Roxane Gay has 10 of them, but how healthy is it to obsess over a rival or enemy? Stylist investigates.

They are our secret adversaries. They make our blood boil on Instagram. Their ever-growing LinkedIn connections really drives us mad. Pit us against them on a sports pitch and we turn gladiatorial. They are our nemeses, and they are also completely normal to have.

Guest editor Roxane Gay is the undisputed queen of conjuring up adversaries. She can have 10 nemeses at any one time, simply because she likes having them. A nemesis is someone for whom you harbour an abiding, relentless dislike, she writes in her essay on the pleasures of having an imagined rival.

They might not know we exist, but that hardly matters. Roxanes primary foe, for example, smiles too much, is thriving professionally and exists to spite me. It is almost too much to bear.

Our rivals exist solely to grind our gears, but we also cant get enough of them. It might not have quite the thrill of Eve versus Villanelle, but more than half of us have a work enemy, according to Totaljobs. And social media has gifted us access to our adversaries out-of-hours. There are close to 300,000 Instagram posts dedicated to the #nemesis.

She smiles too much, is thriving professionally and exists to spite me. It is almost too much to bear.

From YouTube beef to Twitter feuds, nemeses are trending in real life. So why do we have them? Our nemesis often shows what actually matters to us. They reflect back our own values and ideals, says psychologist and life coach Honey Langcaster-James. Its often someone who is doing what we would secretly like to. Or perhaps they appear to be living their life in a way that we aspire to. Your nemesis is a mirror, reflecting back what you want to be doing with your life.

We tend to pick nemeses that are quite similar to us. They are us but with a better CV, #friendshipgoals and great hair (how do they do that?). Social media puts all of this pettiness in the palm of our hands.

Yet nemesis-collecting can be a noble pursuit. We pick workplace nemeses according to how willing they are to throw others under the bus, Totaljobs found, suggesting were keen to protect colleagues who have been wronged. There are other good reasons for having an adversary. Long-distance runners cut five seconds off their race times when competing against an arch-rival, according to a 2014 study from New York University. Nemeses are motivational.

Think of a nemesis as grit in your oyster, Langcaster-James suggests. They might really wind you up, but they also might represent something that is against your own values. They can make us think, What do I want to be doing more of? How should I be investing my time? You can use your nemesis as a springboard to differentiate yourself from. You can even turn a nemesis into an inspiration.

Here,four women offload about their arch-nemeses.

Jen Corrigan - Writer and Tech Worker

I met Diane in a poetry workshop in college. She was the best poet in class, so I was already impressed by her, but what really got under my skin was that she had faith in her abilities. I had never met a writer my age who was comfortable with her own voice, something that I was struggling with. When I met her, I was instantly jealous that I didnt have her skills or her confidence.

A nemesis has to be someone I respect, even just a little bit, otherwise I wouldnt care what they think of me or if theyre better than me in some way. I tend to care too much about what people think of me, even the people I dont like. My nemeses are always a projection of my own insecurities.

At the time, in college, I dont think my envy of Diane motivated me in any meaningful way. It was a distraction, because I was young and hadnt yet learned how to use my insecurities as fuel for self-improvement. It was only years later that I was able to revisit those feelings in a way that was more productive.

I have many nemeses of varying degrees now: ex-partners, former friends, smug acquaintances, people who are just better than me at something. They keep me focused on my goals. Some of my nemeses I want to emulate, some of them I want to impress, some of them I want to prove wrong. Im petty, and revenge can be a great motivator.

Marie Le Conte - Political Journalist

Im a big fan of enemies. I still have a nemesis from a previous workplace. The feud started out for quite dull work reasons, we both enjoyed having someone in the office to annoy. It just spiralled. Now, I will celebrate his demise when it comes. If he loses his job, I will be buying champagne in the pub.

These feuds motivate me. I think, Ill prove them wrong. I work best out of spite, when someone doesnt think I can do this. Im also proving to myself that I can do it. Having nemeses makes life more fun. I dont follow people I dislike on social media, but once a week I will go on my nemeses profiles, screengrab their posts and send them to friends.

I work in Westminster, where people hold grudges over the tiniest things. Youre quite free and expected to act like a wronged teenager even if youre a 47-year-old man. One of my nemeses said that she would never attend the same events I would go to, and so I made a point of ticking attending on every mutual Facebook event invitation, just so she didnt go. It was a proper dick move.

Im a Marmite person. People will dislike me no matter what I do. I suspect this happens a lot, especially to women who are outspoken, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people. Youre disliked for who you are. You can agonise over the fact that they hate you, or you can say fuck that, Ill hate them as well. Ill hate them first. And Ill hate them better.

Sally Thorne - Author

A friend requested I write a fiction piece as her birthday gift. When asked for a prompt word, she offered nemesis. That resulted in The Hating Game, an office romcom about two publishing assistants who play juvenile games of one-upmanship until it becomes clear the fighting is a cover for their attraction. The hate-to-love trope was fun to write.

