Hedonic Treadmill and the Chemical Orchestra
A few days back I read a nice response by a Redditor called “ExRousseauScholar” to the question “Is the hedonic treadmill actually real?” If you are not familar with the word “hedonic”, you may recognize it is related to hedonism – in short “hedonic” refers to the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment. The “Hedonic Treadmill” …
Continue reading “Hedonic Treadmill and the Chemical Orchestra”
taiji chatbot
Generative AI’s boom is unstoppable and OpenAI’s announcements this week, led me to try out a “GPT” – which is a custom program suited to a specific purpose. It was surprisingly easy to create the chatbot below. I fed a few blog posts from this site, a few good articles from elswhere about yoga and …
Continue reading “taiji chatbot”
“Sōng, Sǎn, Tōng, Kòng”
About a year ago, my taichi teacher held up a sheet of paper with 4 characters on it and pronounced the words in the title of this post. She has not revisited the page again but the first word “Song” (or “Sung”) is at the core of every class. There is enough in this one …
Continue reading ““Sōng, Sǎn, Tōng, Kòng””
Startups: Stress, exercise and adrenal exhaustion
Stress is an unfortunate by-product of startup life – both for founders and teams. Picture a small team trying to match a new product to an (often unstated) customer need. Coupled with lack of funding, lack of feedback data, competition, speed of technological change and normal life demands over long periods of time – there …
Continue reading “Startups: Stress, exercise and adrenal exhaustion”
Stretching mindlessly and mindfully
Rushing has always been my nature, and choosing startups as a career only intensified my sense of time poverty, whether real or perceived. However, I’m not alone in this. We live near Manly, and every morning the park and beach are teeming with young people who have an abundance of energy to burn. They engage …
Continue reading “Stretching mindlessly and mindfully”
Smile!
I read in a book by Steve Maxwell (a pretty well-known exercise and fitness hard-arse) a simple hack to counter workout intensity – smiling. Next time you see someone grunting or contorting their face (you know the type – jogging or riding a bicycle and looking like they are literally on the brink of death) …
Breath: a life’s work
When Nadal, Sharipova or Azarenka make those grunts and wails on the tennis court they are doing something that is evolutionarily correct. Believe it or not! Two things are happening: Most people who lift weights and probably most people in physical trades know that you exert the most power on the out breath. So these …