Everyone has a few people in their life that just refuse to appreciate the success of others. Despite any achievement you may complete, goal you may reach, or any pride you may feel, these cynics act the wet-blanket and find a way to rain on your parade.

These people come in many denominations. They can be younger or older, richer or poorer, close friends and relatives or mere acquaintances, but they are always there.

In general, odds are they are pessimistic towards your success because they are jealous or even fearful of it. However, knowing this is often not enough to deal with their negativity.

Here are 7 ways to manage such negativity, keep your aspirations high, and stay on track to a happy, successful life.

1. Keep Aspirations Personal and Private - Most naysayers will not appreciate or commend something in its baby stages. Try keeping silent about your goals until you have achieved something significant. Once you have something concrete to show, they’ll be hard pressed to find something entirely negative to say about it.
2. Positive Passivity - An ideal way to silence a potential naysayer is to merely shrug it off. Be positively passive. If someone is trying to shoot you down, you have no obligation to listen to them. Be aware of the potential for an explosive conversation and how to handle one. Read all »
   

Have you ever been the victim of a bout of anger and rage in a social situation?

Maybe you’ve found yourself at an office lunch with that one person that knows exactly how to get to you, how to make subtle little comments that get your blood boiling.

You try to sit back and tell yourself to calm down, but you are upset, angry, and full of rage. You decide to let this fella have it and open your mouth to spew a stream of swearing.

But your emotions are clouded by anger and rage and you end up making a huge fool of yourself over something unimportant. This is what I like to call an explosive conversation.  Explosive conversations are usually one-sided, blood-pressure-increasing, illogical conversations that have no goal or purpose.

Here’s how you can control the situation. In order to avoid situations like these and explosive conversations, we must first understand why and how they happen.

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A popular analogy for a computer’s memory management systems is the human mind.In this analogy, the hard drive of a computer is equivalent to a mind’s Long Term Memory. The RAM of a computer corresponds to one’s Short Term Memory.

However, one main divergence arises: in a computer, one can easily upgrade memory by purchasing a bigger hard drive disc or plugging in an upgraded RAM chipset. One cannot do this for the human brain.

Luckily, there are methods for expanding the human memory capacity. Here are 11:

1. Multiple Exposure - A common example for this tip is the average college student. For most college courses, a direct positive correlation exists between attendance and good grades. This is the result of extra exposure. Even if a student does not take notes during the class, her brain is still processing the information. Later when said student studies for an exam or does her homework, her brain will recall some of the information from the class and studying will be easier and more of a refresher. This is why most courses and education establishments employ the 3-exposure technique known as lecture, homework, and exams.
2. Pay More Attention to More Difficult Information - This may seem obvious but it is often overlooked. In reality, when we are taking in information for an extended period of time, we tend to lose focus after some time or fall into an expectation of the quality of information. When the quality changes, we may continue taking it in as our expectations propose. Think of it again, as a college student. To take notes on every word a professor utters would be difficult and counter productive. To be as efficient as possible, we must be aware of information quality changes and act accordingly.
3. Learn What Kind of Learner You Are - We all learn differently. Some of us learn best through visual cues, some through auditory cues, and others through pure hands-on experience. Most of us are a mixture of all three, but specialize in one. Use this test to determine what kind of learner you are and from now on, try to use it to your advantage. Read all »
   

Most people who have used dual monitors will immediately attest to the large productivity improvement they provide.

Most others, who have never had the opportunity to try out dual monitors, know a fellow or two that have doubled their desktop real-estate. These people have probably thought to themselves “Hmm… that’s a nifty setup, but is it really that useful?”

These days, setting up an additional monitor on a Windows system is easy-as-pie and there are thousands of tutorials to get it going with most Linux distributions. Just click here for a list of dual monitor setup tutorials for Windows and the more popular Linux distributions.

Since the time factor and difficulty factor of the setup of dual monitors have all but been eliminated, the only remaining barrier between you and the world of multi-monitors is money. Monitors are on sale all the time and for the amount of increased productivity you’ll achieve, the price can almost be considered negligible.

If you are still uncertain about how much productivity would really be gained from having an additional monitor, I’ve compiled some ways that dual monitors can increase productivity.

Action Screen & Reference Screen: This is how I refer to my screens while I’m working. Whether you are programming, writing a paper, responding to emails, or chatting with a co-worker about a current project, it is often necessary to have more than one window open. Of course, this is achievable with one monitor, but no one likes to resize, squeeze, and fit multiple pages on one monitor like some evil Microsoft jigsaw puzzle. Most of the productivity increases from dual monitors spawn from this “action” and “reference” screen mindset.

Dual monitors allow me to work on one screen and open reference materials, chats, or webpages on the other. Not only does this save the time involved with minimizing and maximizing various windows, but it also lets me focus. The work is always on my screen, always in my view. This leads me to…

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