A Really Good Day by Ayelet Waldman

Well, that’s a unique book! Apparently, the author is Professor Ayelet Waldman who is teaching criminal justice :)
Anyways, great research. She’s truly a nerd and I enjoyed her research on drug use and research.
The first note to take is how sometimes women have it hard with pain due to cycles etc. The book itself is her thought process 1:1, quite chaotic, full of self-pity and self-shaming thoughts. No surprise there. But really fun, engaging and in a way carefree. The energy in the book is infectious, such an easy read. At times, I thought this book should be turned into a movie! The way she describes her experiences is very engaging.

It’s so funny how cautious she is. Some women are really willing to explore everything, while others want to stay pure and never try anything mind-altering. Ayelet is somewhere in the middle, but quite fearful.

When you’re microdosing, you got some little hate against Willy Hearstie boy. But then you look at his face and his haircut. Poor boy! :) Must have been a tough life for him. Always chasing money, revenge and power. Sad life.

William fucking Randolph Hearst. It’s great that Ayelet Waldman talks about this guy. He’s the guy who created the yellow journalism and used it to influence or rather screw with politicians to gain financial rewards. It’s a very interesting story that I first heard on Joe Rogan, but effectively little Willy as being the biggest media mogul in the US also an investor in many paper mills, he had massive financial incentive to ban hemp which can be used as a cheap alternative to wood for paper. Also, he was involved as an investor in the early days of the plastic industry. Taking crude oil to make a coffee cup :) Many people don’t know, but hemp was used for thousands of years as a strong material(mainly ropes) and hemp was the primary competitor to his investments. Imagine if instead of plastic, we had cars with hemp interior? It’s a giant business and Willy boy was very much aware of it. So, what did he do? Being the yellow journalist a**hole he simply fabricated stories where black people, in particular, were committing outrageous crimes while being high on weed! Completely fabricated stuff like bullets jumping from their bodies! This led to an outrage and the banning of hemp. And of course insane incarceration rates.

To put into perspective how insanely idiotic this is, hemp composite materials have twice the strength of steel and they are as good as Kevlar! For a moment, imagine cheap Kevlar. What does that mean? It means race car levels of safety for road cars! All the intrusion panels on racing cars, be it F1 or IndyCar or NASCAR, they’re made from layers of Kevlar.
Of course, without the many legal obstacles, the price of hemp composites would be a fraction of Kevlar, but we’ve got the good ol’ lawmakers putting all kinds of obstacles and stigma around hemp. It was Ford who made the first hemp car in the 1940s. You see why hemp was seen as a threat to the oil derived plastic? Moreover, there was talk about hemp oil used in cars! Can you imagine that? Good ol’ Texas cowboys w/o oil?
Nowadays, we’ve got biodegradable composites occasionally used in motor racing, mostly containing flax fibers. They are showing great promise and hopefully, we will soon have biodegradable plastic alternatives. Of course, just some 70 years later, thanks to Mr. Hearst and his mad racist friends.
In the future these mass-produced composite materials, like carbon fiber, Kevlar or these biodegradable composites will make the cars a lot lighter and safer. Lighter cars mean more energy-efficient and much easier to go electric.

Yes, Henry Ford was a nazi supporter. But still, he wasn’t as much as a racist as those who banned hemp. But above all, he was a true leader of innovators. He was quite fond of all kinds of weeds too, but strictly for practical eating purposes ;)

Talking about plastics let’s go into brain plasticity. I didn’t know LSD is stimulating BDNF(that’s Brain-derived neurotrophic factor – responsible for long-term memory formation) so much! Basically, LSD is making your brain being very, very plastic and thus open-minded like when you’re a kid. This means you’re smart as a kid and kids learn faaaaaaaaaast! But more over, when you’re on LSD, you’re very willing to re-learn and re-discover. You’re in essense being open minded with a growth mindset.
This is quite important, because the legal drug alternatives of LSD are actually making you… retarded.

It’s both funny and tragic to read how many different pills she has been prescribed. I mean, no wonder she was neurotic! She was taking Ambien for years, including while her kids were babies… Who in their right mind gives Ambien to a young mother? It’s basically going in a coma with a pill and thinking you’ve slept, just because you feel groggy after you wake up. It’s insane. Honestly, many American doctors and pharma companies should be in jail. They’ve created so much suffering in the name of profit.
It’s important to note, that after start taking LSD as microdosing, your sleep initially gets a bit worse because it’s a stimulant. But over time, and I mean like 2 weeks, your cortisol levels go so much down that despite getting a stimulant in the morning, you start sleeping quite well and wake up happy! :) This is veeeery important. At first, sleep is terrible and after a while it gets normal!

