Saturday, May 18, 2024
dizzying.............................
Yet culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with the much more serious malady, future shock. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)
dress accordingly...............
When you open paint, even a tiny bit, it will always find its way to your clothes no matter how careful you are. Dress accordingly.
a focus.......................
. . . a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.
-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
stoked.............................
. . . curiosity is a strange drive. Unlike hunger or thirst, curiosity is stoked, not sated, when we learn more.
-Scott H. Young, Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery
Friday, May 17, 2024
Eric Baker...................
...............offers four paths to peak happiness:
But in a field of study like psychology where things are often blurry, it seems fair to say there is one necessary condition for extreme happiness…
Connecting with people you love.
Being a pessimist........................
.................goes against my nature, but if there is a World War III it is likely there will be no stock market left to invest in.
facing it.............................
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.
In the background.......................
life management..............
. . . I experimented with a new time management strategy. Every Monday, my assistant would reset the passwords on all my social media accounts, which logged me out on each device. All week I worked without distraction. On Friday, she would send me the new passwords. I had the entire weekend to enjoy what social media had to offer until Monday morning when she would do it again.
-James Clear, Atomic Habits
humanness.......................
Compassion for others and for their humanness transforms life and all relationships.
-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
Thursday, May 16, 2024
on looking at paintings...........
If people would just look at the paintings, I don't think they would have any trouble enjoying them. It's like looking at a bed of flowers, you don't tear your hair out over what it means.
the rules............................
I'm not saying if you just visualize what you want, then it will come true. Hell no. You have to plan and work and learn and fail and then learn and work and fail some more. That's just life. Those are the rules.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Live
normies vs. elites...................
The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring
stuff. That’s what normal means.
The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong—only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”
-Martin Gurri, from here
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
The language will never fail you.........
. . . but I’m convinced that one of the reasons why I read so many books, and poetry is because I want to dial in the gods of language – yes, they do exist – and not fall into a state of ennui, despair or torpor in trying to find a way to make sense of this anthropocentric world.
-Julian Summerhayes, from here
The value of..........................
....................................smarts, discipline, and compounding interest (since 1965):
Berkshire’s total returns work out to a cumulative gain of more than 4,000,000%. The S&P 500 returned more than 31,000% in the same span
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
As Commencement Addresses go..................
..................this is a pretty good one:
Whenever I speak with my students—I teach at the University of Virginia—they seem deeply pessimistic about the state of the world. We all know the reasons. Climate change is going to kill us all; late-stage capitalism is running amok; inequality is at an all-time high; racism and bigotry are rampant; gender-nonconforming and queer people are under unprecedented attack; economic anxiety has never been worse; AI is coming for our jobs; and on and on and on.
I
then pose a simple thought experiment to them: If you were given a time machine
that could take you back to any period in the last 12,000 years—since the dawn
of civilization—when would you rather live?
The secret sauce..............
When people start, they want to know the secret sauce.
After Katie Ledecky won four gold medals at the Rio Summer Olympics, that's what she was asked.
And she said, "The secret is there is no secret."
Work hard.
Take care of your body - nutrition, sleep, training, recovery, and so forth.
Pay attention to the details - the little things that will add up to make a big difference.
Show up every day - whether it's a Sunday game day, a Wednesday practice day, or a Tuesday in the off season.
Fall in love with what you do. The simplicity of it. The beauty of it. The day-to-dayness of it.
You do all of this, and on a long enough timeline, you'll get where you want to be,
-Paul Rabil, The Way of the Champion: Pain, Persistence and the Path Forward
Ah, culture........................
And all the time—such is the tragicomedy of our situation—we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity.' In a ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
-C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)
Opening paragraphs.................
In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically sound people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizen of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)
Ed. note: first read this book about fifty years ago. Young Brandon handed me a new copy of it today, thinking I might find value in it. Early returns say he was correct.
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