Tuesday, April 13, 2010

10 Ways to Instantly Build Self Confidence

Image by dragon762w via Flickr

10 Ways to Instantly Build Self Confidence

Concepts:

self confidence, clothes, appearance, feeling, speak, fear, success, posture, cheap clothes, buying, affecting, perception, recognition, afraid, gossip.

Summary:

Self confidence is the difference between feeling unstoppable and feeling scared out of your wits.

Your perception of yourself has an enormous impact on how others perceive you.

Perception is reality --- the more self confidence you have, the more likely it is you'll succeed.

Although many of the factors affecting self confidence are beyond your control, there are a number of things you can consciously do to build self confidence.

By using these 10 strategies you can get the mental edge you need to reach your potential.

Talk To Somebody Now about building Self Confidence!

Although clothes don't make the man, they certainly affect the way he feels about himself.

Use this to your advantage by taking care of your personal appearance.

In most cases, significant improvements can be made by bathing and shaving frequently, wearing clean clothes, and being cognizant of the latest styles.

Rather than buying a bunch of cheap clothes, buy half as many select, high quality items.

In long run this decreases spending because expensive clothes wear out less easily and stay in style longer than cheap clothes.

Buying less also helps reduce the clutter in your closet.

Even if you aren't in a hurry, you can increase your self confidence by putting some pep in your step.

Walking 25% faster will make to you look and feel more important.

People with slumped shoulders and lethargic movements display a lack of self confidence.

By practicing good posture, you'll automatically feel more confident.

One of the best ways to build confidence is listening to a motivational speech.

Write a 30-60 second speech that highlights your strengths and goals.

Then recite it in front of the mirror aloud (or inside your head if you prefer) whenever you need a confidence boost.

The best way to avoid this is consciously focusing on gratitude.

When we think negatively about ourselves, we often project that feeling on to others in the form of insults and gossip.

To break this cycle of negativity, get in the habit of praising other people.

Refuse to engage in backstabbing gossip and make an effort to compliment those around you.

By deciding to sit in the front row, you can get over this irrational fear and build your self confidence.

During group discussions many people never speak up because they're afraid that people will judge them for saying something stupid.

Having the discipline to work out not only makes you feel better, it creates positive momentum that you can build on the rest of the day.

The more you contribute to the world the more you'll be rewarded with personal success and recognition.

How to Build Self-Discipline

Image via Wikipedia

How to Build Self-Discipline

5% Summary - Source: pickthebrain.com

Concepts:

self-discipline, discipline, goals, courage, commitment, act, awareness, highly recommend, struggle, life, ability, freedom, self-knowledge, wake, gym.

Summary:

For many people discipline is a dirty word that is equated with the absence of freedom.

As Stephen R. Covey once wrote, "the undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passions".

And in the longer term, the undisciplined lack the freedom that comes with possessing particular skills and abilities -e.g. to play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language.

Self-discipline involves acting according to what you think instead of how you feel in the moment.

Often it involves sacrificing the pleasure and thrill of the moment for what matters most in life.

In the past self-discipline has been a weakness of mine, and as a result today I find myself lacking the ability to do a number of things which I would like -- e.g. to play the guitar.

For example, it is only in the past two years that I have trained myself to wake early.

Discipline means behaving according to what you have decided is best, regardless of how you feel in the moment.

Therefore the first trait of discipline is self-knowledge.

I highly recommend taking the time to write out your goals, dreams and ambitions.

Dr. Covey has an excellent Mission Statement Builder on his site.

Self-discipline depends upon conscious awareness as to both what you are doing and what you are not doing.

As you begin to build self-discipline, you may catch yourself being in the act of being undisciplined -e.g. biting your nails, avoiding the gym, eating a piece of cake or checking your email constantly.

You must make an internal commitment to them.

Otherwise when your alarm clock goes off at 5am you will see no harm in hitting the snooze button for "just another 5 minutes...."

Or, when initial rush of enthusiasm has faded away from a project you will struggle to see it through to completion.

Moods, appetites and passions can be powerful forces to go against.

Therefore self-discipline is highly dependent on courage.

After all, it is self-talk that has the ability to remind you of your goals, call up courage, reinforce your commitment and keep you conscious of the task at hand.

When I find my discipline being tested, I always recall the following quote: "The price of discipline is always less than the pain of regret".

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

iPad Specs and Speeds

Source: Macworld.com
Posted on Apr 4, 2010 7:20 am by Jason Snell

Before diving into the details of the iPad, it’s worth recapping some of the details of the product. There are currently three versions available, all identical save for the amount of onboard storage: a $499 16GB model, $599 32GB model, and $699 64GB model. Three other models with built-in 3G networking in addition to Wi-Fi will be available later in April, at the same storage sizes: 16GB for $629, 32GB for $729, and 64GB for $829. Before you buy a Wi-Fi-only model, it’s worth considering how you might use the 3G models.


Speed test
                   Sunspider 
  iPad             10.4
  iPod touch 64GB  15.6           
    (late 2009)
  iPhone 3GS       15.5 
  iPod touch       33.4 
    2nd-gen. 
  iPhone 3G        40.8 
  iPod touch       44.9 
    1st-gen. 
  iPhone           43.0 
    (original)

Results are in seconds. Best results in bold. Reference systems in italic.
iPad tested with iPhone OS 3.2. All other devices were tested running iPhone OS 3.1.

With the iPhone and iPod touch, Apple has been reluctant to talk about processors and speeds, preferring to treat those products as magical black boxes. But we must forgive Apple for crowing a little bit about the processor that powers the iPad, because it was custom-designed by Apple itself. The new A4 processor, running at 1GHz, is a “system on a chip”—in other words, it was built to run the iPad, not chosen from a parts list and adapted to work for the iPad.

