Flow, the secret to happiness

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, “What makes a life worth living?” Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow.”

Transcript

I grew up in Europe, and World War II caught me when I was between seven and 10 years old. And I realized how few of the grown-ups that I knew were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them — how few of them could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security was destroyed by the war. So I became interested in understanding what contributed to a life that was worth living. And I tried, as a child, as a teenager, to read philosophy and to get involved in art and religion and many other ways that I could see as a possible answer to that question. And finally I ended up encountering psychology by chance.

1:31I was at a ski resort in Switzerland without any money to actually enjoy myself, because the snow had melted and I didn’t have money to go to a movie. But I found that on the — I read in the newspapers that there was to be a presentation by someone in a place that I’d seen in the center of Zurich, and it was about flying saucers [that] he was going to talk. And I thought, well, since I can’t go to the movies, at least I will go for free to listen to flying saucers. And the man who talked at that evening lecture was very interesting. Instead of talking about little green men, he talked about how the psyche of the Europeanshad been traumatized by the war, and now they’re projecting flying saucers into the sky. He talked about how the mandalas of ancient Hindu religion were kind of projected into the sky as an attempt to regainsome sense of order after the chaos of war. And this seemed very interesting to me. And I started reading his books after that lecture. And that was Carl Jung, whose name or work I had no idea about.

3:09 Then I came to this country to study psychology and I started trying to understand the roots of happiness. This is a typical result that many people have presented, and there are many variations on it.But this, for instance, shows that about 30 percent of the people surveyed in the United States since 1956 say that their life is very happy. And that hasn’t changed at all. Whereas the personal income, on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation, has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period. But you find essentially the same results, namely, that after a certain basic point — which corresponds more or less to just a few 1,000 dollars above the minimum poverty level — increases in material well-being don’t seem to affect how happy people are. In fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources does not increase happiness.

4:29 So my research has been focused more on — after finding out these things that actually corresponded to my own experience, I tried to understand: where — in everyday life, in our normal experience — do we feel really happy? And to start those studies about 40 years ago, I began to look at creative people —first artists and scientists, and so forth — trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them didn’t expect either fame or fortune,but which made their life meaningful and worth doing.

5:2 9This was one of the leading composers of American music back in the ’70s. And the interview was 40 pages long. But this little excerpt is a very good summary of what he was saying during the interview.And it describes how he feels when composing is going well. And he says by describing it as an ecstatic state.

5:55 Now, “ecstasy” in Greek meant simply to stand to the side of something. And then it became essentially an analogy for a mental state where you feel that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routines. So ecstasy is essentially a stepping into an alternative reality. And it’s interesting, if you think about it, how, when we think about the civilizations that we look up to as having been pinnacles of human achievement — whether it’s China, Greece, the Hindu civilization, or the Mayas, or Egyptians — what we know about them is really about their ecstasies, not about their everyday life. We know the temples they built, where people could come to experience a different reality. We know about the circuses, the arenas, the theaters. These are the remains of civilizations and they are the places that people went to experience life in a more concentrated, more ordered form.

7:13 Now, this man doesn’t need to go to a place like this, which is also — this place, this arena, which is builtlike a Greek amphitheatre, is a place for ecstasy also. We are participating in a reality that is differentfrom that of the everyday life that we’re used to. But this man doesn’t need to go there. He needs just a piece of paper where he can put down little marks, and as he does that, he can imagine sounds that had not existed before in that particular combination. So once he gets to that point of beginning to create, like Jennifer did in her improvisation, a new reality — that is, a moment of ecstasy — he enters that different reality. Now he says also that this is so intense an experience that it feels almost as if he didn’t exist. And that sounds like a kind of a romantic exaggeration. But actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. And in order to hear me and understand what I’m saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second. That’s why you can’t hear more than two people. You can’t understand more than two people talking to you.

