Aligator by animatorhgames on Sketchfab

Roe deer by animatorhgames on Sketchfab

CGSociety - So You Want to be a Visual Effects Artist [2]

FISZKOTEKA

Jakie znasz niekonwencjonalne rzeczy? What unorthodox things do you know?
Co jesteś w stanie zrobić w ciągu pięciu minut? What are you able to do within 5 minutes?
Kto jest uprzejmy wokół ciebie? Who is courteous around you?
Kogo się najczęściej etykietuje i dlaczego? Who is the most often labeling and why?
Dlaczego ludzie tak chętnie oceniają? Why do people evaluate so willingly?
Kiedy reagujesz negatywnie? When do you react negatively?
Jakie cechy powinno się mieć, żeby dobrze zarządzać? Which personality trait should have to good managing?
Jaki wydano ostatnio film? Which movie was release recently?
Co zakładam odnośnie przyszłości? What do I assume relating to my future?
Jaka praca ma załoge? Which work has crew?
W co chętnie się zanurzam, zagłębiam? In what do I immersed so eagerly?
Co systematycznie zaniedbuje? What do I regulary neglect?
Jacy pisarze są godni uwagi? Who writers are remarkable?
Jakie cechy udoskonalasz? Which personality traits do you honig?
Co można dostarczać? What can be deliver?
Pójdę do sklepu pod warunkiem że. I will go to the shop providing
Gdzie mogę zdobyć wspólne doświadczenie? When can I obtain collaborative experience?
Do czego wniosłaś wkład? Do you contribute for something?

Kochane kłopoty S01E01 [3]

Kiedy nie powinno się mówić czegoś jeszcze? When not to say one more thing?
Jakie odtwarzasz wydarzenia z przeszłości? What do you reenact?
Kiedy modeluję odwołuję się do. When I modeling I resort to
Nie rozmawiajmy o tym. Drop it
Ostatnio wpadłam do. I recently stoped by/ dropped in
Co mogę zacząć tak wcześnie jak w poniedziałek? What can I start as early as Monday?
Kiedy trzeba wpłacić zaliczkę? When is neccesary to put something down?
Komu zamierzam oddać pieniądze? Whom do I intend to pay back?
Od kogo pożyczyłam pieniądze? Inaczej From who did I borrow the money? Otherwise
Kto był ubrany podobnie? Who was dressed alike?
Kiedy byłaś ostatnio podekscytowana? When were you thrilled recently?
Jak wyglądam? How do I look?

Kochane kłopoty S01E01 [2]

FISZKOTEKA

Kiedy możemy wybierać którąkolwiek rzecz? When can we choose whichever thing?
Jakie mam zadania do wykonania z uczelni? What assignment do I have from the university?
Gdzie najczęściej ustawiam się w kolejce? Where do I line up the most often?
Kiedy przeszkadza mi kciuk? When do thumb disturb me?
Kiedy lubię błyszczeć? When do I like to sparkle in?
Co się moczy? What do we soak?
Co jest ciężkie do ugryzienia? What is hard to bite?
Co trzyma się na blacie? What is on the counter?
Jakiej będziesz szukać wolnej posady? What vacancy will you looking for?
Jakie jest twoje dążenie? What's your pursuit?
Gdzie są zapisy, nabór? Where are enrolment?
Mam do niej pretensje o. I resent her for
Kto jest zdzirowaty? Who's slutty?
Kiedy warto brać fakture? When is worth to take the invoice.
Jest coś o czym nie pomyślałam: There is something I haven't thought of
Kiedy ludzie się gapią? When do people stare?

Joy Animation Competition [2]

Fiszkoteka
Artykuł

Kto jest szczery? How is sincere?
Lubię nosić____ aczkolwiek___. I like wear ______ albeit
Michael Scofield był więźniem. Michael Scofield was a prisoner
Kiedy Michał bagatelizować znaczenie? When does Michał underplay the importance of?
Szczerość to niepowszechna zaleta. Sincerity is an uncommon advantage.
Co z moich studiów jest powiązane z grafiką 3d? What from my studies are related to 3d graphic?
Kiedy mam trochę mniej czasu? When have I a bit less time?
Co może być uproszczone przy projektowaniu? What can be simplified in design?
Jakie są największe ślady zwierząt? What are the biggest track of animals?
Co jest dla mnie przyjemne w ćwiczeniach? What is entertaining in workouts for me?
Co powinno się odłączyć ze swojego życia? What should be disconnect from life?
Jakie chcesz podjąć wyzwania w 2015? What challanges would you like to take of?
Zachęcam wszystkich do. I encourage everybody to
Nowa animacja Asteriks i Obeliks jest skierowana do. New animation film Asteriks i Obeliks is directed toward

Haircare (clipped to polyvore.com)

Valentine's Special Auburn wig. Long Curly hair with no bangs wig. Glamour long curly wig. Lolita auburn wig. (see more red hair care)

Animation Mentor - TipsAndTricks_eBook - 16-20

BLINKS HAVE MEANING
Tip 1: Blinks Have Meaning!
I feel like writing about blinks today. Why? I just saw a commercial on TV (name of product withheld to protect the innocent) starring
a character who had a severe blinking problem.
Now, I don’t mean the character blinked too much. I don’t mean he blinked too fast. I don’t mean the character’s blinks were too far
offset, too slow, or too few.
No, this character was plagued by a disease that has been running rampant through animation (particularly student work, though
not Animation Mentor students, of course. Everything they do is perfect and wonderful in every conceivable way... Well, okay, that’s
not exactly true, but I haven’t actually seen it as a problem in the school. Probably because we harp on stuff like this ad nauseum).
Where was I?
Oh yeah, the disease...
Let’s call it “Randomblinkitis.”
Many animated characters currently living out their lives on demo reels around the world suffer from this terrible disease, causing
their blinks to feel random and meaningless. While some characters use their blinks to convey thought process and emotion, these
poor Randomblinkitis victims are forced to slog through their daily existence unable to properly communicate their emotions and
thoughts to each other, let alone to recruiters around the globe.
It’s a tough life for them, folks, so let’s do something about it!
See, the medicine for this heartbreaking disease is Observation. It’s easy to do, and it’ll mean so much to your animated characters
(and to the recruiters forced to have to try to communicate with your characters!) if you can just take a little time to observe the
blinks of your friends, your family, your co-workers, your favorite movie star, and yourself before you start plowing ahead into acting
scenes.
Listen, I know about the whole “I just discovered animation a month ago and must do an acting scene IMMEDIATELY!” thing. I know
you all want to do acting scenes. I know you think they’re the most fun. I know you think they’re your ticket into Pixar. And I also
know that for some of you, all the “honestly, spending 6 months practicing basic body mechanics and force will give you far stronger
acting scenes than you’ll ever be able to do without that foundation” advice in the world isn’t going to keep you away from playing
with some acting shots...
So, if you absolutely must do some acting shots (or, better yet, are advanced enough to do acting shots properly), then please, give
some attention to the eyes of your character.
We’ve probably all heard people say “90% of acting is in the eyes” or something to that effect. Shoot, some of us have said that

ourselves. And I actually think that’s true, and is great advice (aside from the fact that if you don’t sell the acting with the body first,
all the facial stuff in the world isn’t going to save your scene), but when you hear that “90% of the acting is in the eyes,” I know most
people immediately jump to “eye darts” and “eye direction,” etc., completely skipping over one of the most essential acting tools you
have - the blink.
When I was in school, I was told that “animated characters should always blink every two seconds.”
Well, that’s just about the worst advice I ever got, other than some advice I recently was given during a trip to Singapore, which was
“giant fish eyeballs taste really GREAT,” but animation-wise, I think the “blink every two seconds” is probably the worst. Actually, both
of those pieces of advice are equally true (or rather, equally completely-and-utterly-untrue!).
Look around. Do you see anyone who is blinking every 2 seconds?! (If you do, please report them to your government, because
chances are they are some kind of android spy from Mars or something.) People don’t blink on any kind of set time schedule
anymore than giant fish eyeballs taste “great” (and for all of you out there who maybe think fish eyeballs DO taste great, probably
because you have some kind of steel-reinforced taste buds like the Singaporeans I was with at that restaurant -- which I do admire
and am completely jealous of, by the way-- then that’s fine to like your giant eyeballs, but just trust me on the blink thing anyway,
okay?)
Look - if you do a scene where your character doesn’t blink at all, and don’t have a reason behind it, you have a fair chance of that
character feeling a little dead. However, there are plenty of times when you’d WANT the character to not blink -- maybe he’s scared
out of his mind, or she’s looking longingly into her husband’s eyes, or you’re doing some homage to A Clockwork Orange...
We’ll get into that stuff in a minute - for now, I just want to point out the reasoning behind the “blink every 2 seconds” rule. Ostensibly,
it’s so your character feels alive. That’s the idea they’re shooting for, anyway.
Sadly, this is a very outdated concept. If you choose to animate according to this rule, and have every character blink every 2
seconds, two things will happen:
1) First off - congratulations: no one will wonder if your character is dead, or if his eyes are getting enough moisture. Mission (sort
of) Accomplished.
2) Instead, they’ll be wondering if your characters are meant to be robots. (D’oh!)
Blinks are so much more than the merely physical act of moistening our eyeballs! We blink for a variety of reasons, and the absolute
least important of these reasons to you, as an animator, is the “I’m just getting my eyeballs wet” blink. Forget about that blink. File it
away in your head for future use, I guess, but file it in the back of the bottom drawer, right next to “My Aunt Martha’s right eyebrow
shoots upwards every time she says ‘pretzel’.” It’ll come up about as often in your work, and be about as useful as well.
People blink for a reason.
Blinks are so much more than any kind of physical dry-eye response.
Blinks are the key to selling many emotions. Fire up some of your favorite films and study the eyes of good actors.
When do they blink?
Why?
What does it feel like?
How does it make you feel?
Right off the bat, the number of blinks can affect emotion in dramatic ways. Rapid blinks can make a character feel shy, nervous,
uncomfortable, relieved, or like they are about to cry. Not blinking at all can feel angry, stoned, dead, or super intense.
Check out Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump when he’s meeting his son for the first time. As soon as he realizes it’s his son, he stops
blinking completely. He’s transfixed. Tom Hanks holds back his blinks to communicate the idea that his character is THAT intense
about what he’s realizing. Then a blink, and boom - he’s on to his next emotion, which is guilt. He feels guilty. Shouldn’t he have been
there to raise his son? Did he do something wrong? The blinks are coming fast and furious now, to indicate his discomfort, his worry.

