We have a foosball table in the game room at work.  We have a group foosball friends usually go to the game room after lunch to have some fun.  Some of us had played foosball in school, have really good skills, while the others play foosball the first time here at work.  We have been playing foosballalmost  daily over a year, practice really improves our skill.  I started as a novice player, but now I can pretty much rule the table playing against an average player.

We play foosball just to relax between work, most of us play casually to have fun.  Somehow one of my friends takes foosball quite serious.  Foosball suppose is not an vigorous game, you just have to stand next the to table doing nothing other than rotating your wrists, but this guy manage to sweat like playing a basketball game and totally exhausted after playing foosball.  I think most of us play the same amount of games.  Because this guy play really seriously every day, his skill improve much faster than us.  He started as a novice, now he is probably the best player in the group.

The more you practice the better you become, but the attitude of how you practice can make a big difference.  If you want to be good at something, not only that you have to do it a lot, you have to do it seriously.

Many of us go to all you can eat sushi restaurants.  Ordering food could become a headache when the table is too big.  There are over hundreds of items in the menu, everyone has different preference, but we only got one ordering sheet.  So what is the most efficient way to order food?

One obviously approach is going through the list one item at a time, ask people to raise their hand and vote on how many dishes of each item should order.  This approach is very inefficient, it takes forever to go through the list while we are starving.  When the food comes, people forgot what they have ordered, so they just grab whatever they feel like eating regardless whether they have ordered it or not.  This approach forget that we can submit order more than once.  Regardless what we order in the first round, we’ll have to order the second or the third round.  Why being so picky on the first order?

A better way to order all you can eat sushi is using pipeline and narrow it down approach.  The goal of the first round is minimize the turn around time instead of getting an accurate order.  Someone just order something everyone loves, like the most expensive item on the menu, sashima or popular sushi rolls, the lowest common denominator.  Get the order into the kitchen to get the ball rolling, so that the food can show in the shortest amount of time.  While we are waiting for the first order to show up, we have more than enough time to vote on the remaining items in the menu.  Using this approach, everyone gets to eat what they like within the shortest amount of time waiting with an empty stomach.

Joining a book club is one of the best way to force yourself to finish a book, especially those difficult to read non-fictions not writing with the general public in mind.  It is like taking a distant course with weekly assigned readings and follow up discussion.  Fellow book club members makes you feel good that you are not reading alone.  The book club reads only one or two chapters each week.   The pace is just right, not too fast nor not too slow, or you won’t have time to absorb the materials.  You can’t read too many pages of those non-fiction difficult title in one sitting anyways or you will start falling asleep.  Reading with a book club gives you discipline to actually finish the book.

I joined a book club starting in the summer, reading “A History of Christian Thoughts” by Paul Tillich.  Then I joined another book club reading the Philosophy of Law starting September.  Both book clubs are really good, the books I am reading are very interesting.  The only problem is I think I am too greedy. Catching up with the reading takes quite some amount of time every week.  I don’t think I can handle two reading club at the same time.  Maybe I should consider dropping one book club.