8:44 Well, when you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, as this man is, he doesn’t have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels, or his problems at home. He can’t feel even that he’s hungry or tired. His body disappears, his identity disappears from his consciousness, because he doesn’t have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that he exists. So existence is temporarily suspended. And he says that his hand seems to be moving by itself. Now, I could look at my hand for two weeks, and I wouldn’t feel any awe or wonder, because I can’t compose. (Laughter)

9:54  So what it’s telling you here is that obviously this automatic, spontaneous process that he’s describing can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can’t be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field. Whether it’s mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it’s better than what was there before.Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out. And because all of these people I started interviewing — this was an interview which is over 30 years old — so many of the people described this as a spontaneous flow that I called this type of experience the “flow experience.” And it happens in different realms.

11:12 For instance, a poet describes it in this form. This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous feelingthat you get when you enter into this ecstatic state. This poet describes it as opening a door that floats in the sky — a very similar description to what Albert Einstein gave as to how he imagined the forces of relativity, when he was struggling with trying to understand how it worked. But it happens in other activities. For instance, this is another student of mine, Susan Jackson from Australia, who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world. And you see here in this description of an Olympic skater, the same essential description of the phenomenology of the inner state of the person. You don’t think; it goes automatically, if you merge yourself with the music, and so forth.

12:20 It happens also, actually, in the most recent book I wrote, called “Good Business,” where I interviewed some of the CEOs who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical, very socially responsible. You see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it. And like all of these successful and responsible CEOs say, you can’t have just one of these things be successful if you want a meaningful and successful job. Anita Roddick is another one of these CEOs we interviewed. She is the founder of Body Shop, the natural cosmetics king. It’s kind of a passion that comes from doing the best and having flow while you’re working.

13:21 This is an interesting little quote from Masaru Ibuka, who was at that time starting out Sony without any money, without a product — they didn’t have a product, they didn’t have anything, but they had an idea.And the idea he had was to establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society and work to their heart’s content. I couldn’t improve on this as a good example of how flow enters the workplace.

13:56 Now, when we do studies — we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people — from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds — who enjoy their work. And regardless of the culture, regardless of education or whatever, there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.

15:02 In our studies, we represent the everyday life of people in this simple scheme. And we can measure this very precisely, actually, because we give people electronic pagers that go off 10 times a day, and whenever they go off you say what you’re doing, how you feel, where you are, what you’re thinking about. And two things that we measure is the amount of challenge people experience at that moment and the amount of skill that they feel they have at that moment. So for each person we can establish an average, which is the center of the diagram. That would be your mean level of challenge and skill, which will be different from that of anybody else. But you have a kind of a set point there, which would be in the middle.

15:50 If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average. And you may be doing things very differently from other people, but for everyone that flow channel, that area there, will be when you are doing what you really like to do — play the piano, be with your best friend, perhaps work, if work is what provides flow for you. And then the other areas become less and less positive.

16:28 Arousal is still good because you are over-challenged there. Your skills are not quite as high as they should be, but you can move into flow fairly easily by just developing a little more skill. So, arousal is the area where most people learn from, because that’s where they’re pushed beyond their comfort zone and to enter that — going back to flow — then they develop higher skills. Control is also a good place to be,because there you feel comfortable, but not very excited. It’s not very challenging any more. And if you want to enter flow from control, you have to increase the challenges. So those two are ideal and complementary areas from which flow is easy to go into.

17:20The other combinations of challenge and skill become progressively less optimal. Relaxation is fine — you still feel OK. Boredom begins to be very aversive and apathy becomes very negative: you don’t feel that you’re doing anything, you don’t use your skills, there’s no challenge. Unfortunately, a lot of people’s experience is in apathy. The largest single contributor to that experience is watching television; the next one is being in the bathroom, sitting. Even though sometimes watching television about seven to eight percent of the time is in flow, but that’s when you choose a program you really want to watch and you get feedback from it.

18:17   So the question we are trying to address — and I’m way over time — is how to put more and more of everyday life in that flow channel. And that is the kind of challenge that we’re trying to understand. And some of you obviously know how to do that spontaneously without any advice, but unfortunately a lot of people don’t. And that’s what our mandate is, in a way, to do.

18:47Thank you.

18:48(Applause)

How Elon Musk Wants to Eliminate Your Car Insurance and Maintenance Bills

Buying a car is only the beginning of the expenditures: there’s the hundreds of dollars in insurance each month, and then thousands more in maintenance over a car’s lifetime.

Tesla wants to change that. During its earnings call Wednesday, the company revealed that it wants to offer a pay-one-price model that will include both insurance and maintenance for the entirety of the vehicle’s lifetime.

Tesla has already been testing the business model in Asia.

Currently, existing car insurance companies underwrite the policies with Tesla paying for them upfrontand then tacking the cost onto the car’s purchase price, but CEO Elon Musk made it clear Tesla would explore all options. “If we find that the insurance providers are not matching the insurance proportionate to the risk of the car, then if we need to, we will in-source it,” he said during the call, according to Elektrek. “But I think we’ll find that insurance providers do adjust the insurance cost proportionate to the risk of a Tesla.”

After the 2014 rollout of the Autopilot feature, which aids drivers during highway driving, Teslas were found to get in 40 percent fewer accidents, according to a report released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in January. That study came in response to a fatal crash in May 2016, in which a Tesla vehicle using Autopilot crashed into a tractor trailer, killing its driver. Tesla concluded that the vehicle’s system had not noticed the white, reflective trailer against the sky. Months later, it released a software update that Musk said would likely have prevented the problem.

Tesla has said that sometime this year, it plans to begin equipping all of its new vehicles with the hardware necessary to drive fully autonomously. As a half proof of concept, half publicity stunt, the company plans to have a vehicle drive from New York to Los Angeles without a driver sometimes this year.

The death in May is the only known fatality to occur while using Tesla’s autopilot feature. The company says Teslas have now driven more than 200 million miles. On average, human drivers suffer about one fatality per 90 million miles driven, according to the NHTSA.

Tesla is due to begin shipping its $35,000 Model 3, the least expensive electric vehicle to hit the market, sometime this year. The company has already received nearly 400,000 preorders. Eliminating variables by rolling insurance and maintenance into the initial cost could make that package even more attractive to customers.

Tesla has not yet revealed when it plans to make this option available in the United States, or how much it might cost. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Tesla’s announcement came during an earnings call in which the company revealed quarterly losses that were wider than Wall Street expectations. Tesla has struggled to hit production goals for its vehicles in recent months, which has worried some analysts.

The company also revealed it’s scouting locations for three new Gigafactories that it claims would help ramp up its manufacturing capacity. The company’s Nevada factory, which is still under construction, is currently mass producing batteries for its vehicles.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.inc.com/kevin-j-ryan/tesla-insurance-maintenance-cost-up-front.html.

The 5 Jobs Robots Will Take First – Shelly Palmer

Oxford University researchers have estimated that 47 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated within the next two decades. But which ones will robots take first?

First, we should define “robots” (for this article only) as technologies, such as machine learning algorithms running on purpose-built computer platforms, that have been trained to perform tasks that currently require humans to perform.

With this in mind, let’s think about what you’ll do after white-collar work. Oh, and I do have a solution for the short term that will make you the last to lose your job to a robot, but I’m saving it for the end of the article.

1 -Middle Management

If your main job function is taking a number from one box in Excel and putting it in another box in Excel and writing a narrative about how the number got from place to place, robots are knocking at your door. Any job where your “special and unique” knowledge of the industry is applied to divine a causal relationship between numbers in a matrix is going to be replaced first. Be ready.

2 -Commodity Salespeople (Ad Sales, Supplies, etc.)

Unless you sell dreams or magic or negotiate using special perks, bribes or other valuable add-ons that have nothing to do with specifications, price and availability, start thinking about your next gig. Machines can take so much cost out of any sales process (request for proposal, quotation, order and fulfillment system), it is the fiduciary responsibility of your CEO and the board to hire robots. You’re fighting gravity … get out!

3 -Report Writers, Journalists, Authors & Announcers

Writing is tough. But not report writing. Machines can be taught to read data, pattern match images or video, or analyze almost any kind of research materials and create a very readable (or announceable) writing. Text-to-speech systems are evolving so quickly and sound so realistic, I expect both play-by-play and color commentators to be put out of work relatively soon -to say nothing about the numbered days of sports or financial writers. You know that great American novel you’ve been planning to write? Start now, before the machines take a creative writing class.

4 -Accountants & Bookkeepers

Data processing probably created more jobs than it eliminated, but machine learning–based accountants and bookkeepers will be so much better than their human counterparts, you’re going to want to use the machines. Robo-accounting is in its infancy, but it’s awesome at dealing with accounts payable and receivable, inventory control, auditing and several other accounting functions that humans used to be needed to do. Big Four auditing is in for a big shake-up, very soon.

5 -Doctors

This may be one of the only guaranteed positive outcomes of robots’ taking human jobs. The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new UN DESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) report. In practice, if everyone who ever wanted to be a doctor became one, we still would not have enough doctors.

The good news is that robots make amazing doctors, diagnosticians and surgeons. According to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, IBM’s Watson is teaming up with a dozen US hospitals to offer advice on the best treatments for a range of cancer, and also helping to spot early-stage skin cancers. And ultra-precise robo-surgeons are currently used for everything from knee replacement surgery to vision correction. This trend is continuing at an incredible pace. I’m not sure how robodoc bedside manner will be, but you could program a “Be warm and fuzzy” algorithm and the robodoc would act warm and fuzzy. (Maybe I can get someone to program my human doctors with a warm and fuzzy algorithm?)

But Very Few Jobs Are Safe

During the Obama administration, a report of the president was published (it is no longer available at whitehouse.gov, but here’s the original link) that included a very dire prediction: “There is an 83% chance that workers who earn $20 an hour or less could have their jobs replaced by robots in the next five years. Those in the $40 an hour pay range face a 31% chance of having their jobs taken over by the machines.” Clearly, the robots are coming.

What to Do About It

In What Will You Do After White-Collar Work?, I propose, “First, technological progress is neither good nor bad; it just is. There’s no point in worrying about it, and there is certainly no point trying to add some narrative about the “good ol’ days.” It won’t help anyone. The good news is that we know what’s coming. All we have to do is adapt.

Adapting to this change is going to require us to understand how man-machine partnerships are going to evolve. This is tricky, but not impossible. We know that machine learning is going to be used to automate many, if not most, low-level cognitive tasks. Our goal is to use our high-level cognitive ability to anticipate what parts of our work will be fully automated and what parts of our work will be so hard for machines to do that man-machine partnership is the most practical approach.

With that strategy, we can work on adapting our skills to become better than our peers at leveraging man-machine partnerships. We’ve always been tool-users; now we will become tool-partners.”

Becoming a great man-machine partner team will not save every job, but it is a clear pathway to prolonging your current career while you figure out what your job must evolve into in order to continue to transfer the value of your personal intellectual property into wealth.

About Shelly Palmer

Named one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Voices in Technology, Shelly Palmer is CEO of The Palmer Group, a strategic advisory, technology solutions and business development practice focused at the nexus of media and marketing with a special emphasis on machine learning and data-driven decision-making. He is Fox 5 New York’s on-air tech and digital media expert, writes a weekly column for AdAge, and is a regular commentator on CNBC and CNN. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com or subscribe to our daily email http://ow.ly/WsHcb

This article originally appeared at: http://www.shellypalmer.com/2017/02/5-jobs-robots-will-take-first/?utm_source=Daily%20Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=170227.

3 Ways to Get More Done Right Now

When I need to get something done in a hurry, I use three time management tactics to maximize my available time and sharpen my focus. For instance, when I returned home last year from my active duty military deployment, I had to quickly readjust to my corporate job and get up to speed with team priorities and deadlines. Meanwhile, my side hustle as a professional music producer was calling. I had limited time to record my next project, a jazz opera about the European financial crisis, or I risked having to wait several months to find a date that worked for the musicians and studio.

In just two months I drove meaningful revenue for my corporation as well as successfully recorded 25 musicians and singers. Here is how I did it:

Go On a News Diet

On November 9th I turned off the CNN feed on my computer; blocked news websites on my laptop and mobile phone; deleted the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn apps on my phone; evaded all newsstands on my walk to work; and avoided all conversations about current events. I was on a full-fledged news diet. I had to focus intensely on my opera recording on which I was playing the bass, and I hadn’t practiced my instrument in almost a year.

I calculated that I spent at least two hours a day consuming news media. That is 16 hours per week, or 64 per month — plenty of time to practice an instrument. I used my newfound time to bloody my fingers on the double bass so that the calluses would form in time for me to be in shape for the recording; developed parts and pieces for the opera; and reviewed and improved the libretto and score. And yes, the recording turned out beautifully, and my fingers healed too.

While I believe an informed citizenry is essential to a functioning democracy, opting out of the news cycle for short durations can help you find enough time to write a book or arrange an opera. By not reading the news, you can concentrate on producing items that will make the news many years from now.

Make Your Phone Less Appealing

Even after I opted out of the news, I was still checking my phone for missed calls, emails, and text messages. In the middle of client meetings, I would sneak a peek at my phone to see whether I had received any communications. Being addicted to my phone made me less present in these meetings, which jeopardized my ability to think critically about the work we were doing.

I broke away from my mobile phone by putting it in grayscale mode (here’s how to do this for Android and iOS). When I switched my phone from color to black and white, it was like I had turned a mental switch: I wasn’t attracted to my phone anymore. It looked obsolete and less vibrant, like a remnant of an early episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Over time, I stopped compulsively checking my phone, which let me concentrate my attention on serving my clients and thinking of how to unlock additional revenue.

Delay Your Emails

By delay-sending your emails, you set the tempo on your communications and don’t get sucked into the back-and-forth of an immediate conversation. Before I went into the recording studio, I wrote a few dozen emails and spaced them out over several days, so that they would reach the recipient at the appropriate time. For example, I scheduled a weekly team report to deliver on Wednesday evening, when I was recording the background music to an opera aria.

You can control when and how often you receive emails by scheduling when you want your email to be delivered (here’s how to do this in Microsoft Outlook). Your inbox is other people’s to-do list for you; don’t let other people’s to-dos distract you at all hours. If someone really needs to reach you right away, they should be using a different method of communication.

With these three extreme time-saving tactics, you will find plenty of time to take on and finish another important project — and perhaps even earn a curtain call! Since meeting my objectives, I’ve resumed using my phone in color mode so I can more fully enjoy messaging with friends. And though I enjoyed my news diet, I’ve started to read some of the headlines again. As for delay-sending email messages, I’ve made it an evergreen practice because I’ve found it so useful to how I manage and allocate my available time.

Kabir Sehgal is the author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Coined: The Rich Life of Money And How Its History Has Shaped Us. He is a US Navy veteran, Lieutenant in the US Navy Reserve, and a recipient of the Defense Meritorious Service Medal. He was a vice president at J.P. Morgan as well as Grammy and Latin Grammy award winning producer. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

 

Boston Dynamics Crazy New Robot Can Jump Over Obstacles, Which Means There’s Nowhere Left To Hide

The robot, called Handle, can also pick up heavy loads in its “hands,” roll down stairs, jump on tables, and generally do a bunch of stuff that will make it easier to track us down and eliminate us one by one.

Handle is a research robot that stands 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4 feet vertically. It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge. Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c.

Breaking News: SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

We are excited to announce that SpaceX has been approached to fly two private citizens on a trip around the moon late next year. They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission. Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration. We expect to conduct health and fitness tests, as well as begin initial training later this year. Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow. Additional information will be released about the flight teams, contingent upon their approval and confirmation of the health and fitness test results.

Most importantly, we would like to thank NASA, without whom this would not be possible. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which provided most of the funding for Dragon 2 development, is a key enabler for this mission. In addition, this will make use of the Falcon Heavy rocket, which was developed with internal SpaceX funding. Falcon Heavy is due to launch its first test flight this summer and, once successful, will be the most powerful vehicle to reach orbit after the Saturn V moon rocket. At 5 million pounds of liftoff thrust, Falcon Heavy is two-thirds the thrust of Saturn V and more than double the thrust of the next largest launch vehicle currently flying.

Later this year, as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, we will launch our Crew Dragon (Dragon Version 2) spacecraft to the International Space Station. This first demonstration mission will be in automatic mode, without people on board. A subsequent mission with crew is expected to fly in the second quarter of 2018. SpaceX is currently contracted to perform an average of four Dragon 2 missions to the ISS per year, three carrying cargo and one carrying crew. By also flying privately crewed missions, which NASA has encouraged, long-term costs to the government decline and more flight reliability history is gained, benefiting both government and private missions.

Once operational Crew Dragon missions are underway for NASA, SpaceX will launch the private mission on a journey to circumnavigate the moon and return to Earth. Lift-off will be from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Pad 39A near Cape Canaveral -the same launch pad used by the Apollo program for its lunar missions. This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them.

Designed from the beginning to carry humans, the Dragon spacecraft already has a long flight heritage. These missions will build upon that heritage, extending it to deep space mission operations, an important milestone as we work towards our ultimate goal of transporting humans to Mars.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-crewed-dragon-spacecraft-beyond-moon-next-year.

Casey Neistat’s Academy Award Television Commercial – Representing Youtubers (the other Oscars)

Wow, super proud of Casey for representing the un-recognized Youtuber community in the Oscars this year. He partnered with Samsung for the commercial below which aired during the Oscars. The video above is the making of the commercial and the messaging behind it. Casey represents the next generation of makers and the message is simple. Do what you can’t.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-HowngZ7EA.

Babocush Bed Helps Prevent Babies Crying, Keeps Airways Open

The babocush helps prevent colic by holding your baby securely just like you do and has the extra comfort of a gentle vibration and heartbeat sound.

You can pop your baby on the babocush immediately after a feed for instant relief from wind / gas pains. The babocush holds your baby in a very natural position, allowing the airways to relax and stay open as opposed to sitting slumped over in a bouncer, rocker or car seat.

You can adjust the incline of the babocush, ensuring your baby is the correct position to prevent acid reflux. With the body, hands, feet, side of face and head in contact with the babocush, your baby will not experience startling. 

The babocush provides essential recommended tummy time. Newborn babies skulls are so soft that flattening of the head will occur if not enough tummy time is provided.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtxNDA6JLts.

Ex-Googler Adrian Aoun’s idea for the doctor’s office of the future

Forward is a new type of medical startup in San Francisco. It shows us how helpful and stress-free the doctor visit could be using A.I. and connected tools. 

Forward, a new type of futuristic doctors office which launched its first location in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district at the beginning of this year. Some in the health industry have had their doubts about a doctor’s office with propriety tools like a body scanner, stethoscope and its own in-house lab. So we asked founder and former Googler Adrian Aoun to show us around the place.

Forward has taken in money from quite a few solid venture firms like Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel as well as angel investors John Doerr, Eric Schmidt, Marc Benioff, Garrett Camp, Aaron Levie and Joe Lonsdale so one would hope they did their due diligence on this new endeavor.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1BZmFuBm2g.