Journal Entry

Last week one of my co-workers decided it was time to move on.  I am not really sure all of the motivations that may have compelled him to do this.  However, I am hoping he found a better job.  He has been pretty vague about it.  Trent Pettry is the person who left he is married to one of my cousins on my mom’s side of the family.   We have worked together for a year.

My work is not hard.  However, it is stressful because there the truth is I am getting paid too much for the jobs we are doing.  We do work for a company that isn’t realistic about how much time it should take to do the work.  This company we are doing work for doesn’t care how much it costs to set up because they get re-occurring revenue.  So the under price it so the customer will buy in.  It’s a win for them and a lose for us.  Sadly,  the company I work for is desperate and willing to enter into these lopsided agreements.   So that is probably also part of why they are entering into these agreements.   Like Trent, I should find a new job.

The weather was more winter like this week.  It snowed several times.  I like the snow in March because it never sticks around for very long.  Yesterday, Saturday 3/17,  St. Patricks day.  I woke up and went to the gym about 6:30 and it was 51 degrees.  By the time I left the gym about 8:30 it was 39 degrees and driving to the library at 5:00 PM it was 34 degrees.  It snowed for most of the day, but nothing stuck.

The Jordan River open house started yesterday too.   I am looking forward that being open again.  I am hoping they will have the 5:00 AM starting sessions again.  Most of the other temples here in the Salt Lake Valley start at 6:00 so it makes it hard to get to work by 8:00 if that is all of the options.  The other smaller temples are also much busier because the Jordan River it closed.

I also felt a little sick this week and skipped a couple of days of the gym.

How to get people selfish enough to share?   Maybe this was what Adam Smith was trying to get at with the “Invisible Hand” Maybe he was trying to say was that if everyone did what was best for themselves everything for everyone would work out for the best.  However, Adam Smith wasn’t really clear on the time frame. If we are always doing what seems best for me now I may be sacrificing what is best for me in the future. Here is an example, if I do what seems best for me now buying a car because I need to get to work, but I cannot save money because of the car payment.  Then when I get older I don’t have enough money to retire and die younger because I have to continue to work.

In the United States, we want the opportunity to make stupid short-term choices the feed our greed now and we also want to be free from the long-term consequences of our poor short-term selfish choices.

I digress, it will always be able to assess the problems.  The question here is how do we change the world into making the choices that will reap the best possible life not only short-term but long-term.

This is where I/we need to focus the effort.

Without going into detail, as I look back on my life, I have often taken the easier short-term selfish approach to my decisions.  I am paying for it now with less freedom than I have ever had.  I look back and many times I thought the choices I was making were good for the long-term.  Unfortunately, they have been bad for the long-term.

It’s like saying.  I’m hungry I will eat, but then I eat too much. Now I am overweight, and I spend a lot of time exercising to lose the weight.  But the weight is not coming off.  I need to either stop eating so much or change what I eat.  My short-term choices are keeping me from the long-term freedom/consequences I want.

However, there was a time where I wasn’t eating enough in college and my testing suffered because I could not remember things well because I was malnourished in an effort to stay thin.  How can we find and maintain the balance?

If you are tired of reading stop here.  I am going to go into some theory after this which isn’t going to solve the problem but will give some better insights into what others have explored.

One view of this contrast is contained in the Douglas McGregor X and Y motivational theories.  The X theory states that people need strict supervision with penalties and rewards because they really don’t want to work.  The Y theory states that people really enjoy working and management need to let them do their jobs.

I think I am like most people, I have things I really enjoy doing that would be considered work.  However, many of those things I am either not good enough at or don’t contribute enough to society to be viewed as a job.   The first thing that comes to mind for me is Pottery.  I love to do it and I am good at it.  The first problem is that is doesn’t seem like this would be contributing much to society.  They have factories that can produce all the ceramic ware anyone would ever need.  Then on the art side.  I would have had to start ceramics as a career 30 years ago to be to the point where I could provide for a family with my ceramic skills.   I also like to do paper crafts, even less useful.

