One trillion stars.............

.......................................................232 million light-years away. 

Explanation: In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In sharp focus beyond is UGC 2885, a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant. Some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way's diameter of 100,000 light-years or so, it has around 1 trillion stars. That's about 10 times as many stars as the Milky Way. Part of a current investigation to understand how galaxies can grow to such enormous sizes, UGC 2885 was also part of astronomer Vera Rubin's pioneering study of the rotation of spiral galaxies. Her work was the first to convincingly demonstrate the dominating presence of dark matter in our universe.

Specific..............................

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice, or kindness in general.  Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

-John Dewey

The Intertunnel is an interesting place.  There are several places that attribute this quote to Benjamin Jowett.  Regardless, it's a good quote.

for no reason at all.....................

You want to live with a spring in your step, a smile on your face.  Why not make cheerfulness, outrageousness, playfulness a new priority for yourself?  Make feeling good your expectation.  You don't have to have a reason to feel good—you're alive; you can feel good for no reason at all!

- Anthony Robbins,  Awaken The Giant Within

On persuasion..................

A rhetorician of times past said that his trade was to make little things appear and be thought great.  That's s shoemaker who can make big shoes for a small foot.  They would have had him whipped in Sparta for professing a deceitful and lying art.  And I believe Archidamus, who was king of Sparta, did not hear without astonishment the answer of Thucydides when he asked him who was better in wrestling, Pericles or he:  "That," he said, "would be hard to establish; for when I have thrown him in wrestling, he persuades those who saw it happen that he did not fall, and he wins the prize."

-Michel De Montaigne, from his essay Of the vanity of words 

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

Grateful Dead.........................................................Casey Jones

Likability.......................

lightness about being.................

     This brings us to the main result of our inquiry.  Sartre seems mistaken about human nature.  He puts freedom before flow.  The surfer suggests that flow comes first.  Flow is a matter of attunement to what lies beyond the self, and it is through attunement that we find full freedom and contented peace.
      Angst is not our natural state but socially induced, by a cultural requirement such as the Protestant work ethic.  For Sartre, out anxious culture simple reflects our anxious selves.  Our need to be seen, loved, validated, and Instagram "liked";  our ceaseless preoccupation with self-presentation in social media postings, fashion choices, and displays of wealth, of sex appeal, of intellectual plaudits, or of taste—these are mainly public expressions of our "being-for-others" that anyway would haunt our private thoughts.  We each hope to recognize ourselves in the gaze of others but find ourselves in fraught, even hellish, conflict, always denied mutual recognition and lasting peace.  For the surfer, our natures and our social dynamics are less fixed.  Our attunement to others or to our natural environment can certainly be spoiled in a confused culture.  But it can equally be eased and drawn forth in cooperative practice.  Our driven, time-is-money work culture is a disability for living.  But we can lessen the demands of work, in a shorter workweek, and our anxieties can be reduced.  The surfer's lightness about being could be for all of us.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Balancing act...................

     The idea of balance is exactly that—an idea.  In philosophy "the golden mean" is the moderate middle between two polar extremes, a concept used to describe a place between two positions that is more desirable than one state or the other.  This is a grand idea, but not a very practical one.  Idealistic, but not realistic.  Balance doesn't exist.

     This is tough to conceive, much less believe, mainly because one of the most frequent laments is "I need more balance,"  a common mantra fro what's missing in most lives.  We hear about balance so much we automatically assume it's exactly what we should be seeking.  It's not.  Purpose, meaning, significance—these are what make a successful life.  Seek them and you will most certainly live your life out of balance, criss-crossing an invisible middle line as you pursue your priorities.  The act of living a full life by giving time to what matters is a balancing act.  Extraordinary results require focused attention and time.  Time on one thing means time away from another.  This makes balance impossible.

-Gary Keller,  The One Thing:  The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

Track awareness.................

     When I was a boy, Renias would take me to a game path, the open trail created by animals as they traveled from clearing to water.
     "Walk down it and tell me what you see," he would instruct.
     I would walk down the trail and see the tracks of a herd of impala and then the massive four-toed foot of a hippo.
     "Hippo and impala," I would report.
     "Famba uya languta futhi."  Go look again.
     The next time, I would notice under the hippo track a washed-out genet track, where a squirrel had bounded towards a tree, and where a hornbill had dust-bathed.
     "Now walk and listen," Renias would say.  Then, "Walk, listen, and smell."
     Each time, there would be more information.  It was like I was an instrument tuning myself to the information around me.  Later in my life, I would come to realize that becoming aware of such information and the feelings it evokes—the people who are important to you, the things that bring you to life, the arrival of something meaningful—is its own kind of consciousness:  track awareness.  You can easily miss this information if you don't know how to see.  Track awareness is how attuned you are to what is around you.  It is recognizing a track when it appears.  It is teaching yourself how to see what is important to you.

