None Can Hurt Us Without Our Consent

On his first day in office, as President Abraham Lincoln entered to deliver

his inaugural address, a man stood up- he was a rich aristocrat.

He said, "Mr. Lincoln, you should not forget that your father used to make

shoes for my family".

The whole senate laughed, they thought they had made a fool of Lincoln.

But certain people are made of a totally different mettle.

Lincoln looked at the man directly into his eyes and said:

"Sir, I know that my father used to make shoes for your family,

and there will be many others like you, because he made shoes

in a way nobody else could. He was a creator.

His shoes were not just shoes. He poured his soul into them.

I want to ask you, have you any complaint about his work?

And because I know how to make shoes myself, I can make you another pair.

As far as I know, nobody has ever complained about my father's shoes.

He was a genius and I am proud of my father".

The whole senate was dumb-struck.

They could not comprehend Lincoln's personality.

Remember: None Can Hurt Us Without Our Consent.

It's not what happens to us that hurt us..

It's our response to a situation or stimulus that hurt us.

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more,

do more and become more, you are a leader.

Our ATTITUDE determines our ALTITUDE

Thanking you,

Love,

Adv. Alex Abraham Odikandathil

Why are our brains prone to procrastination?

Sorry, but I don't think you are that smart !
It's not just laziness; nor is it due to lack of willpower.
Tell me why you have made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row?

Wrong: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.

Right: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now;
something which keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish.

If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of
hundreds of films you think you’ll watch one day. This is a bigger deal than you think.

Take a look at your queue. Why are there so many documentaries and dramatic epics collecting virtual dust in there?

Psychologists actually know the answer to this question, to why you keep adding movies you will never watch to your
growing collection of future rentals, and its the same reason you believe you will eventually do what’s best for yourself
in all the other parts of your life, but rarely do.

A study conducted in 1999 by Read, Loewenstein and Kalyanaraman had people pick three movies out of a selection of 24.
Some were lowbrow like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Some were highbrow like “Schindler’s List” or “The Piano.”
They were to make a choice between movies which promised to be fun and forgettable or would be memorable but require more effort to absorb.
After picking, the subjects had to watch one movie right away. They then had to watch another in two days and a third two days after that.

Most people picked Schindler’s List as one of their three. They knew it was a great movie because all their friends said it was.
All the reviews were glowing, and it earned dozens of the highest awards. Most didn’t, however, choose to watch it on the first day.
Instead, people tended to pick lowbrow movies on the first day. Only 44 percent went for the heavier stuff first.
The majority tended to pick comedies like “The Mask” or action flicks like “Speed” when they knew they had to watch it forthwith.

Planning ahead, people picked highbrow movies 63 percent of the time for their second movie and 71 percent of the time for their third.

When they ran the experiment again but told subjects they had to watch all three selections back-to-back, “Schindler’s List”
was 13 times less likely to be chosen at all.
The researchers had a hunch people would go for the junk food first, but plan healthy meals in the future.

Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake
one week from now, you will usually say fruit. A week later when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered,
you are statistically more likely to go for the cake.

This is why your Netflix queue is full of great films you keep passing over for “Family Guy.” With Netflix, the choice of what to watch right now
and what to watch later is like candy bars versus carrot sticks. When you are planning ahead, your better angels point to the nourishing choices,
but in the moment you go for what tastes good.

As behavioral economist Katherine Milkman has pointed out, this is why grocery stores put candy right next to the checkout.

This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time,
and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy
lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them.
This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys.

Hence my message for the day:
Don't get dispirited.

Hooker/ Rape/ Libel

When it comes to our bodies, women are often presumed to be liars. I know, there’s too many reasons no one should believe anything a woman has to say about what she has done with her body, what has happened to it, and what that means to her. If she tells you that she accepted money for sex, she might just be living under patriarchy or capitalism, or she might be an entrepreneur who couldn’t imagine working for anyone but herself. If she tells you she has been to hotels with wealthy or powerful men for this, she might be bragging while describing a normal day on the job.

At the base, though- if she tells you she is a prostitute- she would be sharing a point of fact. If she tells you she was raped, she is not offering something to be argued. She is not asking to be evaluated as a victim, in either instance, even though she can’t fully ensure that she won’t be. By saying any of this, she knows that she is putting part of her body in front of the public.

Love,

Adv. Alex Abraham Odikandathil

How the world is destroyed by fundamentalist religions.

The earth bursts with life.
Far right exclusionary religions burst with death.
If there is a creator of life, He/ She/ It must hate fundamentalist religions.

The countries in the world that are the most fundamentalist and religious, and those whose identify as most religious-based are the world's greatest troublemakers.
You doubt? Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Vatican City and Israel are just a few examples.

If the rest of the human race could find a time machine to roll back the clock and recreate a world where these countries never exist, we'd live in a better world.

Just take one example of religion's baleful influence:
President Woodrow Wilson's messianic religion-inspired intervention in World War I.
"My life would not be worth living" Wilson wrote, "if it were not for the driving power of religion, for faith, pure and simple." (Letter to Nancy Toy, 1915.)

Wilson's religious views were the driving force in his political career, satisfying his quest for world peace. And like all fanatics he decided to achieve this "peace" through war.
The devout Woodrow Wilson upset fellow Presbyterians as he moved the nation toward entering World War I, including William Jennings Bryan, who quit as secretary of state in protest.

What did Wilson's religious idealism actually achieve? Germany's loss of World War I led to the rise of Hitler, and the Second World War.
Wilson picked sides between two equally tarnished nationalistically-inspired colonial contenders and weighed in.
So Wilson set the stage for the rise of Hitler and World War II. In the absence of World War II, there would be no Israel because there would have been no holocaust.
Zionism would have simply become a forgotten quirk. And there would have been no Cold War either.
Maybe not even a Soviet Union.

The twentieth century began with wars rooted in religion and nationalism and ended as the century of wars rooted in ideological atheism led by the likes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao.
Now the twenty first century seems to be shaping up to be the age of renewed wars of religions led by fundamentalist fanatics on all sides who believe in the divine destinies of their
nations and/or religions.

These fanatics - they are all of the far right - have ranged from the Ayatollah Khomeini to George W Bush.

The deluded religious belief that any people or nation or church is a "chosen" people is the root of almost all our troubles. So is the lunacy of believing in "Truth" revealed through
one special prophet to one special peoples- be they Jews, Muslims or the Evangelical Christians of America, or the Conservative Roman Catholics who believe in the special primacy of their popes.

That's my premise.

Thank you and enjoy the rest of your week.
Love,
Adv. Alex Abraham Odikandathil