Category: Scientific Progress

Recently, I read a book “The Holy Grail of Investing” by Tony Robbins, one of my unmet and highly respected mentors.
I’ve never seen and met him personally but I am touched by his contribution to society.
I have consumed most of his books, videos, and learning materials.
There are many interviews of alternative investment business titans in his recent book “The Holy Grail of Investing”.
All titans are experts in their particular business areas and most of them are not in limelight, and some of them are even not found normally in today’s social media.
They are committed and just doing their work, producing value to people, and people are making them billionaires.

One of the early lessons I’ve learned from Tony Robbins is that we have to see things as their real occurrence, not making them worse than as they are.

After reading “The Holy Grail of Investing” and especially the interview section from the investment titans, some of the nuggets that touched me are here.

We have to see things better than their original version because we deserve better.
We shouldn’t lie and exaggerate but we must demonstrate a clear vision, if there is no vision everything will die.
We have to make our vision a reality with perseverance, hard work, and risk taking.
We must make things the way we actually see them in our mind.
We shouldn’t be scared of any change, because change is beautiful and brings prosperity.
We should stop looking at the world from the eye of suspicion, negativity, and cynicism.

Future and some groundbreaking innovations

Elon Musk’s Neuralink is based on the use of thousands of small electrodes embedded in the brain to read neuron signals and transmit them to a computer.
This could be another milestone for humanity by restoring human vision and a possibility in restoring the vision even in blind people.
We can also restore the motor function of paralyzed patients including the treatment of neurological disorders in people suffering from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. David Sinclair, PhD, an author of “Lifespan” and professor in Harvard University has already demonstrated that we can reverse aging in cells and restore our youth.
Sinclair’s lab reports that aging is no more due to mutations to the DNA but it is due to errors in the epigenetic instructions by some kind of mismatch.
We have the capacity to reboot these cells, remove their corrupted instruction files, and restore our proper function.
It is all about rejuvenating our body and preventing diseases from aging.

CRISPR is another groundbreaking technology that edits and modifies genes.
It can modify healthy T-cells from a donor and could attack cancer cells in patients.
Dr. Samarth Kulkarni, PhD, CEO of CRISPR Therapeutics says, “We’re going to do one-time procedures to change your genome, and hopefully you’re preventing disease or completely curing yourself of disease.”

Hermeus, a company dedicated to supersonic travel, is aiming for five times faster travel than commercial aircraft.
Supersonic travel means we can fly from Chicago to Doha in three hours.
We will fly at 90 thousand feet with the scene of curvature of the earth.

ICON, another company, is involved in 3D-printed homes.
These homes are created by a giant printer and look very nice and attractive, they will be resistant to wind, water, and mold.
How do we feel about 3D-printed homes to live in?

Helium is a company which is using the blockchain to build real communication networks.
They are working to build a 5G cellular network using the blockchain.

Impossible is a food company which is trying to save the planet by providing us only plant proteins.
We now know that plant protein is healthier and tastes better than animal protein.

Innovation in green energy

Sometimes we remain poor not only as an individual but as a nation even though a nation has huge natural resources potential.
There might be a lack of technology, capital, manpower, willpower or the combination of all.
There are many such examples in the world but one I found quite interesting is about the country Congo.
Congo has more cobalt mineral than the rest of the world combined but only one fifth of the Congo population has access to electricity.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time studying cobalt metal in graduate school so I was little interested in this natural resource.

As a fact, cobalt is so important that it is used in nearly every smartphone, tablet, laptop, and electric vehicle to give batteries stability.
It also keeps them away from overheating.
Apple and Tesla are making these products and both are trillion dollar companies.

Like many other resources including coal, cobalt is one of the non-renewable natural resources and consuming excess non-renewable resources is one reason for climate change.
If climate change is a global issue then polluting various countries through waste and emissions from coal mining or by other means doesn’t solve the problem.
All humans live in a global village now and global issues like pollution, climate change have no borders.
We must have a global shared responsibility to protect the planet.

One option for protecting the planet is through green energy technology.
Among many options for green energy technology, one of the cleanest sources of green energy is hydrogen.
When hydrogen burns the only byproduct produced is water vapor.
The only burden is its management like creating, storing, transporting, and leakage management during its transportation which are complex and very expensive.
These things cost a lot of money in comparison to coal management.

For example, hydrogen must be cooled to -253 degree celsius and highly pressurized at least ten thousand psi for its transportation.

Simon Hodson and Dr. Nansen Saleri, chairman and R&D chief from Omnis Energy, are on a mission for conversion of any hydrocarbon into net zero energy with no emissions and no waste.

Titans, their thought process, and success

Behind all of these groundbreaking innovations, there is capital as well as human investment.
Entrepreneurs, scientists, businessmen, and investors all work together as a cohort to make these innovations successful.

Peter Diamandis, a futurist and an author of “The Future is Faster than You Think” says, “technology is the force that converts scarcity into abundance, over and over again. With AI, we will see the first 3 person, billion dollar company in the next year.”

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures says, “what you already know isn’t important but what is your rate of learning is what the world needs now.”

New knowledge and skills are always interdisciplinary, it’s all related and this correlation gives us a fresh perspective for new things.
Pretty soon, we will have AI to assist as a copilot in every profession.

David Sacks, an entrepreneur and AI and Crypto czar for President-elect Donald Trump says, “The history of innovation is that as we make humans more productive, it makes our species richer. It doesn’t put people out of work. We always find new things for them to do.”

Wil VanLoh, founder and CEO of Quantum Energy says, “Whatever advancement we achieve, World always looks for more people having self-awareness, humility, and great communication.
We are made to interact with other humans, getting connected to each other, and communicating with each other which are invaluable assets.”

Michael Rees, Co-President of Blue Owl Capital, says “it’s not about being the smartest person in the room, it’s about being a partner to the person on the other side of the table.”

Partnership is the end result of awareness, humility, and communication.

Warren Buffett, an investor and philanthropist, was once asked about what was his best investment in life in an interview and he surprised the whole audience by not saying the investment in Coca-Cola, what he said is, his best investment was the communication skill that he learned from Dale Carnegie.

Bill Ford, CEO of General Atlantic’s says, “Entrepreneurs are the most interesting people in the world. They see the world differently, they’ve been told about fifty times that their idea won’t work, but they somehow persevere and make it work.”

Entrepreneurs persevere and obsess with their vision, opportunity, and risk.

One of the keys to success, I found in the book “The Holy Grail of Investing” is, we need a model of life using both a value creation and management philosophy, and merge them together as a life goal.
We have to build a system centric mindset rather than a person-centric mindset to give more value to the society.

Barry Sternlicht, chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital says, “When I think about my dad, my worst day now is way better than his best day in his whole life, growing up in a war.”

Ramzi Musallam, CEO of Veritas Capital says, “We all have seen and visited many rural and poor areas of the world and this gives us the opportunity to see how others live and how to be more empathetic to many issues that we face across the globe.”

He further says, “We have to learn from failures, because if we don’t have failure muscles, it’s very difficult to succeed.
I’ ve seen hardships and gone through it so I understand what success means.”

One common skill great entrepreneurs possess is, they try to develop a product or service that could be transformative in people’s lives.
Sometimes, they don’t care about what people think, they just build the right things.
Eventually, people will come and join their product or service.
Nobody told Steve Jobs to make the Apple iPhone, nobody told Henry Ford to make affordable cars.
It’s all their obsession for the product they love to work with.
The only thing they do is make these products or services so simple, useful, and distribution friendly so that people make a great connection with the product or service.

At the end of the day, all great entrepreneurs have the same conclusion, success is the combination of compassion, passion, and consistency.
They love building what they love to do.

Michael Kim, founder of MBK Partners, in answering a question regarding business opportunity says, “There are 450 million driver’s licenses in China but only 270 million license plates. Issuance of license plates is slowing down even further as the government tries to control emissions.
There are 180 million drivers who are looking for cars.”

Michael further says, “there are differences to do business in America and Asia.
If you lay off your employees, you fail to manage both companies as well as people. You didn’t do your job nicely. You have to learn how to do better procurement and consolidation for value creation. There are ways you can do it without laying people off.”

He adds, “work-life balance is not appropriate, create work-life harmony. Harmonize work with our personal life so that there is mutual benefit.”

Conclusion

Many great entrepreneurs and investors agree with the notion that we have to view our work much like we view our lives.
We have to stick with our values in order to be happy and productive for a long time.
It’s very difficult to be happy if we are out of our values.

David Golub, CEO of Golub Capital says, “One of the games of life is to learn from other people’s mistakes as well as our own mistakes.
Mentors can be so valuable because they share with you wisdom that comes from decisions they wish they’d made differently.”

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

“Give the world the best you have and you may get hurt. Give the world your best anyway.” -Mother Teresa

Last few weeks, my life was in a kind of paradigm shift, and a deep thought process of introspection.
I was taking longer breaths because I needed some extra oxygen to get out of my linear thinking.
Just to understand the correlation between my body and mind, I registered and attended a spiritual session where a spiritual leader was giving some hidden truths of life.

Gathering was in a big hall.
Spiritual guru was centered on the topic of pain and suffering and he was addressing how love and respect are still in the center of pain and suffering.
Around one hundred people were attending, and suddenly, one attendee said, “I don’t visit my father often, my situation is different now. My father and I just don’t have the same feelings for each other that we used to have in the past. I guess I just don’t love him anymore and he doesn’t love me either.”

“Please, love and respect your father, whatever the conflict is, he gave you this life,” the guru replied.
“I told you, the respect and feeling just aren’t there anymore,” the attendee replied.
“Whatever, you respect and love your father,” guru said.
“The feeling of respect and love isn’t there,” the attendee repeated.
“Then love and respect your father. If the feeling of respect and love isn’t there, that’s a very good reason to love and respect your father.”
“But how do you respect and love when you don’t respect and love?” the attendee replied.
“Because, respect and love both are verbs. Respect and love both are feelings and they both are products of respect and love. Both are verbs. So always respect and love your father.
Show your sacrifice and listen to your father.
Always empathize, appreciate, and affirm him because he brought you into this world.
So, please, if you can, respect and love your father unconditionally, even if he did something wrong to you.”
“Are you willing to do that?” the guru asked.

The whole hall was in a pin drop silence during this exchange of words.
During that moment, I came across my father’s face multiple times, and it happened automatically, and his face was constantly coming in front of me, even though he was on the other side of the planet physically.
Pictures and snapshots of my last face to face conversation with my father constantly hanging over my head.