-Boyd Varty,  The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life

Secede.............................

Come all ye conservatives and liberals
Who want to conserve the good things and be free,
Come away from the merchants of big answers,
Whose hands are metalled with power;
From the union of anywhere and everywhere
By the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price
And the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;
From the union of work and debt, work and despair;
From the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.
From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,
secede into care for one another
and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

-Wendell Berry, being the fourth stanza of The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union

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

George Harrison.............................................................Wah Wah

Resign...........................

If you add up the time you spend where it's none of your business, or none of your concern, or that you cannot affect the outcome (news, TV reruns, and other crap) you could have been the greatest salesperson in the world or a syndicated columnist, or an author.  But no, you'd rather piss your time down the drain thinking that you're some kind of savior to mankind when in fact, it's just the opposite.  Save your own ass first. . . .
In 1972, when the twins were born, I was in a rotten marriage, I was broke, and I was studying positive attitude daily.  I first read the phrase resign your position as general manager of the universe.  I have searched back and cannot find its origin.  I wish I could.  I wish I could tell you that I created this phrase, but I can't.  What I can tell you is that I have used this philosophy as one of the building blocks of my success.  The reason I have saved it for last is because it is the least evident and the most difficult.

-Jeffrey Gitomer,  The Little Red Book Of Selling

transcendence.................

     In surfing and in life, it's true that one can't have a "too willful will," as the Zen master says.  One won't be very well attuned to things beyond oneself without paying careful attention to them, and it is difficult to pay close attention to other things if one is preoccupied with oneself.  Perhaps one need only withdraw certain "attachments" consistent with one's aim of hitting the target, such as an attachment to performing well, or to winning, or to pleasing one's parents or oneself.  But Zen seems to require more, and indeed nothing less than "withdrawing from all attachments whatsoever, by becoming utterly egoless: so that the soul, sunk within itself, stands in the plentitude of its namely origin."
     Surfing simply can't be so exactingly ego-free.  No aquatic movement is so fixed to permit falling into a fully passive state;  there's no time for not actively adapting.  If you had to find a trance state or wakeful dream sleep, and the wave's next movement was coming quickly, you'd eat it, or quickly become out of sync.  The bodily dynamism and moment by moment demands on one's attention naturally draw one's consciousness out into the waves, away from oneself.  But this ego transcendence serves the surfer's active purposes, of being adaptively attuned.  If that isn't Zen, it's a blessedly easy way of being while doing.

-Aaron James: Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

examining the wallpaper of life........

      We pass a herd of elephants feeding on the combretum veld.  "They like to feed now.  Do you know why?"  Ren turns to ask me.
      Before I can answer, he continues, "I think it's because the branches have dew on them and so they like how juicy it is.  That's what I think."
      It's a question I have never even thought to ask, and it contains an insight into a weakness of mine:  I tend to just accept what I see.  Ren always looks closer, he always asks why.  He has gift for examining the wallpaper of life.
      The art of the way of the tracker is the way he can look at something he has seen a thousand times and always see something new.

-Boyd Varty,  The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

Uneasy.............................

     As modern society reduced the role of community, it simultaneously elevated the role of authority.  The two are uneasy companions, as one goes up, the other tends to go down.

-Sebastian Junger,  Tribe:  On Homecoming and Belonging

"Intrinsic"..................

The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content:  they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.  These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money, and status.

-Sebastian Junger,  Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

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

George Harrison..........................................................What Is Life

Wanting to............................

In America, many men in the groups I have facilitated have told me that they feel like they are sleepwalking through their lives.  Going through the same routines, falling asleep into social media or the news.  They are experiencing a kind of disengagement that makes them feel older than they are.  I suspect that part of being a man is that you will of course fall asleep in your own life.  It will happen.  Knowing this seems important to me.
     The journey out of that will not begin with the call but the desire to hear the call.  The desire itself has an energy.  Part of waking yourself, it seems to me, is made by paying attention.  Most of us are looking but not seeing.  The same men who had told me about falling asleep in their lives reported amazing things when they turned their attention back on and started to tune in and listen for a path back to life.  The ancients call this essential knowledge.
     As trackers our part is to be awake.  Our part is to listen.  We want to hear the call.
     Tracking begins with wanting to track.