It’s important to note, that Ayelet at one point was allegedly bi-polar. It’s not an easy diagnosis to make and this usually is a diagnosis which means you automatically get a big No-No for taking psychedelics. Set and setting, meaning your emotional condition and the setting you get your psychedelic are quite important and you can get very different results. In the case with Ayelet, she sounds more like borderline personality disorder person. She tends to have outbursts, puts people in extreme categories, depression and self-pity. But these mood swings are not consistent. In her case, LSD helped her a lot to be consistently in a good mood :) Nothing dangerous, only the people around her were initially surprised by how good she was with them. In fact, the kids joked that she must have taken smth if she was this cool with them!

Ayelet is a great researcher of how we ended up with weed & psychedelics getting banned. The stories are very entertainingly told. From her position as a criminal justice lawyer, she has the first-hand experience of how much suffering this has caused. It’s such a sad story because it’s obvious how Ayelet from being neurotic and full of self-pity in the space of a month becomes a joy to be with. Her relationship with her husband transforms, her kids love her and she’s not screaming or yelling to anyone! The transformation is massive. Frankly, I didn’t know you can change that much. I’m quite a calm person and I use microdosing as a way to get free and in flow. It’s something that I use to get from 95% to 100%, the last missing ingredient.

This paper on how our brain becomes plastic, meaning open-minded is very much confirming Ayelet’s findings: http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/71/3/316
We are literally taking off the chains we have imposed on ourselves or others did upon ourselves. We are becoming as free as kids! We are becoming young again.

There is one lesson from this book. We can truly be what we want. We can have whatever mood we want, at will. But learning how to do it and maintaining this capability takes a lot of effort and luck concerning outside factors that might screw up our moods in a major way, push us out of balance. When you’ve got family, kids, and work, then, in this case, the outside factors play a huge role and… here come the psychedelics to help us achieve the balance we crave for! :))) You can use them to grow your way into discovering your deeper inner self, become a personality of higher consciousness. Be in the moment, nonreactive, confident, open-minded and empathetic. A really good day where you’re your best self.

P.S. Yeah, the book is written in a very similar tone! It’s like written by a teen girl, a happy go lucky attitude, yet very touching and personal.

 

Mind the gap – a mental tool from Neil Strauss

This is an email I got from Neil. It is very telling and gives us an important and easy to use metaphor/concept on how to stop reacting, but start responding with empathy.
I got it today, I love Neil, he is one of the most curious and talented authors and human beings. Not just because he’s the author of The Game, a book which started an important change in my life and that of millions of others, but because he is able to go through all kinds of struggles, then summarize the best solutions for overcoming these often immense struggles and present them to us, the mere humans, in an easy to understand and remember form. This one is no exception.

I’m strongly recommending signing up to his newsletter. The emails don’t come very often, but most often they’re quite deep and profound.

So here is a copy/paste of this email:

Ivan,There’s a motto that I have for myself that I want to share with you today. It’s very simple: Expand the gap between listening and responding. When there’s no gap, we don’t respond. We react.

Especially when you’re having a hard conversation or you feel criticized. What’s the difference between the two? A response is rational. A reaction is emotional. Example: Your partner says, “You’re always late!” Your reaction might be to feel hurt, and get defensive, and then act that out on your partner. “Leave me alone. Traffic was bad. Why are you always so shitty and critical with me? I couldn’t help it.” If your partner then reacts, soon you’re arguing. And if this keeps happening, eventually you’re broken up. A reaction is generally based on the wounds of the past. A response is generally based in the unfiltered present. So a rational response would be to think: Is this true? In this case, it’s probably not. There are of course some occasions when you haven’t been late.

So if you widen the gap, and sit with the discomfort of a reaction rather than acting it out, and then self-soothe if needed, you can get to the rational response. So you get to experience both an emotional reaction and a rational set of thoughts. Now comes the final step of what you’re going to do in this gap: Combine your emotions and your thoughts, get into a place of reality, and empathize. First with yourself, then with your partner. Now imagine you could say: “It sounds like you’re frustrated that I’m late, and have a pattern of being late sometimes.” If they respond in a connected way, you can continue the conversation. Work on a solution together so the same problem doesn’t keep occurring. If they react instead of responding, stay cool, acknowledge their feelings, and table the connection-oriented or solution-oriented conversation for later. Keep in mind that this gap may just be a matter of seconds, or even less than a second. It is a sliver of time that contains the enormous possibility to transform your relationships and create harmony. Seek to understand first, before seeking to be understood. Best, Neil

 

Update: Just recently, I noticed how Eckhart Tolle is always taking a very noticeable few seconds before answering every question. It’s that easy, that profound, but we rarely do it. We’re so automated :) It’s a mental note for me to take time to answer. Just a few seconds.