Introspection: my father and humility

“You know,” my father said, “our whole lives, your mom and I never made our kid’s life easier” my father stared out the window behind me.
I saw dark shadows under his old tired eyes.
My father was almost 90 years old and had worked actively for close to 60 years.
My father’s mouth was turned up in the tiniest smile when I was listening to this, but I wondered if it was a smile at all.

My dad and mom raised our family, including me and my two younger brothers, and two elder sisters.
They started from nothing and built a great life through hard work and they taught us many core values of life, especially when you are in life’s punishment.
I could say a lot of things about me, my want, my desire, but that wasn’t how I was taught in my family.
One thing they taught me which I will never forget is to bring good health, satisfaction, and trust into life.
They consistently taught me not to let these three things down in life even if we are in distress, pain and suffering.
In my house, humility was valued more than anything else in life, but that’s not how it works in many places where we work nowadays in this modern world.

I was in introspection but who can understand this better than my father and mother.
I constantly relied on my father’s advice not to let my trust go down during turmoil.

After the meeting with the spiritual guru, I called my father in the evening at home and talked to him.
I always get relief and start to think differently when I communicate with my father, I reach a new level of understanding that almost runs by nuance.
Because each conversation contains the cumulative effect of the previous conversations, that is hardly anything to catch upon.
Instead, I can share deep insights and feelings rather than just my current understanding about life.

I don’t see life as a fixed piece of pizza where there is only so much time.
Time with my father and mother doesn’t mean time away from my wife or kids.
I started to see the effect on my kids.
I see time with my father and mother would actually increase the depth of our kid’s relationship with me and my wife as parents.
Kids experience by seeing how much we love our parents and it helps to continue the cycle moving forward.

I have read about a parable from Roberto Assagioli, a pioneer of psychosynthesis movement, about three stonecutters who were building a cathedral in the fourteenth century.
The first one says, bitterly, “can’t you see what I’m doing? I’m cutting stones into blocks and I will be doing this until the day I die.”
The second one says, warmly, “I’m earning a living so I can support my lovely family. I can provide clothing and food in our home filled with love.”
The third one says, joyfully, “I’ve the privilege to help build a great cathedral so magnificent it will inspire people and lift their spirits for a thousand years.”
Same work, but each person brings very different meaning to it.

“We often have more choices than we realize.
We must never cease from exploring inside us, even if we are in pain and suffering at the moment,”
At the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we began and know the place for the first time,” the spiritual guru said.
That’s what I’m getting from my father as we are celebrating his 91st birthday soon.

A lot of times, especially in the past, I didn’t have time to go and see my parents every year. I didn’t have time to call my mom everyday or every other day.
And the truth is, we can’t introspect in front of other people even if we are happy and satisfied, but introspection along with our parents is normal.
To introspect along with our parents is to release the stress out through tears so we become stronger.

Peace, satisfaction, and undoing

As we all know we have only 24 hours in a day, so the question is how to manage to be with our parents in times of distress.
The secret I learn is this.
Many times, in life, if we think deeper, peace and satisfaction comes not from doing, but from undoing.
Peace comes not from getting, but from letting go.
I let go of my past.
Peace is there with me already until I disturb it.
Behind the dramas of our everyday lives is always the light of the projector.
I am just that.
If I start to undo, I get a lot of time.

I learned the task of undoing.
Many people are not happy on this planet and maybe you are one of them right now.
So what they do, they fall into the trap of codependency that spawns some very metastasizing emotional cancers.

Stephen R. Covey, a renowned leadership authority and author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” says  “criticizing, complaining, comparing, competing, and contending are emotional cancers.”

To be honest, I also do one of them many times.
How much time is needed to do these?
I know I need a lot.
If I start to undo these emotional cancers, how much time I get, I’m just guessing, maybe a lot.

The essence of being human is being able to direct our own life.
We are human so we can do more than an animal or recent AI robot, because they can only react.
We can make choices based on our values, these values can be transferred from us to our kids, same like from our parents to us.
This concept of undo also applies in today’s fast moving innovative areas of research, development, and technology.
We all know how to get new innovative thoughts into our mind, but we’re struggling right now to get the old ones out.
This is one reason our generation is always suffering.
The old one never wants to leave, it is with us all the time consuming our energy and time.

From my father’s lesson, I learned that we are not made or born as great thinkers or innovators, we’re self-made thinkers or innovators, this should be our trust with us.
We are a function of our choices.
I have read in books that Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are also products of their choices by undoing many things in their everyday lives.
It gives at least motivation to us when we go for introspection.

Introspection habit and home

Good choices are built by unwavering habits.
And, these habits lie at the intersection of knowledge, attitude, and skill.
Most of the time, people cry at home in private when they are suffering.
We all do the same.
But the reality is we have to make our home a productive place to synthesize our knowledge, attitude, and skill.
Because, if you look around, the most important work people do in the world will be within the walls of their own home.

As you can imagine we work 8 hours outside home but we are 16 hours at home.
There are many successes but no other success can compensate for failure in the home.
For example, we can visualize anything that we want in life at home, we can pen down that visual form in printed form.
Visualization is very powerful but there is more powerful than this, that is writing down on paper.
That’s what I’m also doing at the moment.
I’m releasing my introspection through a pen into the paper, I feel relaxed.

I’m writing so I’m connecting my conscious mind with the subconscious mind.
I’m writing which is a psycho-neuromuscular activity and literally it is imprinting my brain.
Based on this sketch, we can get our hands dirty, we can cry, we can make mistakes, we can take risks, and perform whatever we want.
We can communicate to our mind about our worth and potential so clearly that we can come to see it in ourselves.
Our minds always try to do the right things for us but our bodies always try to do things right. We must try to seek the best path moving forward.

Conclusion

At the end of the spiritual session, the Guru said, “Life is about coping with change, it is also about coping with complexity, so you are the architect and manager of your life.”
“You cannot innovate inventories, cashflow, and costs of your life, you only have to manage all of them, they don’t have the power and freedom to choose because they are as they are.
Only you have the power to choose, choose what you like, and live with intention” the spiritual guru added.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

My friend was a very unsatisfied and unhappy person back then, it was almost more than a decade ago.
I knew that he had a family tragedy, his mother died at age sixty seven due to heart disease.
He used to think personally that he is the most difficult and arrogant human being on the earth but for his family and friends, he was amiable and very helpful.
“Worst of all, for me, I was a procrastinating lazy dude in my personal affairs,” he told me.

“I had no knowledge of differentiation between important and urgent activities in my life.
I would give hours to others without thinking about my health and well being, I never had any idea of the intangible value of life, for example, long term personal health and prosperity,” he further added.

One day, at night, all of a sudden, something unexpected happened to him.
At midnight, he’d walk from one corner of his bedroom to another corner to watch his surroundings.
He said “don’t ask why? I don’t know.
Sometimes, this happens to everybody’s life.”
He saw his wife in deep sleep, his only daughter back then surrounded by her stuffed animals with her favorite Dora the explorer.
Peeking through the window, he saw a quiet dark night outside, all were good outside, all were in deep sleep inside, he felt that his wife and his daughter were happy and, most importantly, very safe.
His mind whispered, “you have everything you could possibly have at the moment, yet you are completely failing to appreciate it.”

The following morning turned out to be different from his usual mornings.
He committed himself that he would change, he didn’t know how but he would change everything, his health, his mindset, his thinking, and most importantly, his habits, the root cause.
The first thing he would change is his health status which was at the moment very poor.
Every morning he would start his day with some minor physical exercise so that he would renew his body early in the morning for the day, a new and fresh day every single day.

Dr. Ernest Becker, PhD, author of  “The Denial of Death” says that death is life’s ultimate motivator, that what gives us a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives is an attempt to create something that will outlive us when we die.

Triggers for mind and habit change

“From that day forward, I started to work and think of my life as a matrix,” he said.
He didn’t pay much attention to what others were saying, though he gradually became a good listener but always made decisions by himself.
He developed some fundamental and tacit knowledge about his life, his health, and his family.
“I learned to know the value of my people around me, and I began to take these different components of life and synthesize them into a coherent whole. I got a clear picture of me and the rest of my life,” he said.

It was a cold morning, he saw some ants on the floor, and realized how they were sharing information with each other.
He would relate that to how he should share information around his close friends and family members.
He visualized how bees colonize and compare what would happen if all families colonize in the same way as bees.
He compared his mind with a pure glittering diamond to view the world.

“I have read that a diamond that has the most glitter has fifty six different angles, so I have to look at something from many different perspectives.
I needed some mental training in my mind but personal habit comes first to check who we are and where we stand,” he added.

First, he changed one very bad habit of spending hours on the phone before and after bed scrolling about people who have zero to negligible influence in his life.

James Clear, an author of “Atomic Habits” says “it’s not sufficient to simply change our behavior, but we also have to change how we see ourselves and how we relate to others.”

He almost stopped using his phone in the bedroom. His whole health was affected by poor sleep in different ways.
“I didn’t need LED or any light in the bedroom because it delayed the release of melatonin, a sleep signaling hormone.
I needed darkness to release melatonin for my good night sleep, a key component of a healthy lifestyle,” he commented.

Remember, melatonin is a hormone created by the pineal gland in the brain that’s released directly into the bloodstream.
Darkness initiates the pineal gland to start producing melatonin but light causes it to stop.
“By adopting good night sleep, we can create more focus in our own life rather than focusing on someone else’s pictures on facebook and instagram because focus creates change.
If we gradually measure the different components of our life we always see noticeable improvements,” my friend added.

Second, he completely changed his sitting habit.
His BMI, body mass index, was still in the normal range but moving beyond the upper range of 25.
He remembered his mother and her heart disease which was somehow also associated with obesity.
So, he decided to be more of a moving figure, a person of movement.
He would even start reading a book or watching a movie and walk at the same time in the living room.
Once he starts talking on the phone, he would start walking simultaneously.
“I would read fifteen pages without stopping walking, I would feel so much clarity in my mind that led to my clear thinking pattern and subsequently the productivity skyrocketed.
I would remind you of the saying, sitting is the new smoking,” he added.

Science behind exercise

Pretty quickly, he learned the chemistry behind physical exercise and why he was having more clarity in his mind.
Do you know physical exercise motivates our body and mind in positive thinking?
For those of you who still are not clear about this powerful science or you know but don’t practice, I’m telling you the secret sauce, exercise does amazing things for our body chemically.