-Boyd Varty,  The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

On achieving financial independence....

Morgan Housel tells a story.   Two wee excerpts:

To generalize only a little: In the 1950s camping was an acceptable vacation. Hand-me-downs were acceptable clothes. A 983 square foot house was an acceptable size. Kids sharing a room was an acceptable arrangement. A tire swing was acceptable entertainment. Few of those things are acceptable baselines for most households today. The average new home now has more bathrooms than occupants.
-------
Everything has a price, and prices aren’t always clear. The price of exercise isn’t just the workout; it’s avoiding the post-workout appetite. Same in finance. The price of building wealth isn’t just the trouble of earning money; it’s avoiding the post-earnings urge to spend what you’ve accumulated.

Given that it's only January 26th......

..............this likely will not end well:

The Focusing Question............

You know about habits.  They can be hard to break—and hard to create.  But we are unknowingly acquiring new ones all the time.  When we start and continue a way of thinking or a way of action over a long enough period, we've created a new habit.  The choice we face is whether or not we want to form habits that get us what we want from life.  If we do, the the Focusing Question is the most powerful success habit we can have.  
     For me, the Focusing Question is a way of life.  I use it to find my most leveraged priority, make the most out of my time, and get the biggest bang for my buck.  Whenever the outcome absolutely matters, I ask it.  I ask it when I wake up and start my day.  I ask it when I get to work, and again when I get home.  What's the ONE thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

-Gary Keller, The One Thing:  The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

Beer me.........................

Checking in with a polymath............

The American Interest talks with Tyler Cowen.   Some excerpts:

And then you look around and you ask, “Well, which are the societies that deliver sustained economic growth the best?” And it turns out they are, for the most part, liberal capitalist democracies. So I think one should be pragmatic. But it’s clear to me what the better winning systems are and I’m all for them.
-----
And I feel I’ve always been consistent on this point, but people have swung around wildly—first for unions, then against them, now for them again, and they’re just not looking at the facts. I would just say, “Look at the research, there are some benefits, but don’t go crazy telling yourself this is going to be the next difference-maker.”
-----
I think addiction is an underrated issue. It’s stressed in Homer’s Odyssey and in Plato, it’s one of the classic problems of public order—yet we’ve been treating it like some little tiny annoyance, when in fact it’s a central problem for the liberal order.
-----

of people who decide voluntarily not to be that ambitious. And they will stay somewhere between middle and lower-middle class, and actually do fine and often be quite happy. They just won’t climb the ladders of success. There are different ways one can evaluate that normatively, but to call it an underclass, I think, is misleading.  Ambition is distributed in a funny way and not everyone is going to have it. And the people who don’t have it… There’s not some future where they’re paid like $300,000 a year, but even so, they’ll do fine. They’ll have a higher per capita income than, say, Belgium today. Is Belgium just a big underclass? I wouldn’t say that.
-----
. . . it seems to me that discussions about what is behind the rise of Trump are some of the worst areas for truthful, accurate commentary in the whole world right now. I would hardly believe any of it. I want to see serious work with data put up against alternative hypotheses. You should just dismiss most of what you read on that topic. It’s probably junk.

a tongue set free from fashionable lies....

Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man. I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose
is a language that can repay just thanks
and honor for those gifts, a tongue
set free from fashionable lies.

Neither this world nor any of its places
is an "environment." And a house
for sale is not a "home." Economics
is not "science," nor "information" knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool
in a public office is not a "leader."
A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost
of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,
returns in the night to say again:
"Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore."

The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this "progress."
So is the cowardice that calls it "inevitable."

I think the issues of "identity" mostly
are poppycock. We are what we have done,
which includes our promises, includes
our hopes, but promises first. I know
a "fetus" is a human child.
I loved my children from the time
they were conceived, having loved
their mother, who loved them
from the time they were conceived
and before. Who are we to say
the world did not begin in love?

-Wendell Berry, being the first three stanzas from Some Further Words

Fun with science and statistics............

No one can ever be wrong using statistics. Pick a common food and studies can show it helps and harms you.

enlargeable graph and back story is here.

via

the lion's roar........................