Time to build palaces, baby!

Enter the Nurburgring Nordschleife, the craziest race track in the world. It’s so fearsome, that single-seater cars are forbidden to race at it since Niki Lauda’s infamous inferno in 1976! On the simulator, if I race with a high downforce F2 or F1 type single-seater, it’s the single most exhilarating experience you can have inside the walls of a home besides having a foursome with model bodied girls. Well, it’s certainly better than sex with some boring girl! Your senses are at their peak, the time has stopped, no second thoughts, it’s one focus. It’s survival. You forget about the world. Flow is all you have. Flow is all there is.
There have been moments, especially with the McLaren 650S GT3, where I’ve felt so invincible, that I start thinking I can’t crash. Your confidence levels are sky-high. It’s dangerous, even the most unruly car suddenly develops understeer. Your subconscious is driving the car. At times you’re amazed by your reflexes, but then you take it as normal. You’re watching yourself driving in amazement. The car is not enough for you. It can’t kill you, it can’t hurt you. You’ve mastered it. It’s so dangerous that seasoned Nordschleife drivers stop themselves from achieving this state to such extreme, because at that moment… it might truly kill you! It’s called the Green Hell for a reason.
It’s the best place to learn a new car on the sim, because it’s corner after corner and there are all types of corners. At the end of one lap, you’ve experienced the car in all possible conditions.

It is Sir Jackie Stewart who called it the Green Hell. 176 turns and out of them, a lot can kill you! Here is Sir Jackie at the Nurburgring in the wet in ’69, he won famously in 68 by 4 minutes, but in ’69 he was slowed down with gearbox issues. Another wet master, Jackie Ickx won in ’69. That was the last race before the track was rebuild. At the time it didn’t even have Armco barriers. Drivers were crashing airborne into the trees. A brave bunch.

Why am I talking about a race track when I want to build palaces? Well quite simple.
It all comes from mnemonics. I had previously played and used mnemonic devices a lot. But I’ve been a student of Tony Buzan. I’m speed reading, using his techniques to memorize shopping lists and I ADORE mind mapping! iMindMap is always open. That’s where I put most of my notes when I’m researching a subject. Only lately, I’ve been inspired to write summaries or articles here on this blog in order to improve my writing skills, but also because it has some memorization benefits.
The problem with Tony Buzan’s books, which I’m recommending wholeheartedly, is that the techniques are simply not the latest. Mnemonics is a field that is improving at a very fast pace. Mental athletes(yep, there are such) are inventing new ways to remember faster and more every single year. They’re improving at gigantic steps. This is something that I didn’t know until I read this book:

It’s got a cool easy to remember name. It’s the story of how a NYT journalist went into the world of memory champions and in the span of 1 year became the best in the USA. Yes, admittedly the US championship wasn’t anywhere near the top, but still, it’s a remarkable achievement. The guy with the best memory in all of the US of A.
As with Tony Buzan and mind mapping, the concepts are super easy. Mental palaces is actually a forgotten ancient technique. People back in antique times were using it to remember because they didn’t have paper to write down! It got very developed in the middle ages when Matteo Ricci published a book on how to build memory palaces and went to teach the Chinese these techniques. He was a very famous scholar at the time and he’s very much respected in Chinese culture.
So what is the technique? First, you need to develop a great imagination. This includes imagination that is full of colours, feelings, and smells. An easy and fun way to do this is visualization of driving a lap in your mind. All racing drivers prepare like this. If you are not into racing, well… the most popular form of visualization is sexual fantasies. You can concentrate on the colors, the details of the female body, the sensations of touch and smells. Visualization can be all sorts of dreaming. It’s the most fun one can have by himself or herself ;) Once you have this imagination developed you can start attaching characters and building stories into your memory palaces. Most memory champions use their homes, buildings, and streets as memory palaces. For whatever reason though, I don’t find these very inspiring. I find them boring and repetitive. That’s why I prefer race circuits.
For example: Moonwalking with Einstein is used for remembering cards. It’s a story. but let’s say we need to remember just the phrase(yep, it’s quite catchy). How do you do that? You imagine your home. Right now, I can imagine Einstein with his crazy haircut listening to a funky tune and entering my room while moonwalking on the floor. It’s a story and it’s absurd! That’s why you’re remembering it. Just like in humour, you’re searching for the absurd, the unexpected. Because if it is ordinary, you won’t remember it for long. But since it’s so weird, you can always remember Einstein dressed in hip-hop clothes with a cassette player on his shoulder like in an 80s music video and moonwalking(that’s a type of dance technique) under the tunes of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
Joshua Foer has been building his memory palaces always inside his home or the homes of friends and families. I just don’t find them very interesting or inspiring.

