Are we really resistant from outsourcing and offshoring?

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.”
-Abraham Lincoln

My friend said, “my father recently passed away. When my father was in deathbed, he talked to my mom and me to say good-bye. My father could barely speak. I remembered, my mom was crying all the time during the entire conversation.”
“At one point my father drew me closer to him and whispered to me in my ear, “son, don’t live life like what I did. I’m telling you now, I didn’t do many things right in my life. I didn’t do many things right for your mother, your sister, your younger brother and for you. Son, promise me you won’t be outsourced or offshored like what happened to me.”

This conversation with my friend shocked me and I started to think how does anyone carry one past life experience so heavily till deathbed.
I’m still thinking is it possible to carry such a regret in life all the time.

Outsourcing and offshoring the jobs

I understand losing our job to outsourcing and offshoring is no more fun than losing it to a robot and automation in the future.
Outsourcing means a company hires a third party to do our job.
Offshoring means a company replaces us with someone else in a different country.
Offshoring currently appears the far bigger problem to many expensive countries like USA jobs.
The recent study suggests that a quarter of all jobs could be offshored in coming years.

Let’s put this into perspective why this is happening so quickly.
First of all, we are no longer in the industrial age, we are in the knowledge worker age, this will eventually bring down the industrial age workforce.
Now we have to be open to knowledge workers and their productivity and it can happen anywhere on the planet because of accessible technology.

Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of Stanford and author of “The Second Machine Age” says “how people can remain valuable knowledge workers in the new machine age are straightforward: work to improve the skills of ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication.”

I strongly recommend to watch Erik’s TedTalk “The key to growth? Race with the machines.”

When we face a challenge, we tackle it, which is called success.
And suddenly we face a new challenge but we try to tackle it in an old way which no longer works for some reason, this is called failure.
We have to understand that today’s knowledge worker age is different from past industrial age models.
This is one of the big reasons for outsourcing and offshoring which will remain prevalent in today’s knowledge worker economy.

Human beings: a combination of body, mind, heart, and spirit

Do you think that the big tech companies are spending money on machines and equipment or knowledge?
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft alone spent a combined $125 billion in R&D in 2020 and it’s increasing every year after that.
These figures are larger than the total country budget in many parts of the world.
These companies are not treating humans as machines and equipment, they are treating humans as potential knowledge power.
They are playing the game of human knowledge transfer across many fields on the planet.
If we start to think and manage people as equivalents to machines and equipment then there is a serious problem.
Human beings are not things, as Stephen Covey, the author of “The 8th Habit” said, humans are four dimensional in nature: body, mind, heart, and spirit.
The new knowledge worker age at present is emerging at a rapid pace by giving equal opportunity to each of the four dimensional human components.
They are basically the combination of four intelligences that we have: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

We have a highly productive economy with a highly productive workforce in the USA.
But our workforce isn’t productive just by virtue of everyone with a college degree, because college degrees still have many reminiscences of the industrial age.
Sixty four percent of the US population never get a college degree.
Just for the sake of information, in Switzerland, this is even higher, 75 percent don’t have a college degree, yet they are far more productive on average than USA workers.
So, somewhere something needs to be re-evaluated.

In the recent past, a college degree was a prerequisite for employment in cutting-edge companies.
That’s no longer the case at present and probably will be more in the future because knowledge, nowadays, is found everywhere, not confined only in college classrooms.
The world has changed and is still changing.
New knowledge is being distributed globally via the internet technology, we are no longer constrained in a particular area, school, or university for specific knowledge.
We can take Harvard and MIT courses, if we want, from Kathmandu and Johannesburg at the same time.
Just check Apple, the giant trillion dollar company.
Half of its new hires haven’t graduated from college but they might have real world application knowledge or Apple trains them once they get hired.

College degree doesn’t bring success

If we go at the core of our human potential and spirit, there is certainly no college diploma needed for becoming amazingly successful.
Here are a few examples of amazingly successful people without fancy college diplomas.
Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, are the richest people on the planet as proof.
Here is another astounding list of top multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies whose founders didn’t go college or didn’t make it through.
Twitter, Fitbit, WhatsApp, WordPress, Tumblr, Square, Stripe, Spotify, Oracle, Napster, Uber, Dropbox, Virgin, Dell, DIG, IAC, just to name a few.
Many of them are top technology companies in the world and they do businesses based on knowledge workers.

The point I’m trying to make is that a college degree is not the only means to success in today’s knowledge based world.
Let’s be honest, I’m not discouraging any of you or your children from attending or finishing college.
I myself have a PhD and Ivy league training.
But what I’m saying here is my understanding based on my last 15 years of research, reading, work, visit, communication, and whole life experiences in poor, developing, and most developed countries.
My whole purpose is to change the conversation to real knowledge or education that gives real value to society rather than a diploma on the wall.

One more time, I’m not saying lightly, as I said I’m a PhD and Ivy league trainer.
I think higher education is of enormous individual and social value.
But we can receive a fine college education anywhere if we become intentional about our core career, values and success.

One more point, we can’t eat and live with the prestige of school that we attend, especially in the future, which we always emphasized in the past.
The person who stands out in the society would be irrelevant to his educational degree or background very soon.
For example, where the person went to college or, indeed, whether he or she finished college or not, those factors won’t be huge.

Highly successful people work their tails off, they learn on the work what’s required to accomplish their tasks. They think about big problems, try to solve these problems, and end up becoming very successful themselves.
Because of these traits, they make financial independence no matter what their precise educational background is.
Remember, elite Ivy League schools gather many successful people from across the globe; they rarely make people successful in their classrooms.
In many cases, connections matter in today’s interconnected world but that helps to access the first job.
But if we aren’t performing up to good standard expectations, then the Harvard or MIT sweater that we like to wear won’t save our job in the future.