     Then, a beat of deep stillness followed by a lion roaring back.
     The sound of the lion's roar is the threshold telling me I have stepped from one world to another.  After so many nights abroad filled with artificial light and the hum of appliances, there is no truer sound of being home.  The timbre of the call, the way it rolls through the cold night air to find me.  Its powerful vibrations shudder the door on its hinges.  My heart instinctively skips with excitement.
     The renowned writer of the African wilderness Laurens van der Post said of the lion's roar that "it is to silence what the shooting star is to the night sky."

-Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

Life its ownself.............................

     Given the paths I had walked so far, I was obviously drawn by the notion that a change in people could change the world.  Yet something about the whole business of life coaching never quite sat well with with me.  Coming from the South African bushveld, I felt pretty certain  life did not need a coach.  The unbroken stream of life that animates all things is supremely intelligent, and nothing in the wild needs a coach to help it discover what it truly is.  If we had lost our way in the modern world—our sense of value, direction, and belonging—it was because we had lost contact with something more instinctual, more innate.  All of this shuddered on its mooring in my own subconscious as the roar cut the night.

-Boyd Varty,  The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life

Couldn't resist........................

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

Brotherhood Of Man............................................United We Stand

A downside to printing presses..............

The modern world will always be in crisis because its wealth and freedom have created a crisis industry. In the agricultural era, society could afford to support just a few intellectuals, usually beholden to royal patrons who didn’t welcome criticism of their policies. . . But after the Industrial Revolution. . . a new class of secular doomsayers emerged armed with charts, theories, and printing presses. 

-as cut and pasted from here

Power.............................

Our culture is the result of a trillion tiny acts, taken by billions of people, every day. Each of them can seem insignificant, but all of them add up, one way or the other, to the change we each live through.

-Seth Godin, as culled from here

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

James Taylor.............................................................Fire and Rain

More than a pawn....................

     Philosophy is simply asking us to pay careful attention and to strive to be more than a pawn.  As Viktor Frankl puts it in The Will to Meaning, "Man is pushed by drives but pulled by values."  These values and inner awareness prevent us from being puppets.  Sure, paying attention requires work and awareness, but isn't that better than being jerked about on a string.

-Ryan Holiday, from The Daily Stoic

a lovely phrase.....................

     So, wars:  what does it mean to win, what does it mean to lose?  And the wars, of course, against yourself.  I certainly am always at war one way or another with myself, and some of them are wars I must fight to try to slay the demons, to kill the dragon, to lay the ghost to rest.  But there are other wars you fight with yourself that are really not worth fighting at all.  The war to make yourself be more, do more than you have it in you really to do or to be.  I think of that wonderful line from one of the poems of my beloved Gerard Manley Hopkins where he says, "My own heart let me have more pity on."  My own heart let me more have pity on.  That's a lovely phrase.  Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much.  Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you're driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn't have to think about doing.  So. think back at the end of the day to the wars you're involved in.  How are they going?

-Frederick Buechner,  The Remarkable Ordinary

protecting the principles and ideals.........

When I turned eighteen I received my selective service card in the mail, in case the United States need to draft me, and I declared that I wasn't going to sign it.  The Vietnam War had just ended and every adult I knew had been against it.  I had no problem, personally, with fighting a war;  I just didn't trust my government to send me to one that was completely necessary.
     My father's reaction surprised me.  Vietnam had made him vehemently antiwar, so I expected him to applaud my decision, but instead he told me that American soldiers had saved the world from fascism during World War II and that thousands of young Americans were buried in his homeland of France.  "You don't own your country nothing," I remember him telling me.  "You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life."
     The way my father put it completely turned the issue around for me:  suddenly the draft card wasn't so much an obligation as a chance to be part of something bigger than myself.  And he'd made it clear that if the United States embarked on a war that I felt was wrong, I could always refuse to go; in his opinion, protesting an immoral war was just as honorable as fighting a moral one.  Either way, he made it clear that my country needed help protecting the principles and ideals that I'd benefited from my entire life.

-Sebastian Junger,  Tribe:  On Homecoming and Belonging

Compelled.............................

Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid. 

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., from his 1963 Letter From Birmingham Jail

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

It's five-fifteen in the morning, and my father is waiting outside my door.  As I open it, I'm struck by his size.  In my late twenties, I'm now bigger than Dad, but I don't feel it.  In my mind, I still come up only to his shoulder.  He has the weathered quality of a lifelong outdoorsman, his skin like tanned leather—a bit worn, but hardened by the elements.

-Boyd Varty,  Cathedral Of The Wild:  An African Journey Home

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

The Jackson 5..........................................................I'll Be There

Value first..........................

