Category: Scientific Progress

“Be the change that you wish to see in the World.”
-Mahatma Gandhi

My ex-girlfriend said, “I feel so sad and pessimistic about the World. I couldn’t do anything for my mother when she was alive.”
Though she was my ex-girlfriend, we are very good friends now.
As we all know, time is the best teacher in our lives but no regret, lives move on.
I Interrupted her and said, “My friend, can I ask you a question?”
“Question, sure,” she replied.
“How often do you get these feelings of pessimism and sadness? I believe you didn’t have this habit when we were together,” I asked.
She said, “What do you mean “how often”? What kind of question is this?”
Once again I said, “Do you remain pessimistic all the time or few times in a day like early in the morning or late in the evening or most of the week or month or one or two times in a season?”
She paused for a moment and then said,” I guess I remain pessimistic and sad all the time, especially after my mother’s death.”
She felt pessimism, sadness and guilt about her situation, working too hard and not having enough time for her mother.
She always felt sad about not being a good enough daughter.
I said, “Can I tell you something, my friend?”
She nodded.

“We have to change our focus from what happened to our father or mother or sister or brother to what we can do for all fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers who are alive now.
We have to find a way to connect to help the ailing fathers and mothers, sisters, and brothers who are alive now.
This is the only way to get rid of your sadness and pessimism,” I said.
When my friend was a child, her mother was everything for her.
When her mother died, her mother didn’t know who she was.
Her mother died by her side with a disease called Alzheimer’s.
“I will never forget this moment in my life when my mother died in my arms without knowing that I was her daughter,” my friend said.

Alzheimer’s disease is the dominant form of dementia.
There are at least 50 million people suffering from it worldwide and at least 6 million only in the USA.
This touches roughly 10 percent people over 65 and more than 33 percent over 85 and up.
This disease kills more Americans than breast and prostate cancer combined.

By the way, a bit of science behind Alsheimer’s disease.
It is a serious plumbing problem in our brain.
Neuroinflammation causes it and leads to loss of brain function.
When the aging brain is unable to drain away the protein sludge that accumulates over time, billions of neurons die.
The neuroinflammation fuels the build up of two very specific proteins that cause plaque in the brain, amyloid and tau.
The cerebral cortex of the brain which is home to awareness, memory, language, and consciousness become non-functional.

According to Dr. Rudy Tanzi, a key expert for Alzheimer’s disease, a professor of Neurology at Harvard University, we have to make a few things a habit to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.
First, we need enough sleep which is mental floss that clears out amyloid naturally from the brain.
Second, we need social interaction that cuts Alzheimer’s risk by twofold especially when we enter adulthood.
Third, we have to control the stress which releases cortisol chemicals that cause neuroinflammation and kills neurons.

Good health is our foundation, no question, no argument.
My friend was physically healthy and active but she was still missing the quality of life.
Our quality of life is our mind, our thinking, our perception about life.
Quality of life means stopping whining, stopping worrying, stopping complaining, and stopping regretting.
Quality of life is spending quality time with family and quality friends, one more time quality friends, please know the difference between friends and quality friends.
Quality of life means giving, connecting, and sharing our honest and intimate emotions.
Just think about when you can not share your intimate emotions with your dying parents as a son or daughter, what does it feel like?
My friend was carrying the same emotions all her life.

But the truth is, we don’t know how many days we have left in front of us but we absolutely know how to use the remaining days, which are under our control.
The quality of our life is the quality of our everyday emotions.
It’s good to occasionally focus on what we missed but we shouldn’t make it a habitual thing.
If we always focus on what we don’t have, we never sustain happiness and quality in life.
We don’t experience life, we all experience what we focus on and the meaning we give to it, so we have to be very selective how we operate daily.

My dear friend,
We had a very memorable past and we are quality friends now so today I would like to take you on a journey back to history.
Probably, it will help you as well as others why we should be optimistic and happy in life moving forward.

In the time of early hominids, one million years ago, our ancestors would enter puberty at age of 12 or 13 and by the time they were 28, they were already grandparents.
The average age of early humans was only 28 years old.
In the middle ages, the average human lifespan was 35.
In 1900, the average lifespan was mid-40s.
Today, we are touching 80.
This is one snapshot of our life that tells why we should be optimistic and happy.

