My friend Adam has recently asked me: “Why don’t you introduce a Q&A (questions & answers) feature/section on your blog where readers can ask you questions about the topics you write about?”. I thought that was indeed a nice idea (Adam is always full of good ideas), so today I’m asking you:
Do you have any questions about personal development, productivity, simplicity, motivation, … etc or any topic that you want my take on? What are the major obstacles that you would like to see addressed here?
You can leave a reply here or send me an email at oscar@freestylemind.com. I prefer the latter so I can keep track easily. Feel free to ask any kind of questions, and together we can improve the quality and usefulness of this website.
Keeping focus. I like mathematics, I like finishing things, I like hard problems, I like even showing off (who doesn’t? or which blog owner doesn’t?).
But I lose focus easily, switching from calculations, thinking and working to web idling, reading online or offline, casual gaming… the usual time wasters.
Keeping focus is for me the biggest problem… How would you tackle it?
Ruben
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Thanks Ruben, and thank to all who have replied to me by email, facebook and twitter.
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Motivation. I think Ruben already said what i’d like to say but motivation is a kind of thing that deserves a little more attention in my point of view. Motivation always was a trouble thing to me. So much wasted time working on crap projects which makes me ask myself about my current occupation and if i choose the right thing.
As a software developer and a curious guy always searching for knowledge, how do you deal with such a thing tough?
Antonio Mello
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Hey Antonio, I’ll definitely write more about that.
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Mine has to do with simplicity but with a twist: I subscribe to every “get yourself together and simplify your life” blog, feed, whatever. I love getting more organized, paring down, having empty shelves and drawers. My partner is the complete opposite: piles of things everywhere, never ever getting rid of anything because “it might come in handy”, shelves and drawers overflowing. Really I want somebody to tell me how to make him more like me :-) but realistically I want somebody to tell me how to compromise when it comes to differing standards of simple living.
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For finding a compromise, the concepts expressed on the book “The power of now” might help a lot. Unfortunately it’s not easy to tell a way to change other people. The best thing you can do is show him that simplicity is having more, and that you enjoy life more in that way.
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Hey there,
me again :D question: actually i do got an really great idea, but not all the knowledge needed to acomplish the whole stuff. problem is, if this thing comes out it might be a lot of money in it and i definetly won’t give this opportunity away, so it’s got to stay a secret. but how do i still acquire all these: i mean attracting people to a project they don’t really know the goal of, but making them interested enough so they’d spend their time and work on it – without money of course. mostly: programming and graphics
example: a dynamic graphic generated through the input of some drop down menues. every option is like one graphic and depending on the choice the graphics got to be part of the genrated picture. of course with static positions.
Plus: Oscar, i love your site and i really do appreciate all the work and thoughts you’ve shared with us. keep it going and don’t feel forced to push new posts, your archive is already awesome – so take your time whenever you need to
Any ;)
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Hi Any, I do have lots of things to write, so it’s not like I’m running out of ideas, quite the opposite :D
Regarding your question, what people do in this case is get a NDA agreement between you and the service provider (the programmer for example). If you are not a technical person tough, I highly suggest partnering with someone else who is an excellent programmer. It may take months to find someone who’s willing to work with you, but it will be worth it.
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Hi Oscar,
This is Vincent from China. And I am working for a foreigner company, and doing research in the field of natural language processing (NLP). The goal of NLP is to enable computer to understand human inputted free text. It really a big challenge. Currently many researchers can only make a very slight progress in this field for a long time. This is a personal question. Do I need to persist on conducting research in this field, or just move to another area? I want to get your opinions upon my situation. Thanks,
vincent
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Hi Vincent,
I believe that’s an extremely interesting area. I think the real question is: do you like what you do? Do you get some satisfaction when you make some progress? I know that it may pass months before making any kind of progress in that field, but if you like what you do then I think you should persist, unless there’s something else that you want to do.
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