When we start to exercise, our body makes an important chemical called adenosine monophosphate (AMP).
It informs our entire body that we are exercising, this internal communication is key and very powerful.
This chemical causes muscle cells, brain cells, and liver cells to break down stored glycogen and fat to use as energy.

A simple exercise not only improves the health of many vital organs like the heart, it increases the blood flow to our brain, improving our cognitive ability.
Once we develop the habit of exercise, we gradually change the quality of our life mentally, emotionally, physically, and even sexually.
We change everything from our sense of awareness to attractiveness and our sense of power to health and vitality.

My friend was very weak from many angles from a health perspective.
His doctor said his bone density degraded pretty badly even though he was not even 30.
For most of us, bone density peaks by age 30.
Once we hit 40, we begin to lose up to 5% of our bone density each decade.

His cardiovascular system was very weak, he could feel that while running for a few minutes.
He started to learn about life, vitality, health, and endurance.
“If I’m not taking care of my body, exercising and eating healthy foods, I can suffer gradual heart failure or a sudden heart attack,” he said.

In his reading, he found an eye-popping scary fact about cardiovascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer, one American dies every 36 seconds from it.
Globally, one out of five people die from heart disease, more than any other disease on the planet, 18 million deaths per year and 50 thousand deaths everyday.
Research shows the amazing thing about heart is that simply walking 20 to 30 minutes everyday can cut the risk of dying from a heart attack in half.

Heart disease and stem cells

Can you guess why so many people die from heart disease?
Because, the heart is the least regenerative organ in our body, meaning there are no stem cells in the heart.
What does it mean?
Stem cells are used for regrowth in all kinds of tissue repair, they have regenerative in the body.

In general, the native stem cells are also known as mesenchymal precursor cells, the body’s most versatile and potent building blocks.
They differentiate into bone, cartilage, muscle or fat whatever we need.
After an injury, they are crucial for two reasons: they keep inflammation normal and they repair damaged tissue.

The problem is that stem cells grow scarcer with age especially with people of chronic disease.
The other bigger problem of the heart is that the heart can’t heal itself on its own after an injury like a heart attack.
Let me tell you why.
Our heart contains 6 or 7 billion heart muscle cells.
If we have a serious heart attack and are lucky enough to survive, we can lose more than one billion of those cells.
The heart can not replace them, so it never replaces their ability to function either.
Ultimately, the problem becomes severe, that is why it’s the world’s leading cause of death.

Dr. Stephen Hussey, DC, an author of “Understanding the Heart” says, “We cannot hope to successfully understand and address modern chronic diseases without evaluating them in the context of a toxic modern world.”

Conclusion

The good news is that prevention is the single best defense against heart disease and many other life threatening diseases.

Therefore, this is worth repeating one more time: just walking 20 to 30 minutes everyday can cut the risk of dying from a heart attack in half.
Remember, this is research proven published data.

One more thing regarding cardiovascular disease.
One natural therapy called sauna or hot shower, is very effective for cardiovascular disease.
This actually started for my dear friend personally because in one of his health issues, modern medicines didn’t work.
The reality is our body is so complex that sometimes doctors couldn’t figure out the cause of the problem despite visiting many specialists.
One of the habits that he developed is getting in the sauna or hot shower because he noticed the improvement.
At that time he was using primarily a hot shower but a little longer shower probably 15 to 20 minutes.

I will take you a little deeper in the science of sauna and what actually happens chemically.
Sauna generates heat stress responses within the body, including the activation of heat shock proteins.
This protein family is produced by our cells in response to stressful conditions, such as excessive heat and are important to many cellular processes.
It regulates the cell cycle, cellular signaling, and functioning of the immune system.
By adopting a sauna at least 4 to 7 days per week at at least 73 degree celsius, our risk for cardiovascular diseases or any premature deaths decreases significantly.
We also reduce the risk of cognitive disorders like dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, skin disease, depression, and stroke.

“We must be the CEO of our own health and body, we have to educate ourselves and make solid independent decisions for our well being and longevity.
Remember, in reality, who we are is what we do in our free time and what we eat normally,” my dear friend added.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

“While the science is complex, our application of it is both straightforward and practical: eat well, stress less, move more, and love more.” -Dr. Dean Ornish

Few months ago, in a casual conversation among friends, one of my friends asked, “why do I get sick even though I have been adopting a healthy lifestyle for so many years?”
There were some biochemical and biophysical scientists at the moment.
For me, this was a simple question but very difficult to answer.
I said, “there are lots of pieces we have to put together regarding our body, its construction, its functional mechanism, and obviously our ancestral evolution.”

This question really intrigued me because I’ve also experienced the same thing in my own personal life.
I plan to write about this in my future posts.
Not only myself, I’ve also experienced the same thing in my family as well as in my extended family, so the question was worth digging a little deeper.

Some of my family members never get sick even though their lifestyle is not healthy, especially in practice of diet and exercise, but some other members whom I’ve seen for many years always get sick despite their adoption of a healthy lifestyle for a very long time.

I read pretty regularly in areas like health, technology, biology, biochemistry, medicine because this is my area of interest, so I did a little more digging in reading and I found some devoted scientist’s work in the area.
The group of Dr. Valter Longo from University of Southern California, Dr. Dean Ornish from University of California, San Francisco, the work from Nobel laureate Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn from University of California San Francisco, and Dr. David Sinclair from Harvard University are some of them.
These are the people I would recommend to go after to find the answer to my friend’s question.

Health, food and genes

Of course, one fundamental aspect of our health is our everyday fuel.
The fuel that we take everyday as food to run our human engine is our key component for health and well being.
The common food for most of us has loads of carbohydrates and fats.
The other part we have to keep in mind is how our body utilizes carbohydrates and fats genetically, which is very difficult to know.

Before the mass migration in human history which is not that old, people used to have marriage within the same cultural population, the genetic pool was the same.
But now there is tremendous mass migration internationally and cross marriages are common across cultures.
This is the key reason in gene variations.
This also answers my friend’s question partially, but at the moment we are not able to understand the genetic implication regarding individual human biochemistry yet scientifically.
We are making progress but it will surely take some time to make genetic technologies available in our local hospitals and clinics.

It appears that humans from different ancestral backgrounds utilize foods especially carbohydrates and fats differently, the main energy source in our body.
This is one of the reasons that people who are on a ketogenic diet gain weight immediately when they start a normal diet.

The role of genes in our body is key to knowing what makes our body happy and healthy.
We are opening the door of genetic diet but still we have to go a long way.
As an example, genetically preferred food is the key whether our body prefers carbohydrates, fats, or a combination of both.

Let’s put it this way to make it a little bit more clear.
Some people burn carbohydrates very quickly so they eat without gaining a lot of weight.
If they don’t eat they can go into hypoglycemic state, that lowers blood sugar and that is very dangerous.
Biochemically, carbohydrates burn very quickly in our body.
Whereas some people burn fat as a primary source of energy which burns slowly so they go many hours without seeing much drop in energy.
This happens due to different genetics set up in the body.

On the negative side, in general, when we eat too many refined carbohydrates like pizza, pasta, sodas, white bread, pastries, fruit juice with high fructose corn syrup, we are adding too much sugar and it goes straight into our bloodstream and blood sugar spikes.
Our pancreas makes insulin to bring our blood sugar down, which is good but insulin also accelerates the conversion of those extra calories into fat.
It causes chronic inflammation and many of these mechanisms lead to chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.

Data driven individualized health

To answer my friend, many biotechnology companies are leading a data-driven future to make individualized interventions for our health.
In the future, we can optimize our eating, fasting, exercise, rest, and sleep based on our genetic and microbiome map.
That would only answer my friend’s question completely.

Some biotechnology companies are already doing tremendous work in this area.
Biotechnology is about using biology as technology on many fronts.
The fundamental components of life like genes, proteins, and cells are behaving like tools to shape and improve our life.

In the book, “Life Force” authors Tony Robbins, Peter H. Diamandis, MD, and Robert Hariri, MD, PhD, bring many world’s top medical minds and the latest research, inspiring stories, and amazing advancements in precision medicine that we can apply today to help extend the length and quality of our life.

Our body is a collection of billion cells and the function of these cells determines our actual health.
Each cell contains 3.2 billion letters from our mother and 3.2 billion letters from our father, these came with us as gifts at birth.
This is our DNA, our genome, the software that codes for everything: our hair color, our face appearance, eye color, our lip size, our height, our voice, our personality, exposure to many diseases, our lifespan, and many others.

Not only that, there is one more factor that plays a key role is called epigenetics.
The epigenetic controls how our genome functions and is more powerful than the genetic code itself.
Epigenetic is affected by various factors, some are diet, obesity, physical activity, tobacco, alcohol, environmental pollutants, stress, and working at night as well as many others.

Habits, lifestyle, and quality of life

Our basic day to day lifestyle has a profound impact on our quality of life, our healthspan, and our lifespan.
These lifestyle choices are entirely in our hands.
For example, moderate exercise can halve our risk of dying from heart disease.
Recent research has suggested that careful dietary decisions can reduce our risk of death from any cause by 36% while poor diets can increase our risk of death by 67%.

The importance of moderate exercise is even higher when we enter old age.
When we get older, our common occurrence is that our hormone levels get changed.
We develop fatigue, insomnia, depression, no interest in sex, loss of our youthful appearance, loss of our muscle mass, accumulated body fat, and many others.

Healthy lifestyle also includes good night sleep.
It’s not only a sufficient number of hours of sleep but a sufficient number of hours of sleep at the right time especially at night.
It’s possible to get a sufficient number of hours of sleep each day, but there is a caveat – our body is designed to follow the sun from evolution.
Our hormones, cardiovascular system, microbiome, and immunity all are coordinated to follow a circadian rhythm.
Staying up all night forces these systems to be out of sync with their coordination and our health defense becomes weaker and we become vulnerable for chronic diseases.

Dr. Matthew Walker, PhD, author and professor of University of California Berkeley says routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes our immune system and we become vulnerable to chronic diseases. The shorter we sleep, the shorter our lifespan.
From his book “Why We Sleep”, Dr. Walker says, “sleep is probably the foundation on which the other two pillars of diet and exercise sit.”