So why the Nordschleife? Because while I drive I get sensations and feelings. Every corner has a story, different feelings to it, different problems and requires a different technique. It’s the longest circuit on Earth, I’ll have lots of space to remember things. Out of 176 corners, all have character and character is what I need! I need to have something to which to connect my memory palace ideas. Something that invokes an emotional response in myself, because when you add emotion/feelings to what you want to remember, then you remember it far more easier. Basically, dopamine, serotonin or cortisol acts as confirming agents in your brain’s memory. Further down the line, hopefully, I will be able to imagine castles and palaces like the ones you can see on top of the article from Pinterest and use them reliably for memorization. But right now, I might get lost and when you get lost, you’re losing the thread. You don’t remember the correct order! On the Nordschleife, I can’t get lost because I can drive or watch an onboard lap whenever I want.

Check out this crazy lap of Kevin Estre, he’s fully committed and taking big risks:

 

I think memory palaces are a very powerful idea and it’s something I need to work on a lot. But I’m most excited about combining mind maps with mental palaces. For this though, I will have to practice a lot with my imagination. It must be as wild and vivid as possible.
Overall, speed reading(the true one, not skipping!!!), mind-mapping and memory palaces are techniques that we should have been taught at school. They can make our lives much, much easier and the childhoods of all kids a lot more enjoyable :)

Do I even care about traveling?

Traveling isn’t experiencing. It’s visiting, but not experiencing. I absolutely don’t have an answer to the so modern question about “Where do you want to travel? Which places?” Maybe because in our part of EU nature is so rich, we are quite spoilt, but I have literally never dreamt in my life about traveling to a certain location. Events? Yes! Taking part in something? Yes! Travel to meet new people? Hell yeah! But to places? Not really. Maybe go to some places and do something, like rallying in the desert, climb a mountain, ride bikes, raft, camp, fly or smth exciting. But seeing and taking a pic? That’s so boring. I dream about adventures, not travel.
What makes a place magical is the people and the culture, not the architecture or landscape – those are the same as on Google Images. Actually, the architecture is an expression of the people and culture, you need to meet them first in order to understand a little bit the spirit behind the architecture. The culture, on the other hand, is formed partly on the landscape – i.e. the Scandinavians/Russians and the winter, it’s fascinating to see how nature has affected cultural norms around the world differently.

It’s so strange and boring to see so, so, so many people just supposedly doing fun things in order to get social approval. They go to places, eat some food, never meet anyone and their stories are mostly wildly boring and repetitive. Copy-paste. Why? Because they were more or less alone, or at best with a group of people from their home country, then they get tired and/or bored. Of course, the last part about being bored or tired will be omitted in terms of words when they tell you the story, but you’ll sense it easily underneath the flash of their camera.
It’d be nice if more people start traveling in order to experience, not in order to get likes on the stupid Instagram and then bore you to death while trying to impress you. Then we might start to appreciate the local cultures and become more accepting, but most importantly live with fewer prejudices. Most stories are told from the angle of “they have or do some cool things, but we’re better”. Quite an ego-driven activity, isn’t it?

End of rant :)

Motivated by a rather boring evening about the latest dose of North African/Asian trip stories where the main characters basically spent their entire time either in a hotel or a bus.

Edit: Later on I found out that Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle, and other spiritual teachers think the same. Travelling is just escapism. You can’t live with yourself and wrongly believe that by traveling to a far away place you’ll live in harmony with thyself. It’s a distraction from your inner issues.

