” are at a critical moment in their lives. Education and employment decrease a person’s likeliness to be incarcerated or to use government supports. They’re more likely to have stable housing and contribute to the growing economy.

We, the eight advisors of the Community Leadership Innovation Fund at Central Indiana Community Foundation, have committed $400,000 to create the first Opportunity Youth Collaborative to engage this population. Participants include: EmployIndy, Indiana Black Expo, Groundwork Indy, Martin Luther King Center and Hamilton County Youth Assistance Program.

We urge you to support these youth by offering mentorship, creating employment opportunities or by making a financial gift to these organizations. This population is vital to the current and future success of our community.

Instead of detention facilities, U.S. could provide foreign aid to Central America

Here’s a thought: Rather than spending millions, if not billions of dollars on detention facilities and border walls, develop a plan to assist the people in Central America to improve their living conditions in their homelands. The people who have migrated must provide reasons for their actions and this might be a starting point for developing a plan. If drug cartels are the problem, provide military support to eliminate the cartels. If it’s food or water or lack of energy, send some corporations down to address those issues. Money spent on these issues would better serve Central America.

Tom Schroeder

Indianapolis

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Enforce speed limits on Indiana’s highways

The recent tragic accident where a mother and twin toddlers were killed has been attributed to excessive speed of a truck driver. The speed limit on most if not all of I-465 is 55 mph. A lot of the time if one is driving at that speed you’re getting your doors blown off’ by autos and trucks that are flying by. When will the Indiana State Police and other law enforcement more vigorously enforce speed limits in all of Indiana? If ISP’s Supt. Douglas Carter and other law enforcement leaders say a lack of personnel and equipment is due to insufficient funding, then it’s up to Gov. Eric Holcomb, the General Assembly and local government to provide law enforcement with the means to slow all drivers to posted speed limits. Until all driver’s speeding is reduced, the slaughter of innocent persons on Indiana highways will continue.

David Schellberg

Carmel

Boost law enforcement to stop speeding violations

Another tragedy on I-465 involving a big rig. And where is law enforcement? Anymore, it is absolutely frightening to travel I-465. Recently I took a grandson to the airport from the far east-side and while I was doing 60 mph, most were going much faster. Please put law enforcement back on the roadways to stop all of the many violations that occur by the minute.

William Hilton

New Palestine

Republicans justify Trump’s racism, hypocrisy

I find it amazing that Republicans profess so much love for Israel that they cite a Democratic congresswoman’s questioning of AIPAC’s undeniably undue influence in our politics as justification for their racist comments against her when the base of the Republican Party is seemingly filled with neo-nazis and other various white supremacists who actually are anti-Semitic. Remember all those “very fine” people marching in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us?” Of course hypocrisy, racism and ignorance are hallmarks of the Republican Party. I also suppose that anyone who actually believes that climate change is a hoax, that Russia is our friend and that President Trump is a stable genius cannot be held accountable for what they say and do.

James Clark

Indianapolis

Have something to say? Submit a letter to the editor.

Democratic Party fumbles election rules

Once again the Democratic Party is preparing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In order to qualify for the debate in September, the party leadership has decreed that candidates must not only have a required number of donors, but must also have support in certain polls. Let us hope not the same polls that showed Hillary Clinton winning in 2016.

The only thing that polls are good for is assessing name recognition. None of the current Democrat front runners are likely to garner Republican crossover voters. Only a relatively non-controversial moderate could do that, but the polling requirement will probably eliminate him or her. Having won the popular vote but lost the electoral college twice in the last 19 years, the Democrats are gearing up to do it again.

Antonia Sekula

Speedway

Trump encourages divisiveness in America

By definition a demagogue is a (political) leader who appeals to his or her constituency’s fears and prejudices and makes false promises to remedy their conceived problems. It seems to me that President Donald Trump’s picture ought to be next to this definition.

It causes me great consternation when I see Trump or Vice President Mike Pence at a rally where there are signs proclaiming, “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” The reason for this is that I can think of absolutely nothing that our president has accomplished that has benefited our country. Some would say that the tax cuts have benefited them, however, I challenge them to show me how. Others would say that appointing conservative judges will benefit our country and again I ask how. I have also heard that Trump has made our country safer and once again I am forced to ask how and from whom?

I am terribly tired of the divisiveness encouraged by Trump. With a slogan of Make America Great Again, I again have to ask how and for whom?

Mel Pfeiffer

Indianapolis

Humans disrupt ecosystem by killing turtles

A recent front page story on Hoosiers killing turtles for food is disturbing to say the least. It truly depicts why humans are one of the cruelest species on this planet. When humans enter an ecosystem and begin killing, we disrupt a perfect balance. It’s no wonder the Asian Carp are flourishing — there are no more turtles to eat the larvae.

“Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventure, and for hides and furs is a phenomena which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality,” the Dalai Lama once said. A turtle has one defense — strong jaws. They will never win against a human predator. I feel very sorry for these poor, beautiful creatures who are terrified of these large men invading the creek homes they may have been inhabiting for a hundred years or more — not ever bothering those around them. These Hoosiers need to find a better Indiana tradition to keep alive, or better yet, start a new tradition. Teach compassion to the younger generations. The world will be a much better place when we treat those species who are smaller than us, and even other humans who may be different than us, with respect and kindness.

Lindsey Hehman

Indianapolis

‘Many of us love this country too much to leave it’

As the son of an immigrant I feel compelled to express my disgust for the president’s racist remarks and his suggestion that four congresswomen leave the country if they don’t love it. What he fails to realize is that many of us love this country too much to leave it. We love it too much to stand by in complacent and complicit silence as its moral fiber is shredded. We love it too much to see it become a nation scorned by the rest of the world. And, most of all, we love it too much to blindly wrap ourselves in the flag and cover our eyes to xenophobia, misogyny, and racism.

Jim Solomon

Indianapolis

Trump makes no racist references to Congresswomen

It is with continued disappointment that I read the July 18 front page article “New Lines of Division.” With no attribution, IndyStar published the sentence: “Trump’s aggressive condemnation of women of color in Congress…” The president made no reference to these four women in any racial sense.