One more example is Parkinson’s disease.
It is caused by the loss of neurons that manufacture dopamine, a natural chemical messenger that controls our muscle movement.
Dopamine also helps to regulate our sleep patterns, our recall, our appetite, and our mood and self control.
If we don’t make enough of it, we will have a serious problem.

One more cause of chronic disease is severe stress.
Severe stress increases cortisol secretion from our adrenal glands, places undue demands on our heart, alters our microbiome for the worse, disrupts angiogenesis, impairs the function of our stem cells, and lowers our immunity.

One of the secrets for a happy and healthy life I found in the work of scientists is eating plant based food, plenty of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and brussels sprouts during lunch and dinner.
There are many factors but one key bioactive in cruciferous vegetables is they contain sulforaphane, a compound that reduces inflammation in our body and can even slow the growth of tumors.
Inflammation is the main cause of many chronic diseases including cardiovascular diseases.
As Michael Pollan, author of “How to Change Your Mind” and professor of Harvard University says, “if it’s a plant, eat it, if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

Another secret for a healthy and happy life from Dr. Valter Longo, PhD, from University of Southern California is intermittent fasting.
The beauty of intermittent fasting is it involves harnessing the healing and protective powers of letting the body rest from constant consumption, breakdown, and digestion of food.
This is the strategy for preventing disease and staying young for a longer time.

Dr. Longo’s research suggests that a combination of prolonged fasting and chemotherapy can be highly effective in fighting various cancers.
Cancer cells rely on glucose as a source of energy so cancer cells become weaker by starvation.

Conclusion

During fasting, our energy reserves are depleted and our body undergoes a metabolic shift from a sugar burning mode to a ketogenic mode in which we use fatty acids and ketones for fuel.
Due to fasting our cells shrink and enter into a protected state.

When we start to eat normally, cells rebuild.
This cycle of starvation and refeeding triggers regenerative and self-healing processes.
This process reduces our biological age, which means the age of our cells and organs decreases.

For a happy and healthy life, I would like to repeat Dr. Matthew Walker, PhD, “sleep is probably the foundation on which the other two pillars of diet and exercise sit.”

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

“A healthy person has a thousand wishes, but a sick person has only one.”
– Indian Proverb

Few days ago, on Saturday morning, I was having breakfast with my two daughters.
I asked a question to my daughters, “Five frogs are sitting on a log, three decided to jump off. How many are left?”
My both daughters replied, “Two.”
“No, the correct answer is five,” I replied.
My both daughters asked at the same time, how?
“Because the three frogs are still thinking, they haven’t jumped off yet,” I further explained.
My both daughters laughed and ran away.
“Silly dad, I heard the voice behind me.”

So the point I was making was why our mind is so weak to make decisions.
What blocks us when time comes to make a decision?
I remember, at one point in my life, my doctor recommended me to perform certain lab tests related to cancer to check my body, but I couldn’t make a decision, though it was optional.
The reason was I was scared of bad results.
I wasn’t making decisions of those actions whose results were far from reality.

Tracy A. Dennis-Tiwary, PhD, professor of psychology and neuroscience and author of “Future Tense” says “we can acknowledge the discomfort of anxiety and see it as a tool, rather than something to be feared and reviled.”

Many years ago, I restricted all kinds of sugar products in my diet because I was almost prediabetic and my family history wasn’t great.
I don’t know how I came back to eating normal sugar products again after beating my prediabetic status.
Now, I’m still trying to avoid all added sugar products, though I’m not diabetic because I knew that they are not good for my lifelong health, but up to now I am unable to make a decision.
I’m still eating sugar products as a normal kid.

Negligence on body and health

At one point, I was so bad and negligent to know about my body, I simply used to ignore it thinking that there are more important things to do rather than go to my primary care physician’s regular check up.
I never even tried to know what those numbers are on the lab report and what they are referring to me.
To be honest, I never reviewed my lab results seriously in any physicals until my doctor indicated some alarms in my report.
The problem is I used to memorize a lot of biochemical data when I was in school and college but I never tried to understand my own body biochemical data.
I never tried to know what my BMI, body mass index, cholesterol, sugar and blood pressure were and what they do in my body.
Body gives a lot of information but we never try to learn what the body is asking for.

Dr. Dain Heer, DC, an author of “Body Whispering” says “the secrets to be healthy and happy lie within our own bodies, we have to start a conversation with our body and have a best friendship.”

At present, medical and biotech innovations are thriving globally.
There are many reasons for this, but for me, one reason is that the study of biology and chemistry is no more traditional science as we used to have in the past, they are becoming more of an information technology of our complex body.

We all human beings are different, we have different genes, we have different biology so the biochemistry is also becoming not one size fit all.
We have heard the stories that the same medicine works for one but not for others though both are diagnosed with the same disease.

We all have different lifestyle choices, we have different types of nutrition, we have different types of exercise, we have different types of sleep patterns, and we all have different mindsets to operate.
These are key factors to affect our health and well being.
These activities affect our complex and sophisticated body in one way or another.

Complex picture of body and our awareness

Just think of our body, it is a complex automated machine.
It has 30 trillion cells and produces 330 billion new cells each day. Not only that, there are more bacterial cells in our gut, microbiome, than human cells.
Isn’t this surprising to you?
Just one more snapshot of our body’s biochemistry, red blood cells can race through our entire body in less than 20 seconds, this is nothing more than internal communication in the automated machine.

If we don’t eat anything our body machine survives three weeks maximum, if we don’t drink it survives three days maximum, if we don’t inhale oxygen, it survives three minutes maximum then after that we see damaged brain, the key component of the machine. Our automated machine starts shutting down, the communication system gets damaged and the whole machinery crumbles down.

On the negative side, just to get the glimpse of our internal biochemistry of our body, if we inhale cyanide, we die in thirty seconds; it targets our mitochondria and blocks using oxygen and producing ATP.
All these mechanisms are regulated and affected every second by what we do every day, every hour, and every minute based on our lifestyle.
This is one of the reasons why our health is becoming more personalized day by day.

Once we are more aware and knowledgeable about our internal communication technology within our body, scientists can develop sensors which can transform medical diagnostics.
Robotics and 3D printing are reinventing the traditional medical procedures.
Artificial intelligence (AI), genomics, and gene editing tools are transforming the medicines.
As we all know, the planet’s own health is declining day by day due to our own activities.
We all are exposed to more chemical toxins, pollutants, radiation, and infectious diseases more than ever, no matter where we live in the world.
The only thing we can do is be more vigilant and informative about our body, body’s reaction, and our own actions.

Life is unpredictable, and in many times this unpredictability appears at the expense of our negligence, ignorance, and unintentional actions.
We think that we know what is good and what is bad for our body.
But in reality, we have no clue of many things in the body to happen.

One of my friends’ experiences, he thought he was doing the right thing for his body by eating lots of fish, a healthy form of protein and omega 3 fatty acids.
He had no idea that the fish that he ate all the time like tuna and swordfish were full of mercury.
Mercury silently deposited on him to toxic levels in his body and caused severe brain fog.
He was losing his memory and felt unbelievably exhausted all the time.
Many doctors couldn’t pinpoint the cause but finally one doctor revealed that he had an outrageously high level of mercury poisoning.
How it happened because he was eating a lot of fish thinking that they are good for health.
This is just one example of how we are hit by life.
Everything comes down to the right information and being very smart and alert on what we do for our body.

Ask why, why not, and what if for our body

Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is connecting things.”
He spent a very long time exploring new and unrelated things in his life.
He spent time on the art of calligraphy, meditation in an Indian ashram, and the fine details of Mercedes-Benz which are very unrelated to each other.
Finally he connected all different dots and formed the information channel for iPhone, and Mac.
He always asked questions why, why not, and what if, to get more and more information.
At least for me, this principle also applies to our body biochemistry, which, of course, is vast and complicated but still why, why not, and what if applies to our body.

Few weeks ago I met a scholar at a networking event and he was heavily influenced by Dr. David Sinclair, genetics professor at Harvard and author of “Lifespan” for his research on aging and epigenetics.
When he talked about Sinclair, I became more interested in listening to him because I was a little bit familiar with Dr. Sinclair’s work.

The scholar suggested five things to do for a long healthy life based on his twenty plus years experience in the area.
He said one thing, I will never forget, based on the information we’ve gathered from our body, up to now.
Remember: “based on the information we’ve gathered from our body.”
The first thing he told me is to be very smart about what we eat everyday.
Can we eat the foods that help to protect our health defense systems like angiogenesis, regeneration, microbiome, DNA, and immunity. He categorically emphasized on limiting red meat and avoiding almost all sugar for a long healthy life.
Second thing he suggested is caloric restriction lifestyle and recommended, if possible, choose one meal per day. I was a little skeptical on this and asked a question but he told me it depends on how you regulate your body.
Third thing he told is limit alcohol consumption and drink only red wine moderately.
The fourth, he said, is a key for our internal body biochemistry, eight hours of good night sleep.
He said, “during sleep, thousands of neurons in the brain switch functions. The complete biological role of sleep still isn’t fully known but good night sleep reinforces the cardiovascular and immune systems and helps regulate body metabolism.
In fact, our brain and body remain very active during sleep and do housekeeping that removes toxins in our brain that build up while we are awake.”
The final, he emphasized, was exercise at least three days in a week.

Conclusion

Please, accept it, we all have our personal health risks.
Numerous factors can affect our body and influence our risk of developing a serious disease over our lifetime.

From childhood to adolescence to adulthood, wherever we are, what we do for work, what we eat, and how we spend our free time can increase or decrease our health risks.
Our genes determine the stage for the diseases we might eventually develop, but we can change our fate by understanding and lowering some risks.
This understanding is the information provided by our body everyday.
Now the question is how easy to make a decision on these five activities mentioned above: eating good food, calorie restriction, limiting alcohol to red wine only, good night sleep, and exercise.
I’m not going to remind the frog’s story, everyone.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. George Bernard Shaw

“I broke my vertebrae and suffered from a traumatic brain injury in a car accident” my friend told me.
He had acute back pain and depression after the accident.
He started drinking heavily.
“Due to depression, I began to have suicidal thoughts” he added
One night he went to his bed and stared in his medicine cabinet.
He said to himself, “if I take all of these prescription pills, what do I have to lose?”

Right then his cell phone rings.
He closed his eyes and said to himself, “don’t answer it, it’s my time.”
But he didn’t know why, he looked over and saw it was his mother.
He picked up and his mother said, “son, I know you are suffering, I am quitting my teaching job and coming to your place. You need me at this point, I will be there if you need anything.”

