Ecology Choice Board: Fill & Download for Free

A horses skull flew past us, Flames boiling from the nostrils and Eye Sockets, demanding we return his leg!!!In my youth, I was sent to a boarding school in the country, which had a magnificently huge piece of land, and included a small nature reserve, a runway, stables etc.During the summer months, we would often go camping out on the “farm” (nature reserve) on a Saturday Evening, to get away from the teachers etc.On this particular day, we had been exploring the countryside, from the “Fanny Patch” (A triangular shaped forest on a hill (we were adolescent youth, what did you expect us to call it?)), swum in the river, and taken a drink at “Kissing Rock”. (A water fall which hugged a rock, so the best way to drink water was to “kiss” the rock)During the late afternoon, sometime before setting up camp, we came across the carcass of a dead horse. Being young men, we spent a good deal of time checking it out, with one of my friends deciding the femur (I think) would make a great trophy. We then proceeded to head towards a flat piece of ground, below a steep hill.We set up camp, ate dinner and decided to sit down to some “horror stories”, each boy trying to out-scare the next. The fear factor was ramped up when a fantastic lightning storm passed overhead, with a massive thunderclap hitting the hill above us.Now the turn came for my friend to prove his manhood by telling the most frightening story. Holding the horses Femur in hand he proceeded to tell us a scary story about how the horses from the Anglo Boer War had been mistreated by their owners, and during a decisive battle, which took place on that very hill, the horses, sick from overwork, refused to carry the men into battle. The order was given and all the horses were shot, lest they aid the enemy.The horses, filled with a hatred for man, still haunted the hill.Suddenly, from above us, we noticed a light appearing. As we looked up, we saw a horses head, which stank of hell, with fire spewing from every orifice come flying past our heads, demanding that we return his femur.Needless to say, we all bolted, making it back to our dormitories in record time, with our tents still sitting out in the field.Our story became the talk of the school, with students both intrigued and scared of what lay within that hill.Cut to a few weeks later. I am at the school stables (my girlfriend was into show jumping, so…) While there, I ran into the groundskeeper responsible for the “farm”. I recounted the story to him, but was amazed when instead of showing fear, he openly laughed. He never told me why, until the week before graduation.You see, the school had plenty of horses, and as is life, they tend to sometimes die. The school policy is to leave them for the vultures, as their population had taken a decline, and it was determined to be the most ecological choice.The horses were originally discarded towards the one end of the property, where we found the carcass, but had in recent years been relocated to the top of the hill. On the night in question, the grounds keeper was searching for a foal which had been frightened by the same lighting storm of which I spoke. In his search, he happened to pass by the “Vulture restaurant” of dead horses. He discovered a small fire, which he proceeded to stomp out.Unfortunately, some of the dead grass within an old skull had caught light, and was making a terrible stink, burning rotten flesh. In an attempted to put it out, he inadvertently knocked the skull down the hill, where it bounced off an overhang and came screaming past us.He followed the skull down, to ensure the fire was out, but was baffled to find a deserted camp.Now where the head demanding its femur back came from? I can only surmise that one of us made that claim and everyone else’s imagination filled in the blanks.