Today’s knowledge world is a link of a chain

Successes are built on trust and power of knowledge transfer, but most of us think more in terms of me, my wants, my needs, my rights.
This “my” mentality doesn’t help in this global knowledge age.
Many successful businesses are run by the diverse economic rules of the global marketplace and many organizations are run by the respected cultural rules of the knowledge workplace.

We have to understand that nobody is a whole chain in today’s knowledge world.
Each one of us is a link of a chain.
But if we take away one link and the chain is broken.
You guessed it.
Core sciences and medical sciences are no more isolated sciences and are more connected to information technology.
For example, one whole body MRI powered by AI can detect early stage cancer, brain aneurysms, Alzheimer’s, visceral fat, and liver fat.
Similarly, business, finance, and accounting are equally interconnected to information science.

Software drives today’s economy and software requires very few assets to generate large income streams. Many physical assets are becoming more and more irrelevant.
Today, we need each other’s expertise to be happy, healthy, and successful in any area.
We need someone and someone needs us.
Isolated islands we’re not anymore.
To make this thing called “life” work, we gotta lean and support, relate and respond, give and take, reach out and embrace.
These all are core human values in the knowledge worker age.

Let’s just take Facebook.
Why do you think that Facebook has over 2 billion users?
Because humans are hungry for a strong sense of connection.
Unfortunately, Facebook is not meeting the need for authentic intimacy at the moment but it’s still connecting us anyway so that Facebook is growing every single day.
At the moment, the majority of people show only the best parts of their lives on Facebook.
Who knows, in the future, people might bring their real or worst parts of lives on Facebook and could be the real world education platform for many of us.
Facebook is a global tool for us, how we use it is up to us.

One more example of the knowledge world, how it is shaping us, we are learning new and new things on the web each and everyday so quickly.
I was watching a TED talk the other day from Sam Berns on you tube, I saw how life treats some of us.
Sam was born with Progeria, a rare genetic disease that speeds aging by a factor of eight.
I didn’t know about this disease at all but now I know through technology.
Progeria is triggered by a single devastating typo in our DNA code.
That one mutation floods the body with progerin, a toxic nasty protein that weakens cell nuclei.

Recently, I read a research article, again on the web, about the relationship between the brain and gut as a two way street.
I knew that, in patients with Alzheimer’s, the gut microbiome gets out of balance.
When researchers altered the diets of mice in a study, they found a dramatic reduction in amyloid, killer trash of Alzheimer’s, and neuroinflammation.
They take these bacteria from the gut, figure out which metabolites within them are useful and make them available to people.
I learn all of these from my comfy sofa, no need to go Stanford’s library or attend professor’s classroom.
This is the power of the new knowledge world, we can get whatever we want from our living room.

At present, I am also learning to meditate through an app at home.
I don’t have to walk to a meditation center, I don’t have to pay money to meditation instructors, I don’t have to drive and spend money on gasoline, but I just need internet in my phone or laptop.
Remember, meditation is an important lifestyle habit to establish.
It is a process, when our mind wanders in this busy world, we have to bring it back to our focus, that could be a word or breath, or sound but we have to bring it back over and over.

Everybody’s mind wanders, no question but only the regular practice of bringing it back, over and over, makes it powerful.
Researchers at Harvard University found that meditation alone can change the expression of genes that regulate inflammation, programmed cell death called apoptosis, and oxidative stress in only a few weeks.
Many studies have shown that our brain waves become more coherent when we meditate.
It increases the gray matter in the frontal cortex of the brain which is related to working memory and executing decision making.

Conclusion

Here is a small snapshot of how we can become resistant proof of outsourcing and offshoring.
Let’s say you are happily working as a financial manager.
Ask yourself the basic question.
Do I still enjoy my quiet and sober clients?
If the answer is no, increase the knowledge in other occupational areas, otherwise digital advisors will replace you soon.
If the answer is yes, study the global financial market.
Who knows, maybe the financial business in India could use your service.

One final note, I would like to add.
All of these founders or CEO’s of these multi-million or multi-billion dollar companies that I mentioned above who don’t have college diplomas know the value of real knowledge.
They read a lot, they experiment a lot, they research tremendously.
And almost all of them meditate so that they remain focused to solve our problems to make our lives easier, and eventually we make them amazingly successful financially.
If we don’t want to be outsourced and offshored then let’s learn a little bit from them and be a value creator.

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

How did I start to live a life with intention not by default?

“Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others’ choices make us.”
– Richie Norton

Many years ago, I was with my wife in a mall to buy a wool coat to escape the winter in Columbus, Ohio.
My wife asked me, “Is that wool coat really worth $100?”
“If you decide to buy it, the answer is yes; If you decide not to buy it, the answer is no,” I replied.
“Your decision is based on your feelings about the coat, its price, and the money that you have at the moment. You make the decision by incorporating your feelings and these other factors about the coat,” I added.

Whether or not we’re conscious of it, we compare our precise benefit of anything from owning it with its price.
We always seek a balance of a few factors to make a decision which is beneficial for us.
And we come up with anything’s value to us by posing a simple question.
What’s the most I’d pay for it?
When valuing anything in life, the question turns into: what’s the most I’d pay for it?
We make decisions by being really intentional.

Intention is precursor for joy and growth mindset

Intention is a precursor for our actions.
It means we only ever take action on things that we believe bring us joy and satisfaction.
Actions means taking risks, there are many types of risks in life.
I have gone through many of these, bigger or smaller, and I’m pretty sure you have also gone through many of these.
Sometimes, we fail, sometimes, we succeed, but always learning and moving.
When we start to live with intention, we start to enjoy our life, at this point, the lines between work and play begin to blur.
We start to do what we love and we start to love what we do.
Everything becomes a learning experience and a part of lifestyle.
This is not only my experience between work and play but also from many other happy people around the world.

