Sunday, February 16, 2020
About bagels..................
...................................................................and life its ownself.
We rushed to judgement, but with the benefit of hindsight, it honestly seems fine. It’s possible that people on Twitter may have used the platform for low-stakes performative outrage instead of making an effort to be reasonable about an otherwise-benign comment.
via
Saturday, February 15, 2020
Not sure........................
..................................................................whether to laugh or cry.
Thanks Chris
Respect...............................
. . . recognize a sadly persistent fact: the concepts contained in words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
-James Baldwin, from his essay The Crusade of Indignation as found in The Price Of The Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948-1985
About security......................
Most people never feel secure because they are always worried that they will either lose their job, lose the money they already have, lose their spouse, lose their health, and so on. The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way, that you are increasing the caliber of who you are and that you are valuable to your company, your friends, and your family. I don't worry about maintaining the quality of of my life, because every day I work on improving it. I constantly strive to learn and to make new and more powerful distinctions about ways to add value to other people's lives. This gives me a sense of certainty that I can always learn, that I can always expand, that I can always grow.
-Anthony Robbins, Awaken The Giant Within
Good questions..................
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
-T. S. Eliot, as culled from this poem
On the freedom to doubt................
This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.
-Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
Fifty years ago..................
The Beatles........................................................I've Got A Feeling
Monday, February 10, 2020
Cooperation.......................
. . . cooperation begins with conversation: asking intelligent and open-ended questions; listening; respecting others' opinions; and understanding people's real concerns, as well as what opportunities they're most excited about and what strengths they have to contribute.
-Dan Sullivan/Catherine Nomura: The Laws of Lifetime Growth: Always Make Your Future Bigger Than Your Past
Fifty years ago................
Led Zeppelin......................................................Immigrant Song
On leaving the door to the unknown open....
All scientific knowledge is uncertain. This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important. I believe that it is of very great value, and one that extends beyond the sciences. I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown open. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.
-Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning Of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
Amen................................
It’s so painful to watch either side try to stake out the high moral ground. They always embarrass themselves.
-via
Sunday, February 9, 2020
Fifty years ago..........................
Creedence Clearwater Revival.............Lookin' Out My Back Door
Saturday, February 8, 2020
Opening doors and minds................
Faithful readers will understand that my musical tastes evolved "fifty years ago." The expression, "no really good music has been written since the Beatles broke up" has been heard a time or two around this house. Acknowledging that's not truly true, escaping from comfortable, well-worn ruts often requires some assistance. Fortunately, Scott Blitstein is hard at work providing such assistance. If you are not following his latest effort at opening hearts and minds—well, you should.
I don't often agree with..............
...............James Carville, but he raises a good point here:
The purpose of a political party is to acquire power. All right? Without power, nothing matters.
What’s the answer?
By framing, repeating, and delivering a coherent, meaningful message that is relevant to people’s lives and having the political skill not to be sucked into every rabbit hole that somebody puts in front of you.
-as extracted from this interview detailing his concerns about the coming 2020 election
On work..............................
Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when the dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret.
-Kahlil Gibran, from his discourse on Work in The Prophet
Thankfulness......................
When we see God's grace operate in the lives of people who we feel don't deserve it, we have a choice. Either we can complain and feel sorry for ourselves, or we can be thankful that the God of such goodness is the One we love and serve. Comparison kills because it always leaves us wanting more, but thankfulness brings life.
-Zig Ziglar and Ike Reighard, The One Year Daily Insights
the mystery.......................
I have observed the power of the watermelon seed. It has the power to draw from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight.
When you can tell me how it takes this material from the ground and out of its colors an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times its weight —when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.
-attributed to William Jennings Bryan
both at the same time...............
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a contemporary of William Jennings Bryan, described this paradox. "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them better." It seems to me that the lesson in both Bryan's and Fitzgerald's comments is to simultaneously choose life while serenely knowing that the mysterious future pull is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing as our bodies age and die. Thus we are in charge and we are not in charge, both at the same time, and it is all right for these two opposites to coexist.
-Wayne Dyer, from Wisdom of the Ages
Friday, February 7, 2020
slow but spectacular.................
By contrast, the African-American poet Langston Hughes sang in 1935: "O, let America be America again—/ The land that never has been yet—/And yet must be—a land where every man is free." Free to move, to invent, to persuade, to offer a dollar, with no master in charge. The result of liberal democracy's partial, imperfect fulfillment has been a slow but in the end spectacular approach worldwide to flourishing, in which fewer and fewer people are pushed or bossed around without their voluntarily given consent or contract.
-Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce A Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World For All
on the International Brotherhood of Contraries...
I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.
I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor,
in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught
so often laughing at funerals, that was because
I knew the dead were already slipping away,
preparing a comeback, and can I help it?
And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed
my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom
had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not
be resurrected by a piece of cake. ‘Dance,’ they told me,
and I stood still, and while they stood
quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.
‘Pray,’ they said, and I laughed, covering myself
in the earth’s brightnesses, and then stole off gray
into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.
When they said, ‘I know my Redeemer liveth,’
I told them, ‘He’s dead.’ And when they told me
‘God is dead,’ I answered, ‘He goes fishing every day
in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.’
When they asked me would I like to contribute
I said no, and when they had collected
more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.
When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t,
and then went off by myself and did more
than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said
‘go and organize the International Brotherhood
of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing
everybody who was against peace?’ So be it.
Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony
thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what
I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest
way to come to the truth. It is one way.
-Wendell Berry, The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Verse.............................
1 How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts! *
My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.
2 The sparrow has found her a house
and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young; *
by the side of your altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my God.
3 Happy are they who dwell in your house! *
they will always be praising you.