Let’s take another small picture.
In 1347, we had the most fatal pandemic called the bubonic plague in human history that killed around 200 million people.
Nobody found a cure of bubonic plague.
There was another pandemic that happened in 1918, the influenza called the Spanish Flu that killed at least 50 million people worldwide.
This virus is still with us today so we take an annual flu shot every year.
Recently, COVID-19 happened and hundreds of thousands people died but we invented a vaccine for it in 12 months so that many of us survived.
Many advanced technologies like mRNA vaccines, global high speed data connectivity, supercomputers helped to design, test, and distribute COVID-19 vaccines globally so that we controlled the sufferings of COVID-19 pretty quickly.
For global progress, big techs like Amazon, ZOOM, Google helped tremendously.

I remember, a few years ago, I would go to the library to find books, journals, or any literature. Today, I use Google.
Not only that, today, everyday, people around the world search on Google 5.5 billion times. These tech companies’ applications are woven into the fabric of our daily life around the world.
And most importantly, everyday, the weave of fabric gets tighter and tighter.
As a result, the majority of the world searches, shops, chats, banks, and performs many everyday activities online.
Today’s technology has become faster, cheaper, and better.
They have saved our time, money, and have made our lives easier and better in many ways.
The amazing thing is that they have made our lives interactive globally.
My friend, this is another reason we should remain optimistic and happy that as a human we are progressing all the time.

Let’s see how far we’ve come because this is directly related to our health and well being.
In 1981, 1 GB of hard drive storage used to cost us half a million dollars.
Today, for the same, it costs us 1 cent per GB.
In 1971, Intel’s first computer chip used to cost us $1 per transistors, where there were 2300 transistors.
Today, we have Core i9 and that has 7 billion transistors in less than a millionth of a penny each.
Our smart phone now is more powerful than any country government’s computational power in the early 90’s on the planet.
We have exponential growth in technology and we are not stopping.
We have 5G mobile service now, but we are not stopping. We are going in 6G soon and that can download 142 hours of Netflix in a second.

This fast technology will be life-changing for the health sector.
We can upload health data or get help from AI wherever we live in the world.
Just think, at the moment we connect more than 125 devices to the internet per second.

Very soon, each one of us will have the ability for real time monitoring of our health and biochemistry from sensors in our body.
Sensor measures everything from blood glucose to blood pressure to micro RNAs which indicates an impending heart attack and the quality of our sleep, diet, and lifestyle.
All of this data will be uploaded to an AI that monitors and advises our exact health status.
My friend, we should not be pessimistic, we should be optimistic all the time, that’s the only reason we are human, we are different from other animals.

The biotechnology industry experienced massive year-over-year growth, from $17 billion in 2019 investments to an all time high of $28 billion investments in 2020.
This investment is largely driven by medical breakthroughs in vaccine development and COVID-19 therapies.
In other words, this is another opportunity for us to grow in science, technology, and human health.
As Dr. George Church, professor of Harvard Medical School says “Exponential technology growth is especially effective in biology, which is now an information science.”
He is one of the hard core believers that even we, humans, can reverse our age.
This far we’ve come now.
There is already precedent for it.
Dr. David Sinclair, a professor of Harvard Medical School has already published a landmark paper in Nature in 2020.
The theme of the paper is there is a backup copy of youthful information in the cell that we can access which gives us the ability to reboot cells.
The crux of this discovery is if we can do this in mouse eye cells, then we can do this in other organs and tissues as well.
It means we can reverse our age too.
I’m just reminding you, my friend, this is the time to be optimistic and happy.

Let’s not take anything for granted.
When we find a bigger cause in our lives, we heal physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and that is the ultimate goal of living.
I wish you all the best, my friend.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“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 creature 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.

“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.
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 life,” 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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“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.

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.

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.

Let me tell you this, 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.
Our body is a collection of billion cells and the function of these cells determines our 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 us 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 that controls how the genome functions is more powerful than the genetic code itself.
Epigenetic is affected by many factors, some major factors are diet, obesity, physical activity, tobacco, alcohol, environmental pollutants, stress, and working at night as well as many others.

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, 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 now-a-days- 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 that I mentioned above 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 and professor of Harvard University says, “if it’s a plant, eat it, if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

The second secret for a healthy and happy life I found from Dr. Valter Longo 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.

Remember, 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, “sleep is probably the foundation on which the other two pillars of diet and exercise sit.”


Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“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 at the moment.
Similarly, many years ago, I restricted all kinds of sugar products in my diet because I was almost pre-dibetic and my family history wasn’t great.
I don’t know how I came back to eating normal sugar products again after beating my pre-dibetic status.
Now, I’m still trying to avoid all 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.
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 blood report.
I never even tried to know what those numbers are 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 internal biochemical data after graduating from college.
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.

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.

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 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 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 it down, the communication system gets ruptured 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 clearly indicates why our health is becoming more personalized day by day.
Once we are more aware and knowledgeable about our internal information technology within our body, scientists are developing sensors that are transforming 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.
The only thing we can do is be vigilant and informative about our body, body’s reaction, and our own actions.