The Unfair Advantage by Mark Donohue

 

Mark Donohue’s image in the racing circles is one of being the epitome of professional. He’s the prototype Penske driver. The pro who is always consistent, never out of line, always prepared.
But it wasn’t always like this, Mark started as a complete novice quite late and worked his way up from being a novice who was ridiculed to the leading professional driver in America at the time. Mark’s approach to racing developed together with Roger Penske’s to give the foundation of what is today Penske in both racing and in his giant business empire. Mark and Roger were a formidable team.
The book can be quite technical and by that, I mean with the contemporary technology at the time – early-mid 70s. Mark was never one to reject new technologies fully, he was always leaving at least a little space for them in his mind. This allowed him to be incredibly creative in outsmarting the competition, he was looking to take every little advantage, be it technology or tactic from other fields and apply it to the full extent in his own racing. He would always take something and aim to make it as big as possible of an unfair advantage for as long as possible. This is essentially the modern racing mindset at the top. Mark was a visionary at the time. He had a never-ending supply of curiosity. People like him need very patient and almost equality curious and hungry teammates. Most people would never endure such a plethora of crazy experimentation and tinkering, the insane chase for finding the root cause of every single failure and success. He would always win and then feel afraid of how the competition can find something new on them. It seems to have been a never-ending chase for innovation, perfection, and learning.

Interestingly, during his whole career, Mark was married with kids and yet his wife was supporting him in his insane racing endeavors which ultimately cost him his life. This simply shows the difference in mindsets between the late 60s/early 70s and nowadays. It was taken for granted that men can die and their wives will have to find the strength to continue without them. He would gamble their house and his secure job chasing his dream and passion of racing professionally.

It’s great to see how Roger Penske wasn’t always Penske Perfect. He’s one of my all-time heroes and examples in life. Sadly, the nature of his business is mostly in the US means that Penske has only just 1 win in F1, but no doubt that if there were supersonic private jets… there would be quite a few World Championships won by Penske’s organization. But still, in the beginning, Roger was probably too naive and trusting with some people. I guess, later on in life he started to require the same high standards he’s used to performing at from all those who work for him. When your confidence grows and you take a few bad lessons where suppliers or partners don’t deliver, you tend to learn pretty quickly and be less trusting and more judgemental. Having a close circle of friends and acquaintances that can hold up to these standards and push you even further. Yet, of course, Penske nowadays is known for his extreme loyalty and at least in the IndyCar and wider motorsport community, he’s helped a lot of people without taking any credit for it.

One thing that I found very interesting is the way Mark was able to blend into different cultures. He was this college-educated driver, one of very few, but he was always finding ways to work and collaborate with a very humble attitude with wild traditional Southerners, with overconfident Brits or with the very methodical Germans. It’s very strange to see how he was always having doubts about himself. Here is this incredible driver who is just not only very fast, very reliable, but also an incredibly capable engineer who was fantastic at sorting cars out, developing winners from terrible shit boxes and yet, he was all through his career doubting his abilities behind the wheel. Before Mario Andretti, he was the driver capable of winning in ANY type of car! It’s incredible, in one season he would develop, race and win with 5-6-7 different cars! Even back in the day, no matter how much the other drivers were involved in the development process, none of them were effectively the team manager who is deciding the setup, the strategy and then organizing the team. All of his competitors had the luxury to concentrate far more on the driving than Mark Donohue could ever afford to. I mean, he was calling Denny Hulme as lazy… while he’s regarded as a very good development driver, but Mark’s standards were simply that much higher.
For me, Mark Donohue is the kind of driver that is very, very rare even nowadays. He’s probably one of the very first drivers who strived to achieve perfection by being the complete driver. He reminds me a lot of Fernando Alonso, but a Fernando Alonso with a very high social intelligence, someone who can adapt and push the right buttons of people and someone who’s far less conflict-prone or egoistical. Was he better than AJ Foyt? Certainly. Far more diverse and technical. Was he better than Mario Andretti? It will be a stretch and unfair to compare them, but most probably yes. His engineering background was simply a giant Unfair Advantage for him.
Under Mark’s watch, Penske Racing was able to successfully race and win at a giant number of championships and effectively established itself as the leading motorsport team in the US in a very, very short period of time – just 5 years!

Donohue needed to win IROC because he needed the money! Here, he’s demonstrating the typical 911 balance: soft rear suspension and front roll bar almost lifting the inner front wheel off the ground while cornering.