A nemesis stirs powerful emotions: jealousy, sabotage and a strange kind of obsession. Its compelling in fiction, particularly the romance genre, because if its written right, all of these negative feelings can unexpectedly boil over into passion. Then we ask ourselves, how can they ever move past hate?

I do have flashes of envy when I see another writer hit the New York Times bestseller list. But I remind myself Ive had achievements that others would envy. I wrote about nemeses and it changed my life in the best way.

Vivienne Jeffers - Football Coach and Founder Of East London Ladies Fc

My nemeses are womens football teams who use grassroots football as a vanity project; hip teams born from the hype and opportunities in women and girls football. They take money and attention from clubs like ours, teams that provide proper grassroots opportunities for women and girls to build confidence and self-esteem.

Our team, East London Ladies, started from nothing and continues to grow without big endorsements from sports brands, who focus their attention on the teams with the trendy-looking girls without a hair out of place. These teams dont know they are my nemeses. Ive tried to get to know their story rather than judging a book by its cover, however, Im not sold on what they are selling. Some may call it jealousy, but when youve been grafting, providing opportunities for over 120 girls and women a week, and it goes unnoticed to the point where you cant even get equipment, its disheartening.

At the same time, it becomes your driving force. Its healthy competition. Every Instagram post of their fresh new kit from a well-known brand motivates me to go that bit extra.I meet my nemeses at games. Sometimes they cant fulfil all the opportunities thrown their way and we are asked to step in. So why not take that moment to show what you do? A nemesis keeps me pushing and driving, but it is not as important as what happens on the pitch.

Roxane says:

I have several nemeses people who have slighted me in ways both real and imagined who are now mortal adversaries. May they be forced to fly only United Airlines for the rest of their days

Photography: David Harry Stewart/Trunkarchive.com

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Healthy rivalries: is it good to obsess over a nemesis? - Stylist Magazine

Simon Sinek. TED

Sinek goes on to share the story about how he and Grant were slated to introduce each other at an event.

"I went first. I looked at Adam, looked at the audience, and said, 'You make me unbelievably insecure because all of your strengths are all my weaknesses. You can do so well the things that I really struggle to do.'The audience laughed,"he recalls. "Adam looked at me and responded, 'The insecurity is mutual.'"

It was a funny (and ballsy) introduction, but Sinek's self-revelatory joke ended up being more than a clever applause line. By facing his insecurity head on, Sinek realized why Grant bothered him so much: His fellow author was great at things Sinek struggled with.

That's a common dynamic, according to experts. We're often most irked bypeople who highlight our own weaknesses. If you hate arrogant people, it's often because you have unresolved issues about self-confidence. If bragging sets you off, chances are excellent you struggle with tooting your own horn.

By recognizing what it was about his own weaknesses that was triggering his envy of Grant, Sinek was able to focus his energy not on fruitless competition but instead on self-improvement. And that eventually drove him to even greater success.

That's often what a great work rival paired with a littleself-awarenesscan do for you.

"A Worthy Rival can push us in a way that few others can not even our coaches, mentors, or advisors," he contends. "Traditional competition forces us to take on an attitude of winning; a Worthy Rival inspires us to take on an attitude of improvement. The former focuses our attention on the outcome; the latter focuses our attention on process."

"It is the focus on process and constant improvement that reveals new skills and boosts resilience. An excessive focus on beating our competition not only gets exhausting over time, it can actually stifle innovation,"Sinek insists.

So forget about winning the competition and vanquishing your work nemesis once and for all.The comparison game is a never-ending soul suck.If you really want to be successful, you don't want your biggest competition to go away. You always want to have a worthy rival. As Grant did for Sinek, the person who makes you sick with envy at first can end up being one of your biggest sources of self-improvement.

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Simon Sinek says having a 'worthy rival' at work can make you better at your job and even he has one - Business Insider UK

November 17

After two seasons of Claire Foy playing Queen Elizabeth II in the period drama The Crown, Olivia Colman takes over for season three, which will follow the queens reign from the late 60s to the late 70s. Tobias Menzies will be playing her husband Prince Philip, while Helena Bonham Carter will take on the role of her sister Princess Margaret. This was an eventful decade for the monarch, as England went through dramatic cultural changes and labor strife, at the same time that the young Prince Charles began preparing under intense public scrutiny for the job of one day replacing his mother.

November 22

The country music singer-songwriter Dolly Parton has already seen some of her more story-driven songs turned into successful TV movies. Now shes serving as executive producer on the anthology series Heartstrings, featuring a variety of approaches to converting her music into television. In the first season, Parton hits like Jolene, Two Doors Down and Cracker Jack will be brought to life with the help of guest stars like Julianne Hough, Ginnifer Goodwin, Delta Burke and Melissa Leo.