Geeky chip talk aside, the iPad flies. It was fast at almost everything I threw at it. The only times I found myself waiting were either for content to download over the network or for one of the iWork apps to convert a file into its native file format. Games played smoothly, with gorgeous graphics. There’s no lag when panning and zooming around large images. Any touch-based device stands or falls based on how quickly and smoothly the content on the screen can react to the movement of fingers on that screen. The iPad passes that test masterfully.

As a bare measure of speed, I ran the SunSpider JavaScript performance test from within the iPad’s Safari browser. The iPad passed the tests in 10.4 seconds. Last September I ran that same test on every iPhone OS model ever released, and the fastest device of the lot (the iPhone 3GS) ran the test in 15.5 seconds. (In contrast, the original iPhone took 43 seconds to run that test.) So the iPad has taken the crown as the fastest iPhone OS device on the planet.

Apple hasn’t released details of the battery that’s powering the iPad, but whatever combination of battery and power efficiency is lurking behind that aluminum back, it’s impressive. Apple boasts a 10-hour battery life for the iPad, and most reports from reviewers who have spent a week or more with the device suggest that the real-world life of that battery is even longer. My two days with the iPad bear out those reports. If you charge the iPad overnight, you can pretty much use it the whole day.

We’ll have more extensive speed and battery testing in the next few days at Macworld.com, but the short version is this: it’s fast and the battery lasts.

Next - Typing on the iPad

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Apple iPad review

Image via CrunchBase

Source: Macworld.com
Posted on Apr 4, 2010 7:20 am by Jason Snell

Ambitious new product makes an impressive debut

It was hyped and ripped before it even had a name, and after it was announced, it was both praised and panned. Apple’s iPad has been the subject of debates about the future of technology and media, and massive speculation about whether people will really want to buy and use it.

Without a doubt, it’s remarkably easy to dump a heap of existential baggage on the iPad. It’s likely that its existence is a direct repudiation of the last 25 years of computer interfaces, an era kicked off by Apple itself. It’s a product in a category—tablet computers—that has been a flop despite nearly a decade of hype.

But before we get into the big, existential questions about the iPad and what it means for life on Earth, it’s probably a good idea to look at what the product actually is: a solid glass-and-metal slab of high technology.

Holding the slab

The iPad may be the most impressive piece of Apple hardware I have ever handled. It weighs a pound-and-a-half—much heavier than an iPhone, but much lighter than a laptop. The front is almost entirely glass, save a thin aluminum frame at the edge. The back is a gently curved plate of anodized aluminum with a black Apple logo smack in the middle.

The iPad is designed to be held and carried, and it couldn’t have felt more solid in my hands. What my senses told me is that this is not a delicate piece of technology to be coddled, but a rugged device that I should feel free to tote wherever I want to go. (Yes, I know some of that feeling is an illusion—it would probably be a bad idea to hurl the iPad like you’re tossing a ball of pizza dough, especially while standing on concrete. But that doesn’t change the fact that, with the solid glass front and tapered aluminum back, the product feels nigh invulnerable.)

The iPad’s touchscreen is 9.7 inches measured diagonally, with a resolution of 1024-by-768 pixels. That’s the traditional 4:3 aspect ratio found on older TV sets, as opposed to the 16:9 ratio favored by modern HDTVs. The screen resolution is 132 pixels per inch, less than the 163 pixels per inch found on the iPhone. The iPad’s glass front continues past the screen, creating a bezel three-quarters of an inch wide all the way around. (The bezel is a good place to put your thumbs when you’re holding the iPad, so you can keep a solid grip without interfering with the touchscreen.)

I found the iPad’s screen to be extremely bright, with vibrant color and a broad viewing angle. I absentmindedly set my iPad down on my coffee table while it was displaying an article within Instapaper Pro, and was surprised to notice that I could clearly read the text despite the extreme angle, thanks to the same in-plane switching (IPS) technology used in iMac displays. (At a certain angle I could also see an array of fingerprints—and boy, does this screen collect them. Fortunately, it’s got the same oil-repellant coating as the screen on the iPhone 3GS, meaning one quick wipe with a sleeve and they’re history.)

Now about the size of that screen. When the iPad was announced, one of the common criticisms of the product was that it’s just a bigger version of the iPod touch. That’s true so far as it goes, but I suspect a lot of the people who said it didn’t understand just how vital that increased screen real-estate—the iPad has five times as many pixels as the iPhone or iPod touch—really is.

Sure, if the interfaces of iPad apps were just scaled-up versions of iPhone apps (like what you get if you run iPhone-only apps on the iPad), the iPad would be the technological equivalent of one of those oversized novelty checks presented to lottery winners. But what the additional pixels really allow is entirely new, richer, and more complex interactions. On the iPhone, an app like Mail is a series of single screens, with the user constantly burrowing down and then backing up like a confused gopher. (Tap on an account, then the Inbox, then a message, then tap the back button, tap another message, tap the back button three times, tap another account, tap Inbox…) The iPad changes that experience by displaying the body of messages in their own, capacious pane, while your mailboxes and lists of messages fight over a smaller pane or, in portait orientation, a pop-over element

Beyond the more sophisticated user-interface possibilities, the iPad’s large screen opens the door for new gestures that simply wouldn’t work on a pocketable device. You can put lots of fingers (and, indeed, both hands) on the iPad, to type or to interact with on-screen objects. This is one of those areas where the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and people who disparage the iPad as merely a hyper-thyroidal iPhone are failing to see the bigger picture.

think-act-do

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

10 Ways to Instantly Build Self Confidence