There was one big issue that Mark wrote very little in his book and that’s his deal-making skills. He wasn’t a good wheeler-dealer… he was the most valuable driver in the US without a question. Bobby Unser had a similar reputation as an engineering driver, but Uncle Bobby certainly wasn’t someone who could work with most people, he wasn’t a team player. It was only team Bobby Unser for him and nothing else. So, Mark was that complete driver and yet he had financial instability. He split up with his wife, no wonder considering his schedule, but he also won tons of races including the Indy 500 and when he retired, he worked for a year just as a team manager and then came back as a driver because of the money. Clearly, I think in this situation Roger Penske should have paid Mark way more handsomely. There are a number of lines in the book where Mark has duly noted how Roger takes a Porsche for himself, makes gifts to his wife, etc., but the guy who’s doing the most work doesn’t get paid very well. Donohue was no doubt very loyal, may be too loyal as he would have made waaaaaaaay more money at Porsche or Ferrari! But ultimately, this financial insecurity forced him back into driving and ultimately his unfortunate death. If Roger Penske had duly been paying Mark what he deserves, then he would have stayed as team manager and Penske would have still been in F1. Mark was instrumental at setting up the F1 team and just 1 year after his death, John Watson won Penske’s first and only Grand Prix. Later on, Penske exited F1 because there was nobody to run the team basically, it was too much hassle. If Mark had been alive, then that problem would have never occurred. Potentially, Penske was a championship-winning outfit. No question about that, the team was very much ahead of its time. Mark Donohue was a master of efficient innovation with a never give up attitude.

For the racing nuts, Mark Donohue’s biography is a classic read. It remains so and it’s very inspiring. This book is basically the diary of an intensely competitive innovator. It’s a mindset diary, but it can become very boring on the technical side because these cars are just very, very different. Still, I enjoyed immensely the technical aspect and the way he is telling the story of how the team or he came up with the technical solutions. Also, because the cars he drove had very basic aerodynamics, it was nice to see how they were balancing cars just by the mechanical setup and very rarely working with the dampers that are now so important in modern racing.
I didn’t know that the hated by me style of braking in a straight line was called European. I hate driving cars requiring such style with a burning passion. His explanation of how people are mixing oversteer with understeer is amazing! Very often, as in cars wanting to brake in a straight line, you’re braking and then the front doesn’t bite – it’s stubborn like a pig for a split second. Unknowingly though, you’ve put a lot more steering lock and suddenly you’ve got instantly more roll and you’ve broken down the traction of the front tires. Of course, a tenth later as you see yourself missing the apex, you apply more brake pressure and with the roll –  the outside rear locks and it causes the car to spin. Your initial reaction is that you’ve got snap oversteer. But this can’t be further from the truth. You’ve got understeer. If you think you’ve got snap oversteer, you’ll simply make changes that won’t have any effect, in fact, might worsen the situation. But instead, if you cure the understeer and simply drive with less steering lock you won’t reach the moment where the rear wheels are unloaded under heavy braking. There is no snap oversteer, it’s cured by decreasing the entry understeer under braking.
Mark was one of the first to pioneer the trail braking driving style. It’s just so much more natural and flowing than slowing down in a straight line and then turning. It’s a much more complex and rich driving style that every modern racing driver must be capable of using. Sadly, at least in Bulgaria, driving instructors are only teaching students using this driving style and it’s very dangerous in many situations. I think 99% of the drivers on the road are still using a century-old driving style… it’s madness!
Of course, Assetto Corsa has the fearsome Porsche 917/30K in the Sunoco Penske livery… the guy had balls! It’s such a riot this car. I don’t know a current driver or person who would have the balls to drive this car and isn’t mentally insane. Different generation. The war must have had a huge impact on the upbringing of these drivers. This car was 1200 bhp and his legs were in front of the front axle(he broke them and could have died on 2 other occasions with it), meaning any impact involving the front would mean broken legs! It was survivorship with a large dose of competitiveness. A fine line to walk.

One last note. Now we’ve got the Hollywood movie Ferrari vs Ford. I’ve only watched the trailer and as much as I appreciate that movies make racing more popular, I also far more disapprove of Hollywood’s way of skewing things up. Nowhere in this book or in the many other documentaries I’ve watched or books that I’ve read, even specifically on Cobra and Ferrari, there have been teammates beating the crap out of each other in a fistfight. AJ Foyt was famous for going into such matches, but it was mostly against people from a much lower status in his mind, like journalists. Also, racing cars don’t have hand brakes, Mr. Damon.
Mark Donohue was part of the Ford Cobra team that won Le Mans and it was a very professional effort. There’s a whole chapter on this book about the development and racing of the GT40s. Sadly, Hollywood portrays racing as a bunch of idiots without brains going at each other’s throat. I guess, or rather… I’m convinced that Hollywood are a bunch of homophobic idiots with alcohol, drug and rape problems. Mostly good looking idiots lucky enough to be paid millions for trying to repeat a line correctly about a 100 times while being filmed.
I don’t watch movies. Just read or listen to real books. Movies are only based on real events or books… and then some sick guy’s fantasy has taken over!

