What’s Next?

I’ve been thinking about what the next project for me is going to be. I’ve got the house bought, all of the financials associated with it set up on auto-pilot, and am just bit by bit getting furniture in the rooms and pictures on the walls. For the next 30 years or whenever I decide to sell it, whichever comes first, I’ve at least got that part all figured out. So now I’ve got to turn my head towards what to do next.

That’s a good question… what should I be working on next? I mean I’ve always got a small project going, something I’m building or some little self-improvement project like trying to read a book a month for the year, but the big projects… the long term goals… those are the ones that I have a hard time figuring out which to attack next.

My thought at the moment is to continue on with my education and work on my Master’s degree in Computer Science. This will be year 8 for me since graduating from college and even though on graduation day there was nothing I wanted more than to be free of the classroom, I’ve been steadily feeling like I need to get back to it. I’ve long been reminded (perhaps pressured) by my folks that I should get a Master’s degree. To them it’s a pride piece, since aside from me the only other person to finish college in my entire family is my brother. He also has a Bachelors of Computer Science, but absolutely no desire to continue on with anything higher. My stepfather, himself a successful IT manager, has always maintained that I would be on the fast track through the corporate ranks with my Computer Science basis and an MBA. I don’t know about an MBA though… getting a Master’s degree is no small task in terms of time, effort and money, so obviously I want to plan this one out and make sure it’s something I really want to do.

What are the benefits for me of getting a Master’s degree? For most people, the obvious draw might be the financial gains that can be had with it. To be frank, that’s not a concern for me, I actually make a very comfortable living with just my Bachelor’s degree. My degree in Computer Science definitely got me in the door in the corporate world, but I firmly believe it’s my mind’s ability to deconstruct problems and find quick solutions that’s been the driving factor in my success there. While I’m sure that a Master’s degree will further develop those skills, it’s not the major goal.

Truthfully, I want to teach at the University level. Yes, I know that this means pursuing more than just a Master’s. I would likely need to continue on with a PhD to be considered a serious candidate as a professor, but I’ve always wanted to teach at the collegiate level. The prospect of being surrounded with intellectuals of various disciplines and working with younger people who have a serious interest in academia, being able to work on the real problems in Computer Science and maybe even get a book or two published. But also there is the idea of personal enrichment… I am a firm believer in education and expanding the mind through the discourse of higher learning. I want to continue my education as a way of understanding our world better. Those are all very real dreams of mine, some that I’d like to realize sooner rather than later.

First things first however, the search begins for a graduate school to start in the fall.

 

It’s kind of a funny…

… and strange thing, but I’ve been spending less time on facebook and online in general. It’s happened pretty much as soon as I got into the house, as I’ve been spending more time working on things, buying things, waiting for things, and most importantly having friends over for good times in the house. To think that it only took $210,000 to kick my internet addiction? Crazy.

Becoming Superhuman

I declared today on twitter that my new goal for this year is to become superhuman. While I’m generally of the belief that anything I want to do can, and will be done, by the sheer force of my own determination and creativity I don’t think I’ll be bench-pressing any Buicks like Superman anytime soon. In fact, when I say I will become superhuman, I’m talking about the meaning of the word is far more realistic and literal way.

What does the word “superhuman” mean? If you break down its parts, you end up with two root words; “super” (adj.) meaning very good, first rate or, of the highest degree; and “human” (noun) meaning a member of the human race.

Chances are that in your life you’ve come across more than a few superhuman people… I know I have. My grandfather was one of them. He was raised in near poverty and didn’t finish middle school. He enlisted in the army at age 17 and fought in World War II in Europe, first as a paratrooper, then as a tank driver, and then a mechanic when the army realized he had a talent for working with diesel engines.

After the war he took a demotion from Sergeant back to Private to stay in the army to participate in the rebuilding efforts in France. He became a Sergeant again and was in charge of the base’s motor pool where he was stationed. He left the army after my uncle was born, returning to the states with him and my grandmother and became the manager of a local garage. By the time he retired from the workforce he was a director at a regional construction company, in charge of the company’s fleet of cement trucks and construction vehicles.

The man was strong and tough as nails too. I remember him breaking his thumb while working on his car, and after a few choice words set the bone, wrapped it in a dirty rage and kept working. Even well into his 70’s, when you shook his hand, his grip seemed like it was strong enough to crush you. Truth is… he probably could have.