Life is so 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.

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 for iPhone and Mac.
Finally he connected all different dots and formed the information channel for Apple.
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 David Sinclair, a biologist and academic known 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 his work.
David Sinclair is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
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 me 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.

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 now?
I’m not going to remind the frog’s story, everyone.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

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.

Design engineering is his bread and butter at the moment.
He said to me, “The habit of rethinking is fundamental to my profession if I have to survive but for me it gives 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 out of his everyday task 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 was 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.
Not only you and me but 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.

Scientists are always trying new things.
Their experiments often fail, but they should become happy in the newness and shouldn’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 scientist friend told me, “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 at work come from experience.
Experience teaches us that as a scientist we shouldn’t fall in the trap of confirmation bias and desirability bias. This is the problem of academic people.”

In his words, the former bias is to see what we expect to see and the latter bias is to see what we want to see.
These biases stop our curious intelligence.
They 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.
Rethinking habits helps us to find the correct mental tool.

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.
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 task and the world.
“My mother opened my mind and helped me to live and understand the world,” he said.
Any task is for the world so all tasks 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, beliefs, taboos, agreement, and disagreements.
The most important thing is we have to readjust our expectations that shape our findings.
At present we have to view our experiences as periods of our lives. Youth, apprenticeship, marriage, parenthood, sickness, death, and so on are connected to our task. 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 added, “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”.

I have seen that the smartest minds today who study computers, biology, and math have come to understand that the world no longer only sees predictable, linear thinking.
Instead, our life is filled with chaos, challenges, and 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, wobbles, twists and turnabouts.
Linear thinking sees the world in quantity and symmetry 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 the labs and offices” 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.

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 internalizing every feeling that enters our heart.

Scientists who are right 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 skills in asking and responding.
The most important thing is to show interest in other people’s interests or work rather than trying to judge their position or prove our own agenda.

Always think this way.
Scientist is a person who is in outer space and observing things very carefully.
When you get to see an overview of the earth from outer space, you realize you 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 cities that would move from an airplane.
The amazing thing is that we can circle the entire planet in 90 minutes from space.
Moreover, from space, stars look the same as from earth but our planet earth gives us a different perspective about life and humanity as a whole, we start to think how fragile the earth planet is where all of humankind exists.

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

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 cranberry juice and chill peppers do a vital job.

Cranberry juice changes the acidity of the urine, preventing bacteria from gaining foothold for infection. Research shows that cranberry juice has a beneficial effect on gamma delta T cells, a special type of immune T cell. These cells are found in the lining of the gut and other mucous membranes of the body including the urinary tract.

Similarly, the bright red, yellow, and green colors of chile peppers contain bioactives like Zeaxanthin, lutein, and beta-carotene.
The bioactive form that carries the heat, capsaicin, activates the immune system and increases the number of circulating white blood cells and antibody producing beta cells.
How difficult is it to drink more cranberry juice and eat a little more chili peppers?

Scientific transactions 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 is not equipped only with skill and knowledge compared with other scientists but also with scientific transactions based on skill and knowledge.
This scientific transaction is nothing but the practice of thinking and rethinking.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

When we move in life, we have to make a lot of sensible 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 risks.
Some decisions may not look creative on the surface but give persistent clues on the horizon for long lasting impact for society.
Knowledge only isn’t sufficient for us, experience only isn’t sufficient either.
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.
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, a MD doctor and 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 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 does his 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 Karma does for others.

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.

Amit Goswami, 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 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?

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.

I remember one of my friends’ 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, he 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,” he 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 friend is the author of two very successful books.

From my friend’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 bearings, which has a connection to our brain that evolves our creativity.
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 to do 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.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“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

We’re at the dining table.
My 12 years old daughter said, “Daddy, everybody says you are a scientist but, daddy, what do you actually do at work?”
My wife jumped quickly and said, “Your daddy makes chemicals in a chemical company.”
My daughter immediately responded, “I hate chemicals.”
My daughter completely shut her mind regarding any activities related to chemicals. She started to complain about her shampoo and nail polish.
She also complained about her paints that she used for her painting class.
“These chemicals are so bad, I think they are very low quality chemicals, my hair gets tangled after using a particular shampoo,” she added.
She turned towards her mom and said, “Mom, I remember you’re complaining about your nail polish last time, you couldn’t remove nail polish completely, am I right?”