Why self-doubt is an idiotic, unnecessary and dangerous social construct

These past two weeks there were the local elections in my home country of Bulgaria. I can go on and explain how sad is the whole political picture, but sadly with the advent of social media, the vast majority of people are so easy to be fooled in virtually every single country that it seems like the picture is quite sad all around the world.
As one would expect, most of the candidates were absolute jokes. I don’t follow politics as I treat it as a waste of time and don’t know the actual results, but as usual, people vote for some self-obsessed idiot who then starts to believe even more in himself/herself and confidently abuses his powers in order to do the best for his people. It’s a bit like when a hot dumb girl chooses to date the drug dealer because he’s so cool and then a month later cries her eyes out because he’s beating her. 1:1 situation, self-obsessed confident guys win the hearts of the stupid.

Why? Very often, the most intelligent people are the most humble and have low self-esteem because of what makes them intelligent – their drive to improve.
As much as IQ tests are incomplete pictures of one’s broad intelligence, they at least show some part of the picture. Nowadays we can determine one’s IQ by analyzing their speech. The PM of my country, the guy with the most power, he’s certainly not above 100. In fact, he’s probably the only PM in Europe or may be even the world who doesn’t speak ANY second language! He’s just an Average Joe, but when you give Average Joe some strong narcissistic tendencies, suddenly Average Joe becomes Confident Joe. Our nature is such that we believe confident people. There are many people who are faking confidence, but they are easy to be caught out. Especially by women, I call women “walking bs detectors”.
But when people’s confidence comes from the inside, unless you engage your logical mind and let’s be honest, most of us don’t use it as much as we think we do, then you simply believe that person.
So here comes the person with huge ego and confidence, who never doubts himself and promises you the world. The person who’s self-critical with a growth mindset, which of course relies on this self-critical nature of the mind, they’re just dumbfounded and can’t show they’re always confident, because they either have to fake it which isn’t easy or can’t fake it all!
So our Confident Average Joe just walks through Self-Critical Joe, and the average people prefer him over his more intelligent opponent. At the end of the day, a growth mindset isn’t something very common in people, quite the contrary!
In the case of that dumb fuck the Bulgarian PM Boyko Borisov, he was a fireman who turned to racketeering people in the 90s. He was shaking people in our capital of Sofia, and later on, the citizens of Sofia elected him as their mayor. Confirming our nation’s slave mentality. I mean, the average Bulgarian is the most gullible person ever… Of course, Bat Boyko as he’s known, he’s sooooooo deep into NPD. He’s the kind of guy who would never admit a mistake and would never ever doubt himself! His confidence is so massive, that I had a girlfriend who was telling me how she would fuck him even though he’s fat af, because apparently, he was so confident(or full) in himself.

Here is Boyko playing against Boris Becker in a charity match with his distinctive fashionable outfit. He thought he would beat Becker. No, seriously he did! After the match, Becker asked if he was mad? To good ol’ Boris, Boyko’s efforts were quite obviously laughable.

Who are the people with most NPD(NarcissisticPersonality Disorder)? They’re mostly in jails or should be in jails. They’re your cheaters, jerks, and bullies. None of them usually is associated with any academic prowess or intelligence. But are they associated with confidence? Hell YEAH!
I had a classmate who was winning many math competitions, he’s got Ph.D. and his little brother is the same. Now there’s a middle brother, apparently, he didn’t follow his big bro’s footsteps. He was a wild guy, more into body-building and in fact once the big brother told me how his little brother told him it’s good to carry a baseball bat in your trunk in case some accident happens!? I mean, wtf? Carry a baseball bat!
Now my classmate, who almost went to MIT on a full scholarship, once told me that years later when he went to Harvard and MIT, he was convinced he wasn’t one bred for an academic career there. On the other hand, I know a couple of rich kids who finished those esteemed institutions and have nowhere near his intelligence. In fact, they’re so inspiring that you think anyone can finish Harvard or MIT if they got the money!
That’s my classmate with his self-criticality going up to the point of self-pity thinking.
His brother though, the baseball bat guy, he’s got none of this. He’s the body-builder type of a guy and he was one of the candidates for municipality advisors, there were posters around town for him, etc.