November 27

The Irishman stars Robert De Niro as a contract killer looking back on his life and reconsidering his associations with a notorious mobster (played by Joe Pesci) and with the labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Directed by Martin Scorsese (from a Steven Zaillian screenplay, adapting the Charles Brandt novel I Heard You Paint Houses), this movie is a decades-spanning reflection on American crime, with cutting-edge digital de-aging technology used to make the characters look era-appropriate. The film is also an elegiac genre piece, made by the modern masters of the gangster picture, and is Netflixs most high-profile attempt yet to compete with the traditional Hollywood studios.

November 29

Based on a novel by Guillaume Laurant (best-known for co-writing the movie Amlie), the animated feature I Lost My Body is imaginatively fantastical and poignant, telling the story of a North African immigrant looking for love and personal purpose in Paris. The story is told mostly in flashback, narrated by the heros severed hand, as it crawls across the city, looking for its original owner. Part action-adventure and part low-key character sketch, this is a cartoon like no other.

Also arriving: Ash vs. Evil Dead Season 1 (Nov. 1), Atypical Season 3 (Nov. 1), Holiday in the Wild (Nov. 1), The Man without Gravity (Nov. 1), Matilda (Nov. 1), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Nov. 1), The End of the F***ing World Season 2 (Nov. 5), Outlander Season 4 (Nov. 5), Seth Meyers: Lobby Baby (Nov. 5), She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Season 4 (Nov. 5), Scams (Nov. 6), Busted! Season 2 (Nov. 8), Im with the Band: Nasty Cherry (Nov. 8), Let It Snow (Nov. 8), Phantom Thread (Nov. 9), Blockers (Nov. 11), Jeff Garlin: Our Man in Chicago (Nov. 12), Maradona in Mexico (Nov. 13), Joe Versus the Volcano (Nov. 15), Seven (Nov. 15), The Toys That Made Us Season 3 (Nov. 15), Iliza: Unveiled (Nov. 19), Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (Nov. 20), Z Nation: Season 5 (Nov. 20), The Dragon Prince Season 3 (Nov. 22), The Knight Before Christmas (Nov. 22), Nailed It! Holiday! Season 2 (Nov. 22), Narcoworld: Dope Stories (Nov. 22), Final Space Season 2 (Nov. 24), Mike Birbiglia: The New One (Nov. 26), Holiday Rush (Nov. 28), Merry Happy Whatever (Nov. 28), Atlantics (Nov. 29), Sugar Rush Christmas (Nov. 29), The Movies That Made Us (Nov. 29).

Originally posted here:
The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in November - The New York Times

Life naturally has its ups and downs, and we tend to produce many of them simply by making right or wrong decisions at any given time. With such oscillations, its often difficult to notice patterns that force us to abandon certain healthy habits or to form unhealthy ones in their stead. Too often, we float through life without giving too much consideration to those common issues, let alone to finding ways to give our choices a structure.

That is perhaps why so many of your New Years resolutions never come to life, or so many of your dreams get replaced by other, subpar solutions. To achieve some of those major milestones in your life means not only to embrace the fact that your entire lifes journey is made up of self-improvement, but to also find systematic ways to take meaningful action. Here are a few starting points to consider that will add purpose and structure to your life and imbue it with meaning and wellbeing.

Photo by Nicole Honeywill / Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Some people enjoy sci-fi novels, others like the classics such as Hemingways stories, while there are those who love poetry. Maybe you have long abandoned your love for storytelling because digital domination has taken over most of your time, so you enjoy social media or you prefer blogs. However, reading, especially fiction, has a profound effect on your mind, both on a physical and a spiritual level.

In addition to boosting brain connectivity and various brain functions, devoting some time to reading fiction allows you to develop your imagination, explore alternative ways of self-expression, evolve your language, and boost your communication skills. Even a chapter a day is more than enough to tickle your reading muscles, so give your mind the boost it needs by picking up a book on a regular basis.

Forming healthy habits takes time, but when you start with a single healthy habit, you have a better chance of developing others, supporting ones down the line and much sooner than you think. In the todays era of greater fitness awareness, its relatively easy to find an activity that will suit your personality and that will help you grow stronger, more agile, and retain healthy muscle and bone mass as you age, all of which is essential for a long, healthy life.

If youre a dancer at heart, find high-quality womens dancewear that you can use as inspiration to hit the dance floor on a regular basis and that will provide you the support you need to dance safely for hours on end. Obtaining the right gear is half the battle, its also a source of motivation that will help you get out of the chair more often, so as to stick to your exercise regime.

Photo by David Pennington on Unsplash

Although dancing and other physical activities give you ample stimulation and allow you to learn something new as often as you please, learning should become a mindset that helps you improve over time in other areas as well. For example, you can try your hand at chess, take up cooking classes, or take math lessons.

