Rootz's Blog

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who live in what I’ll call “default state” and those who live in “preferred state”. And here’s where I get the tiniest bit geeky and invoke the image of an energy graph for an atom, where the atom can be in one of two states, as shown below. [ image source ] At any given moment, a person can either be in the initial energy state or the lower energy state. He cannot be in both, and he can move from one to the other. But this moving requires two things: energy and time (no quantum tunneling in this analogy). And most of us think we don’t have enough of either. Default state is where most of us exist, as reactants. It’s where we started, probably as soon as we got into high school. It’s where most of the people we know are, and it isn’t so bad, at least not for most of us. The default state is where you stay if you do the bare minimum. You get C's and B's. You do what it takes to keep your job, maybe only just eno

Here’s a list of the top 10 podcasts that make up a majority of my podcast-listening time, in no particular order. . .  Hello Internet To this show I owe my entire addiction to podcasts. Whether you know CGP Grey and Brady Haran or not (and I can’t tell you what an awful person you are if you don’t) this show is worth listening to, beginning to end. It’s entertaining and funny, and you’re bound to learn new things. My favorite aspect of the show is how, as you listen, you’ll invariably begin to take a side. Are you on the Haran side or the Grey side? More logical or more gut-led? More of a robot or caveman? And the culture around this show is incredible. I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it for any podcast ever. Radiolab 100% of the episodes turn out to be interesting and important. I don’t believe I’ve ever skipped an episode because of the content. This show is a classic. And the editing is amazing, for those of you who are interested in doing your own p

Finding the way through a place is all about continuation, not destination. It's not about knowing where you want to end up but instead knowing how to go from where you are to the next place you need to be in order to, eventually though not inevitably, reach your destination. You're in a strange town in a strange country. You have an address but no maps and no knowledge of the way the town is splayed out over the rough mountainous farmland surrounding you. You'd be able to recognize the place once you got to it by the address tacked to the stuccoed wall but not before. What do you do? Besides ask for help and a map, what could you possibly do? You could drive every street, looking for patterns in the foreign street names. Or you could give up. The point is, without reference points and a common language, without knowing what turn to take next and what landmark to mark next, finding your way through a place isn't so much an act of looking for something as it is an

(Quotes throughout are taken from this amazing article by Maria Popova.) “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I read this and started to think about balance. What’s the right balance between productivity/routine and presence/spontaneity? In defense of routines: “London maintained that every writer needed a technique, experience, and a philosophical position.” Lots of writers had/have routines. They are generally a very obsessive and superstitious bunch. (“I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have  superstition bout examining it too closely.” - Anne Tyler) I’m not necessarily a writer, but I am a college student, and the same things can be said of me as of many writers. The seclusion. The writer’s block. The seeming futility of the work. The routines in my life help me to overlook and overcome the dread of starting another day that is mostly like the last one and mostly filled with things I don’t feel like doing. Getting to

To keep a thorough to-do list, to be totally on top of the expectations placed on you, is to free your mind to reach its full potential. It gives your brain permission to explore, permission to wander when it wishes to, permission to operate at its highest capacity. Emptying your mind into a to-do list is like lubricating the gears on your bicycle. Everything moves faster and smoother. And you can go further. There's a reason a clear mind works better than a full one. Your brain isn't made to multitask. It's meant to specialize. It wants to focus and find a state of flow. It's your impatient, primitive being that wants to be constantly rewarded and distracted. So externalize the demands of life. Externalize the routine tasks, the boring stuff, the important stuff—everything—onto a to-do list, a daily checklist and/or a calendar. It's only after externalizing every worry and reminder that your brain will wake up, come up with ideas and learn to enjoy the moment