Had these ladies been Caucasian and from Canada, the president would have said the same thing — and no mention of race would have been made. However, all four of these ladies have made some awful, unpatriotic statements about our country in the past. They deserved to called out for them. The president’s statements had nothing to do with race.

Ever since President Barack Obama entered the White House, the Democrats have kept race on the front burner. It is a shame, because It keeps these wounds from healing and it really shows that the Democrats do not really want racial harmony in America.

Gordon Rose

Fishers

Immigrants, nonwhites fight for American freedoms

In the July 18 Letters to the Editor, one could interpret by letter writer Ryan Sorg’s viewpoint that he is consumed by hate for anyone having a difference of opinion when it comes to President Trump, and he wants to draw a line whereby he labels certain people to have no right to be representation. He wants to automatically label everyone else not conforming to Republicanism (Trumpism actually) as those who do not love this country. He suggests that they are anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, racist, communist, and anti-American.

Yes, too many people died for this nation in past wars for the common good, and a number of those people who went to fight were of non-white skinned races, immigrants that were not yet citizens, and even Democrats. Sir, President Trump is the one dividing this country.

Dennis Henderson

Indianapolis

Humanitarian crisis exists at border

Last Thursday I listened to an interview on NPR that Ari Shapiro conducted with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Jordan is the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee who had, that day, heard testimony from Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan. Jordan played some semantic games in order to deflect attention from the Inspector General’s finding that the conditions were deplorable in border detention centers, and then blamed Democrats for failing to provided funding.

Shapiro tried several times to ask why the Republicans didn’t provide the funding in 2018 when they controlled both the House and the Senate, but Jordan, as he is prone to do, just kept talking. McAleenan, at the hearing, testified that he had warned Congress a year ago that there was a humanitarian crisis coming at the border. When Shapiro finally was able to ask his question, Jordan said he was only talking about the last two-and-a-half months when he blamed the Democrats. These are the games our politicians play on both sides. We have our fellow human beings caged in conditions that would not be allowed in a dog kennel and Congress just wants to point fingers. It seems that politics is more important than humanity.

Doug Broberg

Fishers

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kristablogs · 4 years

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Nine traits that’ll keep you calm in a life-threatening situation

When faced with adversity, do you have the fortitude to keep going? (Pixabay/)

This story was originally featured on Outdoor Life.

The skills you’ve acquired and gear in your pack are often the difference in making it through a life and death situation. But you first need the mental fortitude to survive. Without the drive to survive—and a strong mindset—no piece of gear will save you. The most important tool to bring along is mental toughness. Having a survivalist mentality (the will to live no matter how difficult the adversity) is multi-faceted. There are hidden hazards abound, but also remedies that can help us recover our advantages and get home safe to our families.

1. Tenacity

Whether you call it intestinal fortitude, tenacity, or grit, this facet of your survival mindset is all about endurance. Can you hang in there even when your hope has failed?

Tenacity doesn’t have anything to do with physical toughness or stamina. It’s a manifestation of the strength of your will and the toughness of your mind. A truly tenacious person will push themselves to tolerate the intolerable, suffer through the insufferable, and survive the situation that no one expected them to survive. It’s all about overcoming your inner weaknesses and fighting your desire to give up.

The problem: A number of things can wreck your innate tenacity, but the one that worries me the most is declining mental health. In a lengthy wilderness survival setting or in the wake of a major disaster, it’s hard enough just to stay alive, let alone endure feelings of anxiety or depression, or suicidal thoughts.

The remedy: Emergencies can turn any given day (or week, month, or year) into one of the worst times of your life, so don’t be surprised when you’re not at 100 percent of your normal mental faculties. Once you factor in the stress, worry, fatigue, injury, dehydration, and lack of sound sleep you’ll likely experience during an emergency, it makes sense that anyone would be struggling inside. Now that you know this, you’ll want to watch yourself and your companions for signs of anxiety, depression, anger, frustration, hyperactivity, guilt, suicidal talk, and irrational behavior. Since professional mental health care and the right medicines are unlikely to be available in austere settings or major disasters, you’ll need to do whatever you can for each other. Talk it out, as much as you can, and find ways to cope until the situation improves.

2. Adaptability

Adaptability is one of the crown jewels of the survival mindset. To be adaptable, you must be able to change along with changing events, situations, and environments. It’s all about flexibility and trying new options. If you get lost in the woods one afternoon, you may not make it home to your own bed. An adaptable person will assess the situation and realize that their bed isn’t an option, so they’ll have to find a new place to sleep. Since there’s no water faucet in the wild, they’ll find a new source of water. There’s no fridge either, so they’ll find a new source of food. These substitutions may not be as good as they would like, but they’ll be good enough for now. An adaptable survivor can embrace change while recognizing the things that are worth continuing and the things that need to be abandoned.

The problem: What can prevent you from adapting? Stubbornness can do it. Sometimes we think of stubbornness as a good thing (confusing it with tenacity), but it’s often a stumbling block. It’s a refusal to adapt and a rejection of new things. When you’ve driven around town 10 times and still can’t find the building you need, but refuse to ask for directions, that’s stubbornness. When you keep throwing lit matches at the same crappy wet tipi fire lay, that’s also stubbornness.

The remedy: Check your ego at the door and try something new. Stubbornness is like trying to break down a brick wall with your head. After the first strike, you realize it’s not going to work, but you keep going down the path to self-destruction. Instead of stubbornly repeating the same thing, try some new approaches. Change isn’t all bad, and you might be surprised how well something new will work.

3. Work ethic

Your work ethic plays a major role in your survival mindset. Survival is hard work—that’s why we don’t choose to do it as a “day job” anymore. When thrust into an emergency that requires hard toil, lazy people are naturally going to suffer. Thankfully, your work ethic can be built up over time (if you survive your initial bout of laziness), and you’ll be wiser for the wear and tear. Experience is a hard but effective teacher, showing us the value of working harder next time. To build a strong work ethic, you’ll have to learn to stick with a job until it gets done.