Now you see the difference, both his brothers are successful competitive mathematicians, but he’s the one who’s got the confidence! If my classmate was up for this job, which btw is paid and you basically need to go to one meeting per month, he would probably be the most educated and smartest person. But I’m sure, he never thought about such a thing. He was most likely startled when his lil bro announced his intentions, but he would never think of fighting for such a position himself because he wouldn’t feel good enough for this position. He knows how much he doesn’t know. He doesn’t feel good enough and this drives him to be better.

So, here comes the question. Do we need to lower the confidence of such personalities, which is quite a tall order and almost impossible OR do we have to develop or at least massively readjust our levels of self-confidence and eliminate self-doubt?
As far as I know, NPD is extremely hard to be treated by modern psychology. So our only chance left is to find ways to lift our confidence, speaking for those who love to learn, push themselves and have in general a growth mindset. I’d say, we MUST do it! Because we owe it to the rest of the world. We should even fake confidence if needed. Why?
Read about Jim Kwik, he was supposed to be the slow kid after sustaining a brain injury in kinder garden, but now he’s a mental coach. Well, even IQ is massively improvable. It’s more or less the speed that your neuronal networks fire signals. Your intelligence is the complexity of your neuronal networks and even if we are old, we still have a massive ability to learn. Especially if one has the correct diet and takes some nootropics, then they can improve themselves massively. For myself, I know that I can be ANYTHING. I can learn to do ANYTHING as good as 98% of the people and then I can add some creativity mixed with my experience/knowledge from many different fields to be very, very good. To explore approaches others have not thought of.

I remember that my second love after racing and F1 as a kid was basketball. But I’m short, but hey… look at Muggsy Bogues? He played against Michael freaking Air Jordan and Magic Johnson! I’ve no excuses really, and Muggsy is actually shorter than me. In fact, a player who was 5’7 once won the NBA dunk contest in 1986 – Spud Webb.

Muggsy was 5’3, that’s kind of short even for a girl! But he learned to compensate for this by jumping way higher and being super agile on the court.

It’s all about how much effort you put. Even for being at the very, very top with legendary status.
When Ayrton Senna had his first wet race, he was lapped. He was a joke. But then he decided that he’ll learn and turned into the best wet weather driver in history. We all got it inside us, our brains are incredibly adaptable machines. We can learn to do with our bodies stuff that looks crazy and impossible. Self-doubt, once you got your growth mindset in full blast mode is a useless and dangerous concept. It’s only stopping us from chasing ventures that others much less qualified are easily willing to take. Self-doubt amongst the intelligent part of our society is hampering our progress by giving a chance to a bunch of narcissistic lesser-developed people taking important decisions and ruling our lives. It’s up to us to stop this. Just like social anxiety where we are afraid to go and speak to someone we like, self-doubt is something that is unnecessary in our current society for most of those who have it. We should abolish the burdens of self-doubt and earn our freedom in which our creativity can thrive.

Humbleness, from the good kind. This is something that we must keep always in ourselves. Being humble is the thing that allows us to grow from our mistakes because it’s so easy to blame factors outside of our control and stay the same. When we have a humble attitude, then we can see the outside factors, but we can also look inside ourselves for ways to improve.
The Lewis Hamilton combination of supreme confidence and humbleness to boost the reasons you truly have to be confident is yielding for him incredible results. Last week he won his 6th F1 World Championship and no doubt, given his age and the strength of his team, Lewis is most likely going to break Michael Schumacher’s record of 7 titles.
Lewis is both managing to be an inspirational person, someone who has a 1500 person team behind him, but also be super confident and tough while racing the best drivers in the world. The mind games and pressure in Formula 1 are just immense, it’s incredible. Yet, Lewis manages to be an always evolving personality with a superior sense of self-confidence that is frightening to his opponents. When he’s down, he’s always fast back up. Nico Rosberg more or less retired after he managed to beat him once and saw how much mental effort and dedication were required from him to accomplish this task.

 

 

It’s our duty to toughen up, stop this self-doubt, adopt our confidence pose, do our best and contribute to making the lives of others better! Otherwise, we are leaving the lesser of us ruling our lives. The Boykos of this world. Are we willing to do this or are we up to this challenge?
Be strong, always evolve and no doubts! Success always follows smart & hard work.