I want my pick of outstandingly beautiful women. I want to be unaffected by approval from peers, family, or foes. I want to feel peaceful, and happy. I want to feel like I’ve made positive contributions to society. I want to be able to eat whatever I want, unconstrained by budget. I want to be able to afford a cleaning lady and I want this to be a sustainable thing through passive income.

So, you’re looking to advance your technical skills, and have decided to learn PHP. Great choice! PHP is easy to learn and produces rapid results.

You’re going to want to go through a tutorial/some documentation, and then you’re going to want to try to actually reproduce the examples in the tutorial for yourself! And for that you will need “The Setup”

First, the Setup

Are you on Mac OS? If so, you can get basic MAMP for free: http://mamp.info/downloads/releases/MAMP_PRO.dmg.zip
MAMP stands for Mac OS, Apache, MySQL, PHP.
Apache is the “web server”, MySQL is the database, and PHP is the programming language
So if you have a Mac, the above is an excellent solution for developing locally on your own machine.
Just start up MAMP, and then you can put files in your

/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/[filename.php] folder

and then see them live at http://localhost:8888/[filename.php]
If you don’t have a Mac, then you’re going to have to upload your .php files to a web server in order to test. My guess is you have access to such space already. If not – I can maybe hook you up.

Tutorials/Documentation

1) Check out this PHP tutorial, and try to work through it: http://devzone.zend.com/article/627
Copy the code by hand (see if you can do it by memory!) and then play around with it on your Setup. Try different things, and experiment. It’s okay to produce code that gives you errors.. it’s how you learn

2) The php manual - http://php.net/manual – is great if you don’t understand something, but you know specifically what you’re looking for

I was looking up the Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, who btw seems like an all-around great guy.. . and found an essay he wrote on something he calls “Conscious Capitalism.” You can find the essay here: [http://www.flowidealism.org/2007/Downloads/Conscious-Capitalism_JM.pdf], but in this blog post, I’m going to summarize it for you.

Mackey begins with some context: economics evolved out of the industrial revolution as such a high and abundant amount of profit was unprecedented and rare. The Dismal Science aimed to distill the nature of business into a basic equation: the factors of production (labor, land, and capital) are inputs to an function that yields profit. The more labor, land, and capital you have, the more money you make. And I think that this generalization held true for a great many years.

Mackey also points out that voluntary exchange is the foundation of a capitalistic market economy: people try to go where they can get the best deal. This holds true for each component of which Mackey claims are the principal constituencies of the modern business. Mackey claims that in an increasingly global and evolving economy, reductionist glorification of the labor/land,/capital trinity is no longer appropriate. Instead, in “Conscious Capitalism”, the dynamic system now comprises The Customer, The Vendor, The Employee, The Investor, The Government/Community.

Each component of this business system (C, V, E, I, G/C.. which folds into the neat C-GIVE, or ‘corporation-give’) is not an independent piece but instead interdependent on each separate part. He graphs this relationship:

The customer always tries to get a better deal; the vendor, a higher price; the employee, a better wage; the investor, more profits; the government and community, more tax and donations. Mackey believes that win-win relationships between each link of the graph (a win-win edge between every two nodes!) is the key to a healthy thriving business. If everyone gets what they want, then each part of the body grows stronger.

His essay is a riposte to the classical Marxist argument that the corporation’s behavior is guided by the ignoble profit motive. He says that while a few are – it is unhealthy to do so. Indeed, he explains that each element of the CGIVE, except the Investors, extracts value through numerous exchanges within the organization.. and, after all exchanges have been balanced out, the value that remains is distributed amongst the Investors. Therefore, the Investors should be incentivized to create a self-sustaining system in which the entire CGiVE becomes happy; happy people continue their behavior [1]. To that end, the core values of the organization are  (1) selling the highest quality products, (2) delighting customers, (3) supporting team member excellence and happiness, (4) creating wealth, profits and growth, and (5) caring about communities and environment.

He astutely observes that a great deal of transparency is useful for creating such situations and as such has democratized information within his institution. Indeed, Mackey explains how he has built a framework on top of human nature (self-sustaining selfish/giving behavior is the only strategy sustainable in the long run) to encourage positive growth and thriving behavior, complete with incentivization programs and democratized decision making as well as employee empowerment. It’s this positive win-win scaffolding that allows the organization to navigate around inevitable problems (occasionally illuminated by transparency). Consider jealousy over peer compensation: by channeling jealous energy towards productive behavior (yes, you find out how much your peers make, but the same transparency also enables you to understand exactly what skills are valued in the company, enabling you to advance your career if you wanted).

