Some harsh truths........................

.................................that make us stronger:

2.  You will fail sometimes.
The faster you accept this, the faster you can get on with moving forward.  So don't let failure get to your heart (or success to your head).  Do your best and let your consistent daily actions speak for themselves over the long term.

5.  There's a lot you can't control.
You don't have to control everything to find peace and happiness.  It lives with you always, deep within.  See what happens when you loosen your grip, throw your hands into the air, and allow life to just happen and flow.

7.  You can't be successful without providing value.
Don't waste your time trying to be successful.  Spend your time adding value to the world around you.

13.  In life, you get what you put in.
If you want love, give love.  If you want friends, be one.  If you want money, provide value.

-Marc & Angel Chernoff, from their list of 16 "harsh truths" in 1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently

in no way "natural".................

For over a thousand years, Western man's approach to understanding the natural world could be summed up by two words:  Don't try.  This faulty, self-contained, self-satisfied system brooked no serious dissent, as Bruno and Galileo discovered.  The Aristotelian cosmos certainly did not stimulate inquiry.  Nor did it allow creative thought or real advance in our knowledge of the world, nor, ultimately, real improvement in the lot of the average human being.  The great medieval historian Johan Huizinga wrote, "The idea of a purposed and continual reform and improvement of society did not exist.  Institutions in general are considered as good or as bad as they can be; having been ordained by God, they are intrinsically good, only the sins of men pervert them. . . ."
     It did not much bother the average sixteenth-century European that no real social, intellectual, or scientific advance had occurred for a thousand years;  the human condition was universally assumed to be static.  Bacon's staggering genius lay in realizing three thing:  1) that there actually was a problem, that the state of medieval man was in no way "natural";  2) that the deductive system was at fault; and 3) that knowledge of the natural world could be continuously improved, and with it the welfare of mankind.  Improving the lot of mankind could necessitate replacing the old Aristotelian framework with an "inductive" system in which facts would first be gathered without preconception, then analyzed.

-William J. Bernstein,  The Birth of Plenty:  How The Prosperity Of The Modern World Was Created

The prelude....................

In the Spring of 1918 death was no stranger to the world.  Indeed, by then the bodies of more than five million soldiers had already been fed into what was called "the sausage factory" by generals whose stupidity was matched only by their brutality.
     German generals, for example, had decided to bleed France into submission by matching it death for death at Verdun, believing that Germany's greater population would leave it victorious.  The French later replied with their own massive offensive, believing that their elan vital would triumph.
     Only slaughter triumphed.  Finally one French regiment refused orders to make a suicidal charge.  The mutiny spread to fifty-four divisions, stopped only by mass arrests, the conviction of twenty-three thousand men for mutiny, with four hundred sentenced to death and fifty-four actually executed.
      Yet nothing expressed the brutality of this war as did a sanitation report on the planned eradication of rats in the trenches to prevent the spread of disease.  A major noted, "Certain unexpected problems are involved in the rat problem. . . . The rat serves on useful function—he consumes the corpses on No Man's Land, a job which the rat alone is willing to undertake.  For this reason it has been found desirable to control rather than eliminate the rat population."

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

a restless animal..........................

     The ideal of static perfection, which Plato derived from Parmenides and embodied in his theory of ideas, is one which is now generally recognised as inapplicable to human affairs.  Man is a restless animal, not content, like the boa constrictor, to have a good meal once a month and sleep the rest of the time.  Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

-Bertrand Russell,  Philosophy And Politics

a daunting task............................

The value of natural project planning is that it provides an integrated, flexible, aligned way to think through any situation.  Whereas, the basic five-step process of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging is a coherent way to achieve stability across the whole spectrum of your life, natural planning produces relaxed, focused control in more specific areas.
     Challenging the purpose of anything you may be doing is healthy and mature.  Being comfortable making up visions of success, before the methods are clear,  is a phenomenal trait to strengthen.  Being willing to have ideas, good or bad, and to express and capture all of them without judgment is critical for fully accessing creative intelligence.  Honing multiple ideas and types of information into components, sequences, and priorities aimed toward a specific outcome is a necessary mental discipline.  And deciding on and taking real next actions—actually moving one something in the physical world—is the essence of productivity.
     Being able to bring all these ingredients together, with appropriate timing and balance, is perhaps the major component of competence for this new millennium.  But it's not yet the norm of much professional and personal behavior; far from it,  It's still a daunting task to apply this awareness to all the aspects of one's life.  The natural planning model is natural, but in many cases it is not automatic.

-David Allen, Getting Things Done:  the art of stress-free productivity

Habits..............................

"It's not what you know, it's what you do consistently."

-Tim Ferriss

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

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

Pat Metheny..........................................................Secret Story

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

Hal Parker was resolutely closing in on his prey, and he felt his blood pressure amp up with every firm step he placed into the dirt.  He could tell he was nearing his target by the frequency and volume of blood that had fallen onto the darkened ground, like dulled rubies scattered in the rich soil.  He had obviously wounded rather than killed his quarry.

-David Baldacci,  Walk The Wire

The long run...........................

"My goal is not to fail fast.  My goal is to succeed over the long run.  They are not the same thing."

-Marc Andreessen

Peace...............................

