"What's wrong with you?"
"For being so smart, you sure are stupid."
"You're being lazy."
The mean person saying these things to me is... me. These phrases come from the tape recorder in my head that plays over and over. We all "beat ourselves up" with our dysfunctional internal dialogue. It's not helpful. But how do you erase these phrases and record better ones?
Rule Number One: Be Lazy
My new job has me with set office hours, so even though I'm sure I'm still getting some exercise, I have struggled with feeling more sedentary. But how do I ride this change without ill side effects?
I bought a treadmill desk.
A skydiving student of mine remarked to me recently, “My non-skydiving friends just don’t understand why I skydive. They don’t take chances with their lives.” I replied, “That’s not true. Do they ever drive on a two lane highway? When another car comes from the other direction, there’s a closing speed of 120 mph, same as our closing speed to the ground when we are in freefall, yet at a distance of only a few feet. The difference is, I can see this huge planet Earth coming at me 10,000 feet away, but I can avoid hitting it at deadly speed simply by pulling a little handle. On the highway, you never know what that guy in the other lane will do at the last second. He could be messing with his cell phone or under the influence… or eating his sandwich or texting grandma.”
What are the risks we accept unaware, without thinking?
After being DZO of Skydive Kansas for 21 years, I accepted a full time position at USPA as Director of IT. I'm still traveling to teach courses as an eXaminer with Xcelskydiving. But I have never believed in spreading thin or watering down. After much contemplation, I made the bittersweet decision to close my dropzone. In an email to regular jumpers, I explain by starting with:
The only thing that stays the same is that things change.
Here's a collection of some of my best projects I developed throughout my work as JenSharp.com, web programmer. They included e-commerce, e-learning, data management systems, and high functioning websites.
In the third century BC, Aristotle penned the timeless words, “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know.” Since then, countless people in numerous time periods have restated this realization using various wording. Aristotle’s statement and the others like it are the hallmark of those who are recovering casualties of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a phenomenon explored in a series of experiments by David Dunning and Justin Kruger at the Cornell University Department of Psychology in 1999. These experiments—reportedly inspired by a bank robber who knew that lemon juice could be used as invisible ink and covered his face in it thinking it would render him invisible—set out to test a human psychological trait many before have witnessed: People with below average skill or knowledge tend to grossly overestimate their own abilities.