Fifty years ago.............................

Marshall Tucker Band..........Where We All Belong album

Coaching.........................

 

     Coaching is the opposite of what we usually do when we need help.  In trying times, our first instinct is to pick up the phone and ask for advice.  We're better off pausing to reflect on the advice we've provided in the past or calling someone in a similar situation and offering them some suggestions.  We should listen to the advice we give to others—it's usually the advice we need to take for ourselves.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

ignored.........................

So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

-Eric Arthur Blair, channeling George Orwell

more fun here

searching.......................

 We tend to teach, and study, "Great Men."  All over the world, people are in search of figures who can lead them past crises and catastrophes.  Yet all over the world, people feel repeatedly let down by their leaders.  Perhaps that is why leaders from a supposedly glorious past continue to loom so large in the gloomy present.

-Moshik Temkin, Warriors, Rebels & Saints: The Art of Leadership from Machiavelli to Malcolm X

Perhaps the most

..............................significant outcome of our recent experience with Covid-19, was the ruination of any expectation of competency or integrity from our "elites."  These days it pays to question the "data:"

 We’ve been hearing that the rise in inflation has been defeated and how it’s falling like a rock. Data seems to be heading in a positive direction. But this week some very important early indicators have flipped into the other direction.

-excerpted from this Spilled Coffee post

The very picture of..............................

 

.......................................public service.

Optimistic infection..................

 Much of modern society, including our endlessly fragmented media, protects us from having to truly engage with those who don’t share our politics.

That’s why the development of a political rift between the genders is so promising. What’s the most compelling common project of all? Sex - sex and love. Short of a mass conversion to homosexuality, many or most of these people are still going to hook up together and form partnerships and families, caveats about declining birth rates aside. Conservative-leaning young men who only seek out conservative-leaning young women will be fishing in a small pool; liberal women will only diminish the size of their pool if they stick to men who are as liberal as they are. Both sides therefore have a powerful incentive to forge relationships with people who hold political views different to their own. They can then infect each other with their different ideas, generating new syntheses, and moving us all along.

-as culled from this Ian Leslie post

via

Fifty years ago........................

Gil Scott-Heron......................................The Revolution Will Not Be Televised album

 

Highly recommended.....................

 

thanks David

choices...........................

Now that the proposition of crossing Antarctica by myself had taken hold, my choices were to see it through or to live with regret for the rest of my life. . . .

I wasn't sure what worried me more; skiing 1,700 kilometers or spending two months alone.

-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica

connections................

      By being truly alone I had seen how deeply reliant I am on human ties and in ways that were unexpected.  It was not simply a matter of having company to pass the time, or backup in case of emergency.  During the expedition, I found that the absence of others had shaped my behaviour, my thoughts, my actions, my reasoning.  I had seen for myself that it is human relationships that bind us to places, time, and purpose, human relationships that make us who we are as individuals and that our contentment, and our happiness, depend on those precious human connections.

-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica

alone-ness..................

 Now that my alone-ness was coming to an end, I could enjoy the solitude and the isolation.  I had Antarctica to myself and I liked it that way.  I let my mind explore the prospect of seeing other people, of being back at Union Glacier surrounded by company, and I became aware of my instincts shying away from the idea.

     I had to laugh out loud at my own caprice, shaking my head in exasperation.  I had struggled with alone-ness for all this time and now here I was sentimentalising it.

-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica

On perseverance.....................

 It was clear to me that the success of my expedition had not depended on physical strength or dramatic acts of bravery but on the fact that at least some progress—however small—had been made every single day. It had not been about glorious heroism but the humblest of qualities, a quality that perhaps we all too often fail to appreciate for its worth - that of perseverance.  Critical to skiing across Antarctica had been the distinctly unimpressive and yet, for me, incredibly demanding challenge of finding the will to get out of the tent each and every morning.  If I had failed in that most fundamental of tasks, then my expedition would have been over. . . .

     Keep getting out of the tent.

-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica

laughter.............................

 "Laughter," he says, "and a lot of it, is the right response to the things which drive us to tears."

-William B. Irvine, channeling Cato in A Guide to the Good Life

deny..........................

 We must deny that there is any appropriate time for an inappropriate action.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 8

While checking in with.............