The presupposition behind your question is that success comes from achieving goals. And yet we learn so much through our mistakes: the relationship between failure and success possesses a rather yin-yang nature.My experience of goal-setting is mostly in two domains: business and personal learning. In both cases, goals tend to be used to try and define success, by people who have not yet succeeded. You can see the problem, right?The elephant in the room is the question, "what is the goal of a goal?" So let's try to unpack this.Focusing on process over outcomesPerhaps the simple answer is that success requires a focus on process over outcome, since we can control processes but not their outcomes. The process of getting from A to B involves allocating our resources such as time and skill, making in-the-moment decisions, and taking action. The outcomes that result from this process are subject to many unknowns, and to success factors outside of our control.This is a popular school of thought that promotes a sort of 'letting go' of what Stephen Covey called our "circle of concern" in favour of focusing on our "circle of influence." It's based on the psychological insight that our brains tend to be full of thoughts about things that concern us (we call this "worry"), rather than being more productively focused on things that we can actually influence.David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology (GTD for short) tries to address this worry problem. To kill the constant worry machine that is your stream of thought, he suggests that you identify the very next thing that you can do that inches your project forwards. Then put a time slot in the diary. The act of diarising this next step serves to calm the mind, reducing the clutter of all those loose ends that the brain is wired not to forget. In my experience, it works as a productivity method but it still doesn't fix the problem of goal-setting.Do you really care if your goal is achievable?I've rather lost my faith in the popular SMART goal-setting criteria. I can't even bring myself to describe it to you. Don't get me wrong, it's objectively seductive as a methodology. Until, that is, you study the research that reveals 70% of change efforts in companies fail, despite the ubiquitous use of SMART goals. So are SMART goals actually dumb?The problem is that our every-day behaviour is driven largely by our brain's inner dinosaur that triggers habitual thinking and behaviour. Most SMART goals fail because the inner dinosaur is holding the reins, and running rough-shod over our best intentions and plans.In my experience, the problem with SMART goals is that they often don't survive contact with the enemy. The enemy surfaces into consciousness in the form of inner and outer conflicts over what to do with our limited time: what to prioritise, what's important, what's easier, what other people think or want, what we have the energy for and what we just don't want to do.And that's before we complicate the picture further by contemplating our subconscious cognitive biases. Or add confabulation into the mix, driven by our subconscious pursuit of core personal projects.SMART goals are one of those ideas that work in theory better than in practice. My preferred goal-setting book is by Jinny Ditzler and is called "Your Best Year Yet." It's not perfect, but it works because it links goals to values and those subconscious personal projects that really drive every-day behaviour. The author doesn't mention the psychological research on personal projects, but I'm sure she intuited its truths.In a nutshell, we have the greatest chance of success when we pursue goals that we really (at both conscious and unconscious levels) care about. It almost doesn't matter then if an ultimate goal is achievable, as long as we are making progress. The outcome will then take care of itself.Do you really believe your goal is realistic?So let's talk further about so-called stretching goals. The research is crystal clear that stretching goals lead to better performance. But when does stretching cross over into impossible territory?First let me restate a caveat. Your goals need to fit ecologically with your values and personal projects if you want to avoid unconscious self-sabotage. So assuming you 'really' want to achieve an ultimate goal, and knowing that outcomes are often subject to the influence of factors outside your control, when should you "go for it?" The key distinction worth making here is between what is possible versus what is probable.If you buy into the picture I've painted so far, then you know that emotions are as important as facts when it comes to the choices we make. So the question we have to ask ourselves is whether we want something, not just whether its likely. Your desire will likely motivate your behaviour far more than a statistical probability. Which, if you think about it, changes the probability.What’s probable versus what’s possibleThere is a subtle threshold that I think tips the balance between probability and possibility. The controlling idea in Stephen Covey's classic book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" (click for a video link to Brian Johnson’s video review) is the difference between a principle and a habit. Covey defines a principle as an idea that you hold to be true, and a habit as a principal that you put into practice every day. The threshold that you have to cross - in order to be successful - is putting your principles into action, but how do you make the mental leap?The SMART goal 'way' might have you analyse the probabilities and then make an objective decision. But when was the last time that an objective fact made you believe something was possible for YOU PERSONALLY? Thought so.If human beings only did things they thought were probable, then exploration via the scientific method would be in real trouble. Not to mention innovation or entrepreneurship. So probability is all very well for social scientists, fund managers and anyone else analysing aggregated human behaviours. But as individuals, it doesn't drive our every-day thoughts and behaviour.Cognitive psychologists have revealed in their research that our brains are very poor at taking probabilities into account. We are wired to make decisions based on our past experiences - ie what we 'know' - rather than the underlying probability of outcomes.And that makes evolutionary sense: it may be improbable that you come across a tiger on the local high street, but if you live near to a zoo you might be wise to act on the sudden onset of fear and that imagined glimpse of orange-and-black-striped movement in your peripheral vision.Coming to the point, our beliefs are what tip the balance between a probability and a possibility. We navigate the world based on our beliefs, not the probability of outcomes. We don't have perfect information, and even if we did our cognitive biases would have us act first on what we know, from our experiences and emotions.When we BELIEVE something is possible, we become committed to act upon it. Provided we care, that is. Our values are simply beliefs that are charged with emotion: beliefs that we care about, and that have deep meaning to us.So why do some people say some goals are unrealistic? They fall into two camps: those that think it improbable, and those that think it impossible. Either way, they lack belief. Are they right? Well, it's up to you to decide if what they think matters.EDIT: additional thoughts on "Towards Goals" and sustaining effort in the face of potential failure (thanks to Alex for the question!)Hi Alex, thanks for your comment and challenge! Let me get right to the point. The heart of the issue is that to set goals that can be achieved with 100% certainty, you have to operate 100% within your current level of skill and knowledge, and choose goals that are 100% in your direct control. This is limiting.We have to set our sights much lower than our potential. So the real issue is our attitude to risk, and our motivation for setting off in pursuit of a goal in the first place.When a goal is aligned to our values, it provides a sense of being in service of something we believe in. Usually such values and goals are linked to our sense of identity: who we are, and why we do what we do. When we have a clear why, it energises us. It sustains us through the struggle that you mention. It enables us to pick ourselves up from failures, mistakes, embarrassments.The notion of neat and tidy SMART goals is based on the fiction that we can predetermine a course of action that will guarantee a future outcome. But this is not how the world works, because uncertainty and risk are the nature of change.Business people know that 70% of change efforts fail, and yet they still embark on change efforts! Why? Because there is no option to stand still in life. If you don't change, your competitor will.If you think about it, the idea of failure is already "priced-in" to SMART goals. How many times have you heard that we learn from our mistakes, or Silicon Valley types that say "fail fast" or like Facebook, "move fast and break things." That breakage is not achievement, it's failure.We all want to avoid failure, because failing is painful, stressful and difficult. But it's almost a law of nature that pain and struggle are an inevitable part of the path to progress. Where it gets interesting, is that pain and struggle are all in the mind!If we think of an athlete embarking on a career as a freediver (my brother is world number five freediver Mike Board), then he or she will likely look at those succeeding at this time for clues about how to go about it. But performances are improving all the time. The medical science is a new field, and there are many unknowns about the effects of extreme pressure on the body. Who knows if current training methods are optimal? Nobody. Who knows what is the maximum depth that a human can dive on one breath? Nobody, because the records keep getting broken.The goals that give us a sense of achievement, are not the easy ones. The reality is that stretching, exploratory, difficult goals are not achieved by imagining a future and setting a course to achieve it. Any success story - if told honestly, rather than with the benefit of hindsight and in a desire to sell books and impress others - is full of failures, wrong turns, trial and error, and a combination of good judgment and luck/opportunity. You can't take chance out of life: change is simply not certain or predictable.So my notion of a Towards Goal is really a metaphor, not a well-defined formula. Because any formula for change by definition is not. By which I mean, a change is unkown at the outset and by definition is unknowable. At best, all we can hope for is a way to get started with learning and finding the path.A favourite thought leader of mine is