“I don’t know why my brain turned upside down that day, I thought, my mother is quitting her job for me and I’m thinking of taking my life” he said.
“That day I began rethinking and it became a habit in my life, from that day forward, I never looked back in my life again,” he continued.
“I’m a design engineer now and work for one of the fortune 500 companies” he said.

Progress, habit of rethinking and scientist

Design engineering is his bread and butter at the moment.
He said, “The habit of rethinking became fundamental to my profession if I have to survive but for me it gave more energy in my personal life.”
At best what he assured me is he is constantly aware of his limits of thinking but still expects something new everyday and he is convinced that it is possible by the practice of rethinking.
He always doubts what he knows and he is always curious about what he doesn’t know.
I became very impressed by what he was telling me.

I was more interested in how he does it.
I realized that I should update myself as much as I can based on what he was saying.
We definitely need new data from our own as well as others’ experiments and experiences to make a habit of rethinking.
Every single individual should update from his or her inner and outer experiences through thinking and rethinking process.

Recently, I also realized that being a scientist or engineer itself isn’t only a profession, it becomes more and more of a pattern of thinking.
It improves other parts of life significantly.

Though my friend works in design science, I believe working on any science is a lifestyle of thinking and rethinking which is completely different from preaching and prosecuting.
Why do scientists and engineers think and rethink is because they are trying to find the truth out of something.
To find the truth, they have to run an experiment to test their hypothesis and make the result known called knowledge.
These experiments and results are so crucial that they not only guide their daily decisions regularly but also the norm of our society.
Look around, the most luxurious and essential things we use everyday are products of scientists.

Naval Ravikant, an entrepreneur and investor, says, “technology leads society, not the other way around. New scientific breakthroughs lead to new societies.”Eric Jorgenson, the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, has given an incredible source of Naval’s wisdom.

Scientists are always trying new things.
Their experiments often fail, but they become happy in the newness and don’t mind the failures. They never think of overinvesting in their experiments and don’t take it personally if a new experiment fails.

My designer friend told, “science is not only an academic concept and doesn’t come only from literature.
My mother’s telephone call is one example of how our mind changes subconsciously.
Many things in life come from experience.
Experience teaches us that as a practitioner we shouldn’t fall in the trap of confirmation bias and desirability bias. This is the problem of academic people.”

In his words, confirmation bias is to see what we expect to see and desirability bias is to see what we want to see.
These biases stop our curiosity.
They might make us good at thinking but worse at rethinking.
We become lazy on rethinking because we just accept linear thinking.

I learned from my friend that rethinking is a skillset, but if we go deep down it’s also a mindset.
We have many mental tools that we need in life.
We only have to get them out and remove the rust and dust.
Rethinking habits helps us to find the correct mental tool.

Good judgement in life

He further added that the curse of knowledge is nothing but knowledge itself because it closes our mind to what we don’t know.
Good judgment depends on having the skill and the will to open our minds.
Our mind only opens when we rethink and think continuously in a cycle.
Every time when we take a step forward with an open mind, we have to revise and update our understanding of the work and the world.

“My mother opened my mind and helped me to live and understand the world,” he said.

Any work is for the world so all works in life are connected irrespective of the nature, professional or personal.
This revision usually involves a lot of thinking and rethinking regarding our facts, opinions, and beliefs. The most important thing is we have to readjust our expectations that shape our thinking.

John Brockman, the author and editor of “Thinking” explains original ideas by today’s greatest psychologists and neuroscientists who are radically expanding our understanding of human thought and thinking process.

At present we have to view our experiences as periods of our lives. For example, youth, apprenticeship, marriage, parenthood, sickness, and death are connected to our work. Everyone has to capture this progression when we think of the next step.
The career that we always worry about nowadays is the capacity to navigate this course of progression through experiences rather than facts.
This is how my friend views his life as a design engineer.

He said, “In driving, we learn to identify our visual blind spots and remove them with the help of mirrors and sensors. But in life, our mind doesn’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly”.

We see the smartest minds today who study computer, biology, chemistry, and math and understand that the world no longer only sees predictable, linear thinking.
Instead, our life is filled with chaos, challenges, and nonlinear complexities.
We experience periods of order and disorder, linearity and nonlinearity. If we go deeper in thinking and rethinking, in place of linearity, we see loops, spirals, and twists.
Linear thinking sees the world in order but non linear thinking removes those boundaries.
That’s what my designer friend experienced.
If we understand these life principles on a deeper level, each one can become a better scientist as well as a better human being.

“The obstacle of rethinking is arrogance, which I have experienced across many areas” he continued.
Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction in one’s mind, that stops rethinking.
Our humility and kindness is a permeable filter that absorbs life experiences and encourages us in rethinking to convert them into knowledge and wisdom.
Rethinking is the integrity of a scientist.

Relationship between rethinking and wisdom

We have to live and we cannot live without making mistakes.
When people make mistakes, we as scientists, have to take it as an opportunity to explore.
So we have to make mistakes but learn from them. Once we repeat these mistakes in life, we acquire wisdom. Eventually, we realize that the wisdom that we acquired is not real wisdom. This realization brings the invention of new wisdom.
We only live truly and happily once we continue the cycle of this old wisdom replaced by new wisdom for the rest of our life.
This is the ultimate consequence of thinking and rethinking.
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters our mind.
It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid accepting every feeling that enters our heart.

Scientists who are productive a lot listen a lot, and change their mind a lot.
If we don’t change our mind frequently, we’re going to be wrong a lot.
The power of listening is not just talking less.
It’s more than that.
It gives the luxury of skillsets in asking and responding.
The most important thing is to show interest in other people’s interests or work rather than trying to judge or prove our own position.

I would think this way.
Scientists and engineers are like who are in outer space and observing things very carefully.
When they get to see an overview of the earth from outer space, they realize we share a common identity with all human beings.
If you are in space then you see the Asia and Africa continents below, they behave like tiny cities from an airplane.
The amazing thing is that we can circle the entire planet in 90 minutes from space.
From space, stars look the same as from earth but earth gives us a different perspective about life, we start to think how fragile the earth is where all of us exists.

There is a difference between thinking effectively and thinking efficiently, that we realize more when we think from far.
As my friend said, thinking effectively means thinking in the right way but thinking efficiently means thinking only the right decisions as I did when I received my mother’s call in the time of turmoil.

Important but difficult to practice

Though the job of thinking is not difficult, but, most of the time we don’t put it into practice. This is the difficult part in life.
Difficulty is not always proportional to importance.
Just take some examples in this respect which are not difficult at all but very powerful for our lives.
In medicine, simply washing hands has proved to be second only to penicillin in saving lives.
How difficult is it to wash hands?

Immunocompromisation is a way to explain a weak immune system in our body.
When our immune system is weakened, our body can’t fight off viruses, bacteria, or fungi very well. This can lead to serious infections and thousands of people die every year.
To improve our immunity, just taking more fruits and vegetables do a vital job.

Fruits are best food for health, vitality, and preventing bacteria from gaining foothold for infection. Similarly, many vegetables contain bioactives which activate the immune system and microbiome in our body.
How difficult is it to eat more fruits and eat a little more vegetables? Its more about practice than any other things.

Conclusion

Scientific and engineering thinking and rethinking are similar to investment transactions.
A lot of professional investors always say that the key to market success is not your skill and knowledge as an investor compared with other individual investors, but the skill and knowledge with which each specific investment transaction is made.
Exactly the same way, the successful scientist and engineer is not equipped only with skill and knowledge compared with other scientists but also with scientific thinking and rethinking practice based on the same skill and knowledge.
This scientific transaction is nothing but the practice of thinking and rethinking.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

When we move in life, we have to make a lot of practical decisions to achieve what we want.
When we age we always wish we could be a little bit more creative to make those decisions, we could take a little bit more calculated risks.
Some decisions may not look creative on the surface but give persistent clues far on the horizon for long lasting impact for society.
Knowledge only isn’t sufficient for us, experience only isn’t sufficient either.
One of my mentors tole me that wisdom is required to lead success and a creative quality of life.
Wisdom is a counterpart of creativity.
Generally experience combined with knowledge leads to wisdom.

Creativity, longevity, and wisdom

Here is one example applied in scientific work.
I was reading about Dr. Tom Perls and his research.
I came to know that in general women have higher longevity than men due to various reasons.
Therefore, Dr. Tom Perls, MD, a researcher, gives blood every eight weeks to mimic the loss of iron due to menstruation in women, which he believes will increase his longevity.
He not only verbally says that he has been doing research in his lab on the same topic for many years.

Our general perception is a little different.
We think that iron is important to our body especially for blood.
One thing is sure that when great minds exhibit wisdom, wherever it might be: politics, science, administration, business; they generally flip the coin and try to see both sides very carefully.
That is where creativity comes into play as Dr. Perls work and research.

“Iron is a critical factor in our cells’ ability to produce nasty molecules called free radicals that play an important role in aging, so less iron is important in our body,” Dr. Tom Perls said.

One way to remove excess iron in our body is blood donation.
By blood donation we not only decrease iron in our body, but also extend our own life.
Let’s say we don’t extend our own life but we might save someone else’s life as we know there are many people out looking for blood.
Our Karma is what our work does for others in society.

After reading about Dr. Tom Perls, I realized how people become so creative and do remarkable things in life.
If successful such as Dr. Tom Perls, then, transformation in human generations occurs.
This creative idea does not only come from his simple logic, it also comes with his knowledge, background, and experience. He understands why women have a menstruation cycle every month but men don’t.
There is another major difference.
Women give birth to babies and lose a lot of blood during this process.
Except for these two natural phenomena, men and women are equal in the context of blood in their body.
My simple curiosity, how is it related to longevity?
Is it simply imagination or wisdom?
How do people think this far?
Because the human mind is creative by design, it’s up to us how we use it.

Thomas Perls, MD, the author of “Living To 100” teaches us that living long is a function of many factors including physical, social, mental, and spiritual health and some of the factors are totally out of our control such as the genes that we have in our body.

Einstein, Fleming, Picasso, and Newton

Amit Goswami, PhD, author of “Quantum Creativity”, talks about discontinuous creativity which jumps from one pattern of thinking into a completely new one.
It does not progress through incremental steps in between.
Once the creative leap is made, the world changes forever.
Just take a few examples.
Einstein’s theory of relativity, Alexander Fleming’s antibiotic penicillin, Picasso’s cubism, Beatles’s music.
Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first controlled, sustainable airflight, Newton’s laws of motion.
Just to name a few.
Creativity requires a leap in awareness in very small ordinary things or processes that are around us.