Mr Mackey seems like a wise man and I look forward to meeting him one day. But I’m too price sensitive to shop at Whole Foods – I shop at Trader Joe’s, where cheap prices, great product, chill staff and convenient delivery  make me a happy customer.

Notes

[1] As I will explain in a future post, we are all human beings, backwards-rationalizing our emotional desires, with our behavior guiding us towards what we perceive to be a positive emotional payout.

[2] It seems he and Steve Pavlina have some similar ideas, eh? I credit Steve with inspiring me to come up with the notion that giving/ contribution/service is the only long-term sustainable strategy towards maximizing personal happiness and profit. In John Mackey’s essay, Mackey calls it “Service to Others”. That’s why I called it C-GIVE.

I don’t like how I added the second “We are also drawn” speech bubble. For reasons that I don’t care to spend time dissecting, it ruins the comic. I felt compelled to share anyway.

I just finished reading the book “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman.

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (popularized by the term “EQ”) is the ability to identify and manage emotions in yourself; manage anxiety and stress; and defer distractions in the pursuit of goals.

Why am I emotionally intelligent? / Why am I not emotionally intelligent?

Genes, somewhat, and your parents’/teachers’ ability to teach you emotional skills. Arbitrary events in childhood shape your emotional brain.

What biological phenomena cause emotional intelligence?

A set of excellent connections between the amygdala/limbic system (where emotions originate) and the neocortex. Sensory input gets routed to the thalamus, where it then gets routed in parallel to the neocortex and the amygdala. However, the pathway to the amygdala is shorter, so that explains why we have gut reactions to external stimuli and then end up understanding why, (micro)seconds later.

People who aren’t emotionally intelligent (with a “low EQ”) either don’t understand which emotions they are experiencing, or they understand them but can’t deal with them effectively. People with autism tend to have very low EQ. That’s why they make “weird” gestures while walking down the street, such as arm flapping, or tend to rock in their chairs during a meeting. It’s because arm flapping feels good (and they’re flapping their arm in order to regulate their emotions, or create positive feelings), and so does rocking in a chair. Unfortunately, due to their low EQ, they don’t realize that they need to employ different strategies to regulate their emotions: they don’t realize that they probably should employ socially acceptable strategies.

This inability stems from the fact that they probably don’t realize that they are experiencing negative emotions, and then if they do, they don’t know how to deal with them.

Why people are wary of obese people

Call me callous, but I don’t trust most obese people on a true deep level. This is because their overeating doesn’t always stem from a gland issue, or a love of food, but instead, a poor sense of emotional regulation. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy articulates this well, as he describes how the protagonist “smiled joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his mind–the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.” Indeed, eating is a primary reinforcer. When we eat, we almost always feel good.** Therefore, when people feel bad, they often turn to food to ease their poor emotional state.

** other primary reinforcers include sex, water, and sleep.

Thoughts affect emotions (or if we wanna be cute: thoughts affect affect)

Most of our emotional regulations habits are automatic, and below the level of consciousness. This includes thought loops. Thoughts, in addition to external environmental sitmuli, can trigger emotions; this is because there is a loop between the limbic system and the neocortex. You can change your thoughts over time, and practice “positive” thoughts. This is why methods such as CBT have been proven effective in treating depression: they alter the pathways between neocortex and the amygdala. However, they take time, because neural pathways/loops only become permanent when they are accessed repeatedly. (This is the same explanation behind the phenomenon that memories only become crystallized after spaced repetition.)

But it’s automatic

When negative things happen in the environment, we often feel sad, angry, anxious, confused… and then default to behaviors that soothe our emotions. For example, let’s say I’m playing PES 2008 on Xbox, the best soccer game ever, and my buddy scores a goal on me. I might instinctively reach for the chips, or to take a sip of my drink.

You can use these spotted behaviors as cues to another person’s emotional state. And emotions are motivated by needs, so that can clue you in to their desires, and what makes them tick. Major warning though:

**It is very very easy to misinterpret what other people are thinking. VERY easy. So it should only be done if you ABSOLUTELY have to make a guess about it, because the situation calls for it and extra information could benefit you immensely (such as in business or in poker).**

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If you want a more in-depth exploration of emotional intelligence, go get Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. You’ll enjoy it; it’s superbly written, intelligent, and accessible.