Joseph Jaworski. As he puts it, "we have to beat the path as we walk it." This is the essence of a Towards Goal.The idea of a Towards Goal is that it is a goal that you can't define a certain path to. It recognises the truth that some things are not in our control. The nature of "beating the path" is that you have to be on it in the first place, and create the path through the jungle as you journey towards your destination.My personal metaphor for Towards Goals comes from sailing. In sailing, you set off "towards" a destination without committing how you get there, or even when. The further the destination, the more variables there are like wind, tide, weather, boat speed, crew energy, gear failures, human error and so on.When you plan a sailboat trip, it's called a passage plan. Any skipper that sets out to sea has to know and account for all the risks of the journey, and this is what the passage plan is for. If you are setting off in a tight weather window before a storm comes through, you need to know what to do if the storm arrives early. So you plan alternative ports of call. And no sailing passage plan goes to plan.The reality of being a skipper, is that you have to read the situation and make decisions as you go. If you rigidly follow the passage plan in order to get to your destination, despite seeing that the wind has picked up and the wave height has increased, then you are going to put your crew and your boat through unnecessary hardship. If something in your rigging fails, or your engine overheats, you will find it hard to repair if you can't even stand up on deck. At sea, when a crew is tired and the conditions are rough, people make mistakes. This is how distress situations develop.So you learn to read the conditions: the state of the sea, what different types of cloud formation mean, how to keep a crew well fed and their spirits up. None of these things can be planned. They are reactions to what is unfolding at that moment.This is the real nature of any journey. What you CAN plan is the NEXT STEP. The smaller the step, the more directly it will be in your control to achieve.EditReplyAlex Wood1h ago · 1 upvote from Tom Board

Well, the choice and selection of books is no doubt critical while preparing for various medical entrance exams. It really becomes a serious issue especially during the initial stages of our expedition and it keeps on diluting as we progress. Finally when our preparation takes a more pragmatic form, we realize that the quantity of books suppresses the quality we require and eventually we end up cramming those golden lines of ncert. That's a fact….. It may sound bitter.Many a times, students end up with huge number of books accumulated with them due to various reasons and it becomes really difficult to cover each and every one of them in a small time. It is a very common problem and it didn't spare me as well. The problem becomes a grave one especially during the twilight of our preparation journey. We feel confused as to study which part and leave which portion from a particular book and believe me, sometimes it can consume a lot of precious hours from our daily schedule while taking this decision.Hence, it is very necessary to sort out this matter. I am giving the details of the books I read and solved during the 2 years. It may prove helpful to you because I was also in a similar situation as many of u might be facing right now……here we go→PHYSICS :HC Verma- I solved it completely including each example and those brain teasing small problems given at the beginning without any solution.D. Mukherjee - solved mechanics, optics and electromagnetism mainly. Not good for modern physics,shm and waves.Aakash /allen modules - they are a must to know the latest trends. Solve them completelyNCERT - depends on u. Not necessary for neet but helpful for aiims. I solved it almost completely. Do solve class 12 at least because it will pay u in ur boards as well.CHEMISTRY -NCERT - it is a must. Never ever try to neglect it. Inorganic and organic part very important from both neet and aiims point of view.Aakash /allen modules - I solved them completely and suggest u the same.P. Bahadur- very lengthy and tedious. Requires patience to solve it completely which was lacking in me. Did equilibrium and thermodynamics from it. No need for neet.Shree Balaji publications - these 3 books are essential for clearing ur concepts. I solved them but not completely as most questions get repeated in aakash /allen modules. Depends on u.BIOLOGY -NCERT - no need to write anything here. Read it at least 13-15 times.Aakash /allen modules - no need to read ecology, biotechnology, biology in human welfare and diversity from these. But solve all the mcqs given at the back including A/R.Trueman - rarely opened it. I do not suggest u to waste ur time in this. We don't have to do B. Sc or M. Sc in bio right?Mtg fingertips - it is a good book but depends entirely on u. Initially I solved it but as the workload increased its value decreased.Ncert exemplar - again very important. Especially suggested for aiims aspirants.So, that's it…..I mean, u can see that I have mentioned comparatively less number of books than others and the fact is that I wasn't able to solve even these as well. The number of books is not important but what is important is the fact that how much do you understand a given topic. The rest depends on ur memory and retaining skills:-)THANKS.