Then a thought occurs to him: “is he slow, like me?” He doesn’t say it right away, but you can feel the exact moment that crosses his
mind, because suddenly his blinks stop again, and he’s back to that intensity, and finally he works up the courage to ask Jenny his
big question: “is he smart, or is he...?” Huge eyes, locked on, almost afraid to hear the answer. “He’s the smartest in his class.” And the
blinks are fired back up again, which communicates his relief.
That whole scene is amazing for eye stuff. He even asks “can I go see him?” using only his eyes! Sure, his head moves barely as well,
but it’s 90% just his eyes, and you totally know exactly what he’s saying. He delivers a line without ever opening his mouth. And it
feels so real. To me, that’s a great scene, and something we should all aspire to in our work.
So your first set of big blink questions is this: “what’s my character’s emotional state right now? What are they reacting to? How is
that making them feel?” And your second set of questions, just as important (if not more so) is this: “well, how do I blink when I feel
that way? How do my friends blink when they’re in that situation? How did my favorite actor blink in that amazing scene I saw the
other day?”
Figure out the emotional state of your character, go observe that emotional state in as true a form as you possible can, and then
study the heck out of those eyelids. Better yet, act the scene out over and over and over until you aren’t thinking at all about what
the actual dialogue lines are anymore, and all you’re thinking about is the emotion you are truly making yourself feel, and the
context/subtext of the scene, and videotape it, and study it!
That’s it. It’s pretty simple really. Just like with every single conceivable aspect of your animation, you don’t do ANYTHING without
a reason. You don’t move a single finger without knowing why your character is moving it, and the eyes (and sometimes even more
importantly, the blinks) are no exceptions. Never move ANYTHING on a character unless you know exactly why you’re moving it. So
if anyone ever tells you to animate something randomly, unless it’s the tiniest subtle “add a little ‘dirt’ to this movement so it feels
a little less smooth” type of thing, then you should probably say, “No way!” Unless he’s your animation director. Then you probably
shouldn’t say, “No way.” That might be a really bad idea. You should instead say “Right away, no problem!” while you silently think
“man, I wish my animation director would take some AnimationMentor classes...”
Where was I? Oh yeah - nothing is random. Well, neither are blinks.
The most important use of a blink is to show thought process. We do blink sometimes just to wet our eyes, and we blink on a rapid
head turn, we blink on a major change in eye direction, and all those other “blink rules,” but in my opinion the most important time is
when we have a change in our thought process. When we’re having an idea, or when we’re switching from one emotion to another,
or when we’re realizing something. Those are the gold-mines in terms of blinks - that’s when a perfectly placed blink will take a scene
from being merely “good” and make it “great.”
There’s a great book called “In the Blink of An Eye,” by Walter Murch, who is an amazing film editor. Murch is an incredibly accomplished
film and sound editor, with a bunch of Oscars on his mantle, and great work in such films as Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Part II,
The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Part of that book is about his theory that we blink to edit the film of our lives. We
blink throughout the day to cut from one scene to the next to the next to the next. And he uses that theory in his film editing. He
looks for when the main character blinks, and often uses that as his cutting point, figuring that it’s probably the most natural-feeling
place to cut for the audience.
As animators, we can hijack his theory and apply it to our own work and our acting. We can study the same phenomenon that he
noticed, and we will all find the same exact result - people blink when their brain shifts from one thing to another, whether it’s an
emotion or a thought.
We blink for a bunch of reasons, but the most important to me are these:
1. We blink when we shift our thought process
2. We blink to show or hide emotion
3. We blink in the middle of a fast head turn
For me, those three things dictate 99.9999% of the blinks I’ve ever animated, and I’ll tell you what - not one of them has anything to
do with any “2 Second” rule.

Ok, so let’s start with number 3, since that’s the most basic. This is one that most of you have heard about, and use often. Personally,
I think it’s a great rule, and seems to work really well. If your character’s head does a really fast head-turn, drop a blink in there near
the middle or near the end of the head turn, and it’ll give it a nice natural feel. This is something I’ve definitely observed in people,
and it’s a great rule of thumb to generally keep in mind.
I’m not sure why we blink mid-turn, but I think it might have something to do with having too much visual information zooming
past our eyes, and our brain says, “Holy moly! Too much information! Gotta shut those things for a moment!” I have no idea if that’s
true, but it sounds like it might be right, and that’s good enough for me...
Let’s jump back up to good old numero uno - blinking to show a shift in our thought process.
This is an absolutely essential and endlessly useful tool in animation - something you can truly use over and over again, in shot after
shot. Like the idea of advanced “anticipation,” this really can be one of those few “lifelines” of communication you can have with your
audience. A way to reach out to them, and whisper, “Hey, check it out! He’s thinking right now! Oooh! And now he’s made up his
mind!”
Anyway - back to shifting our though processes...
The eyes are the windows to the soul, right? We’ve talked about that cliche, and how right it is, and how important it is to communicate
with your character’s eyes. (I think we have, anyway. Haven’t we? This is month 19, so it’s getting a little fuzzy in my memory! I could
look it up, but we both know I’m too lazy to do that...)
Personally, I feel like 70-80% of the emotion of your character is going to be sold in the face, and 90% of THAT emotion will be sold
in the eyes. The timing and direction of your eye darts will communicate more than almost any other thing in your scene.
But a HUGE part of that communication is with eye blinks. We can talk more about eyes later, if you guys want, but as far as blinks
go, all the great eye animation in the world will not work without carefully planned blinks.
Your character is in a basement. Scared. Backing into a dark corner, unsure of where the villain is hiding. His eyes are wide, darting
all over the place, searching frantically. For help. For a way out. For a weapon. For a hiding place.
So far, so good. No reason to blink, right? He’s scared for his life, searching DESPERATELY for help. His eyes want to suck in as much
information as humanly possible, because if they don’t figure something out quick, his eyes might stop seeing anything at all pretty
soon.
If you’re animating this scene, you’re going to be taking the “no blinks at all” approach so far in this scene, unless it’s gone on for
a REALLY long time. If the eyes are desperate enough, I think you could get away with not blinking for even 10 seconds or more.
There are countless scenes of some of our best actors showing their intensity and emotion by not blinking for much longer than 10
seconds, but at some point, a sustained shot of “scared guy” is going to get stale and boring, so I’d say a shot like this will get boring
long before you’d HAVE to throw a blink in there...
So, he’s scared and desperate. No blinks yet. His back bumps against concrete, and he realizes he is cornered. His eyes are even wider.
Searching. Hoping. Suddenly, they lock on! He spies a shovel! A weapon! He’s found hope!
Guess what he does?
He grabs the shovel, right? Well, yeah, he does, but what does he do first?
He blinks.
Why? Well, it’s sort of the Walter Murch thing. He’s “cutting” his film. His “scared and hopeless” scene has ended, and it’s time for the
“try to be a hero” scene, starring him and his shovel.
In other words, his thought-process has shifted. He’s gone from one idea to another idea, in his head. He was scared out of his mind,
and now his fright has morphed a little bit. It’s evolved. He’s probably still scared, but I bet his eyes are a little narrower, now that he
has his shovel in hand. His eyes are darting a lot less. He’s still frightened, but now he’s a little hopeful, and maybe even a little mad.
Who is this lunatic hunting him down in his basement?! Who does he think he is!? He’s going to get a face full of shovel if he doesn’t
get out right now!
Right?
When you first get handed a scene like this, you’re going to study the amount of time you have to work with, you’re going to plan out
your motions and timing, figure out your dynamic poses, etc. Just as with any other bit of planning, it’s essential to search through
your scene and try to find a moment of change – when an emotion changes, or an idea shifts. These are ALWAYS the meatiest
moments for you as an actor and animator, and these are generally the moments when you will carefully choose when to blink.
A shift from scared to hopeful? Blink. Happy to nervous? Blink. How about something really subtle, like sad to sadder. Blink!
Those blinks will SELL the changes in thought process more than anything else other than possibly overall posture changes.
Ok, and then lastly, we have the idea of using blinks to sell emotions.
Well, let’s go back to our previous example, with the scared basement guy. How do we know he’s scared? Well, hopefully you’re using
as many small things as possible to show his fear. Hopefully his movements feel afraid, his head and eyes are darting around, his
overall actions and broad movements can even show fear.
But having those wide, unblinking freaked out eyes - THOSE are going to sell the fear as much as anything else. Maybe even more
than anything else, right? So right off the bat, we have an emotion being sold through blinks, or rather, through the lack of blinks.
What would it look like if he was blinking a lot in the basement? He’d look flustered, maybe he’d look like he’s thinking rapidly about
a lot of different ideas, or trying to remember something. He might look shy, or maybe even nervous. But he probably wouldn’t look
scared, no matter WHAT you did with the rest of him.
Once Mr. Scared finds his shovel, he blinks to show that realization (and the timing and number of blinks at this point, by the way,
will totally define the mood of the performance. A long pause, with two wide-eyed blinks would be funny and played for comedy,
whereas a quick blink and dash for the shovel will keep it in the “scary” realm), but now that he has his shovel, we’re going to use our
blinks in a whole new way.
He’s still scared, but not so desperate that he can’t blink now and then. Now we’ll have quick “scared” blinks (slower blinks would feel
too laid back) now and then, maybe when he’s shifting his gaze from one place to another, or if he hears a sound in the other corner
of the basement, etc.
The timing and number of your blinks are an invaluable way of letting your audience know what’s going on in your character’s head.
Not only how he’s feeling, but when those feelings are changing.
To me, this concept is one of the most fundamental foundations of any good acting performance, and I think it’s something
worthwhile for us all to continue to study and deconstruct.
If you’ve been reading this column since the beginning, you’ve read my tips about scene planning and know how essential it is to
plan your performances. Part of that planning should often be video reference, of either yourself or friends or actors. If you truly get
into your character’s head, and truly begin to feel the REAL emotions of the scene when you are acting out your video reference, you
WILL see the properly placed blinks, showing these shifts in emotion and thought process. If you aren’t sure where to blink, be sure
to go through this process, it can be really helpful.
Another great idea is to just study the blinks of your favorite actors. Think of your favorite film, and choose a scene that stood out
to you as being especially believable acting. Pull it up on DVD and study the actor’s blinks. Check out Forrest Gump meeting his
son for the first time - it’s amazing. Also, Robin Williams’ blinks and eye-darts in One Hour Photo are great to analyze. Any of your
favorite actors will have valuable reference for you to study. Check that stuff out! How does the timing and frequency of the blinks
communicate the emotion at just the right precise moment to make it feel true... How does it make you feel? Why?
It’s a great idea to sit down and really study that stuff. Make notes for yourself, and really dig into it. You don’t have to be an acting

