Maybe it's been a while since you felt like you've had your mojo. Maybe you remember times in the past, maybe several years ago where you actually felt incredible, a lot more incredible than you do now. I feel like all of us, at some point in our lives have had little checkpoints where we remember feeling incredible. Either we were in a flow state where we were inhibited by our social anxiety, or maybe times where you just felt energetic, enthusiastic about life, and motivated to actually take constructive action. In my life, I feel like I have finally entered a period where I feel good. Most days I feel quite good, and that's sort of foreign to me. You know, I'm very prone to negative emotion, I get into my head a lot, and depression runs deep in my family. So I pay special attention to the actions that I do throughout the day, and how that affects my mental health. And recently, I've started doing a few things that have really helped me feel better, and I live my life with more energy, more enthusiasm towards my work, my personal life, and overall, it just feels better to feel this way. So hopefully through this article, if you guys are going through a rough time and you want to enter into a period of your life where you just feel better on average, you're more enthusiastic to wake up in the morning, and you wanna feel like you have your mojo back, then hopefully some of the things that I've started doing can help you as well. Feel free to experiment, take it or leave it, but this is what I've been doing to make me feel really good.So number one is very simple. Every single morning, I've been waking up at the same time every single day, and immediately I walk outside and I smell the fresh air. And bonus points if the sun is shining and you see a little bird flying by and let the hot sun beat down on your pale face. I'm talking about me of course. I have no melanin in my skin whatsoever. And if I wanna take this one step further, I'll actually go for a walk. Before I have my coffee, I'll put on my running shoes and I'll go for a walk around the block. And while this practice may sound overly simple, it's kind of a game changer for me, because I actually feel like endorphins are rushing through my body. My brain is getting flushed with positive neurochemicals. It also gives me a little window of time to not look at my phone and start thinking of the things that I can accomplish today. I can think of the people in my life that I wanna spend time with, I can think of the person that I want to be, and I can be grateful for a fresh start, a new opportunity to restore order and contribute to the world and make a difference hopefully. And this might sound super cheesy to you. I mean, it would for me, if I didn't start going on these morning walks. 'Cause when you're coed up in your house all day and you immediately jump on the internet, it's hard to have cheesy, wholesome thoughts like this. And when someone says something like this to you, you might say, "Oh that sounds overly Disney, "being thankful for a fresh start." But honestly, stepping outside of your house and getting off the internet will do that to you. You will actually start to have positive thoughts again. So first thing in the morning when you wake up, don't go on your phone, don't check Twitter. Walk outside of your room, put on some runners, go walk out your front door. You don't even need to put on shoes. Just walk out your front door, fill your lungs with that fresh, clean air. Look up at the sun, but not too long or you'll go blind, and just take a few seconds to be thankful for a fresh start and a new day. That will set the tone for the entire rest of the day, and you will never regret doing that. And that leads very well into the next thing that I've been doing, which is intentionally doing things and going places that elevate my mood. So this one sounds really obvious, but I actually don't think it is, because so often in our lives, we will do the same things every single day. We'll go to work, we'll come home, we'll sit on the computer. We tend to do the things that we've always done, and we slowly and slowly and slowly might become more cynical. We might start to think that there's no point. You know, what's the point of doing the same thing every single day, waking up and working for the same boss and the same job that you don't like? But every once in a while, your sister might text you and say, "Hey, do you wanna go for a walk on the beach shore?" And you usually say, no, 'cause your super busy, but this one time, you're like, "Okay, sure, let's do it." I haven't hung out with my sister in a long time. So you go for a walk on the beach and you look around and you say, holy smokes, the world isn't so bad. The sounds of the seagulls chirping in the air. I don't know if seagulls chirp, they kind of like squawk. You know, people are walking their dog. This attractive couple is on a very awkward first date and it's fun to people watch them. And you're getting moving, the blood is flowing, and all of a sudden this new experience gives you a fresh perspective and it elevates your mood. But it's so funny because everyone can kind of relate to this story, but then they go back to doing the same thing that they've always done, slowly becoming more cynical until they reach a breaking point and they do the that kind of thing again. But why not implement the things that make you feel good regularly into your life? Why not have a weekly schedule of going for a walk on the beachfront with your sister? Why not actually go to that book group on Friday filled with smiling faces and attractive people of your same age? And this is going to be very different for everybody. You know, what makes me feel good might not necessarily make you feel good. You know the things that kind of break up that pattern and make you kind of excited to be alive again. Make an effort to make that thing a regular part of your life, because those things are the types of things that make life worth living. So try to really evaluate in your life what are the things that make you feel inspired, invigorated, refreshed, and optimistic? I don't know what that is for you, but if there is something that comes to mind, maybe it's something that you haven't done in a long time, make an effort to make that a regular thing in your life. It will give your better thoughts, your more optimistic viewpoint some more air time, and over the course of days and week and months and years, you'll find that giving your more optimistic tendencies more air time will really benefit your mental health in the long run. Okay, so the third thing that I've been doing that has really helped me feel incredible is that I've started to put more effort into my appearance. So this is probably gonna be the most controversial one on this list. I feel like a lot of self improvement advice out there, including some I've probably given as well, has really emphasized the point that external circumstances won't necessarily make you happier. You know, if you buy a new car, you get a fancy house, you get a cool dog that, you know, people compliment you on, you know, these things won't make you a better person, especially if the desire to attain these material possessions comes from a place of insecurity. You know, if you're feeling really bad about yourself, like you have really low self-esteem and low self-worth, then buying a new shirt and spending a bunch of money on a new iPhone probably isn't gonna help you. It'll just distract you for a day. I think everyone knows this, but I think there also is something to be said about dressing in a way and presenting yourself to the world in a more dignified way, in a way that reflects your inherent dignity and worth as a person. So the clothing choices that you have and the fact that you cut your hair and trim your nails isn't necessarily what makes you have value as a person, but it sure as hell reflects it. And as we've talked about in previous articles, your subconscious is very perceptive. It's constantly evaluating other people and making judgment calls about them, but it's also doing the same thing to you. So when you wear clothes that don't fit, if you wear clothes that are extremely kind of drab and uninspiring, you're not showering, you're not trimming your beard or cutting your hair, your subconscious is picking up on these things. It is evaluating your appearance and making a judgment call of your self-worth based on that. So there's almost no avoiding it. It's an automatic mechanism. And it's almost like a chicken or the egg thing, because by getting a fresh haircut, by buying nice clothes that fit you, and by showering and taking care of yourself and appearing well in the world and orderly in the world, your subconscious does look at that and it will feel better about your self-worth. Obviously this isn't a permanent solution, but it all contributes to this feeling of dignity. Man, it really sounds like I'm just rationalizing the fact that I got some new drip recently. I don't know if you need to do this much thinking before buying new clothes, but hopefully you can see where I'm coming from. I do really believe that if you're more proud of the clothes that you put on, the haircut that you have, or the lack of hair, and just keeping shit tight against your head, I do feel like you'll go about the world in a more confident way. It's kind of like making your bed in the morning, and you can't just restore order to the whole kingdom by cleaning the foyer, but cleaning the foyer does reflect the fact that you're an orderly kingdom, or that you on an orderly kingdom or whatever. I don't know. I'm bad at allegory today. But I feel great. Okay, So the fourth thing is that I've been keeping a list to restore order. So in the notes app of my phone, I keep this list called "Things in Order," and I have a giant inventory of all of the main domains of my life that I could be restoring order to. It starts with my physical surroundings. Is my bedroom clean, is the office clean? The top floor, the main floor, the basement? How about my finances, where am I at with that? My habits, how are those? You know, my social life, my spiritual life. I really flesh out each category of my life and what criteria I would have in order for me to consider that domain relatively orderly. So this might seem kind of obsessive, and I feel like there's a self-improvement philosophy that is making its way through the internet that would be tempted. A philosophy that would be tempted. Philosophy, philosophies don't get tempted. But if you hold this philosophy, you might be tempted to say, that's self-obsessive, you're setting yourself up for misery, because that's conditional happiness. You have a big criteria of things and achievements that you have to hit before you can feel totally satisfied in life. But I think that's completely BS, because the world is always and constantly in a state of decay. If you leave things alone, things always get worse and disintegrate rather than stay the same. Some might call it entropy, some may call it the destructive nature of time, but that's just the way the world works. If you neglect taking care of your teeth, your teeth will rot right out of your skull. If you don't clean your kitchen regularly and do the dishes, a stench will start to develop and you'll attract pests. No matter how you spin it, if you're not constantly maintaining order, if you don't live your life in a mode of being that is constructive, then time will naturally destruct. But there's a silver lining to all of this, it's not so hamster wheely and fatalistic, and that silver lining is that it actually feels good to restore order in your life. So when you have this thorough list of things that you have to restore order in your life, to check those boxes feels good on the inside. It makes you feel proud of the existence that you're living. When you put your head on your pillow at night, you can say, "I put my time to good use today." And without that direction in life, without that game plan of what you're actually doing in the present moment and what you're working towards, then by definition, you're directionless, which is kind of synonymous with meaninglessness. Directionless? Meaningless? Either way, it's not good. So one of the most optimistic things that I've done recently by I far is to make this thorough list, and every single day, I try to check a box or check a fraction of a box, and just take inventory of all the things in my life that I have autonomy over, all the things that I can contribute to, and it helps me feel like I'm the master of my fate. The ironic thing is I'm actually kind of tired. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. So if my eyes are puffy and I look kind of miserable, it kind of totally goes against this whole message. You might be reading this article and be like, "Joey says he's okay, "but he doesn't look okay." But I feel great. So the final thing on this list is a no brainer thing, but it absolutely has to be covered, because it's probably the most important thing. You just heard it a million times before. Number Five is that I stop being an absolute dumb dumb with my health. There's no getting around the fact that when you start working out, when you start being active and you get the blood pumping and the iron, when you start juicing? No, don't juice. There's absolutely no getting around the fact that when you start going for runs, you start getting exercise, you feel like a Greek god. When you drink enough water, you feel like Poseidon. The monotonous things in life don't feel so drab and absolutely agonizing to get through. It's because you actually have the mental energy to get through them. So on average, save for last night obviously, I've been getting way more sleep, I've been drinking more water, I've been hitting my very specific supplement stack, which I'll go over right at the end here, I've been working out, I've been doing more cardio, I've been going outside for walks, and taking care of my health like this is the cornerstone of my mental health. You know, your physical health and your mental health are so intimately linked in ways that are beyond our understanding. So let's talk about my supplement stack. That's what everyone's probably dying to know. I kind of covered it in a previous article, but I've kind of modified it. So I am not advocating or prescribing anything to you, I'm just telling you what I take.  So it's just a very pleasant way to start my morning with the confidence that I'm giving my body all the tools that it needs nutritionally to tackle the day with energy. So if you're interested in joining me in this very simple health optimization habit that I've been partaking in for over two years now. If you like this article, make sure that you hit Like. If you hit the Like button, then it actually, the algorithm goes, "Oh, this is a good article. "I will shove this guy's bald head "into other people's homepages, helping them out," which also helps me out, so it's a win-win for everybody involved. So make sure you actually click the button, because I want you to. If you're lurking here, consider subscribing and hitting that, no, don't hit the Bell icon. You don't need any more needless notifications in your life. Yeah, just consider subscribing. It just looks good on paper, and check out the second channel. There's a lot of fun stuff on there, some family vlogs of mine if you wanna get to know me better, there's some Q&amp;A articles, and there's gonna be a lot of fun stuff, potentially even a podcast popping up on there pretty soon. And if you're on Instagram anyways, which you probably shouldn't be, because it's cancerous and brutal, but if you don't follow my advice and you still go on Instagram, then you might as well follow our Instagram, because it's probably slightly less of a waste of time than other people's Instagram. I don't know. That's a bad pitch. We just need more followers I think. But if you don't feel like following it, don't follow it. Cool, but other than that, that is all for today. Thank you so much for reading, and we'll catch you in the next article.

5 habits that make you feel incredible

s I spend some time at home with my family this Christmas season, I'm reminded yet again how quickly time flies. It's the end of the year again. Not really sure how that happened. But naturally it gets me thinking about the year I just had and whether or not I liked that year. What are some things that I did well? What are some things that I want to improve on? And do I really like the direction that my life is going in? And for the most part, probably more than any other late December pondering, that answer is yes. You know, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at right now, but it wasn't easy to get here. And I remember so many times in my life where that answer was no, where I really didn't like the person that I was when I thought about it. I really had some deep regrets about the year that I just had. I made some mistakes that I really wanted to correct. I wanted to break some bad habits. I wanted to start new habits. But the problem is it seemed like the same story every year. I didn't really know where to start. I didn't really know the secret to getting change to stick, and I'd watch YouTube articles, just like this one, trying to figure out the magic formula that will help me stick to my goals and truly start a new chapter in my life. But the bottom line is you're not gonna change a thing if you don't want to change. If you just feel like you should make a New Year's resolution, or you want to change some aspect of your life because somebody told you that it was a good idea, then you kind of defeat yourself before you even start. You need to combine a very strong will to change with a good strategy. And I can't provide you with that will, but I can provide you with a strategy. So in this article, I want to cover some things that helped me really transform my life, not in sort of an overnight kind of way, as we'll go over, but as a consistent mechanism that served me day after day. So that over the course of months, I was in a better position that I was the previous year. And these things that I'm gonna go over, don't just apply to New Year's. You might be reading this article in July. It doesn't really matter. If you have a strong feeling that there's something in particular that you want to change about your life, then hopefully some of these things that I'm gonna over will help you do just that. So the first thing is to pick one thing to focus on. It's extremely tempting to try to let your mind run irresponsibly wild with all the things that you want to change about your life, in your mental health, your physical health, your social life, blah bidy, blah bidy, blah. And this is good. This motivation and this drive to improve is extremely useful, but you should dedicate all of this emotion to changing one thing about your life. Later down the line as this thing becomes a habit, it might only take 30 days for you to have this thing locked in. Then you can think about adding more things. So what thing do you pick? Well, I think the first thing you should do is write down a list of things that you want to change about your life in several different areas and be very detailed and specific. Where do you want to be five years from now? Where do you want to be in your financial life, your social life? What do you want your mental health to be like? Be very specific about this and detailed. And if you were to boil down one of these things into a daily habit that you could implement, what would that look like? An obvious example is if you want to have some ripped beach body and have crazy muscle mass and low body fat, then obviously probably the most important thing that will help you get there is to develop a consistent gym habit. So the actionable process to achieve that hypothetical goal is to go to the gym four or five times a week, or whatever you think works for you. And once you've determined what the actionable process to achieve that eventual goal is, it's really important to reflect on whether or not you are comfortable with doing that process day after day after day. Is this something that is realistic to you? Is this something that you think you could stick to? Because this process is what you're gonna be interacting with 100% of the time. You're not gonna be interacting with the goal. Once you get there, your goal will change. The process itself is what that thing will feel like. It'll never feel like you are living that goal. You know what I'm saying? You have to learn to fall in love with the process itself. And that is possible because a lot of that satisfaction comes from the quiet understanding that you're trending your life in the direction that you want to trend it in. Part of the reason why going to the gym feels so good is because you know that going to the gym is good for you. And by going to the gym, you're becoming someone you are proud of. You are operating on a day-to-day basis as a more authentic version of yourself. And the gym specifically feels really good because of the endorphin rush and the feeling of power you get when you lift heavy weights. You know, that's a bonus. Pretty much anybody who's ever been consistent with the gym knows that they're consistent, not because they're thinking about this end goal all the time. It's just because they really like the way going to the gym makes them feel, both physically and mentally and emotionally. It's just so good for you. This is a big ad for going to the gym. If being well-read and well-versed in literature is extremely important to you, and you decide that this is the one thing that you want to work on, you want to read a book a month or whatever, then anybody who's actually been successful with that will know that the thing that kept them going wasn't this vague concept or this vague sentiment of getting smarter. They just learn to enjoy reading for what it is. The microcosm of their end goal became the enjoyable thing to interact with. So decide what exactly about your life you want to change. What does that look like specifically? Then determine what that thing looks like on a day-to-day basis. Then try to figure out whether or not you're ready to strap on the boots and do that thing every single day. Because that thing is the thing. If you can't find enjoyment and fulfillment in the daily process of getting to where you want to be in life, then not only are you probably not gonna stick with this change, but your overall just gonna live a less enjoyable life. If everything you do on a day-to-day basis is just a means to an end, then your life is just a means to an end. All right, the second point I want to make is that forcing yourself is a good thing a lot of the time. Right off the bat, you might have alarm bells going, "Joey, what about toxic hustle culture? What about getting burnt out? This toxic self-improvement is really taking over your mind, Joey." But I think that's all BS to a certain extent. Almost everything worthwhile in life requires some form of sacrifice. A lot of the time, you're not going to want to go to the gym. A lot of the time, you're not going to want to read books. You're not going to want to drink more water, or whatever the hell you decided is the best thing for you. But you should never determine the value that something has in your life before you do it. Not never. I mean, that's probably not a concrete rule. Like you shouldn't . You shouldn't just do drugs and then evaluate afterwards whether it was good for you or not. Like, you know? You can use your judgment. But we're not talking about doing crack here. We're talking about doing things that you've already determined are good for you and will help you be where you want to be in life and help you be someone you're proud of. And a lot of the times, even though these things are extremely good for you, before you do them, you're gonna have tons of this emotional and physical resistance in the way of doing that thing. And a lot of the time, these rationalizations will say stuff like, "You're getting burnt out. You need to just take a break today." But in these particular situations, what you'll find is that almost 100% of the time, if you just do the thing anyways, you'll realize that those rationalizations were bullshit. If you're super tired, you're super stressed from work, and you have this voice in your head saying, "No, you're burnt out. Just take a break. Don't pick up those sneakers and go for a run." But you do it anyways. You just go and put on your sweat pants. You put on your running shoes, and you go for a run anyways. Pretty much 100% of the time, you'll say, "Wow, I'm so glad I didn't listen to that rationalization. I feel invigorated and proud of myself because I didn't fall for that." And on that topic of burnout or feeling lethargic or depressed, it's extremely hard to feel that way by consistently taking constructive action. Far more draining on your will and your existence