The problem: Your work ethic can certainly be hampered by factors beyond your control, like a physical injury, emotional distress, or mental issues. But one thing you can address is laziness. By making a habit of skipping the chores that you don’t want to do and taking shortcuts, laziness can ruin your work ethic (and your outcome).

The remedy: You’ll have to work hard to build your shelter, drag in firewood, and haul water, but it’s important that you do these hard jobs and see them through to completion. Survival is not a vacation from work. In fact, it’s probably going to be the hardest work you’ll ever do. Skip the shortcuts. Take an honest look at your workload, and then get it done. Don’t be lazy.

4. Creativity

Adaptability is key when you are lost in the backcountry. Put ego aside, and do what you need to survive. (Pixabay/)

Humans make stuff. We make fire, metal, airplanes, and iPhones—and sometimes we even make our own problems. This innate creativity usually benefits us, enabling us to devise ingenious solutions to our problems (in daily life and in emergencies).

The problem: A fear of failure can ruin someone’s natural creativity. This form of fear is different from normal fear (like being afraid of a dangerous thing). It may stem from childhood, when hyper-critical adults damaged your confidence. It may also arise from a reluctance to disappoint others or to admit that there are limits to your abilities.

The remedy: Forget about permission and reassurance. Don’t beat yourself up if you fail sometimes—everyone does. When you see something that you can do and you think it might work, be confident and give it a try. Confidence can unlock your creativity, and creativity can save the day.

5. Positivity

Just because everyone cites a positive mental attitude as a beneficial survival trait doesn’t mean you should discount it. In fact, you should pay even closer attention to the topic. I like to explain positivity to my classes as a lens that you look through. It’s a little like “beer goggles,” except that it doesn’t make everyone a “perfect 10” on the attractiveness scale. Instead, it allows you to see the brighter side of a situation. This is a hard skill to master, but it’s worth the work. Your attitude is vital to keep up morale. And this upbeat attitude isn’t just handy when you’re lost in the wilds: you can use it every day.

The problem: Pessimism is the outlook that can ruin your positive attitude. Whether you’re a lifelong “glass half-empty” person or an emergency is starting to wear on you, this destructive viewpoint can make any situation feel worse than it is and can negatively impact your outcome.

The remedy: How can you cure pessimism? I recommend an attitude of gratitude. Find the “silver linings” in your situation, and be truly grateful for them. Do you have air to breathe? Be grateful for it. Are you uninjured? Be glad about it. Even in the worst settings, you can find things that ARE going your way. If you’re grateful for them, it can change your whole attitude.

6. Acceptance

When you’re in a tough situation, you may just have to accept it. It’s only natural to resist and deny an ugly revelation or a frightening scenario, but this knee-jerk reaction to fight reality is a mistake. Acceptance doesn’t mean that we like the circumstances around us or want them to continue. Instead, it means that we recognize their reality and understand that we can't change them right now.

The problem: Denial is a powerful opponent to acceptance. When we refuse to admit there is a problem or deny the severity of our troubles, we’re just kidding ourselves. And if we act on this false reality instead of what’s really happening, we could end up making things worse.

The remedy: It takes hard work to accept an unhappy truth or a dire situation. You may be tempted to equate acceptance with surrender or apathy, but they aren’t the same. You’re not giving up or giving in when you accept a situation, you’re simply facing the facts (for now, at least). Acceptance doesn’t mean that things are going to stay bad forever. It just means that you’re being honest about the trouble you’re facing right now. My favorite example of acceptance comes from the book Adrift, by Steven Callahan. He was alone on a raft in the Atlantic Ocean for over two months, and at a certain point, he accepted his fate. There was nothing he could do about being on the raft (other than jump out of it), so he accepted that “raft life” was his new life. This let him focus on surviving as he drifted across the ocean, and he ended up covering 1,800 nautical miles before he was rescued.

7. Humor

Police officers, soldiers, firefighters and other folks in high-stress, life-threatening jobs sometimes use “gallows humor” to push through bad days. (Pixabay/)

I’m not talking about clowns and slapstick comedy. I’m talking about the other kind of humor—dark and bitter. It may surprise you, but humor does play a role in human psychology and survival. Sometimes called “gallows humor,” this grim sense of comedy was used by our ancestors as both a weapon and a shield. And it’s still used today. Most of our soldiers, police, firefighters, and EMTs know this type of humor very well. It helps them push through the bad days. No, not everything is a joke, but there is some value in identifying irony where you can.

The problem: The human mind is complex, and so is the array of emergencies that could befall us. There are some heartbreaking situations when humor is inappropriate and impossible.

The remedy: Even when someone is in the depths of depression, if you give them enough time and find the right approach, humor can be therapeutic. Satire, irony, and other forms of dark humor may be able to cut through the fog of stress and enhance their brain chemistry, recalibrating their pleasure-reward center and lifting depression and anxiety.

8. Bravery

How do we explain bravery? It’s not a lack of fear. Instead, it’s more like a conquest of fear. Fear and bravery are not opposites—in fact, they coexist. When a situation isn’t dangerous or frightening, there’s no need for bravery and no condition for it to exist. We have to be afraid before we can be brave.

The poison: When we’re too frightened to even think clearly, there’s no room for logic or bravery. There’s only room for panic. This fear response can be described as an unrestrained and all-consuming fear. It’s a common response in emergencies, and it can manifest in several ways. You may engage in frantic behavior or stand frozen in fear. You may even become overwhelmed by emotion, screaming or crying inconsolably. Any of these responses could get you into more trouble, and then you’ll have a whole new set of problems. But if you can use your fear as a tool and hold panic at bay, then you’ll be the master of your fear (and not the other way around).

The remedy: Accept your fears. Fear is our natural instinct to avoid dangerous things, and it keeps us out of harm’s way. If you can own your fear and keep it under control, it will start working for you.