In a capitalist society, what does it mean for a person to be free? Does it mean the ability to make one’s own choices? The chance to rise to the top? The chance to experience a life of no limits other than the ones placed on oneself? Before answering that, let’s consider a hypothetical slave society. In this society, freedom, to a salve, means to own one’s own life. Freedom, to the master, means the freedom to not be a slave, to instead own slaves who will make his money for him and do his hard labor. In this slave society, freedom does not exist without the notation of slavery. The members define freedom in terms of what it is not. In this case, it is not slavery. Similarly, in a feudalistic society, freedom would mean the freedom to own land and be protected without having to pay high taxes/rent on the things one produces. In a socialist society, freedom from society would mean to be able to own however much one wished, to be able to increase one's income by increasing one

The first step is to recognize the absurdity of art. I’m sure everyone, on some level, can see how strange it is that humans attach so much meaning and value to things that seem useless and, sometimes, easily re-creatable. But after noticing how temporal and relativistic art is, recognize how it also permeates everything in our lives. It lives with us as furniture and paintings, it simmers within us as poetry and songs, it comes out of us in the form of writing and words. It surrounds us. Everything is art. And if everything is art, then art is everything. Next, don’t censor yourself. Don’t throw away the thoughts that pop into your head. The difference between the normal and the extraordinary is the same as the difference between the normal and the neurotic: a dash of crazy. Take yourself seriously. Don’t throw away even the ideas and questions that seem ordinary or inevitable. Figure out why things happen. Why you have those thoughts. What those thoughts mean. How you can expan

Being a tutor isn’t as much about answering questions as it is about helping people ask questions. Figuring out the question is usually more difficult than finding the answer. Answers permeate our world, online and offline, and you will rarely come across a question that hasn’t been answered and documented at least once in the history of the human race. But questions? Everyone views the world differently. Everyone’s understanding has holes in different areas. So while most answers are pretty consistent across the world, questions vary almost infinitely. Knowing how to ask good questions is one of the most important life-skills you can acquire. If you don’t know how to ask questions, you’ll never get answers. And the more questions you ask, the more answers you get. The more answers you get, the more emboldened you are to ask even more questions. Questions lead to knowledge. Knowledge leads to wisdom. Wisdom leads to a good life. The quality of your life is determined by the q

You have a list of a million things to do. Maybe it’s your to-do list. Maybe the tasks it takes you to start your business. Maybe the things you need to get done before going on vacation. But no matter what, when given a list of tasks——unless it’s all perfectly sequential——the first question you’ll be asking yourself is, “Which do I do first?” There are two basic strategies that you can pick from: You can either start with the most difficult tasks or the easier ones. And depending on who you ask, you’ll get different answers. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, said that if you do the easy things in business first, the rest will follow and the business will be successful. Tim Ferriss says the opposite: Do “either the thing that makes you most uncomfortable . . . or ask: Which one of these, if done, will make all the rest irrelevant or easier?” So there are two camps, two strategies, and it all comes down to personal preference. Are you the type that can jump out of bed and dive st

Neil Gaiman: "Make good art." And all you can do if you want to make good art is to simply make art——any art——and, if you work hard enough for long enough, it will end up being good art. The only qualifier on Gaiman’s command is that we make the art “good”. Don’t make the art half-heartedly. Make it to the best of your ability. Otherwise, to have overcome the obstacles of distraction and disappointment around you, and then to only make mediocre art, is a waste of your energy.

Tony Robbins: Ep. 217 of The James Altucher Show Don’t talk or think or write about how you’re going to do it. Think about the Why. Talk about the Why. The Why is going to carry you through all those times that the How doesn’t seem possible. The Why is what will drive you til the end. Not the How, not the When, not the Where, not even the What. All of those questions will be answered when they need to be answered, don't try to answer them beforehand. The first step is to recognize the Why and to let it drive you forward into doing and making.

Seth Godin: “The most difficult part might be in choosing whether you want to make art at all. . .” That goes for anything you can choose to do. The most difficult part is deciding to do it. The second most difficult part is actually doing it. That’s the part that stumps most people. Don’t let it stump you. You know you want and you know what it takes to get it.