...........................friend Greg at Sippican Cottage, this beauty was found:

Everyone in Hollywood takes themselves very, very seriously at this point, but I think the movies as a true art form is in the rear-view mirror. Exactly how many comic book movies can you watch? But for a while, with everyone pulling in the same direction, Hollywood produced some astonishing stuff. And there’s really no way to listen to Ned Beatty’s speech in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network and come away with anything less than astonishment. 

 Some people nail it. And nail it to the church door, too. 

 Which led me to find Beatty's monologue. Enjoy.

 

The script is here:

Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Beale: But why me?
Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

The James Webb Space Telescope..........

 ....................goes spiral galaxy watching:

Checking in...................

................................with Alain de Botton:

Maturity:  The confidence to have no opinions on many things.

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

 Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.

Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting life skills anyone can have.

Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art of delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us.

Can I get an Amen..................

 via

Fifty years ago..........................

Bob Seger................................Seven (the album)

 

a loose connection...............

 They were convinced that what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all.  It is true that our government and our society determine, to a considerable extent, our external circumstances, but the Stoics understood that there is at best a loose connection between our external circumstances and how happy we are.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)

some capacity...............

Since it has pleased God to give us some capacity for reason, so that we should not be, like the animals, slavishly subjected to the common laws, but should apply ourselves to them by judgment and voluntary liberty, we must indeed yield a little to the simple authority of Nature, but not let ourselves be carried away tyrannically by her: reason alone must guide our inclinations.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 8

On not playing small........................

 Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.  We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small does not serve the world.  There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.  We are all meant to shine, as children do.  We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us.  It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.  And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

-Marianne Williamson, as transcribed from here

raison d'etre........................

 People who tell children that their school days are their best days must, I think, be very unhappy themselves and terribly frustrated.

     The world is a school. "He has put eternity into a man's mind"; and we seem to "know" that our destiny, indeed our true raison d'etre, is something bigger and finer and more splendid than what this world can offer.

-Leslie Weatherhead

On theories............................

 Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

-attributed to Karl Popper

Be careful what you wish for.......

      Those in today's intellectual left are concerned about the planet and about international migrants, but not so much about their compatriots in the working class. . . .

      More broadly, a sense of betrayal among those being left behind by progress is leading to defections from mainstream parties of both right and left.  Among the working classes and the young, there is a steady growth of far-left opposition to the established liberal order, as well as strong support for the far right.  This increasing movement away from the center and toward the fringes is not an ideal formula for a stable democratic society.

      As Tocqueville put it, we may be "sleeping on a volcano."

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

Do you not see...................

 I am told that there is no danger because there are no riots; I am told that, because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand.

Gentlemen, permit me to say that I believe you are mistaken. True, there is no actual disorder; but it has entered deeply into men's minds.  See what is preparing itself amongst the working classes, who, I grant, are at present quiet. No doubt they are not disturbed by political passions, properly so called, to the same extent that they have been; but can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have become social? Do you not see that they are gradually forming opinions and ideas that are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today? Do you not listen to what they say to themselves each day? Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly that all that is above them is incapable and unworthy of governing them; that the distribution of goods prevalent until now throughout the world is unjust; that property rests on a foundation that is not an equitable one? And do you not realize that when such opinions take root, when they spread in an almost universal manner, when they sink deeply into the masses, they are bound to bring with them sooner or later, I know not when or how, a most formidable revolution?

This, gentlemen, is my profound conviction: I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano. I am profoundly convinced of it.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, as he begins this 1848 speech

On re-considering........................

 We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.

-Charlie Munger, as cut-and-pasted from here

Fifty years ago...................

Tom Waits.........The Heart of Saturday Night album

 

On progress.................

      Making progress isn't always about moving forward.  Sometimes it's about bouncing back.  Progress is not only reflected in the peaks you reach—it's also visible in the valleys you cross.  Resilience is a form of growth.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

discovery............................

 Every person you meet knows an amazing lot about something you know virtually nothing about.  It won't be obvious, and your job is to discover what it is.

-Kevin Kelly

On the art of living.............