My sales philosophy is different.  It's called "value first."  Simply put, I put value in the hands of my potential customers before I ever ask them the buy anything.

-Jeffrey Gitomer,  Little Red Book of Selling

the grace needed...................

Value is, at bottom, simple.  The balance of values is complex, and how to trade them, to choose the worthiest course, is the problem of how to live.  Life has its absurdities, which we might expect and find humor in.  As for the meaning of life itself, in human history, we have yet to formulate an answer.  But we have found good enough reasons to potentially find meaning in our own situation, enough so as to find personal peace.  We needn't resign from life or withdraw, but can instead ready ourselves for being ever more attuned, in faithful practice.  For the basic joy in the surfer's kind of relational connection, even in an ordinary surf, is a real basis for peace in the sublime mix of the beautiful and the grotesque, of the fortunate and the unfortunate, of the just and the unjust.   One can relax the perfectionist scruples, ease up on the angst, and be less anxious.  One can get stoked and simple engage in worthy activities that give one the grace needed to call the present good enough within a life that's being well lived.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning

Writing..........................

     Kenyatta and I had been together for nine years, and during that time I had never been able to consistently contribute a significant income.  I was a writer and felt myself part of the tradition stretching back to a time when reading and writing were, for black people, the marks of rebellion.  I believed, somewhat absurdly, that they still were.  And so I derived great meaning from the work of writing.  But I could not pay the rent with "great meaning."  I could not buy groceries with "great meaning." With "great meaning" I overdrew accounts.  With "great meaning" I burned through credit cards and summoned the IRS.  Wild and unlikely schemes often appeared before me.  Maybe I should go to culinary school.  Maybe I should be a bartender.  I'd considered driving a cab.  Kenyatta had a more linear solution:  "I think you should spend more time writing."

-Ta-Nehisi Coates:  We Were Eight Years In Power:  An American Tragedy

but it just might give them a better chance at having a life filled with grace and joy...

But the world looks different from the perspective of middle age. In her last 19 months of life, Ruthie showed me that I now had important work to do back home. Hers was a work of stewardship—of taking care of the land, the family, and the people in the community. By loving them all faithfully and tending them with steadfast care, Ruthie accomplished something countercultural, even revolutionary in our restless age.

-Rod Dreher, from this incredible essay on life its ownself

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

Creedence Clearwater Revival.....................Who'll Stop The Rain

Let's dance............................

. . . the numerical, chronological age has no power within itself.  It is our belief about it, how we hold it in mind, and how we genuflect to all the belief systems that go with it and that we have bought into throughout the years that have power.  How is it that some people are dancing and performing at age eighty, and other people at age fifty-nine are ready for the grave?

-David R. Hawkins,  Healing and Recovery

Yep........................

"The world defies our attempts to confine it with neat definitions."

-Tim Harford, from this post

A crimble wish......................

..............................the actual return of Sippican Cottage.

Fifty years ago

The Five Stairsteps................................................O-O-H Child

Housel on risk.................

Risk gets ugly when you think it requires a specific forecast before you start preparing for it. It’s better to have expectations that risk will arrive but you don’t know when or where than to rely exclusively on forecasts – almost all of which are either nonsense or about things that are well known.

Two things happen when you’re caught off guard. One is that you’re vulnerable, with no protection against what you hadn’t considered. The other is that surprise shakes your beliefs in a way that leaves you paranoid and pessimistic.

-Morgan Housel, as extracted from here

On comparing things.................

     People who have been trained in decision-making understand that you can't evaluate things in isolation. . . . If you have a strong opinion about a proposed plan but you have not compared it to the next best alternative, you are not part of a rational conversation.

-Scott Adams, Loserthink:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

About that 80/20 thing.................

     When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal.  We become active and busy, but this doesn't actually move us any closer to success.  Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business. . . . In other words, in the world of success, things aren't equal.  A small amount of causes creates most of the results.  Just the right input creates most of the output.  Selected effort creates almost all of the rewards.  Pareto points us in a very clear direction:  the majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do.  Extraordinary results are disproportionately created by fewer actions than most realize.

-Gary Keller, The One Thing:  The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

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

Rare Earth...............................................................Get Ready

Do yourself a favor.............

 "Put down your cell phones, put everything away, and feel your blood pulsing in you, feel your creative impulse, feel your own spirit, your heart, your mind. Feel the joy of being alive and free."