We are only aware that Iron is needed for our blood to be healthy.
To completely understand iron, we need a leap in awareness about our functional body and its mechanism.
A leap in awareness is the consequence of brain power that leads to wisdom.
This is just one example of how people connect dots through a limitless brain.

Remember, if we are only improving on existing things then we are innovators not creators.
Creativity brings something into existence that has never been here before like the work of Albert Einstein or Sir Isaac Newton or Stephen King.
Think of Stephen King as a current living person because of his creative writing.
At the moment, he is one of the world’s most successful and prolific writers.
He has published numerous horror, suspense, crime, science fiction, and fantasy novels.
How does one mind create such diversity?

The creative power of Stephen King appears as he said, “You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.”

To be creative is normal but to act creatively consistently is abnormal.
As the 18th century French philosopher Voltaire said, “ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd one.”

Creativity doesn’t follow the same trend in all directions.
As we all know, Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus and devised the formula for universal gravitation.
He discovered that light consists of a wide range of wavelengths, with each one representing a constituent color of light.
As an author of the famous book “Principia”, he described the foundation for classical mechanics including his three laws of motion.
This all clearly tells he was a genius, a keen creative mind.
But he lost everything as an investor, which is kind of absurd for us to perceive.
When he was asked about his experience about the South sea bubble regarding stock investing, the renowned physicist and mathematician would say, “ I can calculate the motion of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.”
This clearly indicates the human brain works differently in different disciplines regardless how creative the mind is for a particular activity.

My mentor’s creativity

I remember one of my mentors‘ creative writing journeys.
In his mid-twenties, he wrote the following in his diary when he was in a deep relationship with someone.
He showed me the following letter he wrote during that time.

Dear Mlaka,
Sometimes, I question, am I in love with you?
I questioned myself to my innermost numerous times.
Why do I listen carefully when you speak?
Why do I always say good words and appreciate you?
Why do I like to touch you lovingly with affection?
These questions are coming in my mind constantly, I realize that I am in love with you.

I know love heals and love also renews us so that I generally forget my pain when I see you.
I know love makes us feel very safe whatever the situation would be, it has provided me with strength.
A lot of time I’ve felt that love makes me very close to my God as I visualize your picture in my meditation.
I know love also conquers all of my fears but I don’t know how long I have to fight for it.
Due to this intense love, I am becoming young physically and emotionally everyday.
I see and feel the benefits all the time.
I believe I am reversing my aging process.
I believe I am also reversing my creativity process.
For me falling in love with you is an altered state of consciousness in which my perceptions, interpretations, and choices in life are being transformed.
I am in love so I am carefree and open to new experiences all the time.
At the same time, I am vulnerable and invincible too.
Sometimes I also worry about things, people, and situations.

But, anyway, I am very renewed, exhilarated, and joyful at every moment that I’ve shared with you.
My love has detached me from my usual mundane and opened my awareness to the magic of life.
And then, I felt I am alive, and will remain alive forever.
So I want to let you know Mlaka, I just want to be alive forever with you.

Yours, PFV

After this letter, for almost 10 years, my mentor didn’t write anything as he told me.
His creative awareness about writing was completely gone.
“Now I’m pretty much sure that creativity is a skill.
Not only creativity is a skill, but it can be learned quickly too. Practice doesn’t make us perfect, it makes us permanent,” my mentor added.
“Once we absorb our task by just observing what’s happening in our mind, we all become super creative one day,” he further added.
After resuming his writing again after a long gap, my mentor is the author of two very successful books now.

Conclusion

From my mentor’s experience and my understanding:
If we want to be creative, we need two kinds of control in our life. We need restful awareness which can be achieved mainly through meditation.
We also need restful deep sleep which can be achieved mainly through physical exercises.
These are required because science has shown that the body needs 4-6 weeks to reset and regain its physiological and meditative conditions, which has a connection to our brain that evolves our creativity.
Research shows that this reset and regain happens during sleep.
Restful awareness and restful sleep maintains the hypothalamus gland that controls body weight, body temperature, hunger, thirst, fatigue, and circadian cycles.
The interim phase through meditation and sleep allows the hypothalamus gland to recalibrate and readjust.
Wisdom doesn’t appear suddenly, it appears with good physiology and proper habits.

Remember, only doing creative work is not wisdom, understanding its continuous resources through rest and sleep is wisdom.

When we try to understand our work and its impact on our identity, we all start to become creative.
We all start to connect dots whatever we do in our life.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

“Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

It was a day of August, I was drinking tea on my patio and my 3 and half year old son was playing around me.
I have to confess that even though I have already raised two daughters, I’m actually not a very good dad in many ways . I’m usually a quiet person when I’m preoccupied with things and especially at times of rest and wondering.
My son, however, was hitting walls with his baby guitar.
Since he was annoying me, I yelled at him, and he started to cry and walked away to his mom.
Within a few minutes he was back, saying, “Daddy, I want to talk to you.”
“Sure, Aayam?”
“Daddy, why do you become so rude to me?
I’m a good boy. You also better be a good boy, Daddy.”
This was a hard ball for me on my head, my son hit the ball right on my head. I was short-tempered and rude.
I realized that I’d spent many years as a short tempered rude dad. At that moment, I also realized I need to change. But how?
Most importantly, I realized that raising my son was not about correcting his shortcomings and yelling at him. He could correct himself at some point in the future. I was worried how I would nurture this precocious strength that he displayed at an age under 4.
This was an amazing learning experience for my social intelligence.
I asked myself how I could read the desires, needs, and emotions of my son with reasonable accuracy.
As I said, I’d raised two daughters already. Raising children, I know now little bit, is far more than just fixing what was wrong with them.
Kids bring amazing strengths with them which we don’t know.
It is about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.
If we achieve this as a dad, I guess, all dad would be very happy in their lives.

I was wondering what might be the reason that I was unhappy and showing short temper at my 3 and half year old son.
I got some answers from Junki.
One day I met a woman in a baby care center because I was looking for a good baby care center for my son.
Her name was Junki, as she said, in our conversation.
She was working in a care center for the last 15 years.
I found that Ms Junki’s work is one of the most important parts of her life. She was very happy that she is in the line of work to look after kinder babies.
When she expressed her feelings I realized that what she does for living is a vital part of who she is.
It is one of the first things she tells people that she loves babies, she wants to be around them so she works in the baby care center.
She told me she usually takes her work home with her, she even takes her work on vacation too.
Ms Junki feels very inspired about her work because she loves it everyday.
She told me she thinks her small step helps to make the world a better place.
During our conversation, I knew that Junki doesn’t have any kids of her own as God didn’t permit her to have.
But I didn’t find any pinch of unhappiness in her face.
She encourages everyone to love and nurture children and make children a priority because what kind of world we are creating depends on them.
At one point she told me, as a parent we don’t have to do giant things, just control the temper and love them.
It made me speechless.
Ms Junki told me she would be really unhappy if she were forced to stop working, she is not interested in retirement until her body allows her to perform the work.

“The most important thing in my life is not to find the right job, there is no such thing that exists, it is basically finding the job I can make a Calling through recrafting. The recrafting process, whatever we do in life, brings the most happiness to us”, Junki said.

After working so many years with so many high profile educated MBAs, PhDs, and MDs; I realized that human strengths like integrity, kindness, dedication, and love for anything are not the same things as talents.
Human strengths are moral traits but talents are non-moral.
Junki taught me what the differences are between a job, a career, and a Calling.
Many of us do a job for the paycheck at the end of the week or month, we don’t see any other interests in it.
Job simply becomes the obligation of life for example to support the family.
When there is no wage we simply quit and look for another job and repeat the same process.
This does not bring any happiness at all in our lives.
In the end of the day, this simply helps us to grow as a short-tempered and rude person.
And obviously, an unhappy creature!

There is another thing in life: a career, which is a deeper personal investment in our work than a job.
In career, we measure each achievement through money, advancement, and prestige.
We obviously seek promotion, prestige, power, and , of course, more money.
We become assistant lawyers or assistant professors or assistant managers in the beginning, and then become full lawyers or full professor or senior manager after a few years of working.
When there is no more promotion, we start to look for something else, because this is required for gratification and meaning in life.
There is no doubt, if there is no promotion and no more money coming, we look for other options.
We remain still unhappy because inherently we remain unsatisfied with our own life so we come home and yell at our own kids.
Just think for a second, what kind of parents yell at their own kids?
Of course, those who are short tempered, rude, and unhappy in their own life.

As Ms Junki taught me, there is one more important thing in life, a Calling, which is a vocation rather than a job or career.
As we all know very few people have this vocation in life.
This is a passionate commitment to work for our own satisfaction.
This is also called fulfillment.
If we have a Calling, we see our work for a greater reason, work becomes something larger than ourselves.
Work becomes fulfilling in its own way irrespective of money, advancement, and prestige.
There is no money, no promotion, no prestige, but work continues in life for joy and self satisfaction.
Any job can become a Calling, and any career can become a Calling.
A teacher who views the work only as a job cannot have a Calling but a baby carer who sees the work as a contributor to make the world a nicer and responsible place can have a Calling.
If we have a Calling in our life, we mostly remain happy in our life, we don’t yell at our own kids at home, we don’t lose our temper on them.

Remember, Gregor Mendel didn’t have a job or career in genetics, he ran his famous genetic experiments as a hobby and later turned his hobby into a Calling.
Benjamin Franklin didn’t make his work either job or career, he ran many lightning rod experiments due to his own interest, which later turned into a Calling.
Emily Dickinson’s job or career was not to write poetry, she started to write poetry to create an order in her own life that later turned into a Calling.

I thought to myself how do I value myself as a dad? A good dad or a rude dad.
Can I measure my worth like a piece of diamond that keeps shining all the time?
If my inner worth was this clear to me, I would not make these words and I would not yell at my own son.
This isn’t simple to measure our self worth so I am keen to make a few words about this and realize what’s wrong with me.

My son, I know looking at me at this very moment is very happy now because he already forgot my yelling.
He is having the purest mind at age 3 and half.
I believe he is the most genuine and pure-of-heart at the moment.
When complete strangers see him, he runs towards me as his dearest person.
Each time he sees the animal, he begins crying and runs towards me for protection.
I provide him comfort in a time of fear.
But why do I yell at him?
Probably, because I am not happy inherently with my own life and transferring my venom to my son at home.
I have not figured out my own Calling yet in my life.

