Steve Pavlina on personal growth

I've found a new favorite personal productivity website along with 43Folders and Lifehacker. It's run by Steve Pavlina who is self-employed in the business of personal growth.

Here are some articles I enjoyed (progressing from practical to spiritual): "Self-Discipline", "Overcoming Procrastination", "Triple Your Personal Productivity", "Environmental Reinforcement of Your Goals", "Are Your Friends An Elevator Or A Cage?", "Living Your Values", "Self Acceptance vs. Personal Growth", "The Meaning of Life"

Most of the material wasn't news to me. I had either figured it out myself or read about it somewhere. I did learn a few interesting ideas:

• Compile a values list.
  
• Imagine all the different lives you could have.
  
• What is your true purpose?
  
• Separate your identity from your growth. (e.g. In my case, I should avoid putting all my identity and self-esteem on being a physicist)
  
• Use will power in short, powerful bursts when you need to make major changes. Then use habit/routine to automate it so you don't have to use much willpower. Save your will power for important stuff since it is exhausting to use it all the time. (I once used my will power continuously to get through a very difficult, estended period and ended up burning out shortly afterwards.)
  

Tech: LyX text editor

Do you like LaTeX's beautiful output but hate its nasty scripting syntax? Well, maybe LyX is the software for you. It tries to give the user-friendliness of WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editors like Microsoft Word but keep the power and uniform elegance of LaTeX. The authors of LyX call their philosophy WYSIWYM ("What You See Is What You Mean"). Check out a review of the program here. Available for Mac, UNIX/Linux, and Windows.

I haven't tried it since I'm old fashioned (I still code webpages by typing the HTML tags.)

Title IX in science?

Many scientists (both men and women) have proposed the idea of enforcing Title IX in academia. Here is an article from the perspective of a chemist. The idea is to replicate the success of Title IX in high school and college sports.

It's a good idea in principle, but I see some problems. In particular, athletic teams have a very high turnover rate and there isn't much at stake. Unless you have a nationally ranked basketball or football team, athletic teams are not a big part of the university budget. In contrast, university faculty jobs are lifetime tenured positions. For a Title IX plan to work, I think we would have to give up the tenure system. If you have an all-male math department, what are you supposed to do? Hire women for the next thirty years? Hire adjunct women professors?

Competition in the academy

The fight for top 10 level prestige among US universities seems to intensifying. Columbia went on a hiring frenzy to boost their economics department and NYU has been on a hiring binge as well. I also found a Boston Globe magazine article about star professors and poaching in academia.

I think it is all a part of growing big business nature of American universities. Every elite member of society has to go to college, and they want to go to places like Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc.

My hope is that if talent will be spread out more evenly among universities, hopefully it will dilute the notion that you must go to a brand-name university to be successful.

Some of my GTD implementations

First, I try to write down personal productivity ideas in a moleskine. It's color coded so that I can identify different categories quickly.



I also have a shoebox cover that I use as a tray for stuff I should take with me when I leave home.



Finally, I have a checklist for things I should be doing daily. These range from my work to health issues (e.g. going to the gym, eating fruit). I also record the fun things I do. If I see that I've spent my last week's free time on video games, I might try to do something different the next week.

Dopp wallet

Following the discussions about minimalist wallets on 43 Folders and Lifehacker, I decided to get a Dopp Regatta 88 Series Front Getaway Pocket Wallet.

It's my favorite wallet so far. It has just enough capacity (3 credit card pockets, one other pocket, and an ID window), but it is still a very elegant wallet (all leather). The only downside is that I have to pull all the bills from the currency section to get the particular bill I want.

There are more minimalist wallets like the All-Ett. I don't like the All-Ett because it looks cheap (made out of sail-cloth) and it doesn't have any convenient easy-access card slots. It is, however, much thinner than the Dopp wallet.

If I was really hard-core, I could make a duct-tape wallet, but I think I'll stick with my leather Dopp.

Physics: Haidinger's brush

This morning, my advisor told me about an optical phenomenon called Haidinger's brush. It looks like a horizontal yellow dumbbell crossed with a vertical blue dumbbell. I'm still trying to see it.

Career: Jobs in industry for quantum computer scientists

I thought there weren't any jobs for theoretical physicists outside of academia. But maybe I could go work for DWave Systems, a privately financed company started from the University of British Columbia. They just secured $14 million of second round funding.

Developing new habits

Here's a great article about how to establish long-term habits. Also related is Steven Pavlina's 30 Days to Success article.

Waking up early leads to success

According to this Fortune article, one of the most common traits among successful people is that they wake up early. I'm trying to move my schedule up a bit now to see if that works.