Expanding your knowledge gives your mind a way to stay nimble, and youll be humbled by how much you dont know, thus be more curious and eager to learn as you go through life. These new insights will also give you a way to connect to new people, expanding your social circle and giving you a better understanding of the world around you.

Life is so much more than a routine, but in order to lead a functional, fruitful existence, you need to develop habits and rituals that enforce positive behavior, self-love, self-care, and that allow you to accomplish anything you desire without exposing yourself to excessive stress. For example, instead of working haphazardly during the day, you can assign various time-slots to each task you should complete.

If you need to reply to emails every day, take a designated hour to do so. If you need to do some creative work, make sure that you devote time to such tasks when you know youre most likely to focus, imagine, and create, be it in the morning, afternoon, or evening. That will let you add your exercise schedule into the mix and establish a stable structure in your life that ensures ample time for all activities that help you grow and lead a fulfilling life.

Systematization may not seem like the most romantic or spiritual way to approach self-development, but its by far the most promising one to give you the flexibility and the structure you need to evolve in life. These are just some examples of healthful activities that will empower you to find other, complementary ways to grow and keep learning as your life unravels.

Read more:
4 Ways to Improve Yourself Systematically - Thrive Global

Inevitably, most teams get to the stage where they need to adopt a more Agile delivery process. This is not just a sign of maturity. Its a sign that the software they are developing is being used, is deemed useful, and is receiving feedback and change requests so that it continues to improve.

My team is in a unique position. We are striving to improve delivery as we develop a tool that strives to help teams do the same. In other words, we use our own tool to improve the delivery of it!

In my experience, the journey to becoming more Agile can be tricky. Each team has its own goals and ideas about how to get there. All teams, however, need to be able to reflect on their progress, measure how effective their current strategy is, and gain more visibility of the wider landscape. Of course, this is easier said than done.

The topic of which metrics Agile teams can trust to reliably help them measure progress or whether to use them at all is both fascinating and contentious. Many people associate metrics with a top-down management style, which is the opposite of the decentralised, empowered and self-determining team philosophy that Agile promotes.

During a one-to-one meeting with my team lead, I asked him which metrics he felt I should focus on. He explained that the only ones worth looking at were those that the whole team agreed would help improve delivery. When it came to my own self-improvement goals, he said I should select metrics myself.

SEE ALSO:Infrastructure as Code Lessons learned from Dev to Ops

As a rule, whenever metrics are applied from the top down, the less effective they are. (This is not to say, however, that there arent valuable metrics that can indicate progress at a higher level.)

Self-improvement is a key Agile principle. On the face of it, its a pretty simple process. First, you identify what you want to improve. Next, establish ways to measure the attributes that contribute to improvement. Then measure and reflect. Therefore you will always need a reliable way to track progress.

My team chose Agile metrics that focus on various attributes of delivery, quality and value. For example, we measure Lead Time from the time the ticket is created in Jira to its production deployment and number of escaped bugs. Weve created a dashboard in our own software around these attributes so we can measure, integrate and affect them daily, or as part of a retrospective. Our dashboards help guide us and qualify decisions we make around team, process, and delivery improvement to ensure we continually head in the right direction. We can also opt to see individual contributions to these metrics. For instance, I have chosen to create a view of metrics that only I can see, so I can measure my own personal output.

As part of our cycle rituals, our team is responsible for making sure our scope is realistic. To support this, we use Agile metrics to ensure that the sum complexity, time and effort of our tasks match the overall time available and the teams abilities. We measure the scope using story points. We also built and now use a Sprint Report facility. This allows us to see a breakdown of the sprints overall completion, including the target completion and work added to the sprint after it started. It also includes Sprint-specific dashboards that use metrics like Completed Tickets to calculate the amount of work developers can reliably complete during a sprint (aka their velocity).

As I said before, Agile metrics for team improvement can be contentious. They open up a lot of heated discussions and to varying degrees benefit from a wider understanding of context and narrative. So we discuss them and apply the following tenets to help find common ground:

Complicated metrics run counter to the Agile spirit. We like to define our journey as specifically as we can, answering simple questions with easy to understand metrics which support them like:

The metrics need to be selected by the development team and serve a common aim shared by project members from the Scrum Master to the technology leader.

You shouldnt measure anything unrelated to your journeys destination. Each project follows a different set of milestones so may need different metrics. However, as there is only one final destination, some carefully-selected metrics should be applicable across all teams. Less can be more, so when we build out a dashboard together in our team meetings, we try to concentrate on only a handful of metrics at a time.

Software delivery metrics are often outcome-based. Although legitimate, theres a risk of tracking only symptoms and not root causes. The Cycle Times metric, for example, shows how long work is taking rather than why. Descriptive metrics like these should also include details of the variables that impact the outcomes. For example, alongside Cycle Time you could show an analysis of the bottlenecks. To improve we want to uncover root causes and identify behaviour gains we can make together we need to tell a full story.