As a dad, this confused me initially, but I realize now that it is simply my son’s genuine heart and mind reaching out to me in a time of need.
There is nothing but joy in my heart as I write about the wonderful son I know.
I can only dream of becoming the best dad I believe I could be.

I know my real and authentic happiness appears when I identify and cultivate my most fundamental individual strengths and use them all the time as much as I can in my work, love, and parenting life.

There is a Chinese proverb I always recite, “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit fortune. If you want happiness lifetime, help somebody.”
How can I help others and be happy as I can not help and understand my own little son at home?

Remember, the cure of anything is uncertain in our life, but prevention is amazingly effective. Just think of how getting midwives to wash their hands ended childbed fever.
Just think of how immunizations ended polio.
Likewise, ending a short temper and rudeness isn’t a cure but a prevention of becoming an unhappy person.

Good life is something beyond a pleasant life, and a meaningful life is something beyond a good life.
As Ms Junki said, one step closer to a meaningful life is controlling a short temper and not yelling at our own kids at home.
One step closer to a meaningful life is turning our job or career into a Calling and connecting the world with what we do everyday consistently.
These are the secret sauces of happiness.

Remember everyone, good things obviously come to those who have patience, foresight, and love so don’t lose your temper with your own kids at home.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

I saw a young man closing his eyes and doing meditation under the shade of a tree.
I went closer to him, he heard the sound of my steps and opened his eyes.
I greeted him saying hello, and also expressed my sincere sorry for the disturbance, he didn’t respond except with a simple smile.
I asked him, “what was happening in your mind when your eyes were closed?”
He replied, “I wanted to walk across the land, but the earth was covered with thorns.”
“One option came to my mind, it was to pave my road, to tame all of nature into compliance.”
“Suddenly, a second option appeared in my mind, I wanted to make sandals so that thorns couldn’t stop me walking.”
Once I heard this, I said to myself, the second option is what R&D is, the internal solution to solve the existing problem.
Of course, R&D is not a single individual but is a unified approach.
R&D is not a submissive force of unity, R&D is not an overpowering force either.
R&D is intelligent thinking and preparation, it is a cultivated resilience which helps us to gain the ability to bounce back and try again with more experience and wisdom.

Can you guess?
What happened over the last 300 years?
Of course, there were a lot of changes over the years.
Some very prominent transformations that changed our lives were the industrial revolution, discovery of penicillin, electricity, the light bulb, automobiles, airplanes, rockets, and space traveling.
Just few to name major transformations that changed our lives in many different ways.
At present, we are in full fledged technological revolution with the invention of microchips, computers, and smartphones, all connected to the world wide web.
With these tools in hand, we have become a globalized community and each of us is one click away from what we intend to do.

Let’s check a little bit of history.
There were at least five technological revolutions from the 1770s to 2000s.
The industrial revolution began with Arkwright’s water-powered cotton spinning mill in Cromford, England in 1771.
This was followed by the age of steam and railways, the rocket steam engine for the Liverpool-Manchester railway in 1829.
The age of steel, electricity, and heavy engineering was the next big move. Andrew Carnegie’s Bessemer plant in Pittsburgh, USA in 1875 revolutionized the world.
Then came the age of oil, the automobile, and mass production of the first Model-T at the Ford plant in Detroit, USA in 1908.
And, the age of information and telecommunications began when Intel unveiled the microprocessor in 1971.

At present, our technology revolution includes information gathering, decentralized approach, and globalization. Information gathering means knowledge as capital in the value added society.
Our global communication system enables instant globalized interactions between local segments. This is a powerful tool to create economies of greater scope and scale and it turns into a huge economic market.
In all of these efforts, the R&D’s role is in the top level and it’s changing at a very high speed. One of the most important changes is the valuation of R&D which can not be defined by numbers anymore. Valuation runs through human’s mind, science, technology, and psychology.

In the past, businesses were defined by their physical structure; more plants, more property, and more equipment. They were considered as tangible assets.
At least, we could make an R&D valuation based on them.
Nowadays, the concept of growing a business has been transferred to the intangible components more. They are more of intellectual properties such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, brand marketing, brand value, attractiveness of product, and the delivery of the product through various outlet channels.
Currently in the USA, the intangible investment rate of the corporate sector is roughly twice that of the tangible investment rate and it keeps growing.
We have come very far, the value of creating aspects of knowledge, information, and entertainment, all of this is possible through the global internet.
The cost of the physical input has gone down but the value part has grown exponentially.

Think of Uber technology, how come a single app can democratize and revolutionize the whole transportation industry in approximately 72 countries and 10,500 cities.
What are the tangible assets of Uber?

Look at Google, can we think of life without it?
The single small box appears on our screen which is very clean and simple, every person knows where to type and just click go.
It has changed human society completely in so many ways which are impossible to explain.
What are the tangible assets of google? Where are its office buildings and infrastructures globally?
Remember, Google spends more than 15% of its revenue on R&D. Their R&D spending has more than doubled since 2016.

Any science and technology company’s product portfolio is created by R&D endeavors which are dedicated to invent, design, and produce products and services for us.
The higher the technology, the more R&D is embodied in a company’s products and greater the asset value of its product portfolio.

The genius Albert Einstein is very relevant here.
“You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level.”
R&D is a source for the next level, it is key for waves of disruption and obsolescence.
In recent years, the bigger companies are spending a lot of money on R&D.
For example, Facebook is spending almost 21% of its revenue towards R&D spending.
Amazon’s R&D spending is more than 10% of its total revenue.
This tells the story where we are going.

R&D always moves in a slow fashion as a series of accepted notions and theories because it is science driven by the market.
We always think that scientific discovery is a process of adding intellectual bricks to an established norm. Many times scientific progress occurs by stepwise process but sometimes also happens by crisis.
But R&D’s role is the same both times.
Take an example of covid-19 vaccine development.
The crisis completely destroys the intellectual deposition of the existing phenomenon and takes us into the direction of new territory.
Normal scientific development works in a normal condition which is the scientific community’s common path. But the crisis violates the common scientific path and leads us into a new direction at very high speed.

Max Planck, a German physicist and Noble laureate has said beautifully, “ A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Past R&D used to be a prudent way of doing things.
But now when you tell people you are a traditional R&D member, you are considered old-fashioned, out of step, clinging to an old idea for a time that has come and gone. The world we are seeing is on the move.
If you are not constantly running computerized model algorithmic experiments, you must be falling behind in R&D.

Any kind of R&D is a noble endeavor because it identifies people’s self-discipline, psychological endurance, and civic community dedication.
Scientists understand that outstanding creations are often born of small modifications or small thinkings or sometimes by small errors.
Problems persist if the R&D scientist has the brittle dependence on the safety of absolute perfection. In such a scenario, any small error triggers fear, uncertainty, and confusion that muddies the decision making process.

We always glorify the essence of teamwork in a corporation’s success but there is also another part in R&D. Many companies’ intangible assets are created by a single R&D person, working and thinking alone.
I’m not discrediting the team effort, what I’m emphasizing is the culture of thinking which is possible when you are alone.

The sistine chapel ceiling is one large fresco that depicts nine separate scenes from the book of Genesis. The amazing fact about this phenomenal work, in addition to its never ending attractiveness, is that it was created by one person working alone, under extremely difficult conditions.
Johann Wolfgan Von Goethe once said, “Without having seen the sistine chapel , one cannot form a truer picture of what one person is capable of.”
R&D scientists fall exactly into the same category.
Our world has already shown over and over again that pure discovery and invention is one person’s capability under extremely passionate conditions.
There is nothing except pure human spirit and interest.

The good R&D managers should always think about how to increase the intrinsic value of business. The manager of the organization who misleads scientists may eventually mislead himself or herself.
This has a grave consequence for the organization. A good R&D manager should nurture the atmosphere of self-confidence among R&D personnel.
Self-confidence is directly linked to self-reliance, and self-reliance, in turn, is the foundation of R&D management.

Here is one way to improve self confidence among R&D scientists.
All R&D scientists and managers must read philosophy and psychology.
Just think about this: why Plato and Aristotle always said practical wisdom involves the combination of skill, conviction, and opportunity.
Any R&D’s mission is to bring practical wisdom into reality.
When we become R&D scientists and managers, skill always indicates right knowledge, conviction indicates good judgment, and opportunity indicates effective application.
In today’s world, each one of these is an intangible asset for the organization.

The whole function of philosophy is to produce habits of action.
In any organization, R&D begins the action. Our beliefs are really rules for taking actions.
For R&D scientists, there will inevitably be times when they need to try new ideas, release their current knowledge to take in new information. But it is very critical for them to integrate the new information in a manner that doesn’t violate who we are and what we want.

Let’s bring William James for a while, the “father of American psychology.”
William James always advocated that nobody understood better than him the role of philosophy in human life.
He is considered the creator of American Pragmatism.
William James did not begin as a philosopher, he had a medical degree but never practiced medicine.
He studied psychology and Roman stoic Marcus Aurelius, Ralph Waldo Emerson was his intellectual godfather.
We as R&D scientists can learn a lot from William James, as we are creators of actions in our organization.

Remember, psychologists, philosophers, and R&D scientists are not far, all they do is study the human mind.
Psychologists study the mind’s defection and philosophers figure out ways to improve thoughts for better decision making, and finally R&D scientists assimilate both and create products and services for human beings.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

I was at the national conference of the American chemical society. After attending numerous presentations, I was at a social gathering cocktail party, a fun, mix up, and refreshing network evening.
I was at the table with one of my colleagues who is now an assistant professor in the university.
All of a sudden, the late professor and Nobel laureate Ei-ichi Negishi stopped by our table.
My friend and I greeted him.
My friend immediately jumped and asked, “Professor Negishi, it’s our pleasure, you are with us this evening, can I share something with you?”
Professor Negishi replied, “yes, of course.”
“Professor, I’m two and half months pregnant now,” she mentioned.
Professor replied, “ Wow, nice, am I the first person to know after your husband?”
My friend replied, “yes.”
“Many many congratulations, you are about to enter into the most fulfilling job on the planet, mom,” Professor responded.
“Any tips professor, I know you raised two astounding daughters,” my friend added.
“In the end of the day, you and your husband’s life revolve around your kids, just keep that fresh always in your mind, it would be an amazing and thrilling experience to live by, especially being a mom and a professor at the same time” professor Negishi replied.