Animation Mentor - TipsAndTricks_eBook - 10-15

PLANNING
Because this is the first article, I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with probably the single most important tip most professional animators
are likely to give a student: PLAN YOUR WORK. Planning is probably the step most often missed by students, and at the same time,
it is probably the most essential tool in your entire animation toolbox, especially in the first few years of your animation life. You
should never sit down in front of your computer, animation disc or puppet, until you know exactly what poses you are planning to
use, when you are planning to use them, and why.
Before you begin any shot, it’s so important to study references, work out your thumbnails, and make your timing and acting
decisions on paper. This may seem like an “extra” step to some of you, but believe me, it will save you time in the long run and your
work will look so much stronger than it would have otherwise.
All of my best feature film shots are also the ones I spent the most time planning out. The shots where I got cocky and thought “Aw,
I know how to animate that, I’ll just sit down and do it” are, almost without exception, the shots that ended up being “okay,” but
never as good as they could have been. I’ll always regret missing the opportunity I had to make those shots special, but at least they
taught me an invaluable lesson: Planning Comes First, ALWAYS!
Tune in next time for some practical tips on how you can plan your shot!

OBSERVATION
Okay, so last month I was going on and on about how important it is to spend time planning your scene before you sit down in front
of your computer, your animation disc, or your stop-motion set. But HOW do you do that? What’s the best way to plan a scene?
Well, the first thing you absolutely have to do is OBSERVE.
Sounds simple, right? Well, it isn’t quite as simple as you might first think, but it will become second nature eventually. The important
thing to realize is that observation is not passive or casual. Observation is much more than simply “seeing” something interesting -
it’s ACTIVELY studying the world around us. Sure, a certain amount of curiosity is natural, but you have to take your natural curiosity
for noticing things and train yourself to crank that curiosity knob to 11 if you want to become an animator.
Let’s say that you see a little girl trying to feed her lollypop to a monkey at the zoo, and her mother grabs to stop her, knocking the
lollypop into the air where it sticks in the mother’s hair. Seeing that happen might have been funny, or maybe you felt bad for the
mother, or embarrassed for them -- either way it was probably pretty memorable. It’s something you might even tell your friends
about that night.
However, simply remembering and relating that overall story is not observation. An animator would notice SO MUCH MORE in that
moment than the mere fact that the lollypop got stuck in the woman’s hair. An animator will see the overlap on the girl’s hand as
the mother smacks the lollypop into the air. An animator will see the frightened expression on the girl’s face, or the way the monkey
reacted to the whole thing, or the frozen moment in time when the lolly landed in Mom’s hair and they both just freeze for an instant
as they realize their situation. The way Mom’s shoulders might slump with resignation, or maybe how the little girl tried not to laugh,
or maybe it’s even the way that their dresses spun in the wind as Mom picked up her daughter and hustled off to cut her hair in the
bathroom.
That’s observation, and it’s the single biggest animation tool you will ever have. Any time you see something interesting - be it the
bounce of a squirrel, the flutter of a feather, or the twitch of an about-to-cry eyelid - file those things away in a little filing cabinet in
your head. You never know what you will find helpful down the road, and the bigger library of observations you can build in your
head, the better equipped you will be to deal with any scene a director might throw at you. Not only that, but you’ll be able to come
up with scenes and actions that are not cliché and that feel real and ring true to an audience - and the reason the audience will
identify with the action or emotion you animate is because it’s something you’ve seen in your past, or in a film, or on TV, or even in
a mirror.
All strong animation starts with observation, so train yourself to do more than passively notice the world around you. Soak it up, file
it away, and start using the amazing things around you in your art! Your work will only become stronger and less cliché the more you
allow yourself to truly study the motions, actions, reactions, and emotions of those around you.
Next month we’ll tackle reference! In the meantime, if you want a fun observational exercise, hit a zoo or a park or a shopping mall
and just sit on a bench and watch people. You can even bring along a sketchbook to draw what you see and take notes, but the
important thing is to watch the people around you and truly study them.
Oh, and don’t forget to wear sunglasses so you don’t creep them out!

REFERENCE MATERIALS
We've been talking so far about the importance of planning. Last month we covered the importance of observation, but this week
we're going to get a little more practical and tackle the concept of reference materials.
There are many types of reference materials that will be invaluable to you as an animator. Photography, comic-books, live-action
movie reference, animated reference, and footage of yourself and your friends acting out a scene will all be incredibly useful as you
sit down to plan your shot. It might be the most practical and useful planning of all, in fact.
One misconception that I often hear from students is that "using reference is cheating." Well, if using reference is cheating, then
99% of the world's top animators are cheaters! Nothing could be further from the truth. Using reference is essential, especially for
animation students, to finding the most believable and unique performance for your scene.
First, let's talk about some of my favorite reference photography for a second. Eadweard Muybridge's books can be a big help,
especially when learning about walk cycles and run cycles - both for humans and animals. My favorite, however, is the work of Dr.
Harold Edgerton. His book "Stopping Time" is incredible, and documents his work as he pioneers incredibly fast flash photography,
which allowed him to capture something at speeds upwards of 100,000th of a second. At these speeds, you can really truly see how
the principles of animation exist, even on a very subtle level, in real-world situations where you might have imagined they wouldn't
apply. Check out the squash and stretch on a golf-ball, or the way a baseball bat slightly bends as it whips around -- pretty incredible
stuff to examine. We use both Muybridge and Edgerton's work in our classes at Animation Mentor, and I'd recommend their books
to any animator interested in delving deeper into learning why the principles of animation exist in the first place.
Next up, we have one of the must underrated animation reference resources of all: comic books. If you're interested in learning
about dynamic posing, there is no better place to look than your local comic book shop. Check out some of Jim Lee's recent Batman
work, or J Scott Campbell's "Danger Girl." Comics are (and always have been) underrated in the "art community," but you would do
yourself a disservice by ignoring the work of some of the best comic book artists out there. Many of them come from an animation
background, such as Mike Kunkel, creator of Herobear (awesome!), and you can learn more about line-of-action and dynamic posing
by spending ten minutes in a good comic book than you can by watching hours of movie reference.
Live action and animated reference are next on my list, and these can be some of the most helpful. It's important, in my opinion,
to keep a solid reference library of films if you're going to attack this monster known as "animation." The pile of DVDs on my shelf
at home come in handy on every single show I work on. It's incredibly useful, for example, to be able to pull up some footage
from the olympics to study how someone throws a javelin if you're going to be animating a guy throwing a spear. If you're going
to be animating flying birds, what could possibly be more useful than spending some time studying the documentary "Winged
Migration?"
Finally the most important reference of all - video reference of yourself and your friends. If you have an action shot to work on, set up
a camera and get up and actually DO the action. Over and over and over and over. Do it until it feels natural. Film your friends doing
it. Get as much reference as you can - at least until you know for a fact that you've filmed at least one take that you think would work
well. Then it's up to you to study that take and glean what you can from it.