I told my daughter, “what your mom just said about my day to day work is true but she missed my main task, making chemicals is only a very small part of the work that I do everyday.”
“My main job is to think about how to solve problems that we all face everyday.”
“Just as you said, you’re not happy with poor quality shampoo, poor quality nail polish, so tell me, who do you think should do work on how to make better shampoo that doesn’t tangle your hair?
Who do you think will solve the problem of low quality nail polish?” I added.

I told my wife in private that you could have said it in a different way so that they don’t shut down their door of perception, their door of listening, and their door of understanding.
My wife nodded with a smile.

As a family, we must be very conscious about our pitch statements regarding our everyday work, our hobbies, and our leisure, when we discuss things on the dining table with others, especially with our children.
Dining table is a very important place to explore our children’s interests.
Interest is the only tool to make people curious, there is no other way around.
Interest is a force that propels us out of bed every single morning and makes us ready to get going.
Sometimes interest becomes really insane. Neil Armstrong, an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer, and the first person to walk on the Moon, got his pilot’s license before his driver’s license.
Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, was interested in peace, he was a prince who renounced his position and wealth to seek enlightenment as a spiritual ascetic, attained his goal of peace and founded Buddhism.

We always say to our children, “You are too small, you don’t understand now, there are so many things I do at my work which are very important. You’ll learn them gradually when you grow up.” These are some answers many parents say to their children without giving any specifics.
If we cannot say what we do 8 plus hours everyday at work in a couple of sentences which they can understand then we’ve a serious problem as parents.

When I was a naive and a new parent, I used to say to my daughter that I make chemicals and sell them to make medicines. This is another type of answer I’ve found most often used by many other parents who also work in a place where things are made and sold.

There is nothing wrong with this answer but if your children don’t like making or selling chemicals or any medicines or any other particular things that you are involved in then you are done.
They don’t want to listen to any further details regarding your work, experience, and expertise.
If we don’t like some food then we don’t want to taste it, if we don’t want to taste it, then we don’t know what it feels like tasting.
This is true to all of us, including children, not only in food but also in many life experiences.

When children lose the patience to listen to us, they don’t understand our passion, our dedication, and most importantly, our attitude.
Listening isn’t only to listen to somebody, it’s a mental toughness practice, we need a lot of energy not to speak but to listen.
Listening is not just to be quiet, it means to be at present.

It’s not about our chemical knowledge or medical knowledge or legal or business knowledge or any specific expertise that we have which we are telling to our children.
It’s all about children’s experience of human attitude by opening their eyes, ears, and senses.
Our attitude is key to solving the most challenging human problems in the 21st century.
If our children are not paying attention in developing a good attitude then it will hamper in many different ways in their adult lives.

A good attitude is a settled way of thinking or feeling about a person or a thing that is generally reflected in a person’s behavior.
Good attitude also makes us aware of others’ perceptions towards us.

The most essential degree that we need in life is a good attitude.

Many skills are teachable but attitude is not.

I told my daughter, “I work various things but all of them help to improve people’s lives in different ways.”
Today I attended a presentation from a person from a cell phone company who was looking for something that he could add in cell phone battery materials so that the cell phone battery can last many years.
Think about your cell phone or laptop, what do you think if you don’t have to charge it for many weeks?

My daughter said, “That would be cool.”

Our cell phone and laptop’s battery life is still very short, we have to carry a charger all the time.
We have to solve this problem by creating technology so that we don’t have to carry a charger.
This is just one example of the type of problems that I face every single day at work.

I further added, “This is just one example of how I work to make a positive difference to people’s lives. I also help to discover unique ways and materials to treat the most challenging diseases. Many people are dying everyday due to many chronic diseases.”

I work to empower people as a team who are to deliver breakthroughs so that people get benefits faster and quicker. This team of people are called scientists.
Scientists always challenge the status quo.
Scientists are a very small segment of society but they change society forever.
They always work in unison to solve human problems because each person has specific expertise.

I also contribute to making science a tool of any technology that changes human lives on many frontiers.
Think about how technology is reshaping us to enhance our quality of life. We are living longer because we know how to cure many diseases.
Unfortunately, people are still dying due to many new diseases appearing every single day like cancer, dementia including Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and schizophrenia.

We have developed CRISPR as one of the biggest discoveries of the 21st century. It allows researchers to easily alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. CRISPR is a gene editing tool that has revolutionized biology research, making it easier to study disease by correcting genetic defects, treating and preventing the spread of diseases, and faster to discover drugs.

We have developed faster communication for documents via email and instant messages so that we don’t have to wait for the mailman to receive information. But what about physical delivery of things, can we do it everywhere using any technology such as drones?
Actually, this has already been started but we need more sophisticated technology to access a larger population.