Strengthening our capacities in life is a continuous process.
It’s a practice, not a one time and done deal.
We can always revisit, refresh and retune, if we have intention, and there will not be a pop quiz next month or next year like what we did in the school.
At the end of the day, it’s not just about learning how to be better at something that we are working on.
It’s all about building our sense of what’s possible and bringing it into our sharp mental focus.
It’s all about changing ourselves from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and understanding that we can always expand our capacity, no matter what.

Dr. Carol S. Dweck, PhD, Stanford Professor and author of “Mindset” says, “People with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower.”

Dr. Dweck’s TedTalk “The power of believing that you can improve” is around the research of fostering success.

When we start to live with intention, by doing some internal homework as I told in my wife’s coat purchasing process, it’s about knowing and trusting ourselves better, and valuing things properly.

In most cases our life goals change every five years on average.
Remember, life is the thing that always seeks intention and happens between our goals in different stages.
The specific steps on our predetermined goals might look different, depending on what we’ve been taught primarily on how to see “success”.
But whether the steps are high school, college, grad school, beginning career, better career, settling down, getting engaged, getting married, having kids, getting early retirement, or fishing in Thailand during retirement, there’s always something laid out.

Micro moments and compounding effect

This is all about being proactive and intentional.
Even as we’re working to achieve small things like getting kids ready for school, or cleaning the bathtub, or saving a little bit extra money for house downpayment or taking a course for weight loss program.
We still have to go through an intentional life one moment at a time, these everyday moments which look mundane but are what make memories in life.
These are nothing but the micro moments of positivity with intention.
Small changes with intention are the beauty of life that are sustainable which for most of us does not cost even a penny.

Let’s take one example of how small things accumulate over time.
The average person eats approximately one ton of food in a year.
If we think about sitting down to eat a ton of food, there is no way it’s going to happen all at once.
But bit by bit or piece by piece or meal by meal, by eating food every day for 365 days in a row, we can eat one ton without even imagining the final amount.
This is compounding and compounding is a macro effect.
Compounding happens faster if we start to live a life with intention, not only in money, in everything, the only thing that makes it very special is our awareness that compounding is playing a profound effect in our lives.

Darren Hardy, business leader and the author of “The Compound Effect” says “success does not come from radical shifts or big breakthroughs but from the accumulation of small choices and behaviors compounded over time.”

Life by default doesn’t bring joy, stability, and freedom

As we realize, life with intention serves three core purposes- joy, stability, freedom.
When we rely on only past life stories without questioning them, we aren’t making our highest and best decisions.
We’re not making decisions at all, not really. We’re living by default.
And default life is not a life actually, it is just an automation without any joy.
And, no one lives their best life by default.
Do you?
I don’t.
We have to live with intention, not by default.
Because we only get one life to live, we have so many aspirations to fulfill.

Then why don’t we go to seek joy, stability, and freedom?
Because, we have beliefs and attitudes that have developed over time inside us.
The experiences of growing up with our parents, our friends, our community is rooted with us.
Many things that were taught by parents, teachers, friends, community, and things that we learned through personal experience are with us.
We still have an echo of “you can’t do that from our uncle” when we were 12 years old.
Something happens good or bad, and it becomes incorporated into how we see the world.
It’s all wrapped up together into a mental pattern that influences how we think and act about everything in life.
But the reality is everything can be changed gradually, if we start to live with intention, one step at a time.

Our path to a life with intention is open and out there, it doesn’t have traffic signals, but only we can drive it. No one else can or will drive it for us.
If we want to raise the odds of living with our dreams, then we have to design our life with intention.
And only then will whatever tools we have for us will truly serve us in creating joy and freedom.

As I said, life with intention is a pure independent life.
If we don’t live our life with intention then we start to live in excess.
In reality, excess of anything can be a problem, a long lasting problem.
It doesn’t matter if it’s money, or sex, or alcohol, or drugs, or facebook, or parties, or rice, or broccoli, or sugar, or exercise.
Even excess water can kill us.
Even excess exercise can kill us.
Even excess broccoli can kill us.
Everything in life is designed for intention, because everything requires balance and balance is achieved by intention.
Used smartly, as a tool, intention is a vital resource, an essential component for survival.

How far we go in life depends on how soft and tender we are with the young.
How compassionate we are with the old, how sympathetic we are with the suffering, and how tolerant we are of the weak and strong.
Because in life with intention, we have to go through all of these, it’s just a matter of time.

Awareness of bigger picture is intention

Let’s take one example related to health of how things are interrelated and why we need intention in life.
This is from Dr. Michael P. O’Leary, professor of surgery, Harvard Medical School.
Blood vessel problems are the leading cause of erectile dysfunction.
Erections serve as a barometer for overall health and it can be an early warning sign of trouble in the heart or elsewhere.
Erectile dysfunction affects more than 18 million men.
Over half of men with type 2 diabetes also have erectile dysfunction.
In reality, men with erectile dysfunction have higher risks of having heart disease, memory loss, dementia, or stroke as their arteries are often clogged throughout the body.
So the fundamental question is almost everybody with the problem goes to a doctor to treat only erectile dysfunction.
Why?
Because they are not aware of what’s going on, they are not aware of power of simple exercise in life. Awareness is a synonym of intention.

In reality, the same biological mechanisms that control blood flow to our brain and to our heart also control blood flow to our sexual organs.
There is a word called “macro”-that means we always have to look for the bigger picture, the truth is we are just a dot of a bigger picture.
The bigger picture at this time is the whole body, the machine, and whole body mechanism.
If we don’t want to be aware of what’s going on in our body in today’s technological age then we are not living with intention.
Remember, most of us aren’t trained to live with intention because it needs a little bit of extra effort.