-Patti Smith, as lifted from the essential blog where cool is the only rule

On habits..................

Every single qualification for success is acquired through habit. Men form habits and habits form futures. If you do not deliberately form good habits, then unconsciously you will form bad ones. You are the kind of man you are because you have formed the habit of being that kind of man, and the only way you can change is through habit. 

-Albert E. N. Gray, from his speech, The Common Denominator of Success

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

Guess Who...........................................................No Sugar Tonight

On letting go..................

     God is life.  God is life in action.  The best way to say, "I love you, God," is to live your life doing your best.  The best way to say, "Thank you, god," is by letting go of the past and living in the present moment, right here and now.  Whatever life takes away from you, let it go.  When you surrender and let go of the past, you allow yourself to be fully alive in the moment.  Letting go of the past means you can enjoy the dream that is happening right now.

-Don Miguel Ruiz,  The Four Agreements:  A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

Execute......................

I am consistently amazed and disappointed at the small number of people willing to execute the simple daily self-disciplines needed to reach higher levels of success.  They know it will bring them the success they dream about, yet they fail to execute. . . .
The victory we call success goes to the best prepared, self-believing, right associated, self taught, responsible person, who sees the opportunity and is willing to take a risk to seize it - sometimes a big risk.

-Jeffrey Gitomer, from his Little Red Book of Selling

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

Simon & Garfunkel..................Bridge Over Troubled Water

The more things change.................

Many people seem to be wondering what will become of the human soul in another world.  I am wondering what has become of the human mind in this world.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, from his 1928 essay, The Rout of Reason

A bias for action....................

     Favoring action over inaction, even in the face of uncertainty, is generally a good approach to life.  The world rewards energy, and it even rewards failure by teaching you valuable lessons and expanding your network of contacts.

-Scott Adams,  Loserthink:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

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

The Marmalade..................................Reflections Of My Life



Released in November, 1969, this tune was a Top 10 hit for 1970

About the mind.........................

      Just as it is the nature of fire to burn, it is the nature of the mind to think and wander all the time.  The mind is comprised  of thoughts and doubts.  It constantly casts up dreams and fantasies, creating its own world and then destroying it.  It builds thought castles in the sky and then gets entangled in its own creation.  In this way, it creates its own suffering and undergoes the consequences.  Some modern psychologists believe that the mind can be satisfied if you let it run free, if you let it have whatever it wants.  But this is not the case.  The mind can never be satisfied in this way;  it will always create a mountain of desires.

-Swami Muktananda,  Mystery of the Mind

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

Eddie Holman......................Hey There Lonely Girl



Released in December of 1969, this tune peaked as a Billboard #2 in 1970

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

The Jaggerz.........................................................The Rapper

On the virtue of being not stupid..........

Because we are so wrong, so often, and because avoiding error provides more benefit than being right does, when we have the choice between being right and being kind, we should choose kind. Every. Single. Time.

-Robert P. Seawright (a long time Cleveland Browns fan) as he ends this essay

On major vs. minor......................

"If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. . . . A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative;  the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals."

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, as culled from his essay On Lying In Bed

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

The Blues Image..........................................Ride Captain Ride

As compared to what......................?

     "People who have been trained in decision-making understand that you can't evaluate things in isolation. . . . If you have a strong opinion about a proposed plan but you have not compared it to the next best alternative, you are not part of a rational conversation."

-Scott Adams, Loserthink:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

All things in moderation................

     The archer who overshoots the target misses as much as the one who does not reach it.  Any my eyes trouble me as much when I raise them suddenly to a strong light as when I drop them into the shadow.  Callicles, in Plato, says that the extremity of philosophy is harmful, and advises us not to plunge into beyond the limits of profit; that taken with moderation, it is pleasant and advantageous, but that in the end it makes a man wild and vicious, disdainful of common religions and laws, an enemy of social intercourse, an enemy of human pleasures, incapable of any political administration and of helping others of himself, fit to be slapped with impunity.  He speaks truly, for in its excess it enslaves our natural freedom and, by importunate subtlety, leads us astray from the fine and level road that nature has traced for us.

-Michel De Montaigne, from his essay, Of Moderation

In the background....................

Santana....................................................the Inner Secrets album

no anxiety.....................

"The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation . . ."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, Worship

Non-prediction predictions............