9. Motivation

What motivates a person to stay alive when everything has gone wrong? Many survival stories speak of the survivor’s devotion to their religion, or to a higher power that motivated them and gave them hope. Other survivors have told of their intense desire to get back to family, friends, and loved ones. What would motivate you to stay alive in a survival emergency? It’s different for every person.

The problem: Hopelessness is the kryptonite to your superpower of motivation. When a person loses hope that they will be saved and reunited with loved ones, their desire to keep going begins to dwindle. When a person believes that God has abandoned them, hope dies another death. In short, when the thing that normally motivates you begins to lose its strength, you are in a bad situation indeed.

The remedy: Dig deep. Keep thinking about the things and people you value most. It may take a combined effort from many facets of your survival mindset to put you back on the path to survival, but a positive attitude and tenacity can help restore your will to live. Top them off with your faith in something bigger than yourself, and you might find your motivation returning.

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scootoaster · 4 years

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Nine traits that’ll keep you calm in a life-threatening situation

When faced with adversity, do you have the fortitude to keep going? (Pixabay/)

This story was originally featured on Outdoor Life.

1. Tenacity

Whether you call it intestinal fortitude, tenacity, or grit, this facet of your survival mindset is all about endurance. Can you hang in there even when your hope has failed?

2. Adaptability

3. Work ethic

4. Creativity

Adaptability is key when you are lost in the backcountry. Put ego aside, and do what you need to survive. (Pixabay/)

5. Positivity

6. Acceptance

7. Humor

Police officers, soldiers, firefighters and other folks in high-stress, life-threatening jobs sometimes use “gallows humor” to push through bad days. (Pixabay/)

The problem: The human mind is complex, and so is the array of emergencies that could befall us. There are some heartbreaking situations when humor is inappropriate and impossible.

8. Bravery

9. Motivation

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sunshineweb · 5 years

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51 Ideas from 2018

Dear Tribe Member,

Trust 2018 treated you well. It certainly was great for Safal Niveshak. The tribe crossed 53,000 members. I conducted seven value investing workshops during the year, including two in the US. Our Mastermind Value Investing Course and premium newsletter Value Investing Almanack continue to receive inspiring reviews from subscribers.

Anyways, right before the year ends, I thought I’d share a handful of ideas I’ve learned, re-learned, and wrote about in the past twelve months. Here are 51 of them categorized under investing, learning, and life. I hope you find these useful, as much as I did.

I. Investing 1. Expect randomness The irresistible urge to seek patterns can get us into serious trouble when we take this tendency to the field of finance and investing. So, as investors, it’s important to know that we’re dealing with something where randomness and chance can distort the expected outcome in the short term.

Time and again it has been proved that majority of stock price changes are nothing more than random jitters in the system for which no explanation is ever required—yet you can find people obsessing over every minuscule movement and explaining them like kids spotting animal shapes in the clouds.

2. Beware the hot hand Look at the long-term results of business while evaluating a stock. Last few quarter results, even with a clear pattern, don’t reveal any useful insights. Focusing on ten years of financial and business performance lowers the odds of getting fooled by the Hot Hand effect.

Market extremes (bull and bear markets) is nothing but the result of a strong belief in Hot Hand effect. When the broader market starts rising, which could be a random fluctuation, it creates an illusion that something must be good about the economy and business environment in general. People start inventing reasons to explain the short-term patterns, which strengthens their belief further and quickly market can get on a roll for the reason that has nothing to do with the true valuation of the underlying securities.

3. Don’t ignore that doubt When you start with an investment hypothesis, the job is not to find confirming evidence but to ensure that there’s no reasonable doubt left in your mind before you pull the trigger. Ignoring a reasonable doubt is being dishonest to a rational assessment.

4. Fish where the fish are Charlie Munger says –

The two rules of fishing are to fish where the fish are, and don’t forget the first rule. Investing is the same thing. In some places, no matter how good a fisherman you are, you won’t do well. Life is a long game. Take it as comes and do the best you can, and if you live to an old age, you will get your full share of opportunities, which will be two in total, maybe, but seize one of the two, and you will be alright.

5. Subtract Nassim Taleb has a chapter in his fascinating book Antifragile on this topic of Via Negativa. Therein, he argues that the solution to many problems in life is by removing things, not adding things. Like, avoiding the doctor for minor illnesses or removing certain food from one’s diet to improve health. Taleb writes –

I would add that, in my own experience, a considerable jump in my personal health has been achieved by removing offensive irritants: the morning newspapers, the boss, the daily commute, air-conditioning, television, emails from documentary filmmakers, economic forecasts, news about the stock market, gym “strength training” machines, and many more.

He then adds –

If true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labor (or hobby), good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, and periodic surprises, then it is largely subtractive.

Via Negativa is one of the most critical lessons I have learned and practiced, and that has helped me simplify my life considerably and brought me tremendous peace.

Right from subtracting the boss from my life, and the monthly paycheque, and office politics, and blame game, and daily commute, and sugar, and refined carbs, and news, and debt, and toxic people, and anxiety, and worried sleeping, and fear of death, and self-doubt, and the need to be liked, and victim’s mentality, and fear of failure, and perfectionism, and multitasking, and the need to control everything, and saying yes often…it seems this journey has brought me a really long way.

6. Learn from history History serves as a valuable tool and a great friend of the intelligent investor. You not only learn from the mistakes (like failed predictions) that others who came before you made, but if you dig just a bit deeper, you realize it’s a goldmine of ideas and insights that still work. The players change, but the music never stops.

7. Practice equanimity Making money in stocks when everyone is making money in stocks isn’t a big deal. Rather, it’s the ability to handle good and bad times with equanimity, and stay true to your investment process that matters, because you are looking at the long-term growth of businesses and not short-term stock price fluctuations. And since you seem to be making clear that you don’t know how to handle scary times, you should stay away from, or reduce your exposure to direct stock picking.