Let’s take another example which is also related to health and diet.
I learned this late in my life when I started to live with intention.
I learned that we need to be healthy in life, and good health doesn’t come free, we have to be intentional on what we do and what we eat.
But I also learned that we don’t have to go too far to seek a healthy life, it’s again awareness.
It’s about building our sense of what’s true and bringing it into our sharp focus for our benefit.

A lot of people, especially Asian people, don’t see the benefit and value of our everyday food, rice and beans.
They always look for something exotic food outside where they see value.
Here is the hidden truth.
There are 22 aminoacids.
Out of 22, 9 amino acids are essential, our body cannot make, we have to eat as diets.
Out of 9, 3 are kind of not available everywhere: they are lysine, tryptophan, and methionine; but rest are found in many different foods that we eat everyday.
Legumes like beans are high in lysine but low in tryptophan and methionine.
Grains like rice are high in tryptophan and methionine but low in lysine.
Look at the meal that we eat everyday of rice and beans- you got the point, it is ideal if we broaden our horizon of understanding at a macro level.
But, of course, we have to eat it in balance.

If anybody says meat is required instead of rice and beans for strength, remind the person with the elephant.
The elephant is vegetarian.
I am bringing these examples just to show you the macro picture of life, if we really want to live with intention.

Conclusion

If we become too much intentional, it might be harmful, we always seek balance: good intention and easy approach.
What is your understanding of stress in your life?
We have to find the right balance of stress in life.
We, of course, need enough stress but not too much like a guitar string.
If it’s too loose, there is no music, if it’s too tight, it breaks, and there is no music.

When stress becomes chronic, out of balance, it increases inflammation in our brain which exacerbates depression.
Once we’re depressed, our immune system is also depressed.
Keep in mind, chronic stress shortens our telomeres.
Telomeres are the ends of our chromosomes that regulate cellular aging.
When our telomeres get shorter, our lives get shorter.
Chronic stress also adversely affects our gene expression and has a harmful impact on the balance of the trillions of cells in our microbiome.
Again, we have to live with intention but not with over intention, otherwise, our guitar string will break.

There is a basic truth about a life with intention.
If you go only to other people’s carved path based on their mission then only they will enjoy the ride, not you, so live with intention.
We need intention because it creates macro understanding and that brings balance in life and that ultimately provides happiness, health, and prosperity.
Remember, we only get one life, so live with intention, enjoy the present and look forward to the future.

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

Are you a value creator CEO of the 21st century or just a classic CEO of the past?

“Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Few years ago, I was in my home country to visit my family.
I met the CEO of a startup company in the USA on one occasion, as he said, he was there for vacation with his family.
I asked, “How long is your vacation?”
He said, “four months.”
“What?” I was shocked.
His plan of scaling the various peaks and embarking on treks within the Himalayas in Nepal was monumental.

If you ask many people how they can increase their results in life, they’ll tell you by working more.
By hearing this new CEO’s vacation plan, I realized that either I’m not understanding something or there is a huge problem with us.
I’ve seen some of the ultra-performers statement that more work will not necessarily increase more results.
Ultra-performers mostly say that more of the same usually results in more of the same, when what we actually want is better than what we already have.
I learned from this new CEO that effectiveness wins over effort and we eventually lose if we start to do a lot of things instead of the right things.

Richard Koch, the author of “The 80/20 Principle” says “how we can achieve much more with much less effort, time, and resources, simply by identifying and focusing our efforts on the 20 percent that really counts.”

During our conversation I said, “I’ve read your book. You say that you want to add value to people’s lives through sustaining innovation, but that’s not easy in my home country.
People don’t trust business people and entrepreneurs.
General public has a good reason for this: they say business people, especially classic business people are corrupt, don’t add value to other people’s lives here.”
Then I added, “I’m sure and hopeful that you can help them in some ways.”
In the meantime, I asked him, “what does your company do?”
He said, “we are developing a drink which can replace the sugary coke type of drinks that people can enjoy without much concern about their health status.”
“Awesome.”
“What inspired you to start this beverage company?” I asked.
“Because my whole family is obese and diabetic. Somewhere somebody has to start because we are 21st generation people now, we can’t just sleep with coke and Mcchicken,” he added.

I said, “Maybe obesity and diabetes are in your family genes.”
He said, “nope.”
“The culprit is our daily food.”
“Remember, only in America and the most developed world, the unhealthiest foods are the tastiest, the cheapest, the large portions, the most available, and the most fun foods.”

Modern CEO and vision for future

He said that he is unconditionally convinced that the quality of any 21st and future company is a direct result of the quality of smart CEOs and the vision they pursue.
As a civilized human being on earth, the general public must focus their attention and analysis on the quality of products and services in any organization that they are using and investing in.
It is the CEO who creates the sustainable business plan that endures for the next generation, who build the processes that work, who create the technology that simplifies our lives, who execute the tasks that deliver the quality healthy products and services to ordinary people, and who determines the success or failure of a business based on the value they provide to the general public as a whole.
It’s the CEO who captures vision and resources to generate other healthier next generation people on the planet.

“People are suffering from wrong foods and wrong lifestyles, people are dying by consuming wrong and unhealthy foods.
Eventually, people will pay for brands and they will pay for quality and health, there is nothing more important than people’s health.
People will pay for their health and quality lifestyles no matter what, only time will tell them when to start.
If you go back to 30 or 40 years ago, Whole Foods was not a place to shop. Today, Whole Foods is the place to shop, it’s picking up.
Sometimes we need a little bit of a kicker and that kicker is a little bit of education,” he continued.

“Many professionals in any field still employ esoteric language to make their job appear more difficult than it is.
For example, take an investment officer, accounting should not be complex, it is the language of business.
It accounts for what a company owns and what it owes, and it helps companies keep track of the money that’s coming in and the money that’s going out.