is the slow creep of existential dread as you sit around and do nothing and let opportunities pass you by, That's far more draining on your existence than forcing yourself to go to the gym even though you're a little tired. So use your brain. I'm not saying punish yourself for messing up or make your feet bleed and call yourself a bitch if you don't run 10 miles and take cold showers in the morning or something stupid like that. Obviously you can take it too far, but it is healthy to force yourself past the resistance and the rationalizations holding you back from doing something that you already know is good for you. And the final point I want to mention is that you can make the processes work for you. There is a way to make the processes genuinely more enjoyable, and there's a lot of methods that you can employ to make this happen. It's important to realize that you're on your own side. You don't want to punish yourself for messing up. You don't want participate in activities that you find absolutely unenjoyable to your core. There are ways to make these things that are good for you also feel good in the moment. A really good example of this is I wanted to start doing deadlifts, but I hate deadlifts. And I know that dead lifts are super good for you, and they're one of the most useful compound exercises you can implement. But I do not find any enjoyment in doing deadlifts whatsoever. I kind of have low back pain and allegedly deadlifts are supposed to help your low back pain 'cause you can strengthen your low back by doing them. But if your low back hurts so much that you can't do them anyways, I don't know. It's always just been a mess for me, but I recently discovered the hex bar. And even though the hex bar is kind of frowned upon with like powerlifting purists or whatever, who gives a shit? I tried it, and I found it so much more comfortable to do the lift. I could load up more weight on it. The weight was distributed to my hips and not to my low back off the initial pickup. And now hex bar deadlifts are a staple of my back day routine. It's something that I actually look forward to doing. Another example is reading books. Maybe you actually hate sitting down to read a book. So instead you might want to try audio books. This article is not sponsored by Audible, by the way. I've mentioned habit bunching on this channel. Maybe you want to implement a writing habit every single morning. Maybe you create a rule with yourself where you can't have your first sip of coffee unless you have written your first sentence of writing. And as you're writing, you get to enjoy this nice hot cup of coffee. Do not be afraid to modify your approach and modify the habit so that it is something that is more enjoyable to you. And if the process itself is something that you look forward to doing, then I guarantee you it'll be no problem sticking with that change for the longterm. So the bottom line is, if you want to substantially change your life in one year, take it one habit at a time. Figure out why you want to do that habit and what the end goal of that habit is. Then try to make that habit as enjoyable as possible for yourself. And once you do that, do it anyways. Regardless of what your rationalizations are, evaluate whether that thing was good for you after you do it, not before you do it. And you can start compounding this month after month. Once you have one habit locked in after one month, add a new habit the second month. And by the end of a year, you might have 12 new habits, which might be overkill at that point. You might only need a few cornerstone habits that will change your life forever. But honestly, over the course of one year, the sky is the limit. You can be in a substantially better place this time next year, if you implement this strategy, combined with your motivation and will to change. So good luck to all of you guys, no matter whether it's New Year's or July, August, September or whatever. Whenever you're reading this article, this advice applies to youThank you so much for reading. Happy New Year, and we'll catch you in the next article.

How to change your life in a year

If you're anything like me you like the idea of reading but when it actually comes time to buckle down sit on a chair pick up a book and read you have a hard time focusing let alone really enjoying it. And maybe you've thought to yourself "Well, I guess I'm just not a reader. I'm more of an action-based learner, you know, I learn by doing." But deep down you know that by not reading books you're missing out on some of the important, in depth and profound insights ever recorded. So how can people like us, people who aren't naturally bookworms, actually read books, retain their information, and actually learn to enjoy it? Well in this article I'm going over 5 powerful strategies that will help you not only read more, but find that you enjoy reading more than you ever possibly thought you ever could. Tip number one: If you want to start reading, don't overachieve. It's very easy to say "yeah I'm gonna read a book a week from now on." But your past is telling. You're not going to. So in order to break into the habit of reading, you need to set your standards almost comically low. I'm talking one page a day. Reading one page only takes about 60 seconds if you're an average-speed reader, and, well, it's an extremely easy task. But remember: It's just as easy not to do, so make sure you do it. Don't make not doing it an option. And if you want to keep reading after you've read your daily page - go for it, but the important thing is to get that one page in. Tip number two is: read before going on the internet. You don't need me to tell you that the internet is an ADHD inducing place full of cheap dopamine highs and shallow thinking. Checking your Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Reddit before reading a good book is like binge eating Skittles before tasting a fine wine. The wine will taste way worse and you'll feel too sick to drink it anyways. Point being - read books before your brain is zapped by the internet. A great way to do this, obviously, is to read first thing in the morning. Which brings me right to my next tip. Tip number three is bunch your habits. Habit bunching is when you pair an already existing habit that you enjoy doing with a habit that you're trying to work on. If it's a habit for you to drink a nice hot cup of coffee in the morning, then pair that habit with reading. An easy way to do this is to put the book you want to read next to your coffee maker in the morning so when you get up and make yourself a cup of coffee you'll see the book and you'll grab it and go. By bunching an already existing habit with one you're trying to work on, not only will it be easier to work on that new habit but the enjoyability of the first habit may even rub off on the second one. Tip number four is: Try audiobooks. Listening to audiobooks is a great way to soak in the information of a book while still being able to multitask. One of my favorite things to do, especially if I have to read a book for school, is to listen to the book while I'm working out. If you enjoy working out like I do this counts as habit bunching. My camera just overheated. Where was I. Audible is personal favorite place to get audiobooks and while the subscription isn't free. Oh yeah! So if you find yourself at about a book-a-month pace then audible's free book system pays for itself. I think that math checks out. My fifth and final tip is: Change your attitude. And this tip, while it may seem not very practical or hands on, it's probably the most important. Because if you self-identify as someone who hates reading, you're building up unnecessary mental resistance towards something you're trying to do more of. That's dumb. So if you start identifying as someone who enjoys reading, you'll break down mental barriers, and you'll find the previous four tips a lot easier to do. So there you go. Hopefully you find these tips as useful as I currently do. I used to be someone who didn't like reading... Reading is not a hard activity in and of itself because you're just kind of looking and understanding paper. But in this day and age with so many distractions, especially because of the internet - it definitely is a lot more difficult to eliminate those distractions and just focus on doing something a little slower-paced for a while. And while I'm definitely not a book worm right now, these tips definitely helped me get to a point where I'm regularly reading good books and making myself smarter and I feel a lot better because of it. If you liked this article be sure to hit that like button. If you like articles like these in general hit that subscribe button. Leave a comment because I love seeing your comments and I respond to all of them I don't know why I'm doing so many hand gestures.. Thanks for reading and we'll catch you in the next article.