If you're working on a dialogue shot, that's a whole other ball of wax and can easily involve much more pre-planning as you attempt
to truly get into the character's head, getting to know your character's motivations, back-story, emotional state, etc. That's a whole
other ball of wax that we'll tackle someday down the road - for now, let's stick with this reference stuff.
The important thing here is that with all of these types of reference, you don't just look at them. Don't just look at the photographs.
Don't just flip through the comic book. Don't just watch the movie. STUDY these materials. Find what makes the poses so appealing,
or what maybe even makes a pose confusing or bad. You can learn from good *and* bad reference, so just soak up as much as you
can. If you're animating a bird, and you turn on "Winged Migration" and find the appropriate bird, watch it many times. Watch it in
slow motion. Frame-by-frame. Look at how the wings work, find the key poses that the real bird is actually using. DRAW them in a
sketchbook so that you remember them. Make notes to yourself.
Then when you get back to your desk, start applying the principles of animation to what you've just watched. This is KEY. Do **NOT**
just copy it. Copying reference verbatim generally results in a robotic lifeless feel. Your job as an animator is to take that reference
and apply your ART to it.
Remember - animation is an art. It isn't math. It isn't something where there is a formula that will work 100% of the time. But that
doesn't mean that you can skip over the essential step of planning your scene, and regardless of what the animation style you're
going to work in is, it's always helpful to examine the way that body mechanics and emotions play out in the real world.
Next time we'll talk about thumbnails, and I promise I'll be less wordy. :)

THUMBNAILS
Welcome back!
This month we’re going to talk about thumbnails (and as promised, I’ll be more brief!). So, what are thumbnails? Well, animators
often use the fingernails on their thumbs to animate with. If you use your thumbnails to click your mouse buttons instead of your
forefingers, you get a much better result.
Wow, was that the all-time worst animation joke in the history of animation jokes? I think it must be, though I’d also hazard a guess
that the “history of animation jokes” is probably pretty short.
Okay, so - for real now - what the heck are thumbnails?
Basically, “thumbnail” is a term used to describe a small “thumbnail-sized” drawing that describes a pose, an action, or an idea.
The first rule of thumbnails is, don’t talk about thumbnails.
Jeeeez. I just did it again. Second worst animation joke in the history of animation jokes. Sorry. It won’t happen again, I promise.
Okay, the first rule of thumbnails is: LET THEM BE ROUGH.
They are SUPPOSED to look rough. They are not meant to be pretty pictures. Don’t spend (waste!) a lot of time making each thumbnail
look like a piece of art. Don’t waste time shading it in, drawing all the little details, etc. They’re meant to be fast and sloppy. The entire
point of doing thumbnails is that it saves you time.
How does it save you time? Well, if you do thumbnails as part of your planning process, then you can work through all of your ideas
BEFORE sitting down in front of the computer, and it’s inarguably much faster to doodle a little stick-man doing a pose than it is to
pose him out in the computer.
We use thumbnails to work through our ideas. To get past our first ideas (remember - your first idea is always the worst and most
clichéd idea. The first idea you think of is probably the first and most obvious idea that the audience will think of too!), and get on
to the ideas that count. The later ideas will be the good ones. They’ll be the most inventive ideas, and the most original. But to reach
those ideas, you’ll first have to work through the clichéd ideas, right? Thumbnails are, without a doubt, the fastest way to do that.
The quickest road to a great idea, then, is through thumbnails!
When you get a new scene, sit down and start doodling. Maybe it’s just poses. Maybe it’s working out full actions. Either way,
you’re quickly discovering what will work and what won’t, and it’s all on paper. Quick and dirty - that’s the way to do it. Use a stickman,
even. Many of the best animators do their thumbnails with what is essentially a stick-man. As long as you can see where the
character’s hips are, the angle of the hips, the angle of the shoulders, angle of the head, and the position of the limbs - that’s ALL you
need to know at this point, and you shouldn’t be worrying about any other details yet, generally speaking.
6
Copyright 2008 by AnimationMentor.com. All rights reserved. This ebook may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format without
express written permission.
So, the first rule is to stay rough, and the first *use* of thumbnails is to discover the best ideas for your shot.
The second use of thumbnails is to get fast feedback.
You can save yourself days of work (and a great deal of frustration) if you run your thumbnails past your lead or your director before
diving into the actual scene. Nothing is more frustrating than spending 3 days blocking in something that you think is great only
to find out, once the director gets a look at it, that you’re doing something he doesn’t like at all. It’s always a great idea to run your
thumbnails past them first, so you can save yourself the headache (and heartache!) of hearing the dreaded “start over” words from
your director.
The third use of thumbnails is to translate your video reference.
Filming video reference is great, but as we talked about last time, you can’t just coy it or you’re going to end up with a scene that isn’t
as alive as it could have been. Thumbnails are a great way to translate that video reference into poses and timing that are infused
with your knowledge of the art of animation. Sure, you can find some great posing and timing ideas in your video reference, but
that’s only step one. Whip out a sketchbook and start doing little stick-figure drawings of what you are observing (and STUDYING!)
in the reference you’re watching.
But as you draw those thumbnails, you can start to inject the principles of animation into them. Exaggerate the poses, push the lines
of action in the body, and make the poses more dynamic and forceful. You can also jot down timing notes, and maybe you can even
start exaggerating your timing at this stage. Right there in your thumbnails you can be making decisions about timing - give this
part a little more ease-in, make that part a little snappier, etc.
The goal, as far as I’m concerned, is that before you sit down in front of your computer, you have a piece of paper or an exposure
sheet that has dynamic and timed thumbnail poses, so you know exactly what pose will happen on exactly what frames. By the time
you have turned on your computer, every major animation decision should have already been made. Without exception.
If you work this way, I guarantee you will end up with stronger, more dynamic, more communicative, and more memorable scenes
than you would if you just sat down and started saving keys. Even better, I guarantee this entire planning process will save you time
in the long run.
I think, as a general rule, I probably spend about 20% of my time planning. If I have a week to do a shot, I’ll spend the first day
completely away from the computer. A two-week shot might get 2 days of planning. If I only had 2 days to do a shot, then maybe
I’d only spend 2 or 3 hours planning, but I would make the most of those couple hours. I’d spend it studying video reference, filming
myself and my friends, doing thumbnails, etc. I do that because I know without a doubt that by spending that first day planning, I
just saved myself a couple days (or more) worth of “noodling” the shot, and tinkering with it, trying to make it work.
Again, the best scenes I’ve ever done, and the ones I finished the quickest, are the shots that I spent the most time planning.
Over and out.
- Shawn