It should be different for any 21st century CEO, don’t use esoteric language, show everybody what the product or service it provides to the public is, is it making the public more healthier or less healthier.
We need judgment to run a company as a CEO, and judgment is qualitative rather than quantitative and, most importantly, judgment can not be searched in google,” he said.

Desire, customer emotion, and its impact

Desire is a powerful emotion and many durable and valuable businesses of the past have been built upon it.

There is an article published in Harvard Business Review that tells about the new science of customer emotions for better way to drive growth and profitability.
As an example, Coca-Cola began in 1886 and has a market value of $260 billion.
Coke’s main ingredients are sugar and water, and the company has habituated consumers to believe that “coke is the pause that refreshes” and it is a “real thing”.
But in today’s world, soda and sweetened beverages are one of the main causes of inflammation in our body.
Researchers have found that sugar can also disrupt healthy functioning of the immune system by causing inflammation.
Eliminating soda from our diet is one of the quickest and simplest ways to protect the public’s health.

Not only those, many refined carbohydrates, white bread, pastries, processed meats like hot dogs and sausages, french fries, and any fried foods in general are inflammation booster foods.
So, the question is who will start and who will replace Coke, who has that responsibility for the next generation healthy society?
Mark Twain says beautifully, “it ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Remember, more than 34 million Americans have diabetes, about one in ten, and approximately 90-95 percent of them have type 2 diabetes.
We have to create a desire not to be diabetic in the 21st century and after.

As we all know, highly processed or refined carbs like white flour, white bread, and pasta are not our friends.
They behave almost like sugar in the body.
According to David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and author of “Always Hungry” “Highly processed carbohydrates are among the lowest quality components of the food supply, accounting for the majority of diet-related diseases in the United States today.”
As the new slogan goes, “sugar is a new poison.”

To a great degree, we are what we eat and what we do everyday.
Losing weight rejuvenates critical insulin-producing cells in the pancreas known as beta cells. And regenerating those cells can actually put type 2 diabetes into remission.
We have to promote healthy fats instead of coke to actually stabilize our blood sugar.
The fastest way to lower insulin levels is to substitute fat for processed carbohydrates.
But the question is how.
The biggest challenge is not how to develop these healthy food habits but how to replace these old junks which are everywhere with new healthy ones.

Convenience is value at modern time

Let’s take one simple example, how we become habituated with business.
Shoppers don’t go to Walmart because they love the experience, they go to Walmart because the company acquires everything from wine to broccoli to indoor plants to school supplies more cheaply than competitors and then passes those savings on to the customers.
Walmart sells convenience at a cheaper price so we go to Walmart.

Let’s take another example of a different company.
Google is not selling a status symbol or a fizzy drink, it’s selling a reliable search engine that consumers have become habituated to in their daily lives.
Because Google’s brand has nothing to do with creating just desire, it’s more likely to endure very long because it’s creating value to the general public’s own professions.
Because they need information for their daily work and they do it by sitting on the comfy couch in their living room.

One of the reasons I am optimistic about next generation CEOs is that they must demonstrate an ability to disrupt themselves before a competitor does.
Google should disrupt itself with driverless cars and artificial intelligence so that we can read in the car while going to the office in the 21st century.

Amazon is a leader in e-commerce and cloud computing now but it must disrupt itself for the whole food business so that we can eat healthy food and snacks at home at the price of Mcdonald’s McChicken.
By the way, McDonald’s does not only sell McChicken, it sells franchises, which is a system not a product.

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and author of “Only the Paranoid Survive” says, “there is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next performance level. Miss that moment, and you start to decline.”

Conclusion

Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy in 2017 but it doesn’t mean that parents are not buying toys for their children. Similarly, it’s not that Brick-and-mortar stores didn’t have the stuff in their store that we needed but the same stuff people started buying from Amazon without leaving their comfy couch at home.

For 21st generations, companies’ CEOs must disrupt themselves to keep obsessing over the public and putting them first for their health, healthspan, longevity, time, and fulfilling healthy lifestyles.

I was about to say goodbye and I asked the CEO of new startup company, “do you succeed in beating coca-cola?”
He said, “Everything looks like failure in the middle.
We cannot make tasty mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner without getting the kitchen messy.
Halfway through a heart surgery, the operating room looks like a battlefield of murder.
If you plan to send a rocket to space, about 95 percent of the time it becomes off-course and it fails.
But finally, all of these works give results by making mistakes and correcting them.
I’m just trying to be that CEO, that’s it.”

I noticed that the new CEO was still doing the work of creativity which is thinking at the banks of the Himalayas in Nepal, and he innovates once he goes to the USA which is doing the real work.

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

Why did I write this letter to my pessimistic ex-girlfriend?

“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.

Guilt, loss of mother, and Alzheimer’s disease

In “Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety” the author Dr. Peter R. Breggin, MD, talks about how to take back our life, get rid of negative emotions, and follow our principles to find happiness.

Dr. Breggin says, “Obeying negative legacy emotions is like feeding wild critters. They will take over and grow in power until we have unmanageable beasts trying to overwhelm us from inside our heads. We need to stop feeding the squirrels in our heads. We can start by refusing to listen or respond to them.”

My friend always felt sad about not being a good enough daughter.
I said, “Can I tell you something?”
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.
We suffer from neuroinflammation and that leads to loss of brain function.
When the aging brain is unable to drain away the unnecessary protein 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 our brain which is a center to our awareness, memory, language, and consciousness become non-functional.

Dr. Rudy Tanzi, PhD, a key expert for Alzheimer’s disease and professor of Neurology at Harvard University says, “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.”

