Search Here ….

Tags

Academic integrity AI AI Detectors Artificial Intelligence Asia School of Business ChatGPT ChatGPT Malaysia ChatGPT Plus Education Entrepreneurs and Startups Malaysia Entrepreneurship Gardens Google GPTZero IGCSE Malaysia Malls Maps72 Microsoft Midjourney MIT MrMoney TV OpenAI Pavilion Plagiarism Plagiarism checkers Poe Quora Sam Altman Software development Technology Turnitin Udemy Writing
Uncategorized

Advanced Laziness

Victor TanPost a Comment

Today I thought I would talk about a little philosophy that has powered me for the past couple of years.

This is the philosophy of advanced laziness.

It’s the same philosophy that has made me exercise every single day since January 1st of 2019, which makes today’s run Day 1740 of exercise without stopping.

It’s the same philosophy that makes me work hard in many areas and to carry forward doing many of the things that I have been doing without stopping.

It’s a philosophy that seems to bear almost no relation to laziness, and may at the end of the day just be a profound rationalization based upon delusional reasoning.

…But I believe in it.

Let me explain.

I believe that somewhere within a person’s spirit, they have things that they wish to accomplish and would wish to accomplish no matter what the circumstances are. As goal-driven beings, we seek to accomplish or do certain things with our lives, and therefore face an innate wish to strive for these things.

Here are some examples. A person might want to lose weight or to learn an instrument. Maybe they might want to successfully create a business that will sustain them or to sustain a social enterprise that is brought forth on the strength of their personality and many other things along the way.

Maybe some of these things are formed by society or from the people around us, or maybe even random interactions between ourselves and the world.

Nonetheless, their existence remains undeniable fact: To deny them is to pay for a future in which one sits up in bed and ponders why the goal has yet to be achieved, to question every moment that came before, and to recognize that one didn’t manage to pay respects to their inner will, leading to existential crisis, confusion, and a recognition that one should have done better.

It is to eventually return and remember the innate wish and see that it hasn’t been fulfilled in the world, and therefore face doubt, anxiety, and a wish to strive for the goal again.

Advanced laziness is founded upon these premises which may well just be assumptions at the end of the day, but it is founded on the basis of the belief that the most efficient way to strive and to minimise the time that a person looks back on life and tries again to achieve something that they could have achieved before is to simply pursue it every single day and with all of their heart to minimise the total amount of time that a person ends up wallowing in regret and wondering about things that could have been and instead capitalising on the benefits of compounding and the growth that comes when a person dedicates themselves daily towards small improvements brought forth manageably as they pursue the goals that arise from within their deepest being.

It is a philosophy that is based upon the idea that benefits compound through daily practice and regrets can be minimized if one doesn’t have a reason to have them in the first place because one is engaged instead in the pursuit of moving the needle forward with each day, interaction, and moment instead. This has always seemed like a more appealing way of living life to me than the converse, though I feel that on a personal level, it hasn’t always played out in that way.

Like any other person, I have moments when I feel subjectively that I’m not up for something, that I’m tired, that I cannot push forward in the way that I would like because of external circumstances, time constraints, or any number of other things that could make life difficult that I haven’t been able to push past constraining me from doing the things that I want on a day-to-day basis. But one thing I’ve come to learn throughout the course of life is that what we want is manifold, and it’s not always clear that we can make rational judgments about what should take precedence over what, and moreover that time inconsistency also assails us with the inability to make decisions on a consistent basis across multiple time periods in the situation that we do not spend time reflecting.

When I reflect personally on the different things that I’m doing, including Korean, cello, making videos, and pushing forward in learning how to educate people, I recognize at many different decision points that these things are difficult to balance because they require discipline and many other facets of personality which I have only imperfectly developed throughout the relatively brief duration of my life upon the mortal coil that is the wick of my life upon the candle of earth.

There are times when I am tempted to deviate and simply rest and stop and pause for a quick bit, allowing the wave of freedom to wash over me, only to realize that this decision represents, when I reflect upon it, a denial of my previously freely chosen decision to pursue these things in the very first place and represent an insult to my earlier self. One could very well contend that a person should be free to make decisions at an earlier point and then also to make decisions to deny that earlier decision when a person has changed. But has a person really changed along the way? Not necessarily. I know that I definitely haven’t. When I reflect upon the deepest parts of my soul, I recognize that the things that I say are valuable, remain valuable, regardless of my immediate feeling of stress or difficulty with coping. Because when I look at the deepest part of my being, I see that I value knowing how to speak Korean and with the world at large. And I know that I value music and its ability to unite people by appealing to the soul in ways that can only be brought forth with skillful practice and a sensitivity not only to rhythms but also to the souls of those who lie without. I see in the balance of things that impacting souls and helping them to strive for better, to live for better in the eventuality of things is and remains something tremendously worthwhile to aim for.

Each of these things is something that bears the possibility of failure the moment one moves away. A person cannot learn a language by simply choosing not to continue a class and hoping that one’s innate nature and supposed freedom will bring them on the path towards a greater mastery.