Adam Grant: The surprising habits of original thinkers Remember, he says, that “the first few drafts are always crap.” Don’t doubt yourself and your potential. You simply cannot know your own potential, and you’ll never know whether you’ve reached it. All you can do is keep reaching further. Successful people understand that there are two versions of failure. One version is where you try and fail. The other, the one you should fear more, is where you don’t try at all. The ones who fail the most are the ones who tried the most, and the ones who try the most will inevitably be the successful ones.

James Murphy: “The best way to complain is to make things.” Don’t tell us what the problem is. Tell us how you’re going to fix it. Value is created when you create, not when you talk about what hasn’t happened, hasn’t been created, hasn’t been working.

Chase Jarvis: “Stop planning. Start doing” A plan is worth nothing. Only results are. Being a great, hard-working person with great ideas is only valuable if you follow through on those ideas. So go do. And you will become good. You will develop good habits. You will be recognized for your work.

This series will be made up of 6 short posts, each one covering one creator, entrepreneur or generally smart person and what they have to say about becoming successful. What does it really take to become successful in any field? Is there one simple piece of advice that totally trumps all other advice? The answer to the second question: Yes. The answer to the first question: You'll have to wait and see!

You can be obsessed with podcasts. You can listen to them every day, while you’re driving, while you shower, while you run. But that might not be a good idea. There’s a limit to how much information your brain can take in and a much lower limit of how much of that information you can apply to your life——can actually remember and use. So this post is about why I quit podcasts. Not forever, and I might listen to an episode of Hello Internet every now and then, but the obsessive, mega-consumption of podcasts that was my life for the past few months is over. I decided that I’ve learned the most important things that podcasts could teach me, and now it’s time to apply what I’ve learned instead of trying to learn more. The lesson is simple: Don’t wait. Don’t waste your time. Instead, do. Chase Jarvis says it best in his video “Stop Planning. Start Doing.” The entire message of the video, the message that I kept hearing, over and over, from everyone from Tony Robins to Neil Gaiman,

Seth Godin starts April 17th's (2017) post like this: “A quick look at Yelp reviews will show you that NY restaurants are not quite as good as those in some suburbs. This, of course, makes no sense. New York is insanely competitive, with a ton of turnover and a very demanding audience. A fast casual restaurant in Shaker Heights can coast for a long time, because... it's better than the alternatives.” Then he moves on to his point about marketing. But the idea he outlines in the first two paragraphs is the one clearly stated in the title: Compared to What? And here's my elaboration on it. . . The reason that restaurants in NYC get lower reviews than their suburb competitors (even though the city places are clearly better, as evidenced by the competition around them and the prices they charge) is because the demands placed on those restaurants are higher than those placed on restaurants in the suburbs . People who eat in the city expect more for what they’re

Fellow girls, if you are convinced that boys are better at math than girls, then when the math gets tough (say, around quadratics or graphing functions or figuring out those dang related rates problems), you will think it's tough because you're a girl. On the other hand, if you believe you can be just as good at math as a boy, you will stick with the tough math until you figure it out, just like the boys do. They haven’t been told that math is harder for them than for others, so when it gets tough they just figure it’s because math is a difficult subject——which it is. They don’t automatically switch to thinking that they can’t do this because there’s something with their brains that keeps them from being good at this. It all comes down to a simple belief. Do you believe in yourself of what others think of you? Be careful which belief you choose. It might mean the difference between a successful career that you enjoy and an unfulfilling, boring one.

[ image source ] Abstract is a raw, edgy look into the very soul of design. If you didn’t before, you’ll finally understand what design is, what it means, what all designers have in common and how they are so very different. And, perhaps, how you can be a designer. Because the field of design is way more broad than most people think it is. I’d bet that, no matter who you are, even if you’re in design, you will learn a lot from this series, and not just about design but about productivity, brainstorming and the importance of focus and dedication. Abstract looks at design from a completely new angle, a sort of insider look, but also an underneath and above and every angle in between sort of look. It’s a view that I don’t think has ever been documented before. Each documentary is filmed in such a way as to be unique to the views and practices and art of the specific designer. In Es Devlin’s episode on stage design, the film unfolds like a stage, complete with clips of Dev