Quality of life and sharing intimate emotions

Good health is our foundation, no question about it.
My friend was physically healthy and active but she was still missing the quality of life.
Our quality of life is based on healthy mind, healthy thinking, and our perception about it.
Quality of life means stopping whining, worrying, complaining, and regretting.
It is spending quality time with family and quality friends, one more time quality friends. We have to know the difference between friends and quality friends.
Quality 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.

Tony Robbins, a motivational speaker and author of “Life Force” says “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.”

Happy life, optimism, and future

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 of human life.
In 1347, we had the most fatal pandemic, bubonic plague, that killed around 200 million people.
Nobody found a cure of bubonic plague.
There was another pandemic in 1918, Spanish Flu, that killed at least 50 million people worldwide.
This virus is still around so we take an annual flu shot every year.
Recently, COVID-19 happened and hundreds of thousands people died but we discovered a vaccine for it in 12 months so that many of us survived.
Many advanced technologies like mRNA vaccines, high speed data connectivity, supercomputers helped to design, test, and distribute COVID-19 vaccines worldwide so that we controlled the loss of COVID-19 pretty quickly.
For this progress, big technology companies 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 technology applications are a part of our daily life around the world.
And most importantly, everyday, the use is bigger and bigger.
As a result, the majority of the world searches, shops, chats, banks, and performs many everyday activities online.
Our life has become faster and better.
Technologies have saved our time, money, and 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. We are progressing all the time.

One more snapshot regarding our health and well being.
In 1981, we paid half a million dollars for 1 GB hard drive storage.
Today, it costs us 1 cent per GB.
In 1971, Intel’s first computer chip used to cost us $1 per transistors, and there were 2300 transistors.
Today, we have Core i9 and has 7 billion transistors in less than a millionth of a penny each.
Our smart phone now is more powerful than any country’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 and exercise 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.

Conclusion

Very soon in future, we will have the ability for real time monitoring of our health from sensors in our body.
Sensor measures everything from blood glucose to blood pressure to micro RNAs that indicate an impending heart attack and the quality of our sleep, diet, and lifestyle.
All of these information will be uploaded to an AI which 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, and we are here.

This is our opportunity 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, PhD, Harvard professor and author of “Lifespan” says “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 cells, then we can do this in humans.
There is a possibility that we can reverse our age.
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.

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

Do you know the science-power behind simple exercise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Triggers for mind and habit change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science behind exercise

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heart disease and stem cells

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

Why do we get chronic disease despite adopting a healthy lifestyle?

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

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

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

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

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

Health, food and genes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data driven individualized health

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

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

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

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

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

Habits, lifestyle, and quality of life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

How informed are you about your body?

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

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

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

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

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

Negligence on body and health

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

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

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

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

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

Complex picture of body and our awareness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

What did you learn from your most painful life experience?

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”    -Victor Frankl

In 2021, I was running a half-marathon in Milwaukee.

I met a fellow runner, we chatted and introduced each other.

He said he was running many 5ks and 10ks the previous year.

Unfortunately, on half-marathon day, I saw him throwing up blood stains.

I asked him, “do you have liver problems? I’m also seeing your eyes and face yellow.”

He said, “I don’t know.”

In the meantime, one of the volunteers came up and drove him to the local hospital.

Doctors found he has high liver enzyme but they couldn’t figure out the reason for it.

Later, I came to know he was moved to the bigger hospital at Chicago, where he was diagnosed with Wilson’s disease associated with hepatitis C.

Wilson disease is a rare autoimmune blood disorder that causes copper to accumulate in the body.

His liver was damaged badly and lungs were filled with a lot of fluid.

Almost two and half years after that incident, we met again in the runner’s club and he recalled and shared some of his past experiences.

He said, “I was only a few moments away from death many times in my past life.”

But fortunately, after his liver transplant, though it wasn’t easy, he got a new life.

Now he has a beautiful family, a loving wife and a healthy daughter around him.

He is doing well, he owns a used car dealership in the suburb of Milwaukee.

He said, “I’m making great progress in my life.”

Progress and meaning of life

I asked him what is progress for you?

He said, “At this stage in my life, my definition of progress is little different, if my daughter is doing better than me, then that is progress. The difference between success and failure for me is the difference between a life of joy and a life of stress. 

In his words, the gap between joy and stress indicates how well we manage the challenge of making a meaning in our life. 

“I always had linear expectations in my life but I always ended with nonlinear realities,” he said.

He was coming with the expectation to finish the half-marathon that day but ended up in hospital bed after not even finishing two miles. 

“I had an unusual life throughout my past, I always had recurrent health problems,  I always suffered,” he added.

Dr. Viktor Frankl, MD, PhD, the father of the modern meaning movement and an author of “Man’s Search for Meaning” says, “you don’t have to suffer to learn, but if you don’t learn from suffering then your life becomes truly meaningless.” 

As we all know, merely understanding our core life problem, whatever it is, even if we can’t do anything about it, gives us a sense of control and sense of satisfaction. 

By forcing ourselves to learn what’s happening to our life, we come to accept the reality, the reality of the problem. 

We become a catalyst in our own thinking and move towards the solution.

Current jobs and toxic environment

In our conversation, he said that he changed seven jobs in his career.

In his last job, he had five reorgs, four bosses, four moves, one failed marriage, and five years later he had his own car dealership.

“One influential thing I learned from my weak health is I created love for social and cultural overlap in our society, I developed a strong sense of empathy, kindness, and belonging around me so that my desire really sharpened to respect differences in our society.

I guess that’s what I was looking for in my life. 

The essence of being me is shared emotions, connections and respect around us,” he said. 

One day on his last job, he walked home to his one bedroom apartment and reviewed all credit cards, wondering how he could cut expenses. 

He reviewed everything including his savings, possessions, and all the holes for expenses.

He figured out he could disconnect cable, phone, netflix, and use free channels and pre-paid phones.