The same applies for learning an instrument. In the absence of teaching, it’s not always clear what I would do on my part and therefore, any freedom that would be brought forth on that front would eventually be drawn back closer into the sphere of what I had attempted to do before, across all different things, which in turn leads me yet again as what goes up comes down in what seems to be a teleological direction of return towards facets that I had identified before and that innately I know I should continue to pursue. These are facets that will ever remain as part of me, and that if I wish to chase with efficiency, I must muster the strength to push forward each day.

There is no guarantee that other people abide by the same way of living or think of the world or value improvement in the same way.

But I feel that this will resonate for those who do.

Here’s to advanced laziness to those of you out, there are striving for better and seek to accomplish it in the most efficient way possible, while paying respect to your nature. Thanks for reading.

Victor Tan

Victor Tan is incredibly excited about AI technology and its potential to transform the world. He is the creator of Transform Your Creative Writing With ChatGPT on Udemy and the author of The Little Robot That Could Paint, an AI-generated children’s book that introduces children to artificial intelligence that will release on March 14th, 2023. He is deeply passionate about education, and In his coaching and tutoring business Ascendant Academy, he teaches students not only how to sell themselves to top institutions, how to write effectively and conceptualize ideas with AI, believing deeply that AI is not here to replace us, but instead to help us to level up as a species as we conceptualize and create the most powerful tools that the world has known since the dawn of humanity. When he isn’t spending time writing, creating online courses, and creating the occasional video about ergonomic chairs and curious uses of ChatGPT on his YouTube channel, he’s probably  spending time coaching students to enter top universities in the US and UK, creating new Apple Homekit smart home automations, and playing an already unreasonably large yet still growing collection of musical instruments.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Assessing English Standards in Malaysia: An Analysis with the CEFR

Often in Malaysia, people talk about how our standard of English is either sufficiently good that it is the basis of a thesis for investment, or they say that our English is abysmal and needs drastically to be improved – discussions go on and on, and people fight, oftentimes in what seems like a battle for the soul of our society. But what does it mean, actually, that our English is good or our English is bad? Some say that Malaysia aligns itself to international standards in creating its curricula, but others squabble day in and day out, constantly complaining about the quality of English amongst graduates who come into the workforce, observing that many of them lack basic skills that they would expect graduates to have. How can it be possible that Malaysia calibrates itself to international standards while at the same time its graduates languish in terms of their English language proficiency? But at the end of the day, who’s right?  As it turns out, investigating a little further tells us that the answer is both. Here’s where the subject of our blog post for today comes in: The Common European Framework for Reference, otherwise known as the CEFR.  The reason that I’m making this comparison today and telling you about CEFR is that Malaysia uses it to calibrate SPM writing standards.  The CEFR operationalizes language proficiency in accordance with six dimensions, from A1 up until C2. It is an international standard that is utilized by examining bodies across the world in order to designate proficiency levels and descriptors that students attain after courses of study, and it is used also in designing curricula so that students can reach a certain defined standard. Source: https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/Images/126130-cefr-diagram.pdf CEFR operationalizes English proficiency according to numerous level descriptors, providing explanations of what a user of the English language should be able to do […]

On Facing Judgment’s Shadow

Picture this. You’ve written a post that you want to share on social media, or you’ve made a video somehow or another. You’re sitting there on the edge of your chair, just about to click post, but you look at what you’ve written, what you’ve made, you notice that final error, you question yourself, thinking about the manifold ways in which people could be judging you silently and from afar, contemplating in your mind’s eye the dialogues that must be taking place. “Oh my gosh, this person wrote this?” “Oh my gosh. Did he really make that grammatical error?” “Wow, this is boring. Why am I even watching?”“How could he make such a video?” And so the thoughts come out, percolate like coffee through filter paper, and eventually crystallize into little gems of self-doubt, blocking the nervous signal that would have caused you to click. You turn away from your plan, and you declare:”Maybe later, but not now.” Before you know it, the entire project is abandoned. If you’re anything like me, you may have faced this, this feeling of wanting to do something, but realizing, or at least thinking that you weren’t good enough, that the manifold imperfections that existed in you would come out, and that people would judge you one way or another. Well, here’s a fact, though. People certainly will judge you. I mean, how could they not? Everyone encounters something as a first glance, thinks about it, and evaluates it on their own terms. That’s just how it is. The judgment will happen. There is absolutely nothing that you can do about it, and your feeling certainly is right. The thing is though, that even though it is right, this isn’t a valid reason to run away. Because truly, the only way to get past it is to face your fears, to accept judgements as they […]

Work, Life, World.