How to Read When You Hate Reading - 5 Tips and Tricks

The largest region in Asia is also its least populous and speaks the fewest languages per square kilometer of anywhere outside of Antarctica. Maybe you think its very name just sounds cold, remote, bleak, but did you fail to consider that here is home to fuzzy bears? And a rich linguistic history? Today we meet, many of us for the very first time, the languages of Siberia. This world is full of languages with histories, and I'm here for that. I asked patrons to vote on unanimated geographies, areas that we haven't covered yet in an animation. The responses surprised me. See, I'd been reading in French about Bantu noun classes and now during quarantine in Spanish and English about Mayan linguistics. So the language part of my brain was unprepared when the votes swung north. Far north to the Arctic... and to Siberia. "Siberian languages". These two words aren't about a language family but a language area. So let me pocket my family trees and start by pulling out a map and thinking about the land first, then by the end we can navigate the languages of this taiga a bit more confidently. Oh, but let me turn it the way you're used to. North is up, right? So what on here counts as Siberia? Well, it's fuzzy, not just its bears, its borders. Today's lines on maps tell me this vast area is in Russia, north of Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China. Along the edges are also Korea, Japan and Alaska. The Ural Mountains draw a line at the western edge of Siberia. All the rest is bounded by ocean. Which ocean? The one to the East. And the other one to the North. But not all Siberia's water is salty. For many peoples of Siberia, life is lived along a river, including the Ob', the Yenisei, the Lena, the Amur, and the Kolyma. Let's fill in the map even more: Lake Baikal north of Mongolia, the mountainous East Siberian system, all the way to Chukotka and down to the tall active volcanoes of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The biome is largely taiga, with low precipitation. Of course it has a reputation for cold, and on that front winters do not disappoint, but summer might. Sibera is about extremes. There are towns here that sink well below freezing for five months, but then in the summer days are up in the 20s (or 70s Farenheit), winning it the award for biggest cold-to-warm swings on the planet! Here's another extreme: it's extremely sparsely populated, especially if you wander away from its southern edge. So I was unsurprised to see one linguist use a database of Earth's 7000 languages to count Siberia as "the least linguistically diverse place in the world." Nonetheless, despite first impressions, there is actually a lot of talk to talk about here. Siberia is home to some forty languages from about ten language families. Hardly a linguistic wasteland. Now, there's an old and messy distinction based on which families originate or have homelands "inside" versus "outside" of Siberia. We'll start with the larger "external" families and travel roughly west to east. First, Indo-European, from the Slavic branch: you hear Russian throughout. Now, я плохо говорю по-русски, but I can tell if you want to start reading about this area, consider brushing up on your Russian. Siberia is outside the three historical dialect areas of Russian, which all evolved out west before expanding. Siberia's Russian mainly has northern features but it might be a compromise or mix. And it's making a big impact on the other languages in Siberia. Another large language family has a long presence here: Turkic, spoken all across Siberia and in two branches. South and West, there is Kipchak, the same branch that includes Kazakh. North and East you'll find one of Siberia's most spoken languages, Sakha, part of Siberian Turkic. Historically, Old Uighur is in the same branch, and it's responsible for the script later adopted by the Mongols. So the earliest writings in the whole family are from Siberian Turkic. Another language spoken by a community of hundreds of thousands is one you'll remember from my article about Mongolic: Buryat centered around Lake Baikal. There's actually even more Mongolic spoken along both sides of the southern edge of Siberia, including Mongolian and Dagur. In my article about how Hungarian builds its long words, we panned over to meet its closest linguistic relatives living near the Ob River. These are members of the widespread Uralic family. Internal Uralic classification is a tricky topic I'm very happy to dodge this time, but to the north Nenets, Selkup and related languages belong to that same family. You'll know the outsider's name for another big family if you watched the one about the Altaic controversy. (Lots of NativLang tie-ins today, I love it!) Tungusic includes, in the south, the Jurchen tongue and its descendant Manchu, and Xibe, and Nanai along the Amur River. Up north, the Evenki and Even have been a major cultural and linguistic bridge throughout eastern Siberia. The people are famous as reindeer herders and even reindeer riders. Oh, while we're here, the creation of this autonomous area in Russia brought in a more recent Indo-European language, too, in the form of Yiddish. One more large family gets represented here. Skip to the edge of this region, and let me circle Chukotka. Right along the coast and now split between two countries the native language is Siberian Yupik, a part of Yupik-Inuit-Unangan across Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Another relative, Sirenik, lived here until the passing of its last voice in the late 1990s, dimming a source of knowledge for a language that's been hard to classify within this family. Ok. So you've met five extensive language families with some members native to Siberia. And then there are Paleo-Siberian languages, an imperfect term that groups together indigenous families entirely inside of Siberia. Typically, they have fewer speakers than in the past. Typically, just a fraction of the people speak their own language. Even so, these languages remain important to their people and continue to fascinate linguists in and outside of Siberia. The westernmost is Yeniseian, traditionally spoken along an extensive north-south stretch. Today, Ket might be its sole living descendant. Judging from comments and suggestions, the thing that interests most language enthusiasts is the proposed link between Yeniseian and Diné in the Americas. But this tongue itself is worth appreciating. It's so full of interesting features, I heard and read legends of its quirks before I knew the full story. Yukaghir is the outsider's name for a family native to lands west of Chukotka, including around the Lena River. Today there remain two languages with perhaps a few hundred speakers between them. Grammatically, it is most often called out for its unusual and far-reaching focus system, which can be a challenge for linguistic theories to explain. Nivkh is a range of dialects from the Amur River to Sakhalin. They undergo initial mutations somewhat similar to Celtic languages like Welsh and Irish. Now the Wikipedia article tells you their vowels are oddly lopsided and gappy. However, this expert disagrees: no, Nivkh vowels form a typical triangle. Consolation, though, it's one of the rare tongues where you have to tell a voiced trill r apart from a voiceless trill r̥ But their most striking feature might be their numbers, which are actually counting words that sort nouns into many, many classes. That brings us right back to the edge. Native to the whole northeastern reaches of this land, east across the peninsula to the Bering Sea, south to the Kuril Islands, is a family linguists label Chukotko-Kamchatkan. (And I want to hear you repeat that five times!) Hmm, here's something unique from Lygh'orawetl'en jilyjil, called Chukchi by outsiders: a basic noun has a reduplicated stem, while plurals and other cases use a simple stem. Yes, so, a grammatical switcheroo: more basic is more complex. And just south, at the edges there's another NativLang tie-in, the story of Ainu told last time, a language today associated with Japan, and also traditionally native to Siberia. We can keep going; there's so much more to share, from the interactions at the edges to language-nerdier questions like do we have evidence for Siberia as a unique language area? (Is there a "Siberian type" language?) But time is getting away, and animating extra minutes takes nearly as long as a Siberian winter. For now we part with a better understanding of this remote but hardly linguistically desolate part of the world, its people and its languages. I hope you are well and stay well. Stick around and subscribe for language.

The Languages of Siberia

Like in the upper 99.9th percentile of likability. These are the types of people who, when you talk to them, you feel understood. You feel like they're really listening, they value you as a human being, and they see the best in you. No matter where these types of people go, it seems like they have friends. It seems like people tend to celebrate them and elevate them to this deity status. And it sounds kind of crazy, but that's why it's so rare. I feel like I can only name like three or four people I have ever met who fit that description. And it seems like the more likable of a person you are, the more the world opens up to you. You know, people just enjoy being around you, they always want to invite you to things, they want you to be part of their company, they give you promotions. And you can look at that and say, "Well, that's not fair, they don't deserve it. They're not more qualified than I am." But it doesn't make it any less true. The more likable a person you are, the more people like you. You know, some people are very likable and other people are very difficult to like. And the people who are likable tend to do better in almost every area of life compared to people that no one wants to be around. I've thought a lot about what makes somebody likable. What makes someone somebody that people love being around? Like, what's the common theme? And can we implement those behaviors into our own lives so that we're just generally more likable as a person? Now, right off the bat you might have some resistance towards this proposition because you might be thinking like, "Oh, why would you want to be more likable? Why would you worry so much about what other people think of you? You're focusing on the wrong thing. You should focus on yourself, your own happiness, and then people who don't like it can screw it off." But I think that's overly simplistic and foolish, and if you think that way you're not gonna get very far in life, especially if you already struggle with people and you think that, oh, just being more of yourself is gonna help for some reason. It's like, how has that worked out for you? How has that worked out for you? Because ultimately, we're creatures of habit. What we think is just part of our personality might just be a conversational tic or bad habit that we've picked up over conditioning, over the role that we played in our friends circle or our family, and it could actually be making us more abrasive of a person than necessary. For instance, if you struggle to make good eye contact with somebody while you're talking to them, and it's just a habit that you have, you tend to look down all the time, if I told you that if you made better eye contact with people and you got more comfortable with making eye contact with people, you're not gonna say that that is somehow a betrayal of your personality. You wouldn't say that I'm telling you to be someone that you're not. I'm not telling you to deny your god. I'm just saying that there are things that you do that make a difference in how you are perceived by others. And I believe that the most likable people just do those things better than the average person. So in this article, it's a little bit of a different article, I'm just gonna talk off the cuff about things that I've noticed about the most likable people I've ever met, and then hopefully we can try to figure out how to implement some of those behaviors and those mindsets to make us more likable and more enjoyable to be around so that we can enrich our lives and have a better time with being social and interacting with people, leaving people better off than when we found them. So the first thing that you need to do if you want to increase your likability is that you have to realize that nobody really cares about what you say more than they care about how you make them feel. How you make people feel when you're around them is the most important thing. That's the thing that leaves an impression on people. In fact, 99 times out of 100, people aren't gonna really remember the things that you said when they go home after you interacted with them. They're gonna remember how you made them feel. Good manners make good first impressions. They have a lot to do with how well people like you. - A good example of this is when somebody that you're talking to is going on a rant about all of their problems and they're really heated and pissed off and they're going on a monologue about all the terrible things that have happened to them throughout the day. And you're listening and you're kind of giving them the time of day, and then you try to offer a piece of advice or an observation or ask them a question, but they just sort of steamroll over you and disregard anything that you say to continue in their monologue. When that happens, you kind of feel dejected. You kind of stop listening to all the particulars of what they're saying, and the only thing that you're left with is this feeling that they don't really care about what you have to say. You know, they don't really care about your opinion, they don't care about you, so F this person. Every interaction that you have with somebody is like that. What people remember about you is how you made them feel. It's the vibe that you give off. Is it one that is encouraging and empowering and collaborative, reciprocal? Or do you feel kind of expendable? Like they don't really care about your unique situation, your unique perspective. They don't really care about any advice that you have to give. They might as well be ranting at a brick wall. Here's another example. Say you're a guy and you're on a date with some girl and you are talking about all these things that you think are very impressive. You're saying a lot of words. You're talking about what you do for a living. You might be saying stuff impressive, like, "Oh, I have a six-figure income, blabbity-blabbity-blah. I have three sisters, something-something-something." And then once you realize that you've been monologuing for a little bit too long, you ask routine questions to them like, "Oh, how many sisters do you have? What's your favorite color, blabbity-blabbity-blah?" You know, this goes back and forth for an hour or two, and she goes home. And while she's at home, she was thinking back on the date and she was thinking to herself, "You know, he seems like a nice guy, but I just didn't feel that spark." Like, "I didn't really feel like we had chemistry." That spark is everything. That spark is what people think of you. They don't think about all the little things you said. They don't really think about all the things that you did or what your job position is. Like. No one really cares. What they care about is that spark, and that spark is the energy you give off. How do you make that person feel when they're around you? If you're sitting there in an interaction with somebody and you are tense and you are performative, then they're going to be tense and performative as well. The most likable people on planet Earth realize this. You know, they put people at ease because they're at ease. That's what good manners do. They make everyone feel at ease. - They feel so comfortable with conversation, with eye contact, with being playful. They realize that people like you when you make them feel important and valued. That's what a boy likes. He wants to know he's appreciated. - You might hear that and say, "Okay, what am I supposed to do then? Am I supposed to just be a pushover and just never voice my opinion on things and make people feel so special and comfortable and listen to all of their problems and never talk about my problems or my life, and just be like an interviewer?" That's not what I'm saying, and that's never the way it works out, because 9 times out of 10, when you are genuinely interested in someone else and you act genuinely interested in someone else, they feel special and they end up liking you more. And when someone likes you, they're more likely to ask you questions about yourself. So it's almost like you have to give first and then receive. So another thing you might say is, "What, I'm just supposed to pretend to be interested in what they're saying? Like, that's not very genuine. I thought that good connections came from authenticity and honesty, so if I'm not honestly interested in what they have to say, then the entire friendship is built on a facade." But here's a weird thing that I've noticed, is it's almost paradoxical because the people who are most comfortable with who they are and the life that they live are usually the people who are least desperate to talk about themselves. Because think about it. If you're insecure and you don't like your life, then everything that you say about your life or your job position or what you tend to do on Saturdays, you're subconsciously hoping that the other person says, "Oh, that's really cool. Oh, wow." Like you want so desperately for someone to say, "Wow, you make six figures. Oh, that's such an interesting job. That's amazing." But think about it. Everyone thinks like you. Most people are insecure, so if you are that for people, if you're the person who says, "Oh, wow, that's super interesting, tell me about that," people say, "Oh my goodness! Let me tell you about it. This is awesome. Someone's listening." People are dying to be listened to. People are dying to be called by their name, to be looked at in the eye, to feel like, "Man, I don't know if that guy really cares about me, but I sure felt like he did and that makes me feel good about myself." That's the key to likability. So I think it all boils down to a few things. If you want to be the most likable person that you can be, the most likable version of yourself, then firstly, you have to live a life that you like. The more you're interested in the world around you, the more interesting you become. - You have to find yourself likable. You have to admire the things that you do on a day-to-day basis, or at least not actively participate in something that ruins your opinion of yourself. Because if you dislike yourself, then curiosity in other people is hard to come by. You can't afford to be curious about other people because you need their validation. You need them to validate you. But people who are secure in themselves and their lifestyle will find that, oh, they don't necessarily need people to comment on their life because they like their life, so then they can actually have fun with conversation and ask questions that they find interesting and be interested in the other person. And as a result of that, the people that you're listening to will say, "Wow I like this person. I want to ask them questions about their life," and then that's when that reciprocity can get going. Those are just some thoughts that I've had. The people that I think are the most likable in life not only like themselves, or at least carry themselves like somebody that they admire, they treat themselves with respect. But because of this, they're able to go into a room and not be desperate for other people's approval. They can sit there very comfortably and easily ask people follow up questions about their life and be genuinely curious because there's a lot to learn from people. There's a lot of things that people have gone through that you can't imagine and that are genuinely interesting, and they can't wait to tell you, but no one ever asks. - You know, to keep your friends, you gotta be... Gotta be pretty considerate. Look for the good in people. Give them credit for being as straight as you are. - Yeah It might work. - So yeah, let me know what you think of all that. It's a little bit more of a loose concept article. I'd be super interested in hearing what you've observed about the most likable people in your life. You know, when I say the most likable person you know, someone probably pops into your head. What makes them likable? Comment below. And if you're looking for less theoretical tips and you want step-by-step things that you can do to make you more likable. Expand your mind, learn something new, and as usual, have a great time. And if you liked this article, watch my previous article. It's not doing too well in the algorithm and I really liked that article. It meant a lot to me, and it changed a lot of people's perspective. Some people just straight up didn't get it. They're like, "You just said eight minutes of absolutely nothing." But other people are like, "Dude, this is some of the most poetic shit I've ever seen." So make up your own mind on that. Thank you so much for reading, and we'll catch you in the next article.

The secret to being more likeable

Shakespeare didn't sound like this. And he didn't sound like this either. But if you were back in 1610 and you snagged a couple front row tickets to the Globe, what kind of English would you hear? I have a confession. A tough one for a language nerd. Hhh.. here goes. I never really got into Shakespeare. I remember the theatre geeks, the girl with one hand raised, head turned, chanting lines to... whom exactly? Maybe a poetry-loving squirrel? Neh, wasn't for me. I was into legos and languages. Which is how I ended up unintentionally parsing Homer in Greek before I had to face Shakespeare. Yes, HAD to. A class assignment, I think it was the Tempest. I skimmed just enough to pass a quiz. Then I would've shelved the bard forever, but for that one stray remark. As the theatre geeks donned their best British accents, a random gadfly sneered: "Heh, you know what Shakespeare really sounded like? He sounded like us." No, what? Had I missed something about Shakespeare? Something that took linguistic detective work to solve? Something like... his poor spelling. It's there in the "Bad Quartos" secretly scribbled by some bootlegger in his audience. It's there in the Good Quartos and First Folio, too. Even on his own grave, "digg" and "frend" look almost childish. His stacked "the" and "that" keep a simplified Germanic letter, thorn. Hmm. This isn't HIS spelling. 1400. Chaucer's "Englissh" was a very readable "tonge". So readable that, 75 years later, Mr Caxton imported a printing press to cash in on that readability. But one day a merchant came to town and ordered eggs. A woman said, sorry, I speke no Frenshe. The merchant got mad. He wasn't speaking French. He just wanted some eggs. Someone jumped in to help. Oh, he means eyren! Caxton griped, "Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now write, egges or eyren?" Unleash the spelling debates! How to spell kniht when it was evolving to nite? Should correc/s/ion have a c? And why, oh WHY, did Chaucer's vowels fall apart so fast? By 1600, the ongoing Great Vowel Shift was turning iː into əi, eː became iː and oː was uː! Welcome to Early Modern English, Shakespeare's tongue. "Good Frend for Iesvs sake forbeare to digg the dvst encloased heare". Not "here". "Heare". Just one of many rhymes that, well, they aren't rhymes anymore. Pleadeth rhymed with dreadeth, her with err and one with alone. You find crɛːtərs! Rɛːzənz! "Eye" went fine with compənəi. "Should" kept its "l" and didn't match wood. Extra credit: spell two words that sound like səsəiətəi and rhyme with "variety"! Haha. You get plɛː and prɛː, and prɛː and sɛː. But then thee rhymes with sɛː. So wait, were all of these actually iː? Or maybe thee was thɛː? Hmh. Well, fortunately, we find earwitness accounts of a meet/meat merger: sea was in the process of merging with see. With caution, rhymes may even help us recover puns. Like probably "reasons" and maybe "bile". And rhythm, like those iambs my teacher made us drum out in class, those count how many syllables were in, say, "enclosed". Uh, two. Too syllables. Except here it demands three: encloasèd. Meter can also reveal stress: not house'wifery, but 'ʔɤzɪfɹəi. Ok, you're learnèd now. You see in sɛː and sɛːz a noun and verb. It's no longer strange to hear "uhy noe the raisin, lead-eye". And you can stomach the news that Shakespeare's name may have been shɛːkspiːr or shɛːkspɛːr. In 1889, Alexander Ellis added one more piece of evidence: modern dialects. Dialects contain traces of a time before English had a proper accent. People who still don't merge miːt with meːt, whiches that aren't witches, undropped r's, h-less hearts, and gerund endin's - sounds downright Shakespearean. Like some dialects still do, he used both "thou" and polite "you": thou hast, thou'rt, you have, you're. And that third-person -eth, like in "she hath", was still competing with has. And while data-crunchers deflate legends of his peerless vocabulary, he was endlessly inventive with meaning and syntax. Try out this word order: "though I with Death and with reward did threaten and encourage him not doing it and being done." Playful a tangle for audiences to untie on the spot! So, what about listening to a whole play? Linguist David Crystal tested that in a newly reconstructed Globe. Thrown back into an era of standing, heckling and OP, Original Pronunciation, playgoers detected suspicious traces of one particular dialect: their own. There's something universal about learning to pronounce. We all come as strangers to Shakespeare's sounds, whether you're a theatre geek who quotes Hamlet by heart, or you're me, who'm about to finish animating this and read it for the very first time. I thank ye patrons for unlocking this and keeping me creating. And to everyone reading: I prithee, tarry and subscribe for language.

What Shakespeare's English Sounded Like - and how we know

I've been thinking a lot recently about microcosms because recently in my own life, understanding what a microcosm is has really helped me live a better life day to day, and I really hope that if you are in a rough place, you'll consider what I'm about to say, and hopefully you can gain some new ideas so that you can trend your life in a better direction. Okay, so a microcosm is defined as a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger. Let me ask you a question. What's the difference between life and living? You know, life itself may seem like a simple enough concept because we talk about it all the time. I have a life, you have a life. It's the thing we are all a part of and all seem to have. But if I ask you to describe what your life is, it's a little bit more difficult to do so because there's so much involved in life and your life is kind of just everything that has to do with you. Your family situation growing up, your family situation right now, it might be the job that you have, the job that you want to have, your hopes and dreams for the future, your trauma and regret of the past, every idea that bounces around your skull or has bounced around in your skull. Life is everything, and since it describes everything, it also kind of describes nothing in particular. It's an all encompassing idea that is basically just a theme and a concept, something we're all familiar with but none of us truly understand. Living on the other hand is something that we experience, something that you are doing right now. Living is something you've always done and something you always will do because by definition before you were living was before you were you, and when you stop living, you will stop being you, so you and living are the same thing. You don't know what it's like to not live. In some ways though, your life and your living are not unlike each other. They both deal with similar people, places and things. They both have familiar faces, people you know and love or strongly dislike and want to avoid. Both have dealt and will deal with similar emotions, similar feelings, tendencies, actions, and reactions, but despite their commonalities, one remains a stranger, something we can only look at through abstraction, through memories we recall but can't see, and places we'll go but never be, because no matter how much we think about our life, it will never make sense to us completely. It's impossible to see it all at once. It's impossible to grasp what our life is. We only see fragments and patterns and themes and in a lot of ways, that's exactly what life is. It's a pattern of moments, strung together. It's the overarching theme of decisions that we've made in days like today, so if we take a step back and we think about our entire life and we don't like what we see, we're basically saying we don't like the pattern, we don't like the theme. If life is everything all at once and living is the day to day, then by definition, each day is a microcosm of life. Each day we live is a situation that encapsulates in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of our life, and when we start to realize this, we'll start to realize that life isn't really something we can interact with. We don't have access to our life. The only thing that we have access to is living, playing it out day by day, decision by decision, and our tendencies and our impulses to do certain things are essentially the only thing that we can influence when it comes to our existence. So what does this all mean? Well, it means that if you survey your life, you look at the direction that you're heading, you look at the things that you dislike about your life and about yourself. Maybe you don't like the fact that you never have the motivation to go to the gym or you can't seem to focus at work, and it leads to poor job performance which leads to less money, which means that you can't put food on the table. Maybe you're not proud of who you are. Maybe you don't take care of yourself. Maybe you have serious feelings of regret about things you did or didn't do in the past. Maybe you have wild uncertainty about the future or you're fairly convinced that there is no future for you. Well, these things are all life things, but you don't experience life. You experience living. Living is confined by constant beginnings and ends, sunrise, sunset, again and again and again. You are living right now and it's all you've been doing, so if there are things that you don't like about your life then the only thing you can do to change them is to change the way you live today. Maybe you're thinking I need to quit smoking, and one day I'm gonna quit smoking for the rest of my life, and I'm gonna live the rest of my life free from this nasty habit, and I'm gonna be happy and healthy all the live long day as if that's somehow different than not smoking today, 'cause each time we wake up, we're confronted with an opportunity to echo the familiar motif that's become the central theme, or we can realize that our entire life is crafted in moments like these, so are we gonna continue to water the same tree or are we gonna plant a new seed?Thank you so much for reading and I'll catch you in the next article.

What to do if you hate your life

You already know that the word "language" refers to our ability to communicate with speech. But we saw that what exactly that ability is, turned out to be quite a quagmire. So now let's turn to the other thing we mean by "language" - you know, the specific languages we speak with their own words, their own grammar and their own pronunciation. I mean, English is a language, right? And this is English! But so is this. And back in time, this was English. Even further back, but we call this English, too. Wait, I get it. This is Old English, and this one is Middle English, and this is Modern English. So are these three languages or three different stages of the same language? But I know, history's always messier than we want it to be. So let's just stick to the present. Here are some basic words in English. And these are the same words in a totally different dialect of English. They're two dialects because, if the same language gets spoken in different ways by different groups of people, we call those different dialects. Moving on, let's translate those words into Norwegian (the Norwegian language). And here's how we would write those same words in Swedish (the Swedish language). So, Swedish and Norwegian are different languages, but British and Scottish are different dialects of the same language? Where's the line between a dialect and a language anyway? Is it just arbitrary or conventional? Maybe in the end it really is buttoned up by a phrase Max Weinreich passed along. During a lecture series he gave in the 1940s, a member of his audience made the witty remark, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." If that's so, it's about politics and power just as much as it's about grammar. Language vs. languages, languages vs. dialects... oh, what a mess I've dragged you into! And with that, I welcome you to my YouTube channel. Subscribe if you want to learn more, because from the looks of it we've seriously got some stuff to sort out together.

Where's the line between a dialect and a language? -- Linguistics 101

- When we think about our life, we usually think about it in a form of a story. (slow music) First we were born and then we did some things and made some memories and now we're here and we work at our job or whatever. But in the future we plan on doing more things, seeing the world maybe and saving up enough money for a enjoyable retirement. We all tend to view our lives in a sort of narrative structure like this, with the beginning, a middle and an eventual end. Which kinda makes sense because by reflecting on the past, it helps us make sense of where we are now and by having hopes and dreams for the future, it gives us something to look forward to, something to plan towards and if we currently don't like our present situation, we can place our pains and frustrations on the hope of a better tomorrow. But if you think about what it feels like to actually live life, like what it feels like on a day to day basis, it feels completely different. We kinda just wake up, we feel kinda groggy, we stumble downstairs, get the coffee, hop in the shower, you get dressed before getting in the car to get that bread. And after you get that bread, you get more bread at McDonald's because you have an addiction and then you come home, usually pretty tired and you veg out and watch Netflix or whatever you do until you go to bed. This is what living life usually feels like to most people most of the time. Life in general is usually pretty normal. You do the things that you do everyday, you kinda have a routine or a pattern you stick to and life usually isn't super inspiring or mind-blowing, it's just sort of the day to day experience. But is there anything wrong with that? I mean, social media has us thinking that everyone's hanging out on yachts all the time, going on crazy adventures, trying out the 2,000 different bananas in southeast Asia and everyone's getting married to the person of their dreams, popping out the most beautiful babies. But that's not life, that's a highlight reel. And these highlights that we constantly absorb by the people we follow on Instagram or the movies we watch on Netflix, these highlights start to really influence the story we tell ourselves about our own lives. We start viewing our lives, at least our lives lived to it's fullest potential as a life with as many of these highlights in it as possible, so the days when these awesome, crazy things aren't happening, we view that as somehow suboptimal. Our amazing days become the expectation and our normal days become boring, like we're wasting our potential, we're wasting our lives away. But this story we tell ourselves, this adventure life, no one's life is like this, not Dwayne Johnson, not Elon Musk. Sure, these guys are doing some really cool, important things more often than we are but still the majority of their lives, they just sort of wake up, they do a bunch of things they don't wanna do, they're grinding it out, they're working hard, they're often really frustrated or stressed out. They still poop, they still have to eat. Most of their lives exist in this sort of day to day monotony. They're experiencing life in the exact same way that you are, except when Elon Musk is fantasizing about escaping the day to day grind and taking a vacation, instead of the Bahamas, he's thinking Mars. Assuming you get eight hours of sleep every night, which I'm sure you do, you only have about 16 hours to live because you only experience life one day at a time. That little section of time between lifting your head off the pillow and putting it back down again and all that stuff in between that seems kind of normal and kinda inconsequential, that's all life is, it's just that thing over and over and over again. And this can sound super depressing or super inspiring, depending on how you look at it. It can be depressing, obviously if you don't like those 16 hours, usually, a lot of us are slaves to our bad habits. We do things we don't want to do. We work jobs we don't really like and we're put in certain financial or social situations that we really don't like being in. So every single day, day after day is something we generally don't like doing. Which is why we fantasize about the future so much. We're still waiting to live our real lives and if this is all there is, then that's obviously super depressing. But there's a silver lining because changing your entire life isn't as big of a feat as you might think it is. Since life is lived in these little 16 hour little mini episodes, that's a very manageable amount of time to perfect. We can start to build habits that we actually enjoy doing and that are good for us and we can train ourselves to make choices that are actually aligned with our values and will help us be the person we want to be every single day. Because a good life is just a serious of good days, not necessarily days where everything went our way and nothing was difficult or stressful but days where our system was running. We gave life a good shot, we made choices that are aligned with our values and we did the little things that make us happy. Maybe that's having a good conversation with a friend or putting a little extra effort into cooking, so you eat something kinda memorable and that you're proud of, maybe that's developing one positive habit at a time so that the things that keep you grounded and happy and your mood elevated, start to become things that you do automatically. Viewing life on a micro scale like this also adds clarity to the little choices we make throughout the day. If you've always wanted to be a more social person, then that means saying yes to beers with the boys today, when you get the invitation. And if you're constantly fantasizing about being a more fit person, that means going to the gym today. Because your life is today, that's all it is. It's just today repeated. A big thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this article. One problem you might encounter when trying to start a new habit is that when you try to go from something like reading YouTube articles obsessively every single day to trying to replace that habit with reading a book, you're going from something that's super stimulating to something that's a lot slower paced and harder to do. So the transition can be pretty jarring and you might quit right away, unfortunately. A great way to counteract this problem is to take smaller steps, so go from something super stimulating, like reading articles to reading just better articles.Yeah, other than that, thank you for reading and we'll catch you in the next article.

Why your life is so boring

One of the most common problems I hear about nowadays. And I'm sure everyone else does is this feeling of being chronically tired Because sometimes it feels like no matter how much sleep you get you just can't seem to perk up, feel energetic for most of the day, every single day, so that you can tackle your day and your life with energy. You know, this lack of energy throughout the day, this chronic tiredness is something that you would expect to happen to you if you were like 60 years old, 70, 80 years old but it's happening to 20 and 30 year olds, 15 year olds young people who are supposed to have this youthful exuberance to them, but they find themselves operating in life with a sluggishness and dread. Believe me, I've been there. I've been there so many times in my life. So many times in fact, that it really caused me to dive deep and figure out what are the things that are actually going to contribute to me having more energy and how do I make those things happen every single day. And through all my research and self experimentation I've found out that the most important things are kind of the things that you hear all the time. Sleep, exercise, and diet. You might be tempted now to click away from this article because you already know this but that's exactly where I ran into problems. I was treating sleep, exercise and diet like a checklist. It's like, yeah, I get a reasonable amount of sleep. I exercise. I'm an athletic guy. Yeah, I eat food. So those things can't be the reason why I'm feeling sluggish. So I started looking for these like quick tips and maybe I was iron deficient or maybe I had a gluten sensitivity or maybe I needed to decalcify my pineal gland. I skipped over the fundamentals in search for some miracle pill that would make me less tired throughout the day. It wasn't until I revisited the basics and try to absolutely nail them that I realized that was the problem the whole time. Especially sleep. So in this article I wanna go over some things that I've implemented in my life that really has given me a lot more energy throughout the day on a consistent basis. And yeah, hopefully they work for you as well. Thing number one, I stopped misusing caffeine. Now caffeine is one of those weird ones. People think they know a lot about how caffeine works. You know, you've probably heard that caffeine lasts between five and seven hours. So, you know, don't drink too much caffeine in the afternoon, or you might not be able to fall asleep. But the weird thing about caffeine is that it lasts a lot longer than five to seven hours. The half-life of caffeine is five to seven hours. And half-life means that after five to seven hours half the caffeine is still in your system. And then it takes another five to seven hours after that for half of that amount of caffeine to leave your system. So if you have a cup of coffee at like 4:00 PM, which is, you know kind of late, but it's probably not gonna ruin your sleep or something like that. Think again, if you have coffee at 4:00 PM by 11:00 PM, there's a good chance that 50% of that caffeine is still in your system. That means by like 5:00 AM. There's a good chance that a quarter of the original 4:00 PM cup of coffee is still in your system. You know, deep into the night is when you're supposed to be having some of your deepest, most restorative sleep of your life. This is the kind of sleep that helps you form memories process the information you were bombarded with throughout the day, form connections form new ideas, so that you can be more creative. The kind of sleep that's supposed to be healing your muscle tissues, purging your body of adenosine so that you don't feel tired in the morning. There's a lot of important things that are going on while you're sleeping and your body being filled with this caffeine is seriously inhibiting those processes. So the simple tweak that I did that helped me not misuse caffeine is to just not drink caffeine past lunchtime. I have the one that I wake up with in the morning. And since I'm a little bit of a caffeine fiend, I have another one about two hours after that to really get my morning productivity the kind of meth head high that I'm looking for. I'll still get the caffeine crash late after lunch. I expect that, it's the kind of game you play. If you're a caffeine addict like me, but at least when I want to put my head on the pillow after a hard day's work I'm actually able to get the sleep that my body needs. So do not drink caffeine past 12:00 PM. Just don't do it. The other thing that I started implementing was I gave myself a lot more sleep opportunity. Everyone's heard that you need eight hours of sleep a night, but the truth is in order to sleep for that long, you probably need to be in bed for longer. I take about half an hour to 45 minutes to fall asleep every single night. So I need to be in bed half an hour or 45 minutes earlier than I'm planning on falling asleep. And that makes sure that I actually get the sleep that I need every single night. Because the benefits of a good night's sleep is something that's cumulative. You know, if you give yourself that much opportunity every single night, your amount of sleep baseline will go up over a long period of time. And you'll kind of work off your sleep debt. You'll work off your sleep deprivation that you've been chronically plagued with. All you need to do is give yourself more opportunity to sleep. The other thing that I did was I fixed my circadian rhythm. For those of you who don't know your circadian rhythm has sort of like this internal clock that tells your brain whether it's daytime or nighttime. When you should be given energy, and when you should slow down and get ready for bed. And a lot of your circadian rhythm is dictated by sunlight. How bright it is around you, how dark it is around you. Which is why you've heard that you shouldn't go on social media or on smartphones, or look at screens right before bed, which is very, very true. When you're looking at all this blue light, your brain thinks that it's daytime. So it's not giving you the melatonin that you need that your brain needs to know that it's like time to slow down and go to bed now. So one thing that's really helped me is to not look at screens right before I go to bed. And especially not in bed. That way my brain can actually start producing adequate melatonin. You know, I can start slowing down psychologically. And by the time my head hits the pillow during my little sleep opportunity window, I'm out like a light. The other thing I did to fix my circadian rhythms was I pinned a black blanket over my windows because I'm a barbarian with no sense of interior design. But what that did was when it's the earlier hours of the morning when I'm still sleeping, like 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM, 7:00 AM. I still want it to be dark so I can still be deep in sleep. Getting as much high quality sleep as I can. Rather than having all this sun blasting in the window interrupting my hard earned slumber. So make your room darker so that for the time you're asleep your brain thinks it's nighttime and that you should be sleeping. And the last thing that I implemented to improve my sleep seems like a little quick fix. I don't know if this applies to you. But I was reading this book called Breath by James Nester. And he talked about the benefits of nasal breathing as opposed to mouth breathing. And I noticed that when I put my head on my pillow every night, my nose gets really congested. And I end up opting in the middle of the night to mouth breathing. And in the book he talks about how nasal breathing is a lot better for you. So anyways, if you can't breathe out of your nose at night fix that, I fixed it by using Breathe Right strips. This article is not sponsored by Breathe Right, but that's just what I did. And they work for me. I'll put a Amazon, actually, I'm not going to put an Amazon, like just type in Breathe Right strips. Okay, so let's talk about exercise. There is a fascinating link between your psychology and your physiology. It seems like what's good for the body is also good for the mind. It's the reason why power posing somehow, you know like you're like standing up and putting your hands on your hips or whatever, that kind of stuff increases testosterone. It's bizarre to think of it, but literally just power posing, feeling powerful lowers your cortisol, which is your stress hormone and increases your testosterone making you feel more confident and powerful. And you hear so many accounts of people who fix their posture which allowed them to go about the day with more confidence. It's like a chicken or the egg thing. They fixed their physiology which translated into benefits for their psychology. The only reason why I'm saying this is because one of the most effective ways that you can have more energy throughout the day is to move your body. - [Narrator] See how the hips act as a pivot. - You would think That if everyone had the same baseline energy to work with, that if you expend that energy by being active you'll have less energy throughout the day. But the exact opposite is true. People who regularly expend their energy having a higher baseline of energy to expend. - [Trainer] He's tight with the buttocks and slowly put the buttocks way back. - It's almost like there's a golden rule baked into the universe that says, "That which costeth energy, giveth energy." I should probably make a t-shirt with that. It wasn't long before Ernie began to feel the benefits of his regular exercise. - So you might be thinking, Joey, you're an active guy. You go to the gym, you play hockey. So that probably wasn't that big of a problem for you. Well, it turns out it was. I play hockey once or twice a in the evenings. And then I go to the gym for like half an hour to 45 minutes to do some heavy lifting three to four times a week. But I spend the rest of that time by and large sitting on my butt, editing articles, writing content, whatever. This sedentary lifestyle was draining my energy. So I made a simple tweak. Not only do I make sure I get out and take a walk every single day, I do something to get out of the house, get moving, but I also bought a standing desk. So I spend a large portion of my time when I'm being productive, standing up on my desk rather than sitting down. And this has that power posing effect. The fact that I'm standing up my body kind of learns that I'm more active and I'm somebody who stands up. So it's like here have more energy. So use this weird phenomenon to your advantage. Make sure that every single day you're getting up, out of your chair you're going for a walk. You know, a minute, every hour, three to five minutes every hour. If you're wanna be ambitious, get up from your chair, go for a walk, go do something. The energy benefits will come in droves. - [Singer] ♪ Take good care of yourself ♪ ♪ It's so easy ♪ - And now just briefly I'm actually not gonna talk about diet because I feel like I don't want to add to the noise. One thing I've learned is that it's really genetically dependent. If your ancestors were from a certain part of the universe Maybe a Paleo diet works better for you. Maybe you have a gluten sensitivity. By and large though, avoid packaged food, avoid sugar, drink enough water. You know, all these things. There's a million diets that you can look up on the internet. If you're putting a reasonable amount of effort into what you're putting into your body, and you're not taking care of your sleep or exercise, you'll probably still be sluggish. It's the combination of these three things, especially sleep, especially exercise with like a reasonable effort put into your diet. You'll have energy to work with. You know, you'll finally be somebody who is perky who has energy, who can, who can tackle their daily tasks and actually get things done without constantly feeling like somebody is just dragging you down, holding onto your shirt and just like covering your eyes all the time. I don't think that was a terrible analogy. I just want to give a big thank you to Audible for sponsoring this article. And I actually only made this article because I started reading the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker on Audible. It was just like a really fascinating book. Talking about the benefits of sleep, the complex mechanics that go on under the surface. You know, it talked about the mechanics of dreams which is some Christopher Nolan's stuff. And I'd highly recommend the Audible version specifically because the guy who's narrating it has just such a golden voice and you can listen to it as you're drifting off into slumber. And for those of you who don't know, Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audio books, ranging from best sellers to celebrity memoirs, to news, business and self-development. Every single month Audible sends you one credit, which you can spend on any audio book of your regardless of price. Audible members also get instant access to a bunch of news digests and guided meditation programs, which is also pretty cool. And by far, one of the most useful things about Audible is that if you cancel your membership for any reason at any time, you still keep your entire library of audio books, including the books that you got for free using their credit system. So to sign up for your free 30 day trial, either click the link in the description below, or text "betterideas" to 500 500. Once again, to sign up for your free 30 day trial click the link in the description below or texts "betterideas" to 500-500. Thanks so much for reading guys. As usual, if you liked this article, make sure you hit like, because the algorithm does it's magic. It works its magic. And it actually recommends my article depending on how many likes it gets and how many comments it gets. If you're lurking here and you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you hit subscribe because there's just, there's more of this where this came from.

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