He stopped eating out, and buying clothes, shoes, and any other extra things.

He finally calculated he could survive for fifteen months from his savings.

Next day he walked into his very toxic boss’s office and quit on the spot.

“How did you get the courage to do that?” I asked.

He answered, “The pain of staying with toxicity was greater than the pain of leaving the toxicity.

We live in a time when most of our circumstances in life start with I not we. I have to start somewhere.”

A relationship with our boss is toxic if our well-being and dignity is threatened and we suffer emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.

“Belonging is a strong feeling which I never had in my last job. Belonging comes from developing and maintaining close relationships either with family members, friends, coworkers, or bosses,” he said.

Personality and a right job

Harvard study has found that the only thing that really matters in life is your relationship to other people.

Charles Duhigg, an author of “Supercommunicators” says, “ With the right tools, we can make relationships with anyone.”

If we feel disconnected with other people then it hurts our dignity.

He left the job because he was disconnected and found no value in the working place.

“I’m not saying everyone should quit their job and have their own business, you can be a great employee but the job you do must match with your personality, vision, and integrity,” he said.

“We must create the personality of passion and commitment for what we do, we should always enjoy what we perform. 

If you think your personality and work environment are out of sync and chaotic, don’t waste time to change the system. 

It takes a very long time to change the system and people and there is a high chance you’ll be unsuccessful.

Instead just quit it and move forward with your life,” he added.

“Of course, we have to accept that many short twists happen in everybody’s life, the only thing we have to do is step back and take a different path,” he continued. 

Our life experiences provide a period of self-reflection and personal re-evaluation for every one of us. 

By doing so we remain in motion with a series of reverberations that allows us to revisit our own identity.

This helps to force in our mind to ask what we generally don’t ask.

We often don’t ask what it is that gives us meaning and how that influences our life.

Self reflection, power and life investment

Self-reflection is a vigorous power, it is an introspection.

It is a mental strength to do good. 

There are blessed people whose self-reflection do a lot of good things in society.

Obviously, greater the self-reflection greater the power.

Self-reflection is a tool to provide a path so that we can think properly in both personal and professional life.

A saying of Aristotle and his student Thomas Jefferson, ‘the pursuit of happiness’ has to do with an internal journey of learning to know ourselves and an external journey of service to others.

In reality, this journey is nothing but self-reflection.

Interestingly, self-reflection habit comes only after painful life experiences.

But whatever is the source, it helps us to pinpoint where and how to invest our time, money, and effort for the rest of our life.

In life, there are not many places we can invest. 

The first place to invest is education. 

We can invest in our own education or in the education of our children or grandchildren or in the education of children whose family cannot afford.

Investment choice also depends on in which stage we are in life.

My friend studied a lot and became educated from his many jobs for how to be a small business owner and became an owner of a car dealership.

From his childhood, as he said, he was a fan of different cars.

He enjoyed cars from different perspectives, that’s what he chose to do in his later part of his life and opened a car dealership business.

Experience and life lessons taught him what he wants to do for the rest of his life. 

He said he is expanding his car business in different locations outside Milwaukee.

“Education could be formal or informal, both have the potential to increase one’s power to lead a fulfilling life with freedom of choice” he said.

He was always worried his whole life due to his poor health condition.

Therefore, for him, the second best investment in life is staying in good health by adopting a healthy lifestyle, especially food and exercise habits.

There is only one life, and the most priceless thing in life is good health.

Conclusion

As my friend said, the value for good health and education can not be measured, these two investments in life can affect our life in a lot of different ways.

Sadly, oftentimes, the value of these two investments we come to know late in life once time passes and we have either little or no time at all to restart.

In Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy theory what is above “self-actualization” is transcendence. 

We can only realize this once we move beyond ourselves to see a greater fulfillment to serve the need and hope of others.

Greater fulfillment and service to others is possible only if we become educated and healthy.

“Life is a cause, a calling, a mission, and most importantly, a transcendent commitment beyond our self-interest, ” he added.

Stay educated and stay healthy everyone.

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

If my friend can turn into an innovative engineer from suicidal thought then why can’t you?

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

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

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

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

Progress, habit of rethinking and scientist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good judgement in life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relationship between rethinking and wisdom

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

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

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

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

Important but difficult to practice

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.” 

What is your daily ritual?

“I have had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” -Mark Twain

When I visit my parents now, every morning I celebrate daily rituals with my mother.
Rituals are very normal for her: celebrate the tulsi puja in the morning, read a few pages of Gita, The holy book of Hindu, worship the sun, and repeat the same in the evening.
When it turns dark, generally after dinner, we sit in the living room area and talk about her past years growing up in Solma, Tehrathum. We talk about her schooling, household chores routine, and her interest to join a religious community recently.
My mother always say these moments in her life as listening to the voice of God but I say it is the tuning of her life to live in the moment.
She is happy in going for long periods of time in complete religious worship.

My mother, her rituals, and my rituals

When my mother was sixteen years old, she met my father, they got married, and together they created four children.
My mother has studied up to grade six formally but she can read fluently and write in moderation in our native language.
My mother and father had an amazing relationship, but through it all they maintained a deeper connection to their god.
It wasn’t always fun, there were a lot of problems and scarcities in the family, I saw them growing up but my mother was good at living in the moment to cherish what she had.
I learned the lesson: cherish what you have, live in the moment and move forward.

It all sums up with Ernest Holm Svendsen, the author of “How to Live in the Now” says “This moment is it. It is everything. It is all there is, and the solution to any difficulty in your life is to be found here and here alone.”

I am sharing my mother’s story with you because her story might not be similar to your mother’s story but it reminds you your story.
Happiness and satisfaction always comes from the connections we build around our family.
Ritual is what binds a family together.
Ritual is what makes a family differentiated, unique, and memorable.
We each nurture an essential quality that evolves with sharing and listening to the rituals.
When we have rituals in the family, we pass on to our future generations, that help them to live their lives with conviction.