One of the things I’ve come to really appreciate learning in college is the ability to just work, and work, and work. Sometimes I feel like my work ethic is just unending, and I can continue doing everything that I’m supposed to do, just efficiently and continually, almost like a machine.  I start, I take breaks specifically for the purpose of making sure that my work efficiency is maintained, then I begin again. The cycle continues, and life proceeds just in that way.  It’s one of the miracles that has come about, I think, from being trained in an environment where people were constantly working hard, and a place where people would not just work hard, but also have the right motivation, initiative, and desire for it.  Somehow or another, it influenced me, and rubbed off on me. And before I knew it, I was one of those workaholics out there, just casually pulling long hours without even questioning things, completely by my own volition.  It sounds bad, but I’ve come to appreciate that part of myself quite a bit.  It’s one of the many reasons that I respect myself, and appreciate the person that I’ve become. Because it’s become an enduring facet of my personality, and something that I know that I can look to whenever I think about my identity as a person, but at the same time, I think it’s come with at least two different disadvantages.  The first of these is that when I think about work, I just continue on and on. It takes hold like a vice grip, consuming almost every single aspect of my mind and my thoughts.  The result?  I just carry on doing things in the way that I feel most natural. Ignoring different things, socializing, hanging out, spending time with people, messaging…The list goes on, and I don’t know how many […]

My cardinal sin

If there is a sin of which I can unreservedly declare my guilt, it is the sin of over-complicating things. As a thinker, I tend to plan very extensively. I consider different things here and there and everywhere, and this manifests itself very often in just thinking about different factors and considerations that should go into a final plan. At the same time though, this manifests very often in overly complicated content, which in turn highlights another possible problem.  What if the fundamental problem isn’t actually over-complication, but instead the wrong way of planning, or planning in such a way that it doesn’t serve the goal at the end of the day?  If one simply were to distill things down to the simplest of all possible elements and in turn just use those things effectively, wouldn’t that create a transformation?  Wouldn’t that make things significantly easier at the end of the day?  This is something that I’ve noticed about myself, and it’s something that I would want to resolve in the days ahead. But what I’ve come to recognize and see is that simplicity requires effort. Completion requires work. Shortening requires sacrifice, judgment, and discernment. It’s not something so easy to develop.  One might say that it’s a talent, but in reality, it’s probably best considered as a skill. One to be honed over many successive days, months, years of practice that go into the development and creation of something that somehow ends up working out. As with all skills though, it’s not something that one can immediately receive just from having done it one single time.  Rather, one must do everything to make sure that it is perfect, tailored.  And although it’s possible to practice for many years, it may be that the person does not reach the destination. What is required is the correct planning, the correct noticing of […]

Automated Speech Recognition

Once in a while, a technology comes along that just completely transforms the way that we think, we live, and we experience the entire world.  ​​Certainly the entire world has been captivated by the rise of AI in recent days – how could it not, when millions of influencers around the world endeavor on a day to day basis to showcase the 500th AI tool that you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO USE on a day to day basis? Well, I don’t know much about technologies beyond ChatGPT, to be honest, but there is definitely one thing that has come out from it, which is probably the feature that I use the very most out of pretty much everything on the planet, and that is automated speech recognition, specifically, the OpenAI ChatGPT Whisper ASR Recognition System. Automated speech recognition is how I’m communicating everything here to you. It is how I’m putting down my thoughts, word by word, by simply sitting down next to this open door on a rainy morning, narrating out the story as if I were talking to you.  The Automated Speech Recognition Algorithm, which is in this case the ChatGPT Whisper app, is transcribing everything that I’m saying with an almost perfect accuracy, but perhaps with some small issues with punctuation that I will fix after the fact. It is incredible, tremendously accurate, and something that I could have never imagined just three to four months ago. As a result of this technology, as you read, you’re actually listening, in a sense, to what I said on that morning when the air was cool and the rain was falling, it was 7.49am in the morning, and 48 seconds had passed on the clock.  As I narrated these words then, eventually, the clock turned to 7.50, indicating a shift in time.  I made a mental note to myself at that […]

Insomnia

Insomnia is a horrible curse, but it’s one of those reminders out there that sleep is one of those things that we can rightly call a blessing and that ultimately, the greatest things within life come from within and not from without, from the simple acceptance of the struggles around us, rather than just continually trying to force things to happen in the way that we want. Nowhere is this more clearly represented than in the domain of sleep. The simple act of just closing your eyes and having yourself fall asleep is one of the most beautiful and restorative things in the entire world, and when it’s taken away from you, it reminds you at the end of the day that one of the greatest joys in this world is one that is inbuilt, one that lies within you, one that has the ability to transform you if only you will accept it, rather than challenging it by adulterating it with things like caffeine and other sorts of things out there that disrupt the balance, change the equation, and otherwise impede you from doing what is natural to you. That the body can rest is something that we assume by default should happen, but in reality it’s one of the greatest luxuries upon the planet yet one of the easiest to corrupt the moment, we allow our minds and our psychologies to take over and to take on the driver’s seat, during which we begin to push ourselves to go for more than what is natural, to push ourselves beyond to do certain things when in reality they are neither needed nor desirable for our ultimate furtherance. Often we sleep late just because we are worried about those things, about all the different matters that will not be completed if we simply do not fall asleep, yet ironically enough that […]