Right sources we need to analyse data from those sources that our developers genuinely engage within their everyday work. These include workflow management software like Jira; code repositories like GitHub and Bitbucket, TFS or Gitlab; code quality tools like Sonarqube; time tracking systems like Harvest or Tempo; and continuous delivery tools like Jenkins and GoCD.

If analysing metrics takes significant cognitive effort or time to collate, we tend to lose patience and abandon the effort. The metrics need to complement processes, not slow them down.

Agile metrics delivered in near real-time fundamentally drive improvement as they can be discussed in daily stand-ups and sprint retrospectives.

Software development is a process (almost) completely driven by people. This means it should be possible to source information and get to the root-cause of issues very fast. Typically feedback is collected in person, in stand-ups and retros. In theory this should work well, but it can also hide issues that participants dont want to openly communicate. This is especially true in changing, distributed teams with a mix of full-time employees and contractors. To address this and provide us with context and narrative around our metrics, we incorporate feedback into our tool. For example, when tickets get closed we get the chance to provide feedback on how the ticket went and its requirements via Slack. These prompts also give us a feel for how a ticket has performed post dev as it continues (hopefully!) past QA.

Metrics only make sense if teams can act upon and improve them. Without constant support, many teams will not have the time or inclination to drive their own self-improvement as they strive to meet their short-term delivery objectives. Active stewardship by the technology leadership team can make a huge difference.

Since for many developers (Agile && metrics) dont seem to get along, its no surprise that few analytics tools are available to measure Agile delivery effectiveness. However, now that Agile is mainstream, there is urgency to measure. Since few analytics tools were available, many teams started to build their own. This worked well on a small-scale but hit the wall when projects and teams grew.

There are several other problems with home-grown tools. Most notably, they allow teams to tweak calculations and tell an overly flattering story. Also, the time it takes to build your own tool can be a big distraction from planned work. Fortunately, new solutions are now emerging that work in line with the principles listed above.

If you are still not convinced about using Agile metrics for teams, I recommend testing them on yourself. Most find that when they do this, the metrics become a reassurance or even a confidence boost. For example, a younger colleague of mine was struggling with his programming confidence. He found metrics to be very helpful because they showed him objective proof of improvement.

SEE ALSO:Seven Security Sins: The 7 biggest security problems of agile projects

For my part, one way I often use Agile metrics is to provide insights during a retrospective. To measure how Im improving over time, I track metrics for the tickets Ive completed, the amount of story points completed, and the amount of returns Ive had from QA. Crucially, this also helps me remember the tickets Ive worked on and how they went. Like most developers, I tend to switch focus once a ticket passes and can find it hard to retain the details when its time to review a cycle or perform a project post mortem.

You will of course come up with your own, but I have found these example questions (and related Agile metrics) can help self-improvement:

Whether you decide to use them yourself or for your team, (Agile && metrics) return true. In my experience, people want similar things and work well together in helping deliver on the key Agile principle of self-improvement. Try it out!

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(Agile && metrics) ? Can agile metrics help developers and teams improve? - JAXenter

Toward the end of Some Rap Songs the muddy, lofi meditation that Earl Sweatshirt released 11 months ago he lays his parents voices over one another. There's audio of his mother, law professor Cheryl I. Harris, giving a keynote address at the symposium honoring Whiteness As Property, her groundbreaking article from a 1993 issue of the Harvard Law Review; she thanks her friends, colleagues, and son, and the speech, like the music underneath it, is hopeful. Harris voice is intercut with that of Earls father, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, reading his Anguish Longer Than Sorrow. That piece includes lines like: For some children/ words like Home/ could not carry any possible meaning. You imagine the competing vocals are supposed to cut against and complicate, but not cancel out one another. It seems cathartic.

Earl had completed this interlude along with most of what would become Rap Songs by the end of 2017, and meant to send the batch to his sometimes-estranged father as a sort of conciliatory gesture. But at the beginning of 2018, the elder Kgositsile died in South Africa, the country that made him poet laureate. Earl flew across the globe to make funeral arrangements, stayed abroad for nearly two months, then returned to Los Angeles to finish the album with a eulogy, recorded drunk and alone in a Mid-City duplex, that's really about the eulogizer. Whatever catharsis he was looking for is effectively drowned out.

Feet of Clay, an EP released without warning last night, is the first full body of work that Earl Sweatshirt has written and recorded since his fathers death. It feels, in many ways, of a piece with the album that preceded it the works share in common many patterns, cadences, and rhyming tics, which are occasionally the driving engines of their songs. But from the opening moment of Clay, there is a new (or rather: reclaimed) toothiness; compared to Rap Songs, Clay sounds like someone finally, desperately poking his head above water, grimacing at what he sees. Feet of Clay does not waste time looking for clean emotional arcs. Like all Earls work, but especially the I Dont Like Shit, I Dont Go Outside from 2015, it disguises itself as a depressive episode while documenting his efforts toward self-improvement and -introspection, rendering them as grimy, thankless processes that take place in cabs, bars, and sweltering kitchens.