I also think we have to at least touch on Maslow’s theory of Hierarch of Needs.  This theory states that we behave differently because of the access to certain resources.  At first, we are motivated by the need to survive, then saftey, then love and belonging to a group, then esteem and then last self-actualization.

If we look at the pyramid we and think about these different levels I can see where we make bad short term choices because we have to make choices that are going to help us maintain our level.  If we feel we are going to lose a level in this hierarchy of needs I think that may be one of the contributing factors of why I make poor short-term decisions.

Proverbs 23:7

Over the years I have read several books and articles as well as listened to speakers that make reference to the idea that what we think about ourselves will have an effect on the way we perform.

Today I again found more evidence supporting this theory. In an article in the WSJ Mental Tricks of Athletic Endurance inspired by the Olympics and a book that is coming out Endure by Alex Hutchinson.

Here is an excerpt from the article.

Perhaps the most powerful and widely applicable technique for changing how your brain interprets incoming signals is to train yourself with motivational self-talk. Whether you’re conscious of it or not, you have an internal monologue running through your head during difficult tasks, and it has a measurable impact on how effortful you perceive those tasks to be. It is possible to channel that monologue in productive ways.

Many athletes consider such techniques a little hokey. My college track teammates and I laughed our way through the mandatory self-talk training we received from a well-meaning sports psychologist, figuring that if we honed our muscles and our maximum oxygen uptake sufficiently, we wouldn’t need to worry about such flimflammery.

That’s now one of my greatest competitive regrets, given the mounting evidence of self-talk’s physiological impact. A 2016 study by Stephen Cheung, an environmental physiologist and avid cyclocross competitor at Brock University in Canada, gave cyclists two weeks of self-talk training before an all-out ride in a heat chamber at 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Replacing negative thoughts like “I’m boiling” with motivational statements such as “Keep pushing, you’re doing well” boosted their time to exhaustion from eight minutes to over 11 minutes. Most tellingly, it allowed them to push their core temperatures half a degree higher, on average, before quitting.

I am reminded that I must keep up the positive inner dialog with myself. I have been trying for a few months, but I must keep it going. Mike my brother is trying to keep a positive dialog going too. Dennis my other brother is deep into a philosophy of questioning ourselves when we bring up negative thoughts.

I am also going to add a Being Thankful portion to my website.  I have heard and read a few things lately that being thankful makes us happier.

I try and post some information every Sunday.    We always end up going to bed late and then I wake up later than my usual around 5:00 AM.  Last night it was about 11:00 PM when I went to bed.  Dennis, my brother, was in town and we were staying up with him.   So I didn’t wake up until 6:30 AM.  The difficult thing with this is that Kate will wake up between 7:30 and 8:30  and then I am done with updating.   It’s 8:24 and I can hear her rustling around in the other room.

So I have to hurry.

I am teaching three classes and it takes up four evenings every week.  Hopefully, circumstances will change and I will be able to change that situation next semester.  This week in my Business 1050 class one of the readings is about how learning how to refine iron better started to accelerate technology innovation in the early 1800s.  It’s crazy how quickly things are moving forward now.

Emerson and Roman have been sick this week, probably the flu.  It’s a huge stress on Amanda as she is trying to keep everyone else from getting sick.  It’s weird because I have woken up many mornings over the last month feeling like I might be coming down with something but within a few minutes, I feel fine.

I learned about the Page action in inContact studio.  To me, it only feels about 1/4 of the way done.  Functional but not super useful.

I also remembered this week I have an educational version of a Java IDE. Hopefully, that helps me as I am trying to write stuff in Java.

Well, Kate is here to do crafts so until next week…

I am trying to think of some things I’ve learned this week.  One of them is that Java has a shortcut to the for-next loop.  I try and spend a few minutes everyday learning java.  However, I haven’t even installed an IDE.

I learned that inContact can spawn one action while waiting for another thing to happen to play hold music.   However, I haven’t actually tried it yet to see how it works.   I also discovered the program I have been using to convert CD’s to MP3 over the last 15 years can batch convert audio

The Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots – You’ll have to google the details.