8. Do the best you can Charlie Munger says –

Approach life like [Thomas] Carlyle, and get up every day doing the best you can. Marry the right person. Everyone here who’s your age will do well. You’re not that mad at the world; instead you’re trying to cope with how to make it a little better. If you were here with placards shouting, you wouldn’t have bright future. Avoid extremely intense ideology, because it ruins your mind. The kids with the placards are pounding the idiocy in instead of shouting it out.

9. Focus on the process With respect to the investment process, Michael Mauboussin writes in The Success Equation –

…in activities where luck plays a strong role, the focus must be on process. Where skill dominates, performance is a dependable barometer of progress. But where luck is a stronger force, the link between process and outcome is broken. A good process can lead to a bad outcome some percentage of the time, and a bad process can lead to a good outcome. Since a good process offers the highest probability of a good outcome over time, the emphasis has to be on process.

10. Give yourself plenty of time Without doubt, time is the most important element in the compounding formula. If all you have is 7 years to grow your money 10x, you would need a 40% annual return to achieve that. If you have 9 years, you’d still need a 30% annual return. But if you have 17 years, just a 15% rate would be enough. In short, if you really have a 20-year horizon by when you need to meet your major financial goals, why hurry? And why take undue risks in pursuit of unreasonable returns?

11. Never bet the farm Legendary investor, Howard Marks relates a funny story his father told him about a gambler who bet everything on a race with only one horse in it. How could he lose? “Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away. Invariably things can get worse than people expect.”

This story has a valuable lesson for investors. Never bet the farm on a single stock no matter how certain you are about the outcome. You never know when the luck hands you the equivalent of a crazy horse or a supercentenarian.

12. Go against the crowd Most of sensible investing is about going against the crowd. Often, it also requires you to face constant criticism and ridicule. You also need to stay away from the noise to be able to think rationally. You may also have to bear being called a loner. In such times, you must have the stomach to keep playing the game without getting perturbed by what others are wanting and asking you to do. You may have the brain to know what’s right and not right for you. But it’s your stomach that leads you to act on your conviction.

13. Zoom out Much of the time, in life and in investing, we would be better off zooming out than zooming in. Rather than being ticker watchers of our own lives, and rather than zooming in and magnifying and thus worrying about the daily volatility in our stocks, we would be better off thinking about our lives and investments as pale dots that are just specks on the canvas of eternity.

Within this, if we keep doing our work well, the daily motions and volatility that we pass by must not worry us therefore.

14. Look at things in the aspect of eternity Marshall Weinberg, one of Ben Graham’s students, said that the biggest lesson he drew out of his class was on long-term thinking –

One sentence changed my life…Ben Graham opened the course by saying: ‘If you want to make money in Wall Street you must have the proper psychological attitude. No one expresses it better than Spinoza the philosopher.’

When he said that, I nearly jumped out of my course. What? I suddenly look up, and he said, and I remember exactly what he said: ‘Spinoza said you must look at things in the aspect of eternity.’ And that’s what suddenly hooked me on Ben Graham.

Here was the father of value investing teaching his students about the value of long-term thinking, and that too in terms of eternity. Now, almost seven decades later, we would be paying true homage to Graham if we could view investing through a wide-angle lens, taking a long-term perspective, and striving for a long, sustained upward trend in our stocks instead of getting worried about the short-term volatility in their prices.

This may not help us eliminate all mistakes we may make as investors, but it can give us the tool to treat our investments and portfolios just a little bit better.

15. Know what you (don’t) control Consider the formula of compounding, where –

Future Value = Present Value x (1 + Rate of Return) ^ Time

What excites most of us in this formula and where we wish to exert the maximum control and expect the greatest certainty is the ‘rate of return’. This is despite that it is the only variable in this formula that is tentative and most uncertain, and beyond our control.

The two variables that are under our maximum control are ‘present value’, or the initial investment and ‘time’, or the amount of time the money is allowed to compound. And these are the two variables, especially ‘time’, most of us choose to ignore in our race to earn the maximum return.

16. Investing’s success secrets When it comes to investing in the stock market, it is often going to be scary, and there will always be something to worry about. But if you have a strong stomach, which will happen if you invest your own money, invest for the long run, invest in high-quality businesses, and always expect the unexpected, you will most likely do well.

17. Deal well with adversity William Hazlitt wrote – “Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.” In fact, a large part of a person’s character is built through adversity.

The world is not a bed of roses for one to think he can be out of wood all his life. Life has its ups and downs, its peaks and valleys. Though it will be great if all our days on earth are on the up-and-up, and completely sunny. Unfortunately, they are not. This is also true of the stock market where people who have created the maximum wealth have done it through the most trying of times.

In fact, Buffett’s advice of being fearful when others are greedy and being greedy when others are fearful is all about dealing well with adversity.

18. Be the real ‘you’ Authenticity is something no investing book can ever teach you. It’s a daily practice. Now, while it’s difficult to be authentic in a world that discourages imperfection and where everyone else is thinking and acting like others, authenticity can be a great asset for a value investor.

Honestly accepting mistakes and learning from them is one of the ways to cultivate authenticity as an investor. Creating an investment process that suits your temperament – and not one that blindly copies other investors – is another.

The simple idea is that – to succeed in life and in investing, you have to be the real ‘you’. As Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

19. No stock is safe The bulls may want you to believe this, but no stock is safe. There are businesses that may remain good for some time, maybe long time, but you must not attach infinite values to them. Everything in this world is momentary. So, your best bet is to just stick with quality (even that is momentary, just for longer moments). The good thing about quality stocks is that you can pay up for them (not overpay), expensive looking prices, and still do well till the underlying businesses remain good. With poor quality, most probably, you have no hope.

20. Don’t look at stocks to make you rich Blindly banking on the market to make you rich is a dangerous belief. In fact, looking at stocks to make you rich may be a path to financial hell. I had a few friends who quit their high paying jobs as analysts to become full-time investors in 2006-07. Some of them even started managing other people’s money. Some leveraged to buy more of the stocks that were surging in prices. Most of these “risk-takers” were destroyed in 2008, and a few had to wind up their affairs and go back to their home-towns and to their family business. Getting full-time into investing, especially because you start believing you have the skill because you’ve done well in the recent past, can be dangerous. Investing is done best when it’s done part-time. And then you need to see it as a way to keep you rich, not make you rich.