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Earl Sweatshirt surveys the damage on Feet of Clay - The FADER

We are bombarded all day, every day with noise. Often, the noise carries messages for us. The messages can be criticism, inspiration, questions, need, opinions, emotions, and many more sounds. Even silence in some instances can be a type of noise. With all this stimuli coming in, how do we separate the noise that will be beneficial from the noise that is toxic? How do we find clarity and reduce distraction from what matters? Lets reflect on the types of noise, and then decide how we can best deal with them.

Be an observer one day and watch people anywhere. It makes me a little sad to see how attached we are to our phones and how focused we can be on interacting with them instead of strengthening a relationship with another person. We waste time checking for likes, searching for the right picture, scanning e-mail every five seconds, and taking another selfie. Our interactions have become impersonal swipes and taps. Our phone is never far away and close by is our tablet or computer. We are consumed with listening to stories, opinions, and watching a variety of glimpses of peoples lives through their videos.

Technology can be a wonderful noise, but only in moderation. It can raise our anxiety level and keep us from spending time and focusing on the people we love. Set boundaries on how often you use your technology. Take back some of that time you are spending with a machine and use it for self-improvement.

Toxic thoughts could be depression, low self-esteem, the need to please everyone, doubt, and judgement. You are wonderfully made and worthy just the way you are. As long as you are doing the best you can to be the best version of you, you are doing all you can. Use positive thoughts and inspiration to chase out the negative thoughts, and surround yourself with good people who send a positive message. Ask for help and counseling when it is needed.

Even when we have a million things to do, it is hard not to be pulled into random conversations with friends and colleagues. If that conversation is not giving you knowledge, strengthening a relationship or helping you to improve, then walk away.

Music can be a beautiful noise. It can soothe us and bring us peace, but music with a negative message can be a toxic distraction for us. Choose wisely and listen to what will make you better.

The sound of nature has always had a calming quality for me. I sit on my porch and listen to the sounds around me. I clear my head and take in the beauty around me.

Listening to too much news can have negative effects. We are consuming what everyone else thinks and believes and we begin to question our own beliefs. I hate to watch the political shows not because Im not interested in learning about what is happening in the political arena, but because the behavior on the shows often shows the worst side of human behavior. Im not sure why we cannot discuss a topic without becoming angry or interrupting each other. My husband was watching them so much that I saw a change in his demeanor. He was becoming more negative than usual so I suggested maybe he needed to balance his television diet.

Meetings can be valuable moments where we brainstorm ideas, discuss plans, and have a chance to build relationships. Unfortunately, there also seems to be meetings that are ineffective. Do your best to find a reason to avoid that type of meeting and the frustration that it may cause you.

One day my daughter and I walked into the Ross clothing store and the greeter said Welcome to Ross. In the most defeated, woe is me, sigh filled, bored voice I have ever heard. My daughter and I use that moment whenever we want to describe someone who thinks they are carrying a greater weight than anyone else in the world, and they want to tell everyone about it, and they want to do so repeatedly. You cannot make this noise better, because every positive thought you throw out will be shot down every time. If you surround yourself with negativity, you will eventually succumb to it yourself. It is said that you become like the five people who you are with the most, make sure they are not negative.

You are really the only one responsible for letting this noise in because you have the power to choose how you react to what happens to you and how you react to balancing the many different aspects of your life. I used to freak out if something was out of sync in my morning routine or if one more thing was added to my already busy day. What helped me to react to everything with calm was something that pastor Joel Olsteen said. He said instead of allowing stress to take over, be a person of excellence and find the calm, reasonable way to react. Show others what grace under pressure looks like and you are helping them defeat stress.

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Now, whenever I start to feel stress rising, I talk myself back down and tell myself I can only do my best at any moment. Becoming bent out of shape because something Im juggling might fall is a waste of energy.

Solutions to tuning out the noise

Hide: Sometimes you have to find a spot away from all the noise where no one can find you and you can focus and be productive or just recharge. You cannot be distracted and the silence will be restorative.

Take a healing day: These are days that I feel my emotions have been stretched, my ability to deal with unpleasant people is at a low, and Im just feeling tired. I tell myself that I am going to slow my pace down and surround myself with nothing but positive. That positive could be surrounding myself with people I really enjoy, having an extra cup of coffee, or refusing to worry about anything that will require too much brain power.

Write down distractions vs. plans: Sometimes we can become so busy we do not even realize what our noises are. Keep a journal where you write down daily distractions. Start to write down your plans for the day. Write down the big tasks for the day. You are in charge of where you direct your time and energy so decide what your priorities will be.