1. Brain Rules 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School Paperback ebook [1-20]

go ahead and multiply the number 8,388,628 x 2 in your head. Can you do it in a few seconds? There is a young man who can double that number 24 times in the space of a few seconds. He gets it right every time. There is a boy who can tell you the precise time of day at any moment, even in his sleep. There is a girl who can correctly determine the exact dimensions of an object 20 feet away. There is a child who at age 6 drew such lifelike and powerful pictures, she got her own show at a gallery on Madison Avenue. Yet none of these children could be taught to tie their shoes. Indeed, none of them have an IQ greater than 50. The brain is an amazing thing. Your brain may not be nearly so odd, but it is no less extraordinary. Easily the most sophisticated information-transfer system on Earth, your brain is fully capable of taking the little black squiggles on this piece of bleached wood and deriving meaning from them. To accomplish this miracle, your brain sends jolts of electricity crackling through hundreds of miles of wires composed of brain cells introduction BRAIN RULES 2 so small that thousands of them could fit into the period at the end of this sentence. You accomplish all of this in less time than it takes you to blink. Indeed, you have just done it. What’s equally incredible, given our intimate association with it, is this: Most of us have no idea how our brain works. This has strange consequences. We try to talk on our cell phones and drive at the same time, even though it is literally impossible for our brains to multitask when it comes to paying attention. We have created high-stress office environments, even though a stressed brain is significantly less productive. Our schools are designed so that most real learning has to occur at home. This would be funny if it weren’t so harmful. Blame it on the fact that brain scientists rarely have a conversation with teachers and business professionals, education majors and accountants, superintendents and CEOs. Unless you have the Journal of Neuroscience sitting on your coffee table, you’re out of the loop. This book is meant to get you into the loop. 12 brain rules My goal is to introduce you to 12 things we know about how the brain works. I call these Brain Rules. For each rule, I present the science and then offer ideas for investigating how the rule might apply to our daily lives, especially at work and school. The brain is complex, and I am taking only slivers of information from each subject—not comprehensive but, I hope, accessible. The Brain Rules film, available at www.brainrules.net/dvd, is an integral part of the project. You might use the DVD as an introduction, and then jump between a chapter in the book and the illustrations online. A sampling of the ideas you’ll encounter: • For starters, we are not used to sitting at a desk for eight hours a day. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed while working out, walking as many as 12 miles a day. The brain still craves that experience, especially in sedentary populations like INTRODUCTION 3 our own. That’s why exercise boosts brain power (Brain Rule #1) in such populations. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in longterm memory, reasoning, attention, and problem-solving tasks. I am convinced that integrating exercise into our eight hours at work or school would only be normal. • As you no doubt have noticed if you’ve ever sat through a typical PowerPoint presentation, people don’t pay attention to boring things (Brain Rule #4). You’ve got seconds to grab someone’s attention and only 10 minutes to keep it. At 9 minutes and 59 seconds, something must be done to regain attention and restart the clock—something emotional and relevant. Also, the brain needs a break. That’s why I use stories in this book to make many of my points. • Ever feel tired about 3 o’clock in the afternoon? That’s because your brain really wants to take a nap. You might be more productive if you did: In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performance by 34 percent. And whether you get enough rest at night affects your mental agility the next day. Sleep well, think well (Brain Rule #7). • We’ll meet a man who can read two pages at the same time, one with each eye, and remember everything in the pages forever. Most of us do more forgetting than remembering, of course, and that’s why we must repeat to remember (Brain Rule #5). When you understand the brain’s rules for memory, you’ll see why I want to destroy the notion of homework. • We’ll find out why the terrible twos only look like active rebellion but actually are a child’s powerful urge to explore. Babies may not have a lot of knowledge about the world, but they know a whole lot about how to get it. We are powerful and natural explorers (Brain Rule #12), and this never leaves us, despite the artificial environments we’ve built for ourselves. no prescriptions The ideas ending the chapters of this book are not a prescription. BRAIN RULES 4 They are a call for real-world research. The reason springs from what I do for a living. My research expertise is the molecular basis of psychiatric disorders, but my real interest is in trying to understand the fascinating distance between a gene and a behavior. I have been a private consultant for most of my professional life, a hired gun for research projects in need of a developmental molecular biologist with such specialization. I have had the privilege of watching countless research efforts involving chromosomes and mental function. On such journeys, I occasionally would run across articles and books that made startling claims based on “recent advances” in brain science about how to change the way we teach people and do business. And I would panic, wondering if the authors were reading some literature totally off my radar screen. I speak several dialects of brain science, and I knew nothing from those worlds capable of dictating best practices for education and business. In truth, if we ever fully understood how the human brain knew how to pick up a glass of water, it would represent a major achievement. There was no need to panic. You can responsibly train a skeptical eye on any claim that brain research can without equivocation tell us how to become better teachers, parents, business leaders, or students. This book is a call for research simply because we don’t know enough to be prescriptive. It is an attempt to vaccinate against mythologies such as the “Mozart Effect,” left brain/right brain personalities, and getting your babies into Harvard by making them listen to language tapes while they are still in the womb. back to the jungle What we know about the brain comes from biologists who study brain tissues, experimental psychologists who study behavior, cognitive neuroscientists who study how the first relates to the second, and evolutionary biologists. Though we know precious little about how the brain works, our evolutionary history tells us this: The brain appears to be designed to solve problems related to surviving INTRODUCTION 5 in an unstable outdoor environment, and to do so in nearly constant motion. I call this the brain’s performance envelope. Each subject in this book—exercise, survival, wiring, attention, memory, sleep, stress, sense, vision, gender, and exploration— relates to this performance envelope. Motion translates to exercise. Environmental instability led to the extremely flexible way our brains are wired, allowing us to solve problems through exploration. Learning from our mistakes so we could survive in the great outdoors meant paying attention to certain things at the expense of others, and it meant creating memories in a particular way. Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. We have not outgrown this. I am a nice guy, but I am a grumpy scientist. For a study to appear in this book, it has to pass what some at The Boeing Company (for which I have done some consulting) call MGF: the Medina Grump Factor. That means the supporting research for each of my points must first be published in a peer-reviewed journal and then successfully replicated. Many of the studies have been replicated dozens of times. (To stay as reader-friendly as possible, extensive references are not in this book but can be found at www.brainrules.net.) What do these studies show, viewed as a whole? Mostly this: If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over. In many ways, starting over is what this book is all about. exercise Rule #1 Exercise boosts brain power. if the cameras weren’t rolling and the media abuzz with live reports, it is possible nobody would have believed the following story: A man had been handcuffed, shackled and thrown into California’s Long Beach Harbor, where he was quickly fastened to a floating cable. The cable had been attached at the other end to 70 boats, bobbing up and down in the harbor, each carrying a single person. Battling strong winds and currents, the man then swam, towing all 70 boats (and passengers) behind him, traveling 1.5 miles to Queen’s Way Bridge. The man, Jack La Lanne, was celebrating his birthday. He had just turned 70 years old. Jack La Lanne, born in 1914, has been called the godfather of the American fitness movement. He starred in one of the longestrunning exercise programs produced for commercial television. A prolific inventor, La Lanne designed the first leg-extension machines, the first cable-fastened pulleys, and the first weight selectors, all now BRAIN RULES 10 standard issue in the modern gym. He is even credited with inventing an exercise that supposedly bears his name, the Jumping Jack. La Lanne is now in his mid-90s, and even these feats are probably not the most interesting aspect of this famed bodybuilder’s story. If you ever have the chance to hear him in an interview, your biggest impression will be not the strength of his muscles but the strength of his mind. La Lanne is mentally alert, almost beyond reason. His sense of humor is both lightening fast and improvisatory. “I tell people I can’t afford to die. It will wreck my image!” he once exclaimed to Larry King. He regularly rails at the camera: “Why am I so strong? Do you know how many calories are in butter and cheese and ice cream? Would you get your dog up in the morning for a cup of coffee and a doughnut?” He claims he hasn’t had dessert since 1929. He is hyper-energized, opinionated, possessed with the intellectual vigor of an athlete in his 20s. So it’s hard not to ask: “Is there a relationship between exercise and mental alertness?” The answer, it turns out, is yes. survival of the fittest Though a great deal of our evolutionary history remains shrouded in controversy, the one fact that every paleoanthropologist on the planet accepts can be summarized in two words: We moved. A lot. When our bountiful rainforests began to shrink, collapsing the local food supply, we were forced to wander around an increasingly dry landscape looking for more trees we could scamper up to dine. As the climate got more arid, these wet botanical vending machines disappeared altogether. Instead of moving up and down complex arboreal environments in three dimensions, which required a lot of dexterity, we began walking back and forth across arid savannahs in two dimensions, which required a lot of stamina. “About 10 to 20 kilometers a day with men,” says famed anthropologist Richard Wrangham, “and about half that for women.” 1. EXERCISE 11 That’s the amount of ground scientists estimate we covered on a daily basis back then—up to 12 miles a day. That means our fancy brains developed not while we were lounging around but while we were working out. The first real marathon runner of our species was a vicious predator known as Homo erectus. As soon as the Homo erectus family evolved, about 2 million years ago, he started moving out of town. Our direct ancestors, Homo sapiens, rapidly did the same thing, starting in Africa 100,000 years ago and reaching Argentina by 12,000 years ago. Some researchers suggest that we were extending our ranges by an unheard-of 25 miles per year. This is an impressive feat, considering the nature of the world our ancestors inhabited. They were crossing rivers and deserts, jungles and mountain ranges, all without the aid of maps and mostly without tools. They eventually made ocean-going boats without the benefit of wheels or metallurgy, and then traveling up and down the Pacific with only the crudest navigational skills. Our ancestors constantly were encountering new food sources, new predators, new physical dangers. Along the road they routinely suffered injuries, experienced strange illnesses, and delivered and nurtured children, all without the benefit of textbooks or modern medicine. Given our relative wimpiness in the animal kingdom (we don’t even have enough body hair to survive a mildly chilly night), what these data tell us is that we grew up in top physical shape, or we didn’t grow up at all. And they also tell us the human brain became the most powerful in the world under conditions where motion was a constant presence. If our unique cognitive skills were forged in the furnace of physical activity, is it possible that physical activity still influences our cognitive skills? Are the cognitive abilities of someone in good physical condition different from those of someone in poor physical condition? And what if someone in poor physical condition were whipped into shape? Those are scientifically testable questions. The BRAIN RULES 12 answers are directly related to why Jack La Lanne can still crack jokes about eating dessert. In his nineties. will you age like jim or like frank? We discovered the beneficial effects of exercise on the brain by looking at aging populations. This was brought home to me by an anonymous man named Jim and a famous man named Frank. I met them both while I was watching television. A documentary on American nursing homes showed people in wheelchairs, many in their mid- to late 80s, lining the halls of a dimly lit facility, just sitting around, seemingly waiting to die. One was named Jim. His eyes seemed vacant, lonely, friendless. He could cry at the drop of a hat but otherwise spent the last years of his life mostly staring off into space. I switched channels. I stumbled upon a very young-looking Mike Wallace. The journalist was busy interviewing architect Frank Lloyd Wright, at the time in his late 80s. I was about to hear a most riveting interview. “When I walk into St. Patrick’s Cathedral … here in New York City, I am enveloped in a feeling of reverence,” said Wallace, tapping his cigarette. The old man eyed Wallace. “Sure it isn’t an inferiority complex?” “Just because the building is big and I’m small, you mean?” “Yes.” “I think not.” “I hope not.” “You feel nothing when you go into St. Patrick’s?” “Regret,” Wright said without a moment’s pause, “because it isn’t the thing that really represents the spirit of independence and the sovereignty of the individual which I feel should be represented in our edifices devoted to culture.” I was dumbfounded by the dexterity of Wright’s response. In four sentences, one could detect the clarity of his mind, his unshakable vision, his willingness to think out of the box. The rest of his 1. EXERCISE 13 interview was just as compelling, as was the rest of Wright’s life. He completed the designs for the Guggenheim Museum, his last work, in 1957, when he was 90 years old. But I also was dumbfounded by something else. As I contemplated Wright’s answers, I remembered Jim from the nursing home. He was the same age as Wright. In fact, most of the residents were. I suddenly was beholding two types of aging. Jim and Frank lived in roughly the same period of time. But one mind had almost completely withered, while the other remained as incandescent as a light bulb. What was the difference in the aging process between men like Jim and the famous architect? This question has bugged the research community for a long time. Investigators have known for years that some people age with energy and pizazz, living productive lives well into their 80s and 90s. Others appear to become battered and broken by the process, and often they don’t survive their 70s. Attempts to explain these differences led to many important discoveries, which I have grouped as answers to six questions. 