21. First calm, then complacency, then crisis That’s the way the system works. You must not be complacent when it seems calm, like it did in the period prior to 2008. A long period of growth, with only a minor interruption in 2001, had led to complacency then. Economy looked stronger with each passing year, banks were willing to lend to everyone willing to borrow, and asset prices were rising across the board. It continued for some time, and then, hell broke loose. Seeds of future prosperity are sown in times of despair. Seeds of future despair are sown in times of prosperity. We must remember this.

22. Appreciate the role of luck Peter Bernstein said – “The riskiest moment is when you are right.” This is because the streak of being right can make you forget how important luck is in determining the outcome. If you realize that you have been right quite a few times in the recent past, you must bear in mind the risk this entails. Most investors forgot this in 2008, and then again recently.

23. Invest right, sleep tight Always invest to the level of a peaceful night’s sleep. Investing that causes you sleepless nights – for some people, their lives – isn’t worth doing. It’s like the game of Russian Roulette, where you put a gun with one bullet and five empty chambers on your head and shoot. The probability that you may survive is a huge 5/6, or 83%, but the consequence of failure is death. You become a statistic.

24. Respect risk Keep a healthy sense of respect for the stock market’s inherent risk. As Ben Graham said, Mr. Market has incurable emotional problems. But he often shows us the mirror that contains a clear reflection of the true investors we are. Never disrespect that for a fact.

25. Buffett’s success secrets In the 2008 shareholder meeting of Wesco Financial, a shareholder asked Charlie Munger to describe what caused Warren Buffett’s success.

“His success…is a lollapalooza,” Munger replied – a confluence of factors moving in the same direction.

Munger outlined the following seven key factors which combined together to cause Buffett’s success –

Mental aptitude (Being seriously smart)

Having great interest in the subject (“It’s very hard to succeed in something unless you take the first step – which is to become very interested in it.” ~ Sir William Osler)

Early start (If something takes a long time to achieve, you better start early)

Being a learning machine (Keep learning and learning)

Reinforcement (Human beings work well if they get reinforcement – constant rewards for doing well, which drives you to do more of the same)

Being correctly trusted by people

Avoiding envy, jealousy, self-pity, vengeance, and extreme ideology

26. Value investing is a good idea Jack Schwager, author of Market Wizards series, who invokes the wisdom of Joel Greenblatt, one of the foremost experts on value investing, writes –

Value investing doesn’t always work. The market doesn’t always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn’t work. And that is a very good thing. The fact that our value approach doesn’t work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.

27. Change your mind Jason Fried, CEO at Basecamp and the author of Rework, recounts a crucial lesson Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos shared with the former’s team a few years ago –

During one of his answers, he shared an enlightened observation about people who are “right a lot”.

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a well-formed point of view, but it means you should consider your point of view as temporary.

28. Volatility is a non-event In the long journey of the stock of a high-quality business, the daily short-term jumps – or volatility as they call it in business news – that makes people nervous are non-events. As Annie Duke writes in her book Thinking in Bets –

In our decision-making lives, we aren’t that good at taking this kind of perspective – at accessing the past and future to get a better view of how any given moment might fit into the scope of time. It just feels how it feels in the moment and we react to it.…We make a long-term stock investment because we want it to appreciate over years or decades. Yet there we are, watching a downward tick over a few minutes, consumed by imagining the worst. What’s the volume? Is it heavier than usual? Better check the news stories. Better check the message boards to find out what rumors are circulating.

Even noted psychologist Daniel Kahneman agrees, “If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It’s the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you’ll be miserable.”

29. Reduce wastefulness Most of our lives are highlighted by tremendous amounts of wastefulness. But since we don’t pause to think about it, because we often don’t learn to see the harsh truth, we are not able to start on the path to freedom from our financial worries.

Of course, money isn’t everything in life. But it sure does help to consistently work towards reducing such wastefulness, to spend less than you earn and invest the difference well. Over time, compounding will do the rest for you.

30. Get comfortable with uncertainty Annie Duke shares insights on how we can get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions as a result –

Life, like poker, is one long game, and there are going to be a lot of losses, even after making the best possible bets. We are going to do better, and be happier, if we start by recognizing that we’ll never be sure of the future. That changes our task from trying to right every time, and impossible job, to navigating our way through the uncertainty by calibrating our beliefs to move toward, little by little, a more accurate and objective representation of the world.

31. You are your own worst enemy In an interview with NY Times, Howard Marks, when asked if investors have become smarter in the 50 years he has been investing himself, replies –

They’ve gotten more information. They know more about more asset classes. There are fewer secrets in the world today. On the other hand, I think they are more shortsighted, moreshort term oriented than they used to be.

And while people now understand more about contrarianism and counterintuitiveness, I don’t think the human race has become less emotional.

32. Three powerful rules Most good decisions in life are marked by peace, detachment, and acceptance. Rising markets may lead us to ignore this. Most investors like to believe they can enjoy stock market gains without losses. And that denial is what causes them stress and conflict. They feel disappointed when the harsh reality doesn’t align with their rosy expectations. And then, such investors feel helpless, which further magnifies their disappointment. After all, most of what happens in the stock market are outside of our control. We can’t stop the market from falling and crashing, nor can we call up companies or the stock market regulator or the central bank when our stocks tumble. Making and losing money is just the nature of investing, and often outside your control. So just do your work well, and then let it go. Yes, let it go.

33. Be vulnerable In his Feb. 2016 memo, Howard Marks wrote this –

My buddy Sandy was an airline pilot. When asked to describe his job, he always answers, “hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.”

Investing follows a similar pattern – hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Now, both these situations make us vulnerable. In the former, we are vulnerable to losing money. In the latter, we are vulnerable to missing opportunities. But it’s upon us how we deal with such vulnerability. Do we buckle under the fear of the unknown or have the courage to face up to it? And if we decide to face up to our fears, all we must do is to play our parts well and let go of what we don’t control.