Set boundaries: Limit screen time, allow yourself a few brain breaks and then get back to work, reduce distractions, and do not feel guilty about closing your door when you need to complete a project.

Remove what doesnt make you better: Decide what noises are holding you back and eliminate them. Remove anything that isnt meaningful. If something doesnt fill you up or make you better, tune it out.

Filter the noise you let in: The noise you allow into your life is eventually going to affect you for the good or bad. If you are in a toxic relationship where you hear only criticism, you may begin to question your value. If all you hear is negative, you will become negative. If you hear upbeat, inspirational messages all day, you will be more positive.

Reflect on the noise that is swirling around you. Is it making you better or holding you back? How can you change that noise to live the best life? The choice is completely yours. You have the power to change everything or maintain it by what you allow in. I hope you choose only beautiful noise.

Jennifer Bonn is a freelance writer and Kennesaw resident. She has been published in several magazines, and has published a book titled Stay Away from the Girls Bathroom, A Teachers Guide. It is available from Deeds Publishing at http://www.deedspublishing.com.

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JENNIFER BONN: Tune Out The Noise | Lifestyle - MDJOnline.com

Bill Gates is fascinating for many reasons: his wealth, his habits, his ideas.

Thenew Netflix documentary "Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates" covers them all. It follows his extraordinary journey, from globalizing office software to building one of the world's most influential companies, becoming its richest man, and now, leading its largest foundation.

But the reason I'm fascinated by Gates has nothing to do with any of that. It's not his success, or his way of thinking, or his approach to solving the world's most critical problems with tech. To me, the most interesting thing about him is what he teaches us about what it means to be human.

Niklas Gke. Courtesy of Niklas Gke

Throughout the Netflix series, an interviewer asks Gates silly, get-to-know-you questions in quick succession: "What's your favorite food? What's your favorite animal? What do you eat for breakfast?" But every now and then, he throws in some curveballs, maybe to catch Gates off guard and get him to veer from his canned responses. Or maybe the show is just edited to make it look like Gates is getting a low-stakes grilling. Whatever the reason, at one point, the interviewer asks this question: "What was the worst day of your life?"

Gates is a composed man. He's reserved, but seems at ease answering all sorts of questions. But this one is different. He squints. He looks down. He appears to be thinking, but not really. He knows what he has to say he just doesn't want to say it. No one would. But finally, he says it:

"The day my mother died."

There, sitting in the library of his $127 million mansion, is a man who's achieved everything there could possibly be to achieve, whose life at least to us outsiders is defined by his business success.

And yet he didn't say, "The daySteve Jobs accused me of stealing from him."

He didn't say, "The dayI was humiliated by getting hit in the face with a cream pie during a visit with Belgian business and government leaders."

He didn't say, "The daywe were forced to pay $1.3 billion in antitrust fines."

No, the worst day in the Microsoft billionaire's life was the day his mother died.

No matter who you are or who you aspire to be, at the end of the day, life is not about money or status or power. It's not even about legacy.

Life is about people; the people you meet, the people you miss. Even the people you hate. Most of all, life is about the people you love. Some of them will die before you do. Nothing will ever bring them back.

Every one of us has limited time. But when it comes to spending it with those we hold dearest, we might have even less. Gates reminded me of this fact. It's his greatest lesson of all.

Continued here:
Bill Gates' greatest lesson comes from the worst day of his life - Business Insider

The Lafayette volleyball team was back in action last weekend, splitting a pair of conference games with a win over Bucknell and a loss to rival Lehigh. With seven games left in the season, all within the Patriot League, the Leopards hold a 13-12 record with a 2-7 mark in conference play.

After losing to Bucknell earlier this season, the Leopards flipped the script with a 3-1 win over the Bison. Lafayette lost the first set 25-19 before coming back to win three straight sets, 27-25, 25-18 and 25-15. Sophomore outside hitter Leanna Deegan tallied a season-high 23 kills to lead the offense, while fellow sophomore outside hitter Grace Tulevech recorded 12 kills, extending her streak of double-digit kills to nine games.

I think we were really fired up to play Bucknell at home because we had improved a lot on many things we struggled with when we played them initially at Bucknell, Tulevech said. We were able to maintain a high level of energy throughout the game and minimize our own errors. Leanna Deegan also had a really good game and earned a lot of big kills which never fails to fire us all up.

Deegans back-to-back kills clinched the second set for the Leopards after the score was tied at 25. Junior setter Jenna Bailey had 23 assists and 14 digs in the game, as well as a pair of aces. Senior setter Julia Howard matched Bailey with 14 digs and added 19 assists.

In addition to securing their second Patriot League victory of the season, the game also marked head coach Ryan Adams first win against his former team. Adams was an assistant coach at Bucknell from 2014-15 and then again in 2018.