We are developing a driverless car so that we can sit back in the car and read the book while commuting to work.
How does it feel?
My daughter replied, “scary.”

We’re living in the age of coronavirus, hundreds of thousands of people are dying, people around the world are still struggling to get vaccines easily.
This pandemic showed us as proof that the importance of science and scientists in any place on earth is always in top priority for human progress.
We still don’t have vaccines for children under the age 12.
Recently we made and delivered vaccines quickly and efficiently using science as a tool for age 12 and older to prevent the pandemic.
This is one example of how great human minds work at times of crisis taking advantage of science as a tool when we are desperate to save people’s lives.
Those people who made this vaccine mission successful worked 24/7 non-stop using science as a tool and developed a new mRNA technology.
At present, vaccines for COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, are the only authorized mRNA vaccines.

Kudos to all of those great minds who contributed to make mRNA vaccines and make our lives safer.

These are only a few examples of why science is the utmost tool for any kind of technology for human progress.

“Daughter, I’m just one of the many curious minds who are dedicated to human progress through science, whatever breakthrough technology it could be,” I added.

In reality, daughter, you don’t have to worry about anything at this point.
You have to focus on the basic foundation when you are young: excellent reading skill, excellent writing skill, excellent listening power, basic fundamental science and mathematics, and most importantly a very good attitude towards a person and a thing.

The basic foundation of education provides you how to handle the aforementioned tools in life, but sharpening these tools is a never ending process. You have to do it continuously throughout your life.

You’re just 12 years old, the work you will be doing may not exist now, therefore, don’t worry about it.
Always keep looking and focus on what you really love to do. You may not know or you might not have found what actually you love to do yet.
Focus mostly on why you do your work more than what you do, because why connects you to the broader world.
Your why should be bigger than yourself because it connects the people around you.

Don’t hate people and things quickly, sometimes the person or thing that you hate the most becomes the person or thing you love the most.

As I said, don’t worry about any existing work your dad and mom are doing, they are here to solve the existing problems, you might have to be ready to solve those problems which may not exist now.
Learn as many skills as you can which help to solve human problems by creating your own unique interests.
Always remember, your why should always be bigger than your how, this allows you to find security in insecurity in your work.
You have to know the answer of your why from inside otherwise you will never understand the answer from outside.
To do this, you must have a good attitude.

Keep in mind, a lot of things that we study in school or in textbooks become out of date pretty quickly and make no relevance with a particular time.
History is a good indicator how things keep changing, and our education also follows the same.
You have to develop the problem solving attitude which is directly related to the update of what happened today, yesterday, last week, and last year.
This update is more crucial than the past history, past textbooks, and past degrees.
I’m not saying these are not important but what I’m saying is don’t put too much emphasis on them and forget the real working ground.
You’ve to learn every single day by various means until you die, this is possible only if you become interested in learning.
Remember, problem solving attitude is learning from history and connecting to the present.

If you show your frustration and disliking thinking of your dad and mom’s everyday work at this age then you might start to lower your expectations in life.
This will affect you when you face bigger human problems later in future, when you should be ready to serve the world.

Remember, your mind is limitless.

The following are my two current mental projects that I constantly discuss with my friends who are generally problem solvers in one way or another. I know there is no guarantee that we could solve them during our lifetime.
Many people debate about these things as possible or impossible, but, in my personal view, we don’t have to go to the far ends of the spectrum, who knows 50 to 100 years from now how technology evolves.
Therefore, you might have to continue to be vigilant in such problems when you or your generation grow up and possibly bring solutions during your time.
These are just two of my personal favorites I like to mention to you but there are multiple of these types of challenges we have.

Most importantly, these kinds of problems also help us to make aware about our attitude, whether we are proactive or reactive or listener or talker.

My first thought.

We always talk about the shortage of fossil fuels for the future generations. Do we really know how much solar energy from the sun is wasted every single day?
So I’m still not sure whether we have to focus on preserving fossil fuels or to develop technology to use solar energy from the sun.
We’ve learned in fundamental physics that one form of energy can be converted to another form.
Does it make sense to you?

My second thought.

We eat food, we convert food into energy and that energy moves our body and our muscles.
Plants cannot move but still change one form of energy to another form.
Leaf slug is an animal that can do photosynthesis because it eats algae having chloroplasts.
Then, why can’t we do photosynthesis?
We eat plants that contain green chlorophyll, we have carbon dioxide that we generate inside the body, we drink water, we have sunlight, we have skin with pores.
So then where is the problem?
Why can’t we convert light energy into chemical energy in our body?
Am I thinking too superficially here?

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina