Read to your child

You can start reading as early as 6 months. No need to stop.

E-reading, while better than no reading has lower retention because of physical stimuli absence and distractions.

Audiobooks while better than no reading still misses the visual cues. We have 200:1 visual to auditory nerve endings in the brain.

Closed Captions are thus helpful. An interesting idea is to watch TV with no volume and closed captions on.

TVs have some small advantages for young watchers. It can improve their vocabulary. However, after 10 years of age, there are no advantages. The main problem is what is missed while the hours are spent on TV. Hence, the research recommends not more than 10 hours of TV for kids 2 and older, and no TV for kids younger than 2. Another idea is to mandate no TV on weeknights or TV with no volume and only captions.

The Defining Decade

Some key lessons learned from the book- The Defining Decade- Why your twenties matter and how to make most of them now.

Work:

Build identity capital. Identity capital means skills, experience, and connections that establish the foundation of a strong long term career. It is not impossible but much harder to do this later. There is more long term satisfaction in building a good career in the 20s than frittering time as if the time in the 20s doesn't matter much since everything is happening later in life these days. 

Love:

Be intentional about finding a partner. Understand "The Cohabitation Effect". Don't move in with a person with whom there are no strong commitments. Living together without marriage makes sense only if both of you are somewhat committed. Otherwise, living together leads to the Cohabitation effect with a lock-in and people end up marrying these people even when their personalities are too different and later this ends in a divorce. WHAT YOU WANT is less important than WHO YOU ARE (OCEAN personality type) when it comes to finding a partner. A personality match is the number one indication of a marriage working, more than what you externally think you want in a marriage.
For eg, there are 5 personality traits- OCEAN. Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. One can be high, low or average in these 5 categories. The only deal-breaker is if someone is highly neurotic (extreme). Otherwise, most other personality differences can be bridged with hard work on the relationship.

Overall Satisfaction:

This has to do with future orientedness. People who are future-oriented with plans and goals tend to be more satisfied. Yes, being future-oriented means more sacrifices and more hard work but that tends to give more meaning to life so that when you look back at life, you tend to feel more satisfied. An example the author uses is starting a family. Having and caring for a child is not easy (and is not for everyone) but it tends to give a lot of overall satisfaction to life. Fertility peaks for women at 28 and starts declining rapidly after 35. Before 35 is the time to have a child since, after that, a lot of medical interventions are needed which have low success rates and are expensive. Despite IVF and Inuterine inseminations, the safest time to have a child is pre 35. 

Adventures in Africa

There was a Masai boy in Kenya, who wanted to be a warrior. He was guarding his family's cows one night when he heard the sounds of rainfall, out of the blue. He suddenly realized that it was not raining, rather, it was all the cows peeing at once.

A Masai boy knows when that happens, it happens only when the cows can smell or hear a lion. The lions were pretty smart. They were two of them. They figured that the wind was blowing from East to West. There was a lion on the West and one on the East. When the wind carried the aroma of the eastern lion to the cows, the cows started running towards the West, recognizing that the lion must be on the east and thus they were captured by the western lion. Game over!

Such is life in Africa.

Africa is a great continent. Even though it has gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to modernization, it is extremely blessed with natural resources.  

I love immersing in different cultures and I do a lot of research before I embark on a journey. After reading a few books and watching some documentaries, I booked the four of us tickets to Kenya, with a stopover for a night in Doha, Qatar. 

We even crossed over to Tanzania for a while and saw a single stone as a marker for border crossing!

We spotted all popular wild animals, except for Rhinoceros. You can see The Lion King!

The trip was extremely eventful and the kids loved every bit of it. The people were very warm and the safari in the Masai Mara Reserve delightful. It's a great reminder to step outside our comfort zones and explore different cultures. It binds humanity closer together and makes this world a better place to live!