Its fun to compete against a very good Bucknell team that I was part of building, Adams wrote in an email. They are having a fantastic year and it was amazing to come out on top while focusing on our side and our side only.

Against Lehigh, the Leopards got off to a fast start with a 25-23 win in the first set, but dropped the following three sets 25-22, 26-24 and 25-15. Freshman outside hitter Ellie Carrera-Justiz notched back-to-back kills to clinch the first set, and finished with 16 kills and 19 digs on the afternoon. Tulevech recorded 15 kills, junior libero Audrey Mangum had 20 digs and four assists, and Howard added 29 assists.

For us its not about rebounding [after the loss at Lehigh], its about moving forward and continuing to take advantage of every opportunity to grow, learn and improve. Moving into this weekends matches its more about us than our opponents, Adams wrote. We know we have the tools to compete at a high level, its all about implementing it in practice in the hopes that it can transfer into matches.

The volleyball team can secure their best season since 2009 with one more win, a vast difference from last years team which finished 5-23 overall and lost all 16 conference games.

As a team, we have shifted our focus entirely to ourselves rather than the other teams. We arent so focused on wins and losses or how good our opponent is, Tulevech said. I think our coaches have really made that the center of our program win or loss, our focus is self-improvement.

Lafayette will play two conference home games this weekend, facing Loyola Maryland tonight at 7 p.m before taking on Navy tomorrow for Senior Day at 4 p.m.

Originally posted here:
Volleyball beats Bucknell, loses to Lehigh in weekend set - The Lafayette

Working at a coffee shop

As state policymakers take on the 'gig economy' with laws that severely restrict the use of freelance labor, such as California's controversial AB5 , I thought it was a good excuse to write about why self-employment is an economic good. Self-employment is a valuable path to upward mobility, protects regions against economic downturns, and helps many workers smooth their savings in the face of unexpected bills (Disclosure: I work with Tech4America, a tech policy nonprofit).

Before I get to the evidence, I want to say that I speak from personal experience. I owe my career and financial stability to self-employment: when I was in graduate school, I moonlit as a freelance journalist; the valuable job experience I got writing a few articles a month helped me snag a full-time freelancer gig soon after I left school. A few years later, even after I landed a full-time staff writing job, I still freelanced for other publications, which ended up being a financial lifeline when I left that company and allowed me to earn a living income between jobs. Eventually, as a consultant/freelancer, I earned more than I did as an employee, but it took a few years learning the skills of self-employment.

My personal experience seems to jive with the evidence.

"A higher share of self-employed workers in a county was unambiguously associated with greater resilience," wrote economics professor Stephan Goetz, in an international comparison of how different regions bounce back during recessions. Goetz notes that his study was in part inspired by prior research showing that regions with higher rates of self-employment seemed more resistant to the negative impacts of trade deals with lower-wage countries.

Beyond economic resilience, self-employment also helps workers cope with unexpected expenses. Using special access to individual bank data, JP Morgan Chase found that workers with income from known job platform companies had noticeably less volatility in their savings accounts, presumably since they were able to opportunistically take on new work. "Simply put, landing a platform job is easier and quicker. Individuals can, and do, generate additional income on labor platforms in a timely fashion when they experience a dip in regular earnings."

Last, I run an experimental jobs training program, which is based on some previous research showing that multiple-job holding is how many workers train for new, higher paying occupations. So-called "side hustles" are an invaluable source of job training and upward mobility for many workers. One of the things I learned this past year while running the pilot program is just how inaccessible being an employee is for many workers at the lower end of the income distribution. I deal with single moms and folks with health issues who can't take time for full-time school or internships. Most training programs systematically exclude people who need more flexible, intermittent work and therefore exclude a large slice of the population from upward mobility.Freelancing is a way for many disadvantaged workers to have a shot at high-income occupations.

Now, self-employment does have serious problems, and can often mean financial hardship for the workers who rely on it. But, in my experience (and the data I've analyzed), the hazards of self-employment often exist because we treat it as something temporary or intuitive. Self-employment is like any other skill or occupation: it takes about 3-5 years of dedicated experience to earn steady, well-paying income.

The problem has become that it is too easy for workers to become freelancers without knowing the complex skills of solo-preneurship: time management, client relations, networking, financial planning, and stitching together non-employee benefits. The path to earning more money as a freelancer is less intuitive than the promotional path as an employee.

Workforce agencies are beginning to realize that people need help navigating flexible work arrangements, which is why cities like San Francisco have partnered with SamaSchool, a flexible work nonprofit education organization (Disclosure: the Tech4America pilot project has partnered with SamaSchool to train some of its participants).

As more policymakers begin to evaluate their state's relationship with new forms of work, I hope evidence like this makes the case that self-improvement is worthwhile, but like all worthwhile things, requires investment.

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Why Self-Employment Is Good For Workers And The Economy - Forbes