At his funeral there were large collections of photos from his life posted all over the funeral parlor. In fact the photos lines the walls of the parlor, the waiting rooms and the hallways. Everywhere there were pictures of his experiences… images of him in Germany and France during the war, images of him back in Germany and France 50 years later, images of him sailing on the Atlantic, images of him going cross country, and images of him with people I’d never meet in every single one of them. I saw everything that Grandpa had done in his life and suddenly I felt like I was wasting my time.

Comic books and science fiction are one thing, but the real superhuman is the person that by the length and breadth of their experiences, the magnitude of their achievements, and even the grace of their presence invoke in you a feeling of admiration and WANTING to achieve more. These are the sages in our midst, people that sometimes even take on a mystic quality because of the way they seem to both expertly and effortlessly move through and influence our lives. The reason you look up to these people is because they have done things and learned things beyond that of the ordinary human.

The Buddha was superhuman in his compassion for all living things. William Shakespeare was superhuman in his ability to expertly craft words into verses that evoke the greatest of emotional responses. Albert Einstein was superhuman in his ability to see beyond perception and understand the abstract nature of the universe.

There are many more, all of them are superhuman… and I want to be superhuman too.

Great, so what do I do to become superhuman? I struggled with that question for several hours today, trying to figure out what I could possibly do to exceed that of an ordinary human. Some would consider being superhuman based upon a specific skill you do better than anyone else, others would consider it based upon some inherent personality trait that sets you apart from most others. To figure out the necessary step of why I want to be superhuman, I had to think about which of those camps I fell into.

My grandpa was the latter. He had no one skill that set him apart from the rest of humanity. In fact, he was less skilled than most at pretty much everything except for making engines work, and there were those better than him at it as he eventually stopped working on them altogether in favor of managing those that did. Grandpa did have a trait that most people didn’t however… he was so enriched by life and the world around him that he would never settle for any one experience. He fought, he destroyed, he built, he protected, he traveled, he painted, he sailed and he grew with every experience. He could live any one of us under the table, and did.

That’s what I can do to be superhuman… what anyone can do, really. When others say “no” or “why?” I will say “yes” and “why not?” popular opinions, be damned. Endeavor to become fearless in the discovery of life and deriving a meaningful experience from it.

Parts of that mindset had been surfacing recently on their own. When asked by a friend why I had read so many obscure (meaning: boring, to them) books in the last parts of 2010 I replied, “… someone took the time to write them, I may as well read them.”  In the past I never would have even admitted reading them for fear of ridicule. I never again want to let someone else’s opinion sway my decision to do something. The greatest thing I believe you can do to become superhuman is to desire to be master of your own destiny.  That desire is primal in nature, and unfortunately too often given up for the sake of safety, convenience and predictability.

Some people are ok with doing that. I’m not ok with it… not anymore, anyway. I’ll live the rest of this life as well as I can, for my benefit and the benefit of everyone around me… I’ll just have to leave the flying cape on the coat hook at home.

Think about someone that you know, or simply may know about, and how they inspire you to become superhuman yourself. Being superhuman means taking the one chance you have to be more than the sum of your parts. Find out what that is then learn it, love it, do it and live it.

Resolution 2011 – Where I’m coming from (and where this is going)

A year ago about this time I had made the New Year resolution to lose weight. I know it’s cliche but it’s just one of those things that, unless you are a male underwear model or Olympic swimmer, you know that you need to do each and every year. For the record, I absolutely abhorred the gym each time I’ve ever gone to it and still do. Whether it was Gold’s, Planet Fitness or whatever, the gym is the LEAST conducive environment I’ve ever been in to losing weight and getting into shape, and I don’t see forthcoming reason that this opinion will change. What’s more is that I don’t even like exercising. If I wanted to labor intensively on physical activity, I wouldn’t have become a software engineer. Welcome to the nerd mystic.

Still, I knew that I needed to get it done and I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to accomplish it. I needed help, so I got my best friend on board to help me stay on track. My buddy is no gym rat, but he is capable of driving people to keep on track with something by the sheer nagging nature of his personality. While over the years I had grown a pretty tough skin to his relentless pushing, but its something that you never become immune to. I was counting on this relentless attitude of his to get me through my goal of losing 50 lbs. across the 2010 calendar year. Then his wife left him, and going to the gym with me wasn’t the biggest thing on his mind. Needless to say, I didn’t lose my 50 lbs. in 2010.