      According to Epictetus, the primary concern of philosophy should be the art of living:  Just as wood is the medium of the carpenter and bronze is the medium of the sculptor, your life is the medium on which you practice the art of living.  Furthermore, much as a master carpenter teaches an apprentice by showing him techniques that can be used to build things out of wood, Epictetus taught his students the art of life by showing them techniques that could be used to make something of their life.  The techniques in question were quite practical and completely applicable to students' everyday lives.  He taught them, among other things, how to respond to insults, how to deal with incompetent servants, how to deal with an angry brother, how to deal with the loss of a loved one, and how to deal with exile.  If they could master these techniques, Epictetus promised, they would experience a life that was filled with purpose and dignity, and more important, they would attain tranquility.  Furthermore, they would retain their dignity and tranquility regardless of the hardships life might subsequently inflict on them.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)

An idealist..........................

Power worried him: no one ever believed he possessed too much of the stuff.  His sympathies were with the man in the street, to whom he believed government answered.  A friend distilled his politics to two maxims: "Rulers should have little, the people much." And privilege should make way for genius and industry. Railing against "the odious hereditary distinction of families." 

-Stacy Schiff,  The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

Morgan Housel................................

 ...............................talks money:

Unspent money buys something intangible but valuable: freedom, independence, autonomy, and control over your time. Every dollar of savings buys a claim check on the future.

-more thoughts here

Marco Island.................

.4 mile from the start of the beach to the water.  Lots of sand

We managed some time away from Ohio.  Blue skies abounded.  

Windy, but comfortable compared to Ohio

We hung out on the fourth floor.  Pretty special.

 

Just more proof we were not in Ohio.

choose...................

 Such is the madness of men, he said, that they choose to be miserable when they have it in their power to be content.  The problem is that "bad men obey their lusts as servants obey their masters," and because they cannot control their desires, they can never find contentment.

-William B. Irvine, channeling Diogenes

17 thoughts...........................

 .............................about money:

16. People who act like they have it all figured out are usually full of shit. No one has it all figured out when it comes to money. Most of us are making it up as we go.

Fifty years ago.........................

Doobie Brothers/What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits

On the virtue of being boring................

 We are a nation of rules and the rules are boring. Embrace that. In times of difficulty, go with the boring option. When faced with a frightening crisis, tamp it down with ultra-boring moves. No matter what, stick with the rules.

I can’t avoid talking about Donald Trump but I’m going to make it brief. I know you don’t like him; neither do I. But let’s assume he’s only a politician. He’s not Hitler, Godzilla or the Beast of the Apocalypse—just a guy with a loud mouth and a desperate need for attention. Most Americans think of him that way.

This is not about him. It’s about you.

When you demonize those who disagree with you, you invite treatment in kind. When you refuse to engage in political argument and resort to performative moralizing, you make it clear to any neutral observer that for you there’s only one side, one opinion, one conformist crowd that can ever govern legitimately. The rest are disgusting subhumans who should never be tolerated near the levers of power. When you trample on the rules that say “all are created equal” like that, you are destroying the fabric that holds the country together. And believe me when I say this: You will reap the whirlwind.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

...........the way.

 You will complete your mission in life when you figure out what your mission in life is.  Your purpose is to discover your purpose.  This in not a paradox.  This is the way.

-Kevin Kelly

On indecisiveness...........................

      What Washington's critics did not see then, and sometimes not even now, was that being indecisive was decidedly preferable to being decisively wrong.

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles

Hmmm..................

      Deeply idealistic—a moral people, Adams held, would elect moral leaders—he believed virtue the soul of democracy.  To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune.  To elect him yourself was a disgrace.

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

A dream with teeth..................

 Things that are perfect
are dead things.

Empty things.

A silence beyond change or challenge.
An endpoint.
A blank page.

You are a wonderfully messy thing.

An impossible thing made of salt
and rainwater.
Meat and electricity.

A dream with teeth.

You're too good for perfection.

-Jerod K. Anderson, Flawless

a boost........................

 When our circumstances threaten to overpower us, instead of only looking inward, we can turn outward to mentors, teachers, coaches, role models, or peers.  The scaffolding they provide looks and feels different depending on the type of challenge we're facing, but it has the same effect: giving us a foothold or a boost.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

agnostic........................

 Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to—that is, what to value.

-Matthew B. Crawford