Being Persistently ADAPTIVE (You are travelling THROUGH the Environment)

When on a journey of expansion or moving into new paradigms of being, we can get get tunnel vision and feel like the vision we are working to transform into existence is going in slow-motion. Those of us who identify as Type A personality can probably identify with the feeling that we are the odd one going against a lot of societal pressures and cultural norms. This is why we have to be independently strong and really believe in the vision we have for ourselves number one before anything else. We need ways of being personally validated about what we believe and being personally stabilized and persistent.

It can be an easy mistake to mix our business and culture-changing ideals with our personal sense of well-being and value as a human being. We may begin to feel as though we are victim to the cycles of business and culture which is actually far more "friendly" to our personal development process and attitude than we may realize. By friendly, I mean that the way that we experience the world and the way the world experiences us...is very dependent upon how we are living out our pattern. If we begin to believe that we should be owed more by others and the world then we are going to start placing the emphasis of action on others and upon the environment. We must take ownership of our actions and the results we get.

The wise course of action is to continually practice the art and sciences that we know are personally developing oneself as a human being on all levels of being including our spiritual self-development. The way we interface and interact with the development of our dreams and aspirations is highly-important. Many people have been close to achieving success and given up on their dreams shortly before they would have brought them to life.

Being able and willing to adapt in order to remain strong (or grow stronger and wiser) is one main key I believe is crucial to the long success game. Sometimes we feel like we just have to be more persistent. But if persistence morphs into negativity about the current state of things then it is morphing into a "give-me attitude" instead of a gratefulness attitude and positive work ethic.

Be like this water droplet that can flow as water and also refract light and shape our environment so strongly as water does. Also notice how water can cling together as a stream and also break off into a smaller bead drop and flow across a surface.

Water and light both follow cycles as well on an atmospheric, physics and biologic level which is another reason why these are both ideal analogies for how a person should ideally adapt throughout the process of creating business success in their lives and their community.

A person must have core-values and integrity and for this to exist within a person, they must believe in themselves and their value in whatever shape they take as a person. If they believe they are only valuable if they are acting in a certain capacity or way, they can become stubbornly set on a rigid view of how their life should be playing out. And that's following a script that is almost surely doomed to failure. Our actions and emotional/mental strategies should never be conditioned (or contingent) on such a fragile, singular result.

The essence of any creative pursuit is being able to see the big picture. I will add to this metaphor. It is being able to see the big, MOVING picture and being able to see it from multiple angles and perspectives. But what about when you can't? How do you move and create within a landscape when you are using imperfect maps? You have to be able to adapt to streams of information and to your surroundings as they emerge to you and be able to extrapolate extra data from limited, incomplete patterns. It also helps when you realize that preparedness is one of the greatest keys to the Universe.

We are constantly co-creating the conditions for our success. We are the creators of our lifestyle. The story we write and the movie we create is dependent upon us believing in our innate value and the value we transform in the world around us.

Google Announces Calico: What does it mean for the future of Health?

With the notably vague announcement of Calico by Google, pundits and nerds alike are left wondering about the details of what this will mean for emerging healthcare trends and life extension technologies in general.

Larry Page, CEO of Google, who originally made the announcement on G+ here, had this to say: "I’m excited to announce Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases."

The startup involves Art Levinson, the Chairman of Genentech and a director of Hoffmann-La Roche, as well as Chairman of Apple.

I thought that my good friend Gideon Rosenblatt wrote up a great encapsulation of what we know so far in his post over on Google+. Gideon suggests that Google may leverage their significant search capacity and expertise as an entry-point into the genomic (genetic) bio-informatic sciences. If there's one thing Google's good at, it's big data. They index it, graph it, and use algorithms to help people find what they're looking for within that massive set of data.

Gideon says, "What do you want to bet it has to do with smart approaches to managing the data in our genetic code? That's my bet, but it will be interesting to see how this story unfolds over the next year and beyond. I just don't see the company straying that far from its core competencies and this bet is by Google, not Google Ventures."

Some are wondering if this announcement has something to do with Google's semi-recent hiring of the famous visionary, Ray Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil is well known in the Transhumanism circles and is well respected as an accurate predictor of famous trends such as his Law of Accelerating Returns. (definitely well worth your time if you haven't read about it yet)

And others note the similarities with the work of Aubrey de Grey, a renowned anti-aging researcher and evangelist...also well respected in the Transhumanist, technological, and life extension communities. He's the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) a non-profit devoted to researching "negligible senescence" and rejuvenation therapies.

de Grey has come up with a framework for classifying, studying, and targeting various types of aging processes which he believes to be comprehensive:
Cancer-causing nuclear mutations/epimutations—OncoSENS
Mitochondrial mutations—MitoSENS
Intracellular junk—LysoSENS
Extracellular junk—AmyloSENS
Cell loss and atrophy—RepleniSENS
Cell senescence—ApoptoSENS
Extracellular crosslinks—GlycoSENS

Increasingly, the bottleneck in science and health is becoming information-based. We have so much data we don't know what to do with it all. Biological organisms are extremely complex from a "static" viewpoint and significantly moreso when you realize that biology and chemistry are anything but static. If we have any hope of reaching a more useful understanding of what causes aging and the associated diseases, we are gonna need a lot of professional research, the right digital tools, and a large research effort.

The truly beautiful thing about science these days...or any subject/field...is the incredible access we each have via the Internet. The World Wide Web is really changing the landscape of science. Ideas can come from anywhere; anyone. Projects can be initiated and supported by ad-hoc "virtual" teams from around the Earth. Questions can be asked from experts in fields we know very little about. An altruistic individual can help disseminate knowledge and raise questions and spark conversations about virtually any topic and anyone interested can chime in. Google+ is a fantastic blessing we have and I'm extremely grateful that Google built that amazing social network...and indeed this very blogging platform I'm typing this in.

Open-Source is a concept, philosophy, movement, and more...practically speaking, it is one of the many wonders of our digital age. An enormous opportunity for volunteers to achieve huge milestones, projects, or even breakthroughs by simply collaborating, hacking, and co-creating together. Small contributions add up to sometimes become world renowned public services, products, knowledge, etc.

So what am I bringing up this optimistic view of self-organizing online interest/topic-oriented communities for? Well, I think that citizen scientists, research hobbyists, and nerds who like to dabble in various subjects that interest them at the time...are a key ingredient in humanity's mission to get everyone healthier and (more) immune to aging.

There are scores of startups and even big established corporations moving into this space. There are numerous fitness trackers, such as Fitbit, the Nike Fuel Band, the Jawbone UP, and the MyBasis that have sprung onto the market recently and more to come. There is Watson by IBM. They are doing some amazing things in healthcare.

Not to mention the whole lifehacking movement and bio-hacking. (I find bio-hacking incredibly exciting by the way.)

I will shamelessly mention that I am also personally invested (time-wise...not so much financially) in this whole health/anti-aging scene. I spend a lot of time reading and researching about cutting edge science about disease and nutrition. This is an area I'm paying close attention to. I think we can each contribute in our own way. And indeed health really requires personal responsibility anyway. We can't just pay for it. We have to put in the effort, go to the gym, go on a run, do pushups in your room, do pullups at the local park, eat right, get quality sleep...whatever you've gotta do to take yourself to the next level.

So this definitely appears to be an area that is growing rapidly. I'd really appreciate some feedback and would love to hear what my readers have to say about this new venture by Google. Are you as excited about the possibilities and opportunities of radical life extension as I am? p.s. sorry if my thoughts are disjointed. I'm working on it.

Cheers to Optimization!

Think for yourself, with others in mind...