“By the way Sophia, you don’t become a good professor by becoming knowledgeable yourself, you become a good professor by knowing how to transfer knowledge to others effectively, and as a mom you will have an edge for the later part,” professor Negishi added.

“Thank you professor, I have one more weird question to ask you because I’ve got this golden opportunity. I’m with you this evening, I don’t know what’s coming to my mind” my friend added.
“Sure,” Professor Negishi replied.
“By any chance, could you remember, how long you and your wife didn’t talk to each other due to some kind of misunderstanding or argument or whatever it could be during your conjugal life?”
“Wow, this is difficult to answer, you are taking me long long back, of course, we had many many of those instances.”
“Well, as far as I remember, for at least 5 to 6 hours we didn’t speak, but for most of the time, I broke the silence” professor Negishi replied.
“Thank you professor, thank you for sharing,” my friend and I greeted him again saying bye when he was moving to another table .
When the professor left, I told my friend, “congratulations, am I the second person to know this secret news after your husband?”
She laughed and said, “kind of yes.”

I told my friend, “I was expecting questions related to either a chemistry project or your professor position or maybe research funding or any university related to a Nobel laureate chemistry professor, but you surprised me with unexpected directions.
You are unpredictable”.

“My friend, sometimes life takes us far from our real current standing ground, what we do everyday and what we think everyday, I guess this is what life is all about,” she expressed.

“I was the most timid person throughout my life and still I’m.
I became irritated very quickly.
I rarely felt secure and calm,” she expressed.

“My decision power had been uprooted long back.
I always felt infected and contagious.
Everything looked fictitious to me” she further added.

“I never understood what I wanted in life until I met a man whom I married 5 years ago who transformed me completely into a new me,” she expressed.

“This is not the appropriate time to share all of these but you just told me as an unpredictable person so I’ve got motivation to initiate different aspects of my life even though I’m meeting and talking to Nobel laureates and brilliant minds in our field on this beautiful evening. Nobody knows what’s inside us and what is the cause of our suffering and infection unless we express it,” she added.

“My parents always focussed on my weaknesses, they never allowed me to improve my strength.
I was very good at storytelling and map reading but they always pushed me in mathematics and statistics where I was weak.
I was weak in Spanish in high school but very good in English so my parents hired a Spanish tutor for me.
My story telling capacity got plateaued and never crossed the barrier but nobody cared.
These were my childhood memories.
I couldn’t do anything but I could reflect and connect now,” she said emotionally.

“I came from a very unusual family situation. My parents didn’t talk to each other for many years, even though we’re under the same roof.
My childhood consisted of numerous silent dinners and numerous silent lunches.
Now I’m an adult but I feel this is so awkward and unmotivated.
My parents said they didn’t divorce because of me.
Dad wanted to show his love and care for me more than my mom, and my mom wanted to show her love and care more than my dad.
They had competition to possess over me.
I never understood what they were trying to prove until very recently in my life.
I was in the middle taking advantage of both of them without knowing the chronic infection inside me.
Though I’m an adult now, my childhood memory sometimes suffocates me and is affecting my adult life,” she expressed.

“Sometimes, guilt and shame are very important to reconsider.
Many times my dad showed his guilt but never improved on his behaviour.
My mom also showed shame many times but never showed any attention around my dad, she was centered only in herself,” my friend noted.

“My dad and mom never sat together and discussed and learnt anything from each other. Both always tried to find whose fault was associated more than what was the actual truth. Finding somebody’s fault accelerates our ego but finding truth accelerates peace.
Ego and truth are very strong words but sometimes we are compelled to dissect them.
My mom was a project manager in a tech company and dad was a sales officer.
Both were immigrants to the USA from Japan, both were very exhaustive in their 30’s and 40’s, both were trying to be perfect, both were trying to be somebody else, but I had no clue who that somebody else was.”

“As far as I understand, we were somehow an upper middle class family financially, but dad was always running behind the commission rather than his annual salary.
My mom was always running behind more work performance and quick job promotion.
Relationship promotion never became a priority for my dad and mom.
My mom always complained about things that didn’t go as per her expectation.
She failed multiple times, her projects failed multiple times, and she didn’t meet her expectations multiple times, but she always complained about them.

I remember Stephen Hawking, a great physicist, cosmologist, and author who lived with the crippling disease ALS for 55 years. He has said beautifully, “people won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining,” she mentioned in a very soft voice.

“Now I learnt that once we start something, we don’t need to know it all at once.
Our complete potential and results start to appear once we trust our work.
In the end, complaining becomes so insignificant we actually don’t need it in our life.
I learned this from my husband.
At present I’m struggling to get my assistant professor position as a tenured position in my university.
I also know it’s tough because there are limited universities and limited tenure tracks, the majority of these tenured positions have already been occupied by my dad and granddad faculties.
But I’ve learned how to be calm and confident throughout the process and, most importantly, trust in me.”

“I remember, I used to come from school and I always saw either only dad or only mom at home, there were rare incidences where I saw both of them together at home at same time.
If dad were at home, he used to ask me “how was the school?” she said.
I used to say, “good”.
“Our conversation used to end and I walked towards my room.
When I came out for a snack in the kitchen, my dad was already on the phone,” she added.

“Later in life I learnt that people always do things which they want, not what they need.
Want becomes so vicious in life that we all can also gradually change our want into need if we are not conscious in our decision,” she added.

“Due to my silent home environment, I never knew the fine line between courage and confidence in my life because I never had that discussion at my home,” she said.

“Do you know the difference now?” I asked her.
She said, “I’m learning.”
“Yes, I know, I did some bungee jumpings,” she said
“That’s great, you accomplished your long quest of bungee jumping.”
“Awesome,” I added.

She said to me that once she was wrapped in a large elastic cord for the first time for bungee jumping, she was kind of senseless but she just gave up, closed her eyes and let it go.
She said, “I was really curious to know how it feels to have courage?”
She said, “I didn’t have confidence at all at the first time, it was just courage because I was shivering on the elastic cord.”

“Upto now I have done five bungee jumps, so I’ve learnt the difference between courage and confidence.
My husband has run multiple marathons.
He says that the present record of marathon is 2 hours 1 minute with Eliud Kipchoge.
But there will be somebody in the future with a lot of confidence who reaches the tipping point and will surely break the present record.
He always tells me that our life expands or shrinks whether we show courage or not, but exponential life expansion happens only when one courage turns into repetitive acts, that is the birth of confidence,” she said.

Her explanation was quite intriguing for me.

She said, “courage is an act where we don’t know the end point. We don’t know what is on the other side and how does it feel when we reach there?
But confidence is different, when we become confident, we know what is on the other side.
We gradually grow it.
Our brain can smell confidence and feel it.
Confidence is the same as our muscle, we can build it the same way as muscle.
I learned this from my husband.”

Suddenly, she received a call.
“Is this Sophia?
“Yes it is.”
“Do you have a dad named Brad in Macomb, Illinois?
“Yes, who is this, please?”
“Mr Neal, I’m Dr. Neal Kornik, calling from McDonough District Hospital, Macomb illinois. Brad was in an accident tonight. He is stable now but in critical condition.”
Sophia stood up and ran on the floor. “What happened?”
“As best we understand, madam, he was driving a car at dusk, he was making an U turn, he was hit from behind. Are you his closest relative?”
“Well, yes ….uh…well, no, I mean my mom is alive but my mom and dad don’t speak.”

I just heard what she said and how her life is leading up to now.
She cried in front of me.

She said, “Why did I tell the doctor that my dad and mom don’t speak to each other?
I don’t know, maybe my mind is working on autopilot.
It wasn’t intentional, it suddenly came in my mouth, maybe this burden is in my subconscious.”

She called her mom in Philadelphia.

“Mom, I never asked you anything in my adult life. Can I ask you something?”
Mom replied, “is everything okay Sophia”
She said, “yes.”
Her mom said, “yes, of course, you can ask.”
“Mom, it is very serious but promise me first, you won’t reject it,” she reiterated.
Her mom said, “promise.”

“Mom, my dad, your husband is in critical condition in McDonough District Hospital at Macomb, Illinois, he got in an accident. I received a call from the doctor and according to the doctor, he is stable but in critical condition. Mom, could you go right now to Macomb, Illinois and see my dad?” she said.
Her mom said, “yes.”

Next morning, my friend Sophia also took the first flight to Springfield, Illinois to go to Macomb.
Once she entered the hospital room, she saw her mom was on her dad’s bedside.
When they saw her, they both had tears in their eyes.

“Mom and dad, you might not be happy after reading this piece of content.
You might say what kind of daughter you are who shares her personal family story to the world.
Mom and dad, I’m not judging you, this my life is your gift.
Whoever I am now and wherever I stand, it’s all due to you both.
I haven’t seen god, so for me, you are on the same level, you are no different from god.
I always respect you both and I always love you both, my love and respect will remain the same no matter what, unconditional. period.

I gave permission to my good friend to write about me and my family, this is my only pure feeling that I expressed with him so that I can think and act mentally strong.
I wanted to clear my mind and body both.”

“Though I may not be 100 percent free from any judgement because I’m human with soul and mind, but trust me, I’m moving in that direction.
And I request to everybody, please, try to be free from any kind of judgement that you have.
We humans are here on earth not to judge others but to do our part of the task to make this world a beautiful place.
Who am I to judge my parents?
Actually, who am I to judge anybody else on the planet?
I always love you both, dad and mom.
I wish you both all the best.
Please, dad and mom, forgive me if I did something wrong by sharing our family story to the world,” she noted.

“My friend, I also know, your head is still running, why did I tell professor Negishi about my private news.
Professor Negishi gave us revolutionary scientific achievement in the name of Negishi reaction in 1977 when he was 42 years old.
But he got the Nobel prize at age 75, after working 33 years for the same discovery which he made when he was 42.
The mystery is that our society is weird, it only credits the work when we become old for the same work that we did when we were young.
My friend, we can learn a great lesson from professor Negishi, he is one of my heroes in my life.
I want to tell everyone that when you are young, please take risks, experiment, wander, travel, create, participate, show courage, and build confidence.
We have one life to live.
I wanted to have this conversation with you, professor Negishi, and my little one in my womb.
Believe me, he or she, I don’t know yet, is listening from my womb,” she said.

Rest in peace, wishing you peace professor Negishi.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina