Jacques

I have often heard about people talking about reaching their maximum potential, but what is the maximum potential, what would somebody's life look like if they were literally living to their maximum potential? If we look at the game of chess, there are 64 squares, and 24 pieces, and a maximum potential number of moves. As far as I understand, the whole game has not been calculated yet, and determining the perfect move in every instance is quite difficult, and the calculations required by a computer is at the around the maximum of our technology. The above is within a set of rules defining a very simple game (compared to reality), when you compare that with life, with much more possibilities, the element of time, the long time frame, and the complexity, it is obviously massively more complicated than the game of chess. I imagine it would be unrealistic to expect someone to make the perfect choice every time. If a person where to do this hypothetically, I imagine they would have to make their decisions in alignment of a grand strategy, and go and learn the right things at the right time. The idea I want to get across is, imagine what would this person do, what would their life look like, what would be the nature of their decision making process etc. Just food for thought I guess.

I have English as a second language, and decided to improve it a bit, because sometimes I would read sentences and not know the meaning of some words. I also did a word test, that estimated how many words I knew in English, and I wanted to improve the number. At the moment I highlight every word I read in a book that I don't know, and then add it to an application called Anki after I have finished the book. The application uses flashcards which reveals the word, and afterwards the meaning, I then answer whether I knew the answer, and if I knew the answer, it will ask the card later than if I did not know the answer.

Johannesburg, South Africa

I think I had a similar is as you. I did this twice in my life, one time in the past, and a few months back. So I have some experience doing it, and reflecting on it, and I am also in the process of doing it. Out of the things I noticed or can remember: I am making effort not to slander (label people) or gossip. I found that people immediately notice when I say something about someone else. They will consciously or subconsciously register it in their minds, and when they see me doing it even once, they will not easily trust me again. I am going for a more trustworthy image. Consider contracts, especially ones where you still interact with people in your past. Even like a alarm system contract in your own home, when you move, it may get messy to deal with. You can sometimes hire a storage area, outside of where you will live, like a garage or smaller, then you can bring all your stuff with you. I used meetup, the website, to find places to go and interact, this way if I don't like a group, I can just stop attending, I also get experience hanging out with people, and also get to interact with a lot of different people. I found a job that I worked from 9:00am to 3:00pm, so I get to do a lot of stuff, however, I had gotten a lot of luck getting that. The predatory people seem to sort of start from scratch when I moved. The trick seems to not get involved with their shit, they have their opinion, and you have yours. I found that if they cannot trigger you emotionally, they are completely screwed. Anyway good luck!

I use one as a sort of diary journal. I have had one since September 2015. I keep it password protected on the PC, and use it to to write anything that is going on, if it is either in external reality or internal. I also try and be as honest as I possibly can with it. I enter entries every day, at the start, it would sometimes just be a sentence to describe the day, and later on I decided to make 5 topics every day, and minimum 300 words, which takes about 20 to 30 minutes a day. For me the benefits are: For me it helps a lot in terms of self-awareness. When I write things down, I can look at it, and try and determine what my beliefs, motivations, biases and a lot of other stuff are. I can express strong negative emotions and learn about them. For instance, if I am frustrated, then I can write about it. After I write it down, I can look at what I wrote down, realize I was frustrated, and then try and identify the beliefs attached to those frustrations, and can then consider whether those beliefs are justified. The amount of memories I have over my life does not seem like enough. When I try and remember what happened 3 years ago, there is not enough memories and stuff to construct any story, with the journal, I could have just looked, and seen how I spent my time, and what I was doing. Helps with spelling, typing and writing. I can use it to trace development, so any time I make any progress in life, I write about it. Later on if I want to, I can check what was going on in a certain time in my life. I found it to be very useful, and I do consider it one of the best choices I made. For me it becomes more valuable as time goes by, I found that at around 6 months, I had quite a bit of information, and was very glad that I did it.