Nature will take its course then, and a few years later, we may be surprised at what we were able to achieve just because we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable.

34. Be water Bruce Lee said –

Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. Put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or creep or drip or crash. Be water, my friend.

Problems arise all the time in life and in investing, and you can try to keep your rigid shape, smashing into the problems until you break. Or you can be like water and slip through the cracks.

Charlie Munger says, “The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win.”

In fact, a few of life’s great pleasures are to keep learning, letting go of previously cherished ideas, and emptying your mind for new ideas to come in. Then you’re free to look for new ones.

Be formless. Be adaptable. Be open to new ideas. Like water.

35. Work with imperfect information Trying to increase your confidence by gathering information that is supposedly unknown to most others really only makes you more comfortable with your investment decisions, not better at them, and is generally an unproductive use of your limited time. Seth Klarman wrote in Margin of Safety…

Some investors insist on trying to obtain perfect knowledge about their impending investments, researching companies until they think they know everything there is to know about them.

They study the industry and the competition, contact former employees, industry consultants, and analysts, and become personally acquainted with top management. They analyze financial statements for the past decade and stock price trends for even longer.

This diligence is admirable, but it has two shortcomings. First, no matter how much research is performed, some information always remains elusive; investors have to learn to live with less than complete information.

Second, even if an investor could know all the facts about an investment, he or she would not necessarily profit. This is not to say that fundamental analysis is not useful. It certainly is. But information generally follows the well-known 80/20 rule: the first 80 percent of the available information is gathered in the first 20 percent of the time spent.

Moreover, business information is highly perishable. Economic conditions change, industries are transformed, and business results are volatile. The effort to acquire current, let alone complete information is never-ending. Meanwhile, other market participants are also gathering and updating information, thereby diminishing any investor’s informational advantage.

…Investors frequently benefit from making investment decisions with less than perfect knowledge and are well rewarded for bearing the risk of uncertainty.

The time other investors spend delving into the last unanswered detail may cost them the chance to buy in at prices so low that they offer a margin of safety despite the incomplete information.

36. Recognize your losses Doing this is hard because it’s also an acknowledgment of your mistake. But it’s important to recognize your losses sooner than later. Don’t be afraid to swallow your pride and move on before your losses become even greater.

37. Quality businesses, not cheap stocks Avoid having an investment process that starts with looking for cheap stocks. Instead, have one that starts with looking for high-quality businesses that benefit from established competitive advantages and business models that produce large and growing distributable cash flows. And when you find some such businesses, wait for the right valuations (which won’t be cheap but at a premium to their peers) for them, even if you must wait for a long time.

Charlie Munger said –

It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.

38. It’s the journey, not the destination The pleasure of travel is in the journey and not so much in reaching one’s destination. Like, you will never know how much money is enough, or how much you will need (destination) to be happy and your financial life to be fulfilling. So, there’s no point fretting about it. Rather, focus on building the right process (journey) that you’ll work on the way.

Destinations rarely live up to the traveller’s expectations. By the time you are close to your goal of making your first ten-bagger, it won’t seem like the ambitious goal it once was. It will seem like a boring inevitability of the right process.

39. Enjoy the experience Stop worrying about future market crashes and stop getting surprised when these actually happen. Because they will. That’s the nature of the market. Simply enjoy the experience and be grateful for it.

II. Learning 40. Write It Down Writing down your thoughts is the most powerful tool for crystallizing thinking and decision making. People who don’t have a habit of writing down their questions are usually sloppy thinkers. Expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can’t be bothered to do that, you don’t deserve an answer. The question doesn’t have to be in flawless, stiff and formal language but it has to be precise. There has to be some indication that you’re thinking and paying attention.

41. More you know, more you don’t In his book, The Island of Knowledge, physicist Marcelo Gleiser writes this –

Consider, then, the sum total of our accumulated knowledge as constituting an island, which I call the Island of Knowledge. A vast ocean surrounds the Island of Knowledge, the unexplored ocean of the unknown, hiding countless tantalizing mysteries. As the Island of Knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance—the boundary between the known and unknown. Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination — whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyways — but to more questions and mysteries. The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask.

42. Wisdom requires humility In The Apology, Plato wrote that the oracle at Delphi had pronounced Socrates the wisest man in Athens. No one was more astonished and disbelieving than Socrates himself. So, he immediately set out to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser man. Here is what Socrates found as he met a few supposedly wise men…

I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him – his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination – and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.

In the end, Socrates discovered he was indeed the wisest man in Athens. Not because of how much he knew, but because he was the only one who understood how much he did not know.

Knowing that you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom. Knowing that you don’t know, accepting it and not being ashamed about it is the start of a continuing journey of wisdom. Recognizing the darkness is the prerequisite for bringing on the light. Only when the darkness is brought out of hiding does the light have the opportunity to illuminate it.

III. Life 43. Skip the rush lane Rushing is rarely worth it. Life is too short to be wasted in the fast lane and is better enjoyed at a leisurely pace. I can vouch for that, from the experience of running in the fast lane during the first eight years of my career and the slow lane during the next seven.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, has listed the trappings of a lot of wealth, stuff like “a golden roof, purple clothes, marble floors.” He has described the life of someone who has been blessed mightily by fate and fortune as having imposing statues, the most brilliant art, teams of servants.

“What does having all these things teach?” Seneca asks. “All you learn from this is how to desire more stuff.”

44. It’s the war within A brilliant book I re-read this year was Eknath Easwaran’s The Bhagavad Gita. Here is an excerpt from the book I found super insightful –

The battlefield is a perfect backdrop, but the Gita’s subject is the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious.

Easwaran adds –

Scholars can debate the point forever, but when the Gita is practiced, I think, it becomes clear that the struggle the Gita is concerned with is the struggle for self-mastery. It was Vyasa’s genius to take the whole great Mahabharata epic and see it as metaphor for the perennial war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness in every human heart. Arjuna and Krishna are then no longer merely characters in a literary masterpiece. Arjuna becomes Everyman, asking the Lord himself, Sri Krishna, the perennial questions about life and death – not as a philosopher, but as the quintessential man of action. Thus read, the Gita is not an external dialogue but an internal one: between the ordinary human personality, full of questions about the meaning of life, and our deepest Self, which is divine.

