The process...............

 Why is improvement hard?

Part of the issue is everyone wants to improve, but nobody wants to destroy. Change often requires destruction. Or, at least, unlearning.

Let's call it gentle elimination. You may have to leave little habits, update current beliefs, eliminate comfortable patterns. When you want better outcomes, your daily norms may need to change. The process of improvement is not just about adding things you like.
Sometimes habits and patterns belong to who you were, not who you are trying to be. If you'd like something better, then a routine you are comfortable with may have to die.

-James Clear, from today's effort

Opening paragraphs................

 

      Selfmade men always do a lopsided job of it, and the sheriff had come out conspicuously short on the capacity to sympathize with anyone but himself.  No doubt ears still were burning at the Fort Peck end of the telephone connection; he'd had to tell that overgrown sap of an undersheriff he didn't give a good goddamn what the night foreman said about dangerous, get the thing fished out of the river if it meant using every last piece of equipment at the dam site.  This was what he was up against all the time, the sheriff commiserated with himself during the drive from Glascow now, toward dawn.  People never behaving on bit better than they could get away with.

-Ivan Doig, Bucking the Sun

the formula...................

 

At the Sun Valley Conference a number of years ago, Jeff Bezos told the story about asking Warren Buffett for advice on a phone call.  It went like this:

     Bezos:  "If you're the second richest guy in the world and your investment thesis is so simple, why isn't everyone just copying you?"

     Buffett:  "Because no one wants to get rich slow."

     There is no formula for getting rich in a hurry.  It's pure luck or timing.  But there is a formula for building wealth slowly.  You have to live below your means, have a healthy savings rate, regularly invest your money into risk assets and then wait.

-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward

Giving it all away...............

 

Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity.  But this means we then give away our power to that entity, be it "fate" or "society" or the government or the corporation or our boss.  It is for this reason that Erich Fromm so aptly titled his study of Nazism and authoritarianism Escape from Freedom.  In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom.

-M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Sixty years ago...................

 

      The Beatles....................We Can Work It Out

       

To counter.......................

 

.......................................perfectionism:

1. Mistakes don’t make you a failure. They make you a learner.

2. Achievements are not a symbol of your worth. They’re a snapshot of your performance.

3. Beating yourself up doesn’t make you stronger; it leaves you bruised. Don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to a good friend.

4. It’s impossible to please everyone. Decide whose opinion matters to you—and whose doesn’t.

5. Character is not revealed by how many setbacks you face. It’s forged by how you face them.

6. People gauge your competence mostly by your hits, not your misses.

7. The objective is not to be the best; it’s to get better. The person you’re competing with is your past self, and the bar you’re setting is for your future self.

8. Our biggest regrets aren’t actions—they’re inactions. Don’t set yourself up to wish you’d taken more chances.

9. Healthy goals include two targets: an aspirational result and an acceptable outcome. If you fall anywhere between them, you haven’t failed.

10. Success is not a straight line. It’s a squiggly line.

The mystification (and pride)..................

 

.....................................of being out of the loop.

atmosphere...................

 

Claude Monet      +/-1863    Sunset over the Sea 

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the air and the light which vary continually. For me, it is only the, surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.

-Claude Monet

On being careful about...................

 

..................................what you wish for.

Eric Barker........................

 

.............................weighs in on self-sabotage:

Žižek says we aren’t unified. We’re not transparent to ourselves. We say one thing, do another, and then rationalize like crazy. We don’t just fail to know ourselves. We actively collaborate in not knowing ourselves. This isn’t the kind of thing you want to hear from a man who looks like he resides in a storm drain.
But we don’t need more false reassurance. We need a brilliant lunatic to point at the machinery of our lives and say: “You see, that part there? (sniffs, rubs nose) This thing you think is normal? That’s where the madness lives.”
And this is why Slavoj Žižek is our most helpful ally against self-sabotage.