All ten of these will likely be true over the course of 2020.  A sample or three:

2. Something will happen that doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s sure to be something that catches investors off-guard in 2020. Something is bound to defy expectations whether it involves geopolitics, irrational market movements, corporate takeovers, huge gainers, huge losers, or any number of crazy news, events, or performance moves. I’ve learned I’ll almost always be surprised by markets to some degree. So the trick is to not be surprised that you’re surprised because these things can be completely random at times.

4. There will be other people getting richer than you. Fear and greed often influence investors into making mistakes with their money. But envy is probably a more destructive force. Seeing your peers, friends, or even perfect strangers making money faster than you can cause some strange emotions and reactions. This is true in down markets as well. Someone is bound to put on the right hedge or trade at an opportune time. When that happens you will always regret not doing the same

10. Everything will look obvious after the fact. The fact that stocks have rocketed higher and interest rates fell like a rock in 2019 feels pretty obvious in hindsight. Who couldn’t have seen this coming what with all the central bank easing? Hindsight makes the past look more explainable than it actually was while uncertainty seems to always be at an all-time high about what’s going to happen in the future. But that’s always been the case and will always be the case. No one can predict the future but we can all craft beautiful narratives about the past. Whatever 2020 has in store for us, it will only be clear with the benefit of hindsight.

What if............................

A small, inconsequential experiment. But I wonder: If instead of giving speeches, making promises, or berating opponents during their town hall meetings and political rallies, what if our politicians asked the question: “What are your hopes for America for 2020?”

And then listened to the answers.

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Possibilities for greatness.............

-     Don't be in the business of playing it safe.  Be in the business of creating possibilities for greatness.

-     If you walk down the halls constantly telling people "the sky is falling," a sense of doom and gloom will, over time, permeate the company.  You can't communicate pessimism to the people around you.  It's ruinous to morale.  No one wants to follow a pessimist.

-     Optimism emerges from faith in yourself and in the people who work for you.  It's not about saying things are good when they're not, and it's not about conveying some blind faith that 'things will work out."  It's about believing in your and others' abilities.

-Robert Iger, as parceled out from his list of 45 Lessons To Lead By, found at the conclusion of The Ride of a Lifetime:  Lessons Learned From 15 Years As CEO of  The Walt Disney Company

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

George Harrison...............................................My Sweet Lord

As resolutions go........................

             via

In the background...................

Stan Getz's album.....................................More Getz For Lovers
(with Dizzy Gillespie adding his horn on this track)

Mindset.........................

-     I talk a lot about "the relentless pursuit of perfection."  In practice, this can mean a lot of thing, and it's hard to define.  It's a mindset, more than a specific set of rules.  It's not about perfectionism at all costs.  It's about creating an environment in which people refuse to accept mediocrity.  It's about pushing back against the urge to say that "good enough" is good enough.

-     Take responsibility when you screw up.  In work, in life, you'll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you own up to your mistakes.  It's impossible to avoid them; but it is possible to acknowledge them, learn from them, and set an example that it's okay to get things wrong sometimes.

-     Ask the questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don't understand, and do the work to learn what you need to learn as quickly as possible.

-Robert Iger, as culled from his list of 45 Lessons To Lead By, found at the conclusion of The Ride of a Lifetime:  Lessons Learned From 15 Years As CEO of  The Walt Disney Company

Good systems........................

Leaders understand that a good system involves doing something on a regular basis to improve your odds of good outcomes, even if you don't know exactly what the outcome will be. . . .   
     When it comes to your personal life, business life, and political opinions, it makes sense to favor systems over goals whenever that is practical.  A goal gives you one way to win, whereas a system can surface lots of winning paths, some of which you never could have imagined.

-Scott Adams,  Loserthink:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

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

The Temptations.............................................Ball of Confusion

Tom Paine was an interesting man.........

Whether that state that is proudly, perhaps erroneously, called civilization, has most promoted, or most injured, the general happiness of man, is a question that may be strongly contested. –On one side, the spectator is dazzled by splendid appearances; on the other he is shocked by extremes of wretchedness; both of which he has erected. The most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized. 

-Thomas Paine, from his essay, AGRARIAN JUSTICE:  OPPOSED TO AGRARIAN LAW,AND TO AGRARIAN MONOPOLY BEINGA Plan for meliorating the Condition of Man, in which he offers a plan to make God's creation happy.  The view here from the cheap seats is that the "general happiness of man" is beyond the capacity of the State.  Your results may vary.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T....................

     "A little respect goes a long way, and the absence of it is often very costly.  Over the next few years, as we made the major acquisitions that redefined and revitalized the company, this simple. seemingly trite idea was as important as all of the data-crunching in the world.  If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real.