There is, in fact, no other way to read the Gita and grasp it as spiritual instruction. If I could offer only one key to understanding this divine dialogue, it would be to remember that it takes place in the depths of consciousness and that Krishna is not some external being, human or superhuman, but the spark of divinity that lies at the core of the human personality.

If you have an interest in reading the Gita, I suggest you pick up this book.

45. Real success in life In his book Education of a Value Investor, Guy Spier quotes Warren Buffett as saying this to college students…

When you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster. That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life.

He continues –

The trouble with love is that you can’t buy it. You can buy sex. You can buy testimonial dinners. You can buy pamphlets that say how wonderful you are. But the only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love. But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.” Of all the lessons that Warren has taught me, perhaps this is the most important.

46. Become antifragile Life is uncertain, and often random. Things that we think should happen, often don’t. And things we think should not happen, often do. Most of it makes sense after the fact. But when we are facing life’s randomness, we curse it. We think we’ve been dealt an unfair hand, except when things are going our way.

However, the good thing about the randomness of life is that it provides us with the ability to become better at dealing with, well, randomness. Again, in Taleb lingo, randomness provides us with the opportunity to become antifragile – things that get better when exposed to shocks, volatility, randomness, disorders, stressors, risk, and uncertainty.

Taleb writes in Antifragile –

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.

Artisans, say, taxi drivers, prostitutes (a very, very old profession), carpenters, plumbers, tailors, and dentists, have some volatility in their income but they are rather robust to a minor professional Black Swan, one that would bring their income to a complete halt. Their risks are visible. Not so with employees, who have no volatility, but can be surprised to see their income going to zero after a phone call from the personnel department. Employees’ risks are hidden.

47. Life is a single-player game In his podcast session with Farnam Street, Naval Ravikant talks about the idea of being happy –

When it comes to learn to be happy, train yourself to be happy, completely internal, no external progress, no external validation, 100% you’re competing against yourself, single-player game. We are such social creatures, we’re more like bees or ants, that we’re externally programmed and driven, that we just don’t know how to play and win at these single-player games anymore.

We compete purely on multi-player games. The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player.

48. What to teach kids Naval also tells this during his session with Farnam Street –

I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields and learning them really well over and over. Life is mostly about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in the things that you truly love and where you understand the basics inside out. That’s not how our system is built.

We teach all these kids calculus and they walk out not understanding calculus at all. Really they would have been better off served doing arithmetic and basic computer programming the entire time. I think there’s a pace of learning issue.

Then there’s finally a what to learn. There’s a whole set of things we don’t even bother trying to teach. We don’t teach nutrition. We don’t teach cooking. We don’t teach how to be in happy, positive relationships. We don’t teach how to keep your body healthy and fit. We just say sports. We don’t teach happiness. We don’t teach meditation. Maybe we shouldn’t teach some of these things because different kids will have different aptitudes, but maybe we should. Maybe we should teach practical construction of technology. Maybe everyone in their science project, instead of building a little chemistry volcano, maybe you should be building a smartphone.

49. Time + Health > Wealth Ben Carlson, author of the blog and a nice book by the same name – A Wealth of Common Sense – wrote about few financial advices he thinks are not talked about much but offer big financial payoffs. One such advice, and that I believe makes great sense, is about why time and health matter more than wealth. Ben wrote –

Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son William was far and away the richest person in the world after doubling the inheritance given to him by his late father in just 6 years. But the burden of wealth brought him nothing but anxiety. He spent all of his time managing his substantial wealth through the family’s businesses, which meant he had no time to enjoy his money or take care of his body.

He once said of a neighbor who didn’t have as much money, “He isn’t worth a hundredth part as much as I am, but he has more of the real pleasures of life than I have. His house is as comfortable as mine, even if it didn’t cost so much; his team is about as good as mine; his opera box is next to mine; his health is better than mine, and he will probably outlive me. And he can trust his friends.”

William also told his nephew, “What’s the use, Sam, of having all this money if you cannot enjoy it? My wealth is no comfort to me if I have not good health behind it.”

All the money in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t have the time or the health to enjoy it.

50. Remind yourself of your mortality Citizens of one of the happiest countries in the world, Bhutan, meditate on their mortality five times a day. “It cures you,” the Bhutanese say. Not just the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, even Stoicism talks about memento mori that is the practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

Now, the thing about meditating on your own mortality is that it doesn’t make life pointless. Instead, knowing that you will die one day creates priority and thinking about it helps you live with a more positive perspective. So you can focus on what’s important.

Like Seneca reminds us to be spendthrifts of time given so little time we have on our hand –

Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives — worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.

He then advises –

Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.

51. Be humble You are just a tiny cog in a massive machine. You may want to board the lift to the top floor, but you have no control over someone pressing the wrong button, or the lift crashing down. So, be humble.

Thank You Before I close, let me share with you the Serenity Prayer that has helped me a lot in facing my personal, professional, and investing turmoils. I am sure if you keep this prayer close to your mind and heart, it will help you face your own turmoils well, including those related to your investing.

The Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I wish you a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2019.

I am lucky to have you as a tribe member.

With respect, Vishal

PS: Best Books I Read in 2018 – Here is a list of the best books I read in 2018. This is apart from the usual supertexts I re-read during the year – stuff like Poor Charlie’s Almanack, and Warren Buffett’s letters.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

The Art of Living by Epictetus

Einstein by Walter Isaacson

Dialogue with Death by Eknath Easwaran

12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Striking Thoughts by Bruce Lee

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley

Disclosure: I participate in the Amazon Associates Program, which simply means that if you purchase a book on Amazon from a link on this page, I receive a small commission. The book does not cost you any extra. I give away 100% of the commission for the betterment of the under-privileged.

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