When I was in high school working on the farm, I used to daydream about the things that I didn’t have.
I didn’t know then but I know now, that was my ritual without me knowing.
Even daydreaming during that time inspired me because I didn’t have an electronic gadget then like today’s smartphone in my fingertip.
It doesn’t really matter what we do and what we achieve in life, if we don’t live with our rituals everyday, life becomes complex.
Once we adopt ritual, we don’t worry much about the past, and not much time worrying about the future too.
In other words, staying in the present is the way to live, cultivating the focus on the here and now and avoiding unnecessary concerns about the future.

Michael Norton, PhD, Harvard professor and author of “The Ritual Effect” says ” All intention-filled acts that drive human behavior are rituals and create surprising satisfaction and enjoyment.”

Ritual is living in the moment that just proliferates us in many directions.
When we live in the moment, we broaden our thinking, we see the world in different eyes.
At least, I view the world this way.
Sometimes, I used to think and still feel that I couldn’t become wealthy by this time, probably, one of my regrets occasionally appears inside me. But after reading Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness” I realized why I should be happy even though I am not wealthy.
Because I am living with my rituals, and in the moment now.

Wealth, gratitude, and dissatisfaction

I had won little money in the past which was twice as sweet as the money that I earned.
I thought I could be wealthy.
But I also lost that won money immediately.
After certain times, I felt that money has a way of creating stress when there is no harmony how it comes and goes through my life.
I realized that it doesn’t matter how much I make or how much I spend, I must maintain good relationship with it.
If money creates only stress and takes my energy, then I must stop stressing about more money, I must live in the moment.

I remember David Rubenstein’s advice, an author of “How to Invest“, “find areas outside of investing that can enable you to broaden your scope as a human, and experience things other than the pursuit of money and professional success.”
I still don’t understand how to apply this in real life.

In the moment of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, I envision the world with my thoughts and gratitude.
I think about one billion people even today struggle everyday to find clean water, they work all day just to eat a meal at night.
There are another one billion people with an income that fulfills for most of life’s necessities.
Probably, I am in that category now.
And the remaining 6 billion are struggling to make the transition to get clean water to fulfill life’s necessities.

As I learnt from my mother, living in the moment gives us very different things about why we should enjoy what we have.
Let’s see the operation, how our mind works.
First we want to get clean water.
After this, we want to get nearby clean water.
After this, we want to get clean water at home.
After this, we want to get hot water for showers at home.
After this, we want to get hot water for showers attached in our bedroom.
The essence is that the pursuit of a better life will never end.
It keeps moving, this is another reason, living in the moment is so crucial.

The great enemy of our truth is not lie.
It’s dissatisfaction inside us.
Generally dissatisfactions are persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
The only way dissatisfactions will settle once we start to live in the moment.

Start something as a ritual

One of the ways to live in the moment is to make something a ritual in our life.
For anything we do or want to build, we have to start somewhere.
We have to make it our one ritual.
Just start and see what happens.
See your internal clock that runs through your mind.
Make small adjustments in your task as you progress along the way.
When we do adjustments, it inspires us to move ahead further with more refinement.

Do it again whatever time interval is suitable to you.
Do it again when you feel doing.
You may not accomplish anything substantial but you sleep well, you feel happy and satisfied. You enjoy each moment of your involvement. I’m sure you live in the moment.

Living in the moment teaches us one more thing that nobody makes a perfect thing, and you will never create a perfect thing, because it doesn’t exist.
However, the thing you create, whatever it is, will reflect the life you want to live, that is what we all want.

What matters most is creating harmony with our desire, embracing the life of abundance, and making small progress every day.
You, your family, your mundane work, your ritual. Just think.
We have to slow down our life to live in the moment.
We must celebrate our daily mundane work, the more we celebrate these works throughout the day, the more we live in the moment.

Over the last few years, one ritual I have developed is reading books that interest me beyond my profession.
Sometimes I read one page or few pages in a day, sometimes I don’t.
But I always keep the book of my interest in the house in my access, maybe in the living room or bed room or dining table, or in the bathroom.
This ritual helped me learn a lot about life and purpose.

Recently, I have been reading a book by Dr. William Li, MD, “Eat to Beat Disease” that explains about food as a medicine, and various research labs across the globe are working on it, where I found out about prostate cancer.
I found that tomatoes decrease the risk of prostate cancer by 30 percent.
I am amazed that I am a chemical scientist by training but I had no clue what tomatoes do in our body.
I knew that tomatoes contain a bioactive lycopene that inhibits angiogenesis, blood supply to cancer cells.

This is just one example of how we transform our and other people’s lives just by cherishing our mundane ritual.
One question that should continue to come up is how can the global community continue to move to the next level by nurturing a ritual.

Conclusion

I am relating one example of my family friend who is suffering from cancer now.
I came to know this when I was involved in running a campaign for awareness of cancer.
I can feel how painful this disease is.
If you have cancer, or have ever had it, what would be your ritual in life?
Of course, your number one focus would be to kill those cancer stem cells.
But how?
I know there’s no medicine that can kill cancer stem cells yet, but there are a growing number of foods, and their bioactives’ roles in our body.
Many of those bioactives of foods are being studied for their suppressive effects on cancer stem cells.
Fortunately, foods that target cancer stem cells don’t harm beneficial stem cells.
My friend’s current ritual is to read about those foods and their bioactives that might suppress the cancer stem cells.

Once we cherish our ritual, we have to learn to get in touch with the silence within ourselves, and we must know that everything in life has purpose.

One thing I learned growing up in a farming family is that there are no mistakes, coincidences, and regrets, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Just cherish those moments and move forward.

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

Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”