The sad truth is that I gained weight during last year. On any given day my weight will fluctuate 10 lbs, give or take, so I don’t worry about it when my weight goes up unless it stays up for more than a couple days. With a major project coming to fruition over this past summer coming with about two months of long hours at the office, eating junk and convenience food, then immediately going home and crashing, I found myself at the end of the summer weighing the most I have in my entire life at and even 300 lbs. The weight has yet to come off and now 2011 is my critical year, the year that I need to make something happen.

As I mentioned I’m not a real fan of exercising, it’s just not how this nerd rolls. So towards the end of 2010 I went looking for alternatives. I’ve mostly heard from people (mostly the gym rats) that the key to weight loss is simple… calories in versus calories out. If you want to lose weight you need to eat lots of low calorie foods to effectively fool your body into thinking it has more than enough energy and that you aren’t starving yourself, as well as exercise to create a calorie deficit. This makes perfect sense in a perfect and normal world, however as I’ve learned over time my world is far from normal.

I’ve known since I was a young boy that I’m not normal. I knew that I wasn’t normal when I my teacher pulled me out of class in 3rd grade to participate in a school-run trivia contest comprised almost solely of 6th graders. I knew I wasn’t normal when at age 10 after reading “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne that I spec’d out and created schematics for the Nautilus as described in the book. I knew I wasn’t normal when in 7th grade they asked me to take the SAT’s four years early and scored higher than the 11th graders I took it with. I knew I wasn’t normal when a few years after college, when I had gained 100 lbs since graduating high school, that my waist was just 4″ larger than it was when I weighed 165 lbs.

The real turning point on the calories in vs. calories out convention came for me when early in 2010 when I subscribed to weight watchers and actually found myself eating MORE with the program than I did before. Obviously conventional means were not going to work for me.

I suspect it has something to do with my body’s structure. Throwing out how much I currently weigh, I’m not a small guy. I’m 6’1″ tall, which isn’t towering, but I have the skeletal frame of a man 6″ or 7″ taller than me. Even at my current weight my ribs can be felt on my sides, and with my arms flat at my sides my shoulders fill all but 3″ of a standard door frame. People have never been able to accurately estimate my weight, from casual observers to the the nurses at the doctor’s office that weigh me. I am by and large far stronger than any of my friends, including the few that are bigger and in better shape than I am.

Each time I’ve tried losing weight I’ve wanted to spend the time investigating all of the methods and theories out there for losing weight in the most efficient manner. Each time I shot these ideas past people, I was told that I “… couldn’t research myself into losing weight…” and that I just had to get to the gym and start exercising. In the past I reluctantly agreed that they were probably right and got to work, and each time I failed miserably. I always thought that there had to be a better way, a SMARTER way to lose weight and getting into shape, a way that would appeal to my nerd sensibilities and my lack of desire to spend countless hours in the gym. What I’ve found so far is, at least to me, a very interesting set of ideas.

I’ve read that a better way to lose weight is to increase your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Running for 3 hours on the treadmill at the gym is a great way to lose weight in short bursts, because you burn a large number of calories while you are running, but it effectively stops when you stop running. You increase your BMR by building muscle such that your body burns more calories when it is at rest. I think its fantastic if you have the time to run for 3 hours in order burn 500 calories, but I’d much rather increase by BMR by 50 cal/hr so that I can burn 1200 calories per day while doing nothing special besides breathing.

Makes sense right? I think so anyway. So that on a high level is what I’m shooting for and what I’ll be working on. I’m out to disprove my friends and casual observer’s mantras that one MUST just go to the gym and kill your desire to live by working endlessly for minimal results. That’s not how I do things around here… I do the research and develop more efficient ways to do things. That’s what I get paid to do in my professional life and that’s what I am going to do for my endeavor to lose weight and get into shape.

For the time being, this blog will be focused on sharing the tips and information that I find along the way of building a better body using nerd tactics… brains over brawn… that kind of thing. I hope that what I dig up is ultimately effective (for my sake) and informative as a way to blow away the barriers of conventional wisdom constructed by the meatheads at the gym. I’ve started diving into my first round of information, the book “The 4 Hour Body”  by Tim Ferriss, and the Nerd Fitness blog of Steve Kamb.

So Happy New Year everyone, and cheers to 2011 and building a smarter body!