1) Is there one factor that predicts how well you will age? It was never an easy question for researchers to answer. They found many variables, from nature to nurture, that contributed to someone’s ability to age gracefully. That’s why the scientific community met with both applause and suspicion a group of researchers who uncovered a powerful environmental influence. In a result that probably produced a smile on Jack La Lanne’s face, one of the greatest predictors of successful aging was the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle. Put simply, if you are a couch potato, you are more likely to age like Jim, if you make it to your 80s at all. If you have an active lifestyle, you are more likely to age like Frank Lloyd Wright and much more likely to make it to your 90s. The chief reason for the difference seemed to be that exercise improved cardiovascular fitness, which in turn reduced the risk for diseases such as heart attacks and stroke. But researchers wondered BRAIN RULES 14 why the people who were aging “successfully” also seemed to be more mentally alert. This led to the obvious second question: 2) Were they? Just about every mental test possible was tried. No matter how it was measured, the answer was consistently yes: A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary. Exercisers outperform couch potatoes in tests that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so-called fluidintelligence tasks. These tasks test the ability to reason quickly and think abstractly, improvising off previously learned material in order to solve a new problem. Essentially, exercise improves a whole host of abilities prized in the classroom and at work. Not every weapon in the cognitive arsenal is improved by exercise. Short-term memory skills, for example, and certain types of reaction times appear to be unrelated to physical activity. And, while nearly everybody shows some improvement, the degree of benefit varies quite a bit among individuals. Most important, these data, strong as they were, showed only an association, not a cause. To show the direct link, a more intrusive set of experiments had to be done. Researchers had to ask: 3) Can you turn Jim into Frank? The experiments were reminiscent of a makeover show. Researchers found a group of couch potatoes, measured their brain power, exercised them for a period of time, and re-examined their brain power. They consistently found that when couch potatoes are enrolled in an aerobic exercise program, all kinds of mental abilities begin to come back online. Positive results were observed after as little as four months of activity. It was the same story with schoolage children. In one recent study, children jogged for 30 minutes two or three times a week. After 12 weeks, their cognitive performance 1. EXERCISE 15 had improved significantly compared with pre-jogging levels. When the exercise program was withdrawn, the scores plummeted back to their pre-experiment levels. Scientists had found a direct link. Within limits, it does appear that exercise can turn Jim into Frank, or at least turn Jim into a sharper version of himself. As the effects of exercise on cognition became increasingly obvious, scientists began fine-tuning their questions. One of the biggest—certainly one dearest to the couch-potato cohort—was: What type of exercise must you do, and how much of it must be done to get the benefit? I have both good news and bad news. 4) What’s the bad news? Astonishingly, after years of investigation in aging populations, the answer to the question of how much is not much. If all you do is walk several times a week, your brain will benefit. Even couch potatoes who fidget show increased benefit over those who do not fidget. The body seems to be clamoring to get back to its hyperactive Serengeti roots. Any nod toward this history, be it ever so small, is met with a cognitive war whoop. In the laboratory, the gold standard appears to be aerobic exercise, 30 minutes at a clip, two or three times a week. Add a strengthening regimen and you get even more cognitive benefit. Of course, individual results vary, and no one should embark on a rigorous program without consulting a physician. Too much exercise and exhaustion can hurt cognition. The data merely point to the fact that one should embark. Exercise, as millions of years traipsing around the backwoods tell us, is good for the brain. Just how good took everyone by surprise, as they answered the next question. 5) Can exercise treat brain disorders? Given the robust effect of exercise on typical cognitive performance, researchers wanted to know if it could be used to treat atypical performance. What about diseases such as age-related BRAIN RULES 16 dementia and its more thoroughly investigated cousin, Alzheimer’s disease? What about affective disorders such as depression? Researchers looked at both prevention and intervention. With experiments reproduced all over the world, enrolling thousands of people, often studied for decades, the results are clear. Your lifetime risk for general dementia is literally cut in half if you participate in leisure-time physical activity. Aerobic exercise seems to be the key. With Alzheimer’s, the effect is even greater: Such exercise lowers your odds of getting the disease by more than 60 percent. How much exercise? Once again, a little goes a long way. The researchers showed you have to participate in some form of exercise just twice a week to get the benefit. Bump it up to a 20-minute walk each day, and you can cut your risk of having a stroke—one of the leading causes of mental disability in the elderly—by 57 percent. The man most responsible for stimulating this line of inquiry did not start his career wanting to be a scientist. He wanted to be an athletics coach. His name is Dr. Steven Blair, and he looks uncannily like Jason Alexander, the actor who portrayed George Costanza on the old TV sitcom Seinfeld. Blair’s coach in high school, Gene Bissell, once forfeited a football game after discovering that an official had missed a call. Even though the league office balked, Bissell insisted that his team be declared the loser, and the young Steven never forgot the incident. Blair writes that this devotion to truth inspired his undying admiration for rigorous, no-nonsense, statistical analysis of the epidemiological work in which he eventually embarked. His seminal paper on fitness and mortality stands as a landmark example of how to do work with integrity in this field. The rigor of his findings inspired other investigators. What about using exercise not only as prevention, they asked, but as intervention, to treat mental disorders such as depression and anxiety? That turned out to be a good line of questioning. A growing body of work now suggests that physical activity can powerfully affect the course of both diseases. We think it’s because exercise regulates the 1. EXERCISE 17 release of the three neurotransmitters most commonly associated with the maintenance of mental health: serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Although exercise cannot substitute for psychiatric treatment, the role of exercise on mood is so pronounced that many psychiatrists have begun adding a regimen of physical activity to the normal course of therapy. But in one experiment with depressed individuals, rigorous exercise was actually substituted for antidepressant medication. Even when compared against medicated controls, the treatment outcomes were astonishingly successful. For both depression and anxiety, exercise is beneficial immediately and over the long term. It is equally effective for men and women, and the longer the program is deployed, the greater the effect becomes. It is especially helpful for severe cases and for older people. Most of the data we have been discussing concern elderly populations. Which leads to the question: 6) Are the cognitive blessings of exercise only for the elderly? As you ratchet down the age chart, the effects of exercise on cognition become less clear. The biggest reason for this is that so few studies have been done. Only recently has the grumpy scientific eye begun to cast its gaze on younger populations. One of the best efforts enrolled more than 10,000 British civil servants between the ages of 35 and 55, examining exercise habits and grading them as low, medium, or high. Those with low levels of physical activity were more likely to have poor cognitive performance. Fluid intelligence, the type that requires improvisatory problem-solving skills, was particularly hurt by a sedentary lifestyle. Studies done in other countries have confirmed the finding. If only a small number of studies have been done in middle-age populations, the number of studies saying anything about exercise and children is downright microscopic. Though much more work needs to be done, the data point in a familiar direction, though perhaps for different reasons. BRAIN RULES 18 To talk about some of these differences, I would like to introduce you to Dr. Antronette Yancey. At 6 foot 2, Yancey is a towering, beautiful presence, a former professional model, now a physicianscientist with a deep love for children and a broad smile to buttress the attitude. She is a killer basketball player, a published poet, and one of the few professional scientists who also makes performance art. With this constellation of talents, she is a natural to study the effects of physical activity on developing minds. And she has found what everybody else has found: Exercise improves children. Physically fit children identify visual stimuli much faster than sedentary ones. They appear to concentrate better. Brain-activation studies show that children and adolescents who are fit allocate more cognitive resources to a task and do so for longer periods of time. “Kids pay better attention to their subjects when they’ve been active,” Yancey says. “Kids are less likely to be disruptive in terms of their classroom behavior when they’re active. Kids feel better about themselves, have higher self-esteem, less depression, less anxiety. All of those things can impair academic performance and attentiveness.” Of course, there are many ingredients to the recipe of academic performance. Finding out which components are the most important—especially if you want improvement—is difficult enough. Finding out whether exercise is one of those choice ingredients is even tougher. But these preliminary findings show that we have every reason to be optimistic about the long-term outcomes. an exercise in road-building Why exercise works so well in the brain, at a molecular level, can be explained by competitive food eaters—or, less charitably, professional pigs. There is an international association representing people who time themselves on how much they can eat at a given event. The association is called the International Federation of Competitive Eating, and its crest proudly displays the slogan (I am not making this up) In Voro Veritas—literally, “In Gorging, Truth.” 1. EXERCISE 19 Like any sporting organization, competitive food eaters have their heroes. The reigning gluttony god is Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi. He is the recipient of many eating awards, including the vegetarian dumpling competition (83 dumplings downed in 8 minutes), the roasted pork bun competition (100 in 12 minutes), and the hamburger competition (97 in 8 minutes). Kobayashi also is a world champion hot-dog eater. One of his few losses was to a 1,089-pound Kodiak bear. In a 2003 Fox televised special called Man vs. Beast, the mighty Kobayashi consumed only 31 bunless dogs compared with the ursine’s 50, all in about 2½ minutes. Kobayashi lost his hot-dog crown in 2007 to Joey Chestnut, who ate 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes (the Tsunami could manage only 63). But my point isn’t about speed. It’s about what happens to all of those hot dogs after they slide down the Tsunami’s throat. As with any of us, his body uses its teeth and acid and wormy intestines to tear the food apart and, if need be, reconfigure it. This is done for more or less a single reason: to turn foodstuffs into glucose, a type of sugar that is one of the body’s favorite energy resources. Glucose and other metabolic products are absorbed into the bloodstream via the small intestines. The nutrients travel to all parts of the body, where they are deposited into cells, which make up the body’s various tissues. The cells seize the sweet stuff like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Cellular chemicals greedily tear apart the molecular structure of glucose to extract its sugary energy. This energy extraction is so violent that atoms are literally ripped asunder in the process. As in any manufacturing process, such fierce activity generates a fair amount of toxic waste. In the case of food, this waste consists of a nasty pile of excess electrons shredded from the atoms in the glucose molecules. Left alone, these electrons slam into other molecules within the cell, transforming them into some of the most toxic substances known to humankind. They are called free radicals. If not quickly corralled, they will wreck havoc on the innards of a cell BRAIN RULES 20 and, cumulatively, on the rest of the body. These electrons are fully capable, for example, of causing mutations in your very DNA. The reason you don’t die of electron overdose is that the atmosphere is full of breathable oxygen. The main function of oxygen is to act like an efficient electron-absorbing sponge. At the same time the blood is delivering foodstuffs to your tissues, it is also carrying these oxygen sponges. Any excess electrons are absorbed by the oxygen and, after a bit of molecular alchemy, are transformed into equally hazardous—but now fully transportable—carbon dioxide. The blood is carried back to your lungs, where the carbon dioxide leaves the blood and you breathe it out. So, whether you are a competitive eater or a typical one, the oxygen-rich air you inhale keeps the food you eat from killing you. Getting food into tissues and getting toxic electrons out obviously are matters of access. That’s why blood has to be everywhere inside you. Serving as both wait staff and haz-mat team, any tissue without enough blood supply is going to starve to death—your brain included. That’s important because the brain’s appetite for energy is enormous. The brain represents only about 2 percent of most people’s body weight, yet it accounts for about 20 percent of the body’s total energy usage—about 10 times more than would be expected. When the brain is fully working, it uses more energy per unit of tissue weight than a fully exercising quadricep. In fact, the human brain cannot simultaneously activate more than 2 percent of its neurons at any one time. More than this, and the glucose supply becomes so quickly exhausted that you will faint. If it sounds to you like the brain needs a lot of glucose—and generates a lot of toxic waste—you are right on the money. This means the brain also needs lots of oxygen-soaked blood. How much food and waste can the brain generate in just a few minutes? Consider the following statistics. The three requirements for human life are food, drink, and fresh air. But their effects on survival have very different timelines. You can live for 30 days or so without food,

The Vampire Diaries - Season 5/ Episode 4 - Mystic Falls Messenger (recap/synopis)

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1. We opened with amnesic Stefan reading his journals. "Let me guess, fun brother," he said, referring to himself. "Safe brother," he said, motioning to Damon.  Damon crashed the car and proved he is definitely the most fun brother.

2. Caroline, who's been boning up on all things biology to help Stefan, impress Dr. Maxfield, and spend time with her tutor Jesse, told Elena she planned to take him with her to study in the graveyard during the festivities. 

Gramatyka:
Ważny czas i trwanie zdarzenia a nie rezultaty!


I'm tired ^[now] because I've been running. - Coś się dopiero co  skończyło i widać tego efekt, ma wpływ na teraźniejszość.

How long have you been learning English? [You are still learning now]. - Coś się zaczęło kiedyś, ale nadal trwa.

używamy przy tym since oraz for

I have been studying for 3 hours.
Tara hasn't been visiting us since March.

3. Stefan was getting thirsty looking at the waitress. Not that he's a shrink ("I'm no shrink, right?" "Right."), but maybe he only turned Ripper when he drank human blood from the vein because of all the trauma and guilt associated with his early days as a vamp. Since he can't remember any of that, maybe he could drink and not kill now. Damon told him not to find out.

4. The next scene was the funniest of the episode. We got to see Jeremy doing shirtless push-ups on a rug at Salvatore Mansion. Bonnie likes to watch, too. "You working out is my main source of entertainment," she told him. He's just working off some extra adrenaline. "And every girl on the other side thanks you for it." Sigh. Swoon. Rewind. 

5. Matt phoned Jeremy to come to his place. Matt was determined to find out the cause of his blackouts, so he'd set cameras up all over the house. Like Damon and Elena, who'd tried contacting Bonnie for help with Stefan, he's pissed that Bonnie's not returning his calls to help figure out what Nadia has done.

6.  Stefan cornered the waitress he'd been eying earlier and compelled her not to scream or move. The thought of killing her scares him, but the hunger inside of him is just so much more powerful.  Damon swooped in to stop him right before Stefan's fangs made contact. 

7. Damon and Elena took Stefan to the family crypt, to keep him away from humans until they could fix his memory. Was that really a good idea considering the graveyard was going to be filled with people that day? Stefan asked if there was anyone in there he hadn't killed. Damon got a text from Jeremy saying he needed to speak to him alone. That gave Stefan and Elena a chance to catch up.

8. We'd already learned that Damon hadn't told Stefan much about Elena yet. Stefan said he hoped Elena's backstory wasn't as tragic as his. Ha! She rattled off all those she'd lost. "How do I not remember you?" Stefan said. "You're smart, you're pretty, you're funny. Obviously you're the strongest woman in the world if you managed to figure out a way to get through all of that." She said she surrounds herself with amazing people who help her through it, like him. "Bonded by death," he said. "Please don't tell me that we met in a cemetery." Technically, no. To the school they went.

9. Elena reenacted them running into each other as she walked out of the men's room. Wait, maybe he was coming from the other direction. Perhaps they should try it again. Colliding bodies with Stefan would be a great way to spend an afternoon, I'm sure, but it wasn't helping him remember anything. And since the football team had entered the hallway, and one player was bleeding, it was time for Elena to try something else.

10.She took Stefan outside and showed him how to jump to the roof of the building. So no one who'd just been watching the football team practice or play a game was around to see that? Stefan figured out they'd dated. "I may have amnesia, but I'm not an idiot. I'm a 164-year-old vampire who went back to high school, so I'm guessing that had something to do with you," he said. He guessed his Ripper tendencies were the turnoff. No. He was the most compassionate person she knew, she said. He was always in control. So he bored her? No. It was her, she said. Becoming a vamp had changed her. He wanted to know how she became a vampire. She said she'd show him. Then she fell backwards off the roof, because again, she was sure no one would see? I'll forgive that because that was much cooler than the motorcycle scene when Elena was learning the physical joys of being a vamp.

11.Jesse had accepted Caroline's invitation to study in the graveyard. She told him she wasn't talking to her boyfriend and explained she just wanted to hang out with him that day because he was smart and nice
and available. He made a classic look over there and when you turn back around, I'll kiss you move. Good kisser. He can stick around. He apologized. He'd just been wanting to do that since the day he met her. Back to studying.

12. Jeremy did his best to break Bonnie's death to Damon gently. "Don't you say it, Jeremy. Don't you dare," Damon pleaded. Damon didn't want to hear Jeremy say she was dead, because if he did, everything in Elena's life sucks again. Too bad. "Bonnie's dead." Damon was pissed. Like, snarling pissed. When he walked toward Jeremy, you thought he was going to grab him and lock him up so he couldn't share the news with anyone else. Instead, he embraced him. AHHHHHH, Damon.

13 Elena took Stefan on a walk down memory lane that ended with them gazing upon Wickery Bridge. She explained about her two accidents there, and what a great boyfriend he was as we heard. Stefan said this was working -- his urge to feed had settled. He could see why he was different around her and not a monster. He scared himself when he saw his vamp face in the mirror. She told him she'd never been afraid of him, and showed him how she'd touched that face when she saw him for who he is and told him not to hide.  She went to move her left hand away. "Don't," he said, taking it and placing it back on his face.They leaned in and were about to kiss when she remembered she's with Damon. And she blurted that out. "You're with my brother? And neither of you thought that was something I should know?" he asked. She said they weren't hiding it from him. "And just like that, the hunger returns," Stefan said. And he was gone.

10 of the Most Important Life Lessons I Learned from My 20s

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On my 20th birthday, I got drunk and peed on(siusiać na) some old ladies' front lawn(trawnik). A cop(glina) saw me and stopped me. Fortunately(na szczęście), I talked my way out(dyskutować) of going to jail that night. I already had an arrest record, but he didn't bother (nie silili się, nie przejmowali) to check. My 20s started out(rozpoczynać się) with a bang.(huk)P

This post originally appeared on Mark Manson's blog.P

At the time (w tamtym czasie), I was aimless(pozbawiony celu). I had just dropped out(wycofać się;porzucić;rzucić szkołę) of music school and cut my long, tangly(spątany) hair. I wanted to move out of Texas but didn't know how or where. I would sometimes lecture(wygłaszać wykład) people about the spiritual(duchowy) aspect of consciousness(świadomość) and had a number of half-baked ideas(nieprzemyślany pomysł) about the theory of relativity and whether the universe actually existed or not.P

I was smart and audacious(bezczelny) and arrogant and really annoying.P

Three days from now, I will be turning 30 years old. I will be in Las Vegas and probably completely out of my mind when it happens. But I'm happy to report(donieść) that I'm far more responsible and far less pretentious(protensjonalny) these days. I've changed a lot in these 10 years. I don't get arrested anymore and I don't pee on people's lawns anymore. I've built businesses, been around the world multiple(wielokrotnie) times, and managed to create a career for myself as a writer — something I never could have predicted(przewidywać).P

In our instant gratification(natychmiastowe zaspokojenie) culture, it's easy to forget that most personal change does not occur(wydarzyć się;wystąpić jako) as a single static event(zdarzenie) in time (w swoim czasie), but rather as(raczej jako) a long, gradual(stopniowny) evolution where we're hardly aware of it as it's happening. We rarely(rzadko) wake up one day and suddenly notice wild, life-altering(zmieniający życie) changes in ourselves. No, our identities (tożsamość) slowly shift, like sea sand getting pushed around by the ocean, slowly accumulating into(gromadzić się) new contours and forms over the passage of time.(upływ czasu)P

It's only when we stop years or decades later and look back that we can notice all of the dramatic changes that have taken place (mieć miejsce, zdarzyć się). My 20s certainly(z pewnością) were dramatic. Here are some of the things I learned:P

1. Fail Early and Often; Time Is Your Best Asset(atut)P

SEXPAND

When you are young, your greatest asset is not your talent, not your ideas, not your experience, but your time. Time grants(przyznawać) you the opportunity to take big risks and make big mistakes. Dropping everything(porzucić wszystko) and traveling the world for six years or starting some company to build this crazy app you and your friends came up with(wytrzasnąć, znaleźć coś) when you got high one night, or randomly(przypadkowo) packing up all (four) of your belongings(dobytek) and moving to another city on a whim(zachcianka) to work and live with your cousin, you can only get away(wyrwać się) with these things when you're young, when you have nothing to lose. The difference between an unemployed(bezrobotny) 22-year-old with debt (dług)and no serious work experience and an unemployed 25-year-old with debt and no work experience is basically(w zasadzie) negligible(nieistotny) in the long run.(na dłuższą metę)P

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Chances are you aren't strapped by all of the financial responsibilities that come with later adulthood: mortgage payments, car payments, daycare for your kids, life insurance and so on. This is the time in your life where you have the least amount to lose by taking some long-shot risks, so you should take them. Because its the disastrous failures of these years — that crazy love affair with the Taiwanese dancer that made your mother lose her hair, or the entrepreneurial joint venture some guy in Starbucks talked you into that turned out to be an elaborate pyramid scheme — it's these failures that will set you up for your life successes down the line. They are the best lessons of your life. Get learning.P

2. You Can't Force FriendshipsP

SEXPAND

There are two types of friends in life: the kind that when you go away for a long time and come back, it feels like nothing's changed, and the kind that when you go away for a long time and come back, it feels like everything's changed.P

I've spent the majority of the last five years living in a number of different countries. Unfortunately, that means that I've left a lot of friends behind in various places. What I've discovered over this time is that you can't force a friendship with someone. Either it's there or it's not, and whatever "it" is, is so ephemeral and magical that neither one of you could even name it if you tried to. You both just know.P

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What I've also found is that you can rarely predict which friends will stick with you and which ones won't. I left Boston in the Fall of 2009 and came back eight months later to spend the Summer of 2010 there. Many of the people I was closest to when I left could hardly even be bothered to call me back when I returned. Yet, some of my more casual acquaintances slowly became the closest friends in my life. It's not that those other people were bad people or bad friends. It's nobody fault. It's just life.P

3. You're Not Supposed To Accomplish All of Your GoalsP

SEXPAND

Spending the first two decades of our life in school conditions us to have an intense results-oriented focus about everything. You set out to do X, Y or Z and either you accomplish them or you don't. If you do, you're great. If you don't, you fail.P

But in my 20s I've learned that life doesn't actually work that way all the time. Sure, it's nice to always have goals and have something to work towards, but I've found that actually attaining all of those goals is beside the point.P

When I was 24, I sat down and wrote down a list of goals I wanted to accomplish by my 30th birthday. The goals were ambitious and I took this list very seriously, at least for the first few years. Today, I've accomplished about 1/3 of those goals. I've made significant progress on another 1/3. And I've basically done nothing about the last 1/3.P

But I'm actually really happy about them. As I've grown, I've discovered that some of the life goals I set for myself were not things I actually wanted, and setting those goals taught me what was not important to me in my life. With some other goals, while I didn't attain them, the act of working towards them for the past six years has taught me so much that I'm still pleased with the outcome anyway.P

I'm firmly convinced that the whole point of goals is 80% to get us off our asses and 20% to hit some arbitrary benchmark. The value in any endeavor almost always comes from the process of failing and trying, not in achieving.P

4. No One Actually Knows What the Hell They're DoingP

SEXPAND

There's a lot of pressure on kids in high school and college to know exactly what they're doing with their lives. It starts with choosing and getting into a university. Then it becomes choosing a career and landing that first job. Then it becomes having a clear path to climb up that career ladder, getting as close to the top as possible. Then it's getting married and having kids. If at any point you don't know what you're doing or you get distracted or fail a few times, you're made to feel as if you're screwing up your entire life and you're destined for a life of panhandling and drinking vodka on park benches at 8AM.P

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But the truth is, almost nobody has any idea what they're doing in their 20s, and I'm fairly certain that continues further into adulthood. Everyone is just working off of their current best guess.P

Out of the dozens of people I've kept in touch with from high school and college (and by "keep in touch" I really mean "stalked on Facebook"), I can't think of more than a couple that have not changed jobs, careers, industry, families, sexual orientation or who their favorite power ranger is at least once in their 20s. For example, good friend of mine was dead-set when he was 23 of climbing the corporate hierarchy in his industry. He had a big head-start and was already kicking ass and making good money. Last year, at age 28, he just went and bailed. Another friend of mine went from the Navy to selling surf equipment, to getting a masters in education. Another friend of mine just picked up and took her career to Hong Kong. Another friend stopped working as an environmental scientist and is now a DJ.P

I rarely had any clue what I was doing. I get emails all the time from people wanting to know how I built my business, when I decided to become a writer, what my initial business plan was. The truth is I never knew any of those things. They just happened. I paid attention to opportunities and acted on them. Most of those opportunities failed drastically. But I was young and could afford those failures. Eventually, I was fortunate enough to work my way to do something I liked and do it well.P

5. Most People in the World Basically Want the Same ThingsP

In hindsight, I've had a pretty rollicking 20s. I started a business in a bizarre industry that took me to some interesting places and allowed me to meet interesting people. I've been all over the world, having spent time in over 50 countries. I've learned a few languages, and rubbed elbows with some of the rich and famous and the poor and downtrodden, in both the first and third worlds.P

And what I've discovered is that from a broad perspective, people are basically the same. Everyone spends most of their time worrying about food, money, their job and their family — even people who are rich and well fed. Everyone wants to look cool and feel important — even people who are already cool and important. Everyone is proud of where they come from. Everyone has insecurities and anxieties that plague them, regardless of how successful they are. Everybody is afraid of failure and looking stupid. Everyone loves their friends and family yet also gets the most irritated by them.P

Humans are, by and large, the same. It's just the details that get shuffled around. This homeland for that homeland. This corrupt government for that corrupt government. This religion for that religion. This social practice for that social practice. Most of the differences that we hold to be so significant are accidental byproducts of geography and history. They're superficial — merely different cultural flavors of the same overarching, candy-coated humanity.P

I've learned to judge people not by who they are, but by what they do. Some of the kindest and most gracious people I've met were people who did not have to be kind or gracious to me. Some of the most obnoxious asshats have been people who had no business being obnoxious asshats to me. The world makes all kinds. And you don't know who you're dealing with until you spend enough time with a person to see what they do, not what they look like, or where they're from or what gender they are or whatever.P

6. The World Doesn't Care About YouP

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The thought that is so frightening at first glance — "No one cares about me!?" —becomes so liberating when one actually processes its true meaning. As David Foster Wallace put it, "You'll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do."P

You, me, and everything we do, will one day be forgotten. It will be as if we never existed, even though we did. Nobody will care. Just like right now, almost nobody cares what you actually say or do with your life.P

And this is actually really good news: it means you can get away with a lot of stupid shit and people will forget and forgive you for it. It means that there's absolutely no reason to not be the person that you want to be. The pain of un-inhibiting yourself will be fleeting and the reward will last a lifetime.P

7. Pop Culture Is Full of Extremes, Practice ModerationP

SEXPAND

My life immediately got about 542% better when I realized that the information you consume online is predominantly made up of the 5% of each extreme view and that 90% of life actually occurs in the silent middle-ground where most of the population actually lives. If one reads the internet enough, one is liable to start thinking that World War III is imminent, that corporations rule the world through some conspiracy, that all men are rapists (or at the very least, complicit in rape), that all women are lying, hypergamous whores, that white people are victims of reverse racism, that there's a war on Christmas, that all poor people are lazy and destroying the government, and on and on.P

It's important to sometimes retreat to that quiet 90% and remind oneself: life is simple, people are good, and the chasms that appear to separate us are often just cracks.P

8. The Sum of the Little Things Matter Much More Than the Big ThingsP

I remember reading an interview of Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg's college roommate. The interviewer asked Dustin what it felt like to be part of Facebook's "overnight success." His answer was something like this, "If by 'overnight success' you mean staying up and coding all night, every night for six years straight, then it felt really tiring and stressful."P

We have a propensity to assume things just happen as they are. As outside observers, we tend to only see the result of things and not the arduous process (and all of the failures) that went into producing the result. I think when we're young, we have this idea that we have to do just this one big thing that is going to completely change the world, top to bottom. We dream so big because we don't yet realize — we're too young to realize — that those "one big things" are actually comprised of hundreds and thousands of daily small things that must be silently and unceremoniously maintained over long periods of time with little fanfare. Welcome to life.P

9. The World Is Not a Scary Place Out to Get YouP

This gets said all the time, but it's basically true. I've been to a fair amount of dangerous shit holes both inside and outside the US. And when given the opportunity, the majority of people are kind and helpful. If there's one piece of practical advice I would give every 20-year-old, regardless of circumstance, it is this: find a way to travel, and when in doubt, talk to people, ask them about themselves, get to know them. There's little to no downside and huge, major upsides, especially when you're still young and impressionable.P

10. Your Parents Are People Too1P

SEXPAND

And finally, perhaps the most disillusioning realization of your 20s: seeing mom and dad not as the all-knowing protectors like you did as a child, and not as the obnoxious and totally uncool authoritarians like you did as a teenager, but as peers, as just two flawed, vulnerable, struggling people doing their best despite often not knowing what the hell they're doing (see number 5).P

Chances are your parents screwed some things up during your childhood. Pretty much all of them do (as my mom always likes to say, "Kids aren't born with instruction manuals.") And chances are, you will start to notice all of these screw-ups while you are in your 20s. Growing up and maturing to the extent that one can recognize this is always a painful process. It can kick up a lot of bitterness and regret.P

But perhaps the first duty of adulthood — true adulthood, not just taxed adulthood — is the acknowledgment, acceptance, and (perhaps) forgiveness of one's parent's flaws. They're people too. They're doing their best, even though they don't always know what the best is.P