4 Happy are the people whose strength is in you! *
whose hearts are set on the pilgrims' way.
5 Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, *
for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.
6 They will climb from height to height, *
and the God of gods will reveal himself in Zion.
7 Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer; *
hearken, O God of Jacob.
8 Behold our defender, O God; *
and look upon the face of your Anointed.
9 For one day in your courts is better than a thousand in my own room, *
and to stand at the threshold of the house of my God
than to dwell in the tents of the wicked.
10 For the Lord God is both sun and shield; *
he will give grace and glory;
11 No good thing will the Lord withhold *
from those who walk with integrity.
12 O Lord of hosts, *
happy are they who put their trust in you!
-The Holy Bible, Psalm 84
Saturday, February 1, 2020
Fifty years ago.....................
Santana........................................................Black Magic Woman
bias............................
In all of American life, there is a bias towards the happy ending, toward the notion that human resilience and intellect will be a match for any problem. This holds especially true for problem of white supremacy. For white people who have not quite taken on the full load of ancestral debt but can sense its weight, there is a longing for some magic that might make the burden of slavery and all that followed magically vanish. For blacks born under the burden, there is a need to believe that a better day is on the horizon, that their lives, their children's lives, and their grandchildren's lives are not forever condemned to carry that weight, which white people can only but sense. I felt this need whenever I spoke to audiences about my writing since, invariably, I would be asked what I could say that would give the audience hope. I never knew how to answer the question. The writers I loved, whom I sought to emulate, were mostly unconcerned with "hope." But moreover—what if there was no hope at all? Sometimes, I said as much and was often met with a kind of polite and stunned disappointment.
-Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy
Rewards and risks...............
History shows that the way innovators make ideas into practical and affordable products or processes is trial and error. Edison understood that, as does Jeff Bezos, who made plenty of mistakes on his way to huge success. Says Bezos: ‘Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week.’ Among Silicon Valley’s best features is a forgiveness of going bust at least once. Capital there is patient and takes risks.
-Matt Ridley. as culled from this essay on unleashing trial and error, serendipity, speed, and innovation
Thursday, January 30, 2020
nothing more healing...................
Step off the superhighway of modern life and go quietly onto your own track. Go to a new trail where you can hear the whisper of your wild self in the echoes of the forest. Find the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus. Live deeply on you own inner guidance.
There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them.
-Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life
a kind of energy.........................
I'm terribly thirsty now and wish that I could go and dip my face in the river, but I am conscious of not wanting to seem weak. As I look at Alex and Renias, it appears that in six hours of walking, of intense focus and vigilance, and with no food or water, they have not broken a sweat. It is a kind of energy I have witnessed in people who have merged "work," "mission," and "meaning." These people don't take holidays or need days off. They outwork everyone not from some kind of gritty determination, but from a place of pure pleasure.
-Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life
Seeking........................
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
-Joseph Campbell
Live it into reality..........................
For thousands of years, to be outside the dominant cultural story spelled death. To be outside the band of hunter-gatherers meant you had been shunned by the village. Deep inside, we want to belong. This remains true today, but maybe for the first time in human history, modern society—the dominant culture—has become the thing that isolates us. If you could track your way out of the burdens of modern life and create and existence that is much more an expression of who you are, then your own life could become a living mythology. One that could inspire others.
Inside of me I hear the wild self whisper, Live it into reality.
-Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life
a far horizon..................................
To the east, the land runs for hundreds of miles of pure uncharted wilderness.
Looking out toward it from the high ground, I feel the space enter me and expand me in some fundamental way. The scope of the horizon liberates my imagination. Staring daily at screens, we have lost what a far horizon does to the spirit.
-Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life
image via
a human community.....................
Out here, surrounded by trees and the presence of wild beasts, we are a human community of three. Individuals made more by our trinity. People help each other grow through shared endeavor. I am traveling miles beyond where I could go alone. Alex has goon beyond where he could go, and Renias has had his life opened because of us. True giving gives in every direction.
-Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
individually infinitesimal...........
Hayek’s great lesson is that each of us, individually, can know only an infinitesimally small amount of the knowledge the full use of which is required for any great and prosperous civilization to exist – but that, when we engage with each other under the laws of private property, contract, and tort (what Hayek called “the rules of just conduct”), each of us is led by this engagement to combine his or her speck of knowledge with the specks of knowledge of countless others in a way that causes this use of these dispersed bits of knowledge to produce and sustain a great and prosperous civilization.
Hayek’s great counsel is that we never forget how individually ignorant each of us inevitably is, or how unfathomably great is the amount of knowledge daily put to productive use in free, market-oriented societies.
-Don Boudreaux, from this post
Seth.................................
.......................................................................on luck.
. . . luck over time is a symptom of productive contributions.
Fifty years ago......................
Neil Young.................................................................Tell Me Why
Sailing heart-ships
thru broken harbors
Out on the waves in the night
Still the searcher
must ride the dark horse
Racing alone in his fright.
Tell me why, tell me why
Is it hard to make
arrangements with yourself,
When you're old enough to repay
but young enough to sell?
Tell me lies later,
come and see me
I'll be around for a while.
I am lonely but you can free me
All in the way that you smile
Tell me why, tell me why
Is it hard to make
arrangements with yourself,
When you're old enough to repay
but young enough to sell?
Tell me why, tell me why
Tell me why, tell me why
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
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
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
Monday, January 27, 2020
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
Sunday, January 26, 2020
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.
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
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.
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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.
-----
. . . 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
Thursday, January 23, 2020
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
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Fifty years ago..................
Brotherhood Of Man............................................United We Stand
Monday, January 20, 2020
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
Sunday, January 19, 2020
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
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