-Robert Iger,  The Ride Of A Lifetime:  Lessons Learned From 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company

In the background.................

Top of the Stax:  Twenty Greatest Hits

The magic.............................

....................that is Jet Boy (with a nod to Skip for his worries).

Discipleship....................

     Effective management is putting first things first.  While leadership decides what "first things" are, it is management that puts them first, day-by-day, moment-by-moment.  Management is discipline, carrying it out.
     Discipline derives from disciple—disciple to a philosophy, disciple to a set of principles, disciple to a set of values, disciple to an overriding purpose, to a superordinate goal or a person who represents that goal.
     In other words, if you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will.  You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source.  And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values.

-Stephen R. Covey, as taken from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

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

Dave Mason.......................................Look At You Look At Me
Mason starts a guitar solo at about the 4:55 mark.  One of the finest ever recorded.  Just saying.

which matter........................

"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least."

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A common denominator................

The common denominator of success --- the secret of success of every man who has ever been successful --- lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don't like to do.

- Albert E.N. Gray, as excerpted from this address

the absurd temerity...........

"It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend."

-Michel de Montaigne, from his essay It Is Folly . . .

On the proper harnessing of ambition..........

You can't let ambition get too far ahead of opportunity.  I've seen a lot people who had their sights set on a particular job or project, but the opportunity to actually get that thing was so slim.  Their focus on the small thing in the distance became a problem.  They grew impatient with where they were.  They didn't tend enough to the responsibilities they did have, because they were longing so much for something else, and so their ambition became counterproductive.  It's important to know how to find the balance—do the job you have well; be patient; look for opportunities to pitch in and expand and grow;  and make yourself one of the people, through attitude and energy and focus, that your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises.  Conversely, if you're a boss, these are the people to nurture—not the ones who are clamoring for promotions and complaining about not being utilized enough but the ones who are proving themselves to be indispensable day in and day out.

-Robert Iger,  as culled from The Ride of a Lifetime:  Lessons Learned From 15 Years As CEO of the Walt Disney Company

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

Diana Ross................................Ain't No Mountain High Enough

Verse........................

37.  Asteyapratisthayam sarvaratnopasthanam

    To one established in non-stealing, all wealth comes

     If we want to become the world's richest people, this is a very simple way.  There's no need to get into the stock market or even to go to work.  Just practice non-stealing.  All of us are thieves.  Knowingly and unknowingly, we steal things from nature.  With every minute, with each breath, we pick nature's pocket.  Whose air do we breathe?  It is nature's.  But that doesn't mean we should stop breathing and die.  Instead, we should receive each breath with reverence and use it to serve others;  then we are not stealing.  If we accept it and don't give anything in return, we are thieves. . . .
     If we are completely free from stealing and greed, contented with what we have, and if we keep our minds serene, all wealth comes to us.  If we do not run after it, before long it runs after us.  If nature knows we aren't greedy, she gains confidence in us, knowing we will never hold her for ourselves.

-Sri Swami Satchidananda,  The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Book 2

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

Edwin Star......................................................................War

Some pretty good writing................

     The group containing Duffield was emanating an almost magnetic force over the room.  Strike saw it in the sneaking sidelong glances other occupants were shooting at them; in the respectful space left around them, a wider orbit than anybody else had been granted.  Duffield and his cohort's apparent unselfconsciousness was, Strike recognized, nothing but expert artifice;  they had, all of them, the hyper-alertness of the prey animal combined with the casual arrogance of predators.  In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted;  they were receiving their due.

-Robert Galbraith, as excerpted from the Cuckoo's Calling

But, but, but........................

"Recyclers in the U.S. are now awash in dirty plastic, with no outlet for their commodity. Much of that is headed for landfills."

-as culled from here

Even in little Newark, Ohio this is a real thing.  Two months ago, we were prepared to bid on a local 90,000 square foot abandoned industrial building.  On a price per square foot basis the building was ridiculously cheap.  One catch.  The previous owner, who was walking away from the building, stocked the whole place with giant bales of compacted dirty "recycled" plastic.  The buyer of the building also got the bales.  We had several quotes for hauling the dirty plastic to the landfill - there being no other use for it.  That cost changed the building from ridiculously cheap to a bit too risky for our taste.

There is no doubt that many of our fellow citizens feel virtuous when they carefully sort their trash and take their recyclables to a recycling center.   Not sure that feeling is warranted.