Stillwater Consulting

Once a participant was telling us about the stress he was experiencing helping his daughter study for her exams.

But I wondered if he might be transmitting a sense of pressure and tension to a level that might actually be counterprodutive. I told him how my parents had taken me for a two week holiday right before my 12th Std exams without any textbooks because they were worried I was studying too hard. I felt, based on final results, that their decision had been effective and it also sent a very powerful message to me that my marks were far less important to them than my happiness.

The participant listened to me intently but concluded that the risks of doing this were too high.

I was thinking today about the amount of time I waste in thinking about how to improve my productivity.

I was watching YouTube videos on a really cool app called Notion and felt tempted to move my second brain system from OneNote, Diarium, and a propriety Stillwater app.

But then I realised that my current system does everything I want it to, and a large part of the desire to move was prompted purely by the novelty of doing something new.

The Russian attack on Ukraine made me think about the traumatic events in the histories of countries, and also people, that create beliefs that lead to them harming others.

Russia and China are seen as threatening autocratic dictatorships by many of us living in democracies. But I can’t help thinking traumatic events in their histories have contributed to the siege mentality they seem to have.

In World War 2, the highest number of casualties of any countries were the Soviet Union (20m dead) and China (13m dead). The Germans and Japanese of the times tried to enslave them and suffered only a fraction of the casualties (7m and 3m respectively). Torture and rape were commonplace.