You’re in line at the store. You’re in the car waiting for your date to come out. You’re walking across campus between classes. What do you do in these moments of free time? Free time is check-your-phone time. You open emails, reply to a couple texts, update your apps or scroll through Instagram. That’s great. But here’s what’s not great: Taking up time that is not free time and doing the same thing. I realized something recently. I check Instagram once in the morning, right after I wake up, and once at night, before getting to bed. In some ways, this is how I force myself to get out of bed in the morning and into bed at night, but it’s also a waste of time. Because what happens when I encounter a pice of free time? I check Instagram! Instead of spending a block of ten minutes in the morning on social media, I could spread it out over the little moments of nothingness that pop up during my day. Then I could use the extra ten minutes in the morning for reading or exercising!

[This post was inspired by CGP Grey and Myke on Cortex 44 Existential Time Tracking and Thomas Frank’s “How to Wake Up Early and Make it a Habit - College Info Geek” ] There are very few apps that can completely change your life. But Toggl, Momenum, Alarmy and Todoist are four that can. I know because they’ve changed mine. I’ve gone from a person who wanted to be productive to someone who actually is. And I feel productive, which is in some ways more valuable than being productive. Feeling productive gives me confidence and the clearness of mind to be in control of my life. So, here they are, the four apps that can change your life. . . [ image source ] Alarmy (iOS/Android, free and paid versions) - Let’s start with Alarmy because that’s how I start my day. Alarmy is the sort of alarm clock that will make you get out of bed. The way I use it, I have it ask me to take a picture of a preset object to shut it off. This way, I have to get out of bed, and

[ image source ] Can I say it was. . . interesting? No, that’s not descriptive or accurate enough in any way. So what was it? Strange, yes. One of those books that should be  tasted, but not devoured . It’s like, as I was reading it, I loved it but not enough to sit for hours and loose myself inside of it. I was always conscious of the time I spent reading it, time that was always worth-it, but, still, time that was palpable. I felt it. I felt it pass me by as I felt it run through the pages of this book. Every now-and-then, I found myself pulled out of the story by the poetry and the random weird truths that popped up. “We [humans] made machines, the way spiders made silk,” is one line that stopped my reading eyes. Another, perhaps my favorite, “Color returned to the world, cone time replaced rod time.” I’d stare for a second, write down the words, contemplate their beauty and then move on. The story felt weirdly choppy near the end, but not so bad that I couldn't finis

[ image source ] (For some background on this idea and a very interesting listen, check out Brady Haran and CGP Grey’s "Hello Internet" podcast, episode 3 .) The idea is simple: We humans are awful at multitasking. We can only do something effectively and efficiently if we focus on that one thing. The way I’ve come to see my life, at any one time I am putting my focus into one of five different areas of my life. I’ve named these areas interacting, working, learning, expressing and maintaining . Notice how they all end in “ing”. They are about action. They are about the things that fill my life with meaning and fulfillment and health. I believe we each have these areas in our lives, and I think we should all try to understand them better. Here’s how they work: Each of these areas is a “lightbulb”. These lightbulbs are only “on” if we’re putting energy into them. The things we do in each bulb’s specific area is what powers it. Over the course of our lives all th

I do five things that keep me ahead of my schedule and workload, both in school and at work (but the way I’ve written about them here they mostly apply to school). They keep my head clear and my hands ready to work. They remove anxiety and don’t give me reason to cram for anything. They are why I'm an A-student. And they can be your reasons too. A small warning: All five of these have become habits for me, and that is really important to realize. You have to make them habits for you too, or you will not get the benefit that I have out of them. The idea is to make these such a part of your life that you don't think about them at all. This will give you the head-space to focus on the actual working and studying. 1 - Think and do ahead Basically, I’m always thinking about what I’m going to do next. My to-do list has EVERYTHING on it except "eat breakfast", including floss teeth, submit programing assignment and ask my sister about her learning style. I neve