"The very word 'success' has become contaminated by our ideas of someone extraordinary, very rich, etc., and that's really unhelpful. . . . Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well."

-Alain de Botton, as quoted here

Sometimes............................

2.  If you have the power to make someone happier today, do it.  The world needs more of that.

5.  Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, and honest compliment, or the smallest act of love—all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

13.  The single greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.  Too often we don't listen to understand, we listen to reply.  Bring awareness to this.  And listen for what's truly behind the words.

15.  Sometimes it is better to be kind than to be right.

-Marc & Angel Chernoff, from their chapter 20 Morning Mantras to Start the Day Loving People (instead of Judging or Ignoring Them) in 1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently

Eurocentric..................................

     Although I try to maintain a global perspective throughout this book, many readers will find its focus overly Eurocentric.  Were not the Chinese—the inventors of paper, the printing press, and gunpowder—the great innovative engineers of the premodern world?  Were not the early Arab empires oases of learning and culture during a time when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages?  did not mathematicians in India devise a numerical system, incorporating the concept of zero, far more advanced that the Greco-Roman letter based system?  To all these questions, the answer is a resounding yes.  Yet not one of these societies was able to turn the modern Western trick of continuously and permanently raising its citizens' standard of living.  Furthermore, the four factors responsible for modern wealth—property rights, borne on the common law, scientific rationalism, advanced capital markets, and the great advances in transportation and communication—were largely European in origin.  Although prosperity has become a global phenomenon, there is no escaping the fact that its nursery lay in the area between Glasgow and Genoa.

-William J. Bernstein, The Birth Of Plenty:  How The Prosperity Of The Modern World Was Created

Curious................................

Later in life, remembrances of his restrictive educational experience continually reminded Bucky of just how debilitating our educational system can be for curious young minds.
     He felt that, like almost all human organizations, including government, industries, and religions, the primary function of the educational system is self-perpetuation and acquisition of fame, fortune, and power for the people who control it.  Rather than contributing to the wisdom and well-being of everyone, he believed organizations attempt to indoctrinate individuals into accepting traditional dogma, restrict the perspective of members, and influence individuals to believe rather than think for themselves.

-Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller's Universe:  His Life And Work

irreducibly wild...........................

. . . Job wants justice;  God offers only awe.
     But as we read in the Book of Proverbs, the beginning of wisdom is awe.  God is going to bring Job wisdom, and to do so God has to strip Job of his anthropocentric view of reality.  God cannot be reduced to human ideas of right and wrong, just and unjust.  Creation does not run in harmony with human notions of law and order.  Creation is irreducibly wild . . . chaotic and unformed.  There is no conquering the chaos of life.  There is no avoiding the terror of merely being alive.  There is only learning how to make meaning in the madness. . . .

-Rabbi Rami Shapiro, from this essay included in Roger Walsh's The World's Greatest Wisdom:  Timeless Teachings from Religions and Philosophies

enlargeable photo and description here

I haven't been blogging....................

........................much here of late, mostly because I've stayed away from the computer.  It seems like a logical conclusion that paying to much attention to what passes for news these days does not enhance one's mental well-being.   However, it is a given that checking in regularly with these fine people does enhance one's mental well-being.   Stuff like this for instance:

 I'm a glutton for punishment but I would love to watch a Jeopardy! showdown between CNN's Jim Acosta and Wolf Blitzer. I'd put the combined over/under for correct answers for the entire show at 5. I'd also bet that neither would qualify for Final Jeopardy because they would both be well into negative numbers...

Like Danny used to say, "he cracks my head up."

a great and strange reputation...............

     So science has, it seems, been so successful that it has inevitably earned a great and strange reputation.  If it has never yet been defeated, presumably it is all-powerful.  And since science is, after all, the work of scientists—for one seldom encounters disembodied science—then presumable these scientists are both so clever and so wise that they can do anything.  Perhaps we should turn the world over to this superbreed.  Perhaps they could, if properly supported, really liberated, and put in charge—perhaps they could solve all problems of human relations, of economic stability, of international peace, and of the good life.  Perhaps they should design not only the churches, but the creeds also.  Perhaps the best music and the loveliest poetry will, in a short time, come out of a machine.
     The sad fact is that some scientists themselves appear to believe precisely this.  And this arrogant attitude quite naturally irritates, or even angers, the social scientists, the humanists, the moralists, and the creative artists.  The classic protest is surely that of Keats:

               Do not all charms fly
               At the mere touch of cold philosophy?  
               There was an awful rainbow once in Heaven:
               We know her woof, her textures; she is given
               In the dull catalogue of common things.
               Philosophy will clip and Angel's wings.

-Warren Weaver, Science and Imagination, 1967

Asking history to repeat itself............

Initial responses are inevitably confused. But trial-and-error learning happens and we do get better. The U.S. was horribly unprepared going into WWI and WWII but, once on track, American productivity stunned enemies as well as friends.

-Peter Gordon, from this list of ten things we are re-learning

As long as Scott................

................................keeps introducing (some of) us to new music, the future will be normal enough for me.  Stay healthy my friend.

Freed.............................

"Refusal to forgive leads to a self-imposed imprisonment.  It's time we freed ourselves by letting old pain dissipate into the darkness, so that new opportunities can take us to greater heights of joy."

-Marc & Angel Chernoff,  1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently