the tidal wave of being..............

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

-Jack London, The Call of the Wild

reciprocation................

 

     I explained to him something we at Echelon Front call the "reciprocal nature of leadership," which put simple means that what you give, you get in return.  When you show that your care for your people, they reciprocate; they care in return.  When you listen to your people, they listen in return.  When you treat your people with respect, that respect is returned.  And so on.

-Dave Berke, The Need to Lead

anti-fragile.............

 

The Harvard Grant Study followed subjects for 80 years and found that participants who chose comfort over challenge aged faster, died sooner, and reported less life satisfaction.

We are anti-fragile systems.  We require stress to maintain basic functions.  Remove all challenge and we literally decompose.

-Stan Taylor

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

 

Lynyrd Skynyrd.................Simple Man

Mama told me when I was young
Come sit beside me, my only son
And listen closely to what I say.
And if you do this
It will help you some sunny day.
Take your time... Don't live too fast,
Troubles will come and they will pass.
Go find a woman and you'll find love,
And don't forget son,
There is someone up above.

And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Won't you do this for me son,
If you can?

Forget your lust for the rich man's gold
All that you need is in your soul,
And you can do this if you try.
All that I want for you my son,
Is to be satisfied.

And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Won't you do this for me son,
If you can?

Boy, don't you worry... you'll find yourself.
Follow your heart and nothing else.
And you can do this if you try.
All I want for you my son,
Is to be satisfied.

And be a simple kind of man.
Be something you love and understand.
Be a simple kind of man.
Won't you do this for me son,
If you can?

maps......................

 

Opening it one night in my house, an ordinance survey map of Connemara made little sense to Martin.  Mostly, it was what was isn't in it that he had an eye for.  Refolding it, he handed it back to me saying, "What chance have we when that's where we think we live."

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

Monet......................

 

Claude Monet   1874   Sunset on the Seine    Oil on Canvas

The Art & Artists blog gifted us a 27-part series on the wondrous works of Claude Monet.  Do take advantage of it.

precedented............................

 

            via

continuous judgment..........

 

The skill can’t be ‘learn the fixed answer,’ because there is no fixed answer. The skill has to be continuous judgment.

Speed matters, but speed without judgment is just fast failure.

-Nicholas Bate, from here

Let's keep it simple...................

 

........................................just call me flag.

Be careful what you wish for...........

We nationalized risk, socialized failure, taxed boldness, and administered everything else. Result: a magnificent country that builds nothing anymore, that manages its decay with a funereal elegance, and where the most gifted young person dreams of only one thing—leaving.

Freedom doesn't die assassinated. It dies anesthetized, to applause.

-as culled from here

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

 Why is improvement hard?

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

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

-James Clear, from today's effort

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

 

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

-Ivan Doig, Bucking the Sun

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

 

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

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

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

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

-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward

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

 

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

-M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

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

 

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

       

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Claude Monet      +/-1863    Sunset over the Sea 

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

-Claude Monet

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

war and peace.................

 

The most sophisticated villain creation happens in your own head.  You split yourself into parts and declare war.  The disciplined self fights the lazy self.  The ambitious self quarrels with the comfortable self.  The good self goes to war with the bad self.

This internal villainization feels productive because you're fighting your demons and conquering weakness.  You declare war on procrastination, make it the enemy, and fight it with willpower and discipline.  It fights back by getting stronger.  The harder you battle, the more energy you feed it.  Your resistance becomes its fuel.

Every internal villain follows the same pattern.  The more you fight anxiety, the more anxious you become about being anxious.  The more you battle negative thoughts, the more mental energy you spend thinking negative thoughts.  The more you battle against your body, the more your body wars against you. . . .

The solution is integration and understanding that your procrastination is trying to protect yourself from judgment, your anxiety is trying to keep you safe, and your comfortable self is trying to preserve energy for survival.

They are merely parts of you serving outdated functions.  Fighting them creates internal civil war, but understanding them creates internal peace.  The issue is peace doesn't provide the same chemical hit as war, so most people keep fighting themselves until they die.

-Stan Taylor, The Black Book of Power

Being honest about...................

 

.................................self-chosen distractions.

Michael has been thinking about this subject for a long while.  To wit:

Abstract expressionism.........

 

Jasper Johns    1961      0 Through 9      oil on canvas

It's simple........................

 

It's simple, you just take something, and then you do something to it, and then you do something else to it.  Keep doing this and pretty soon you've got something.

-attributed to Jasper Johns

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

-attributed to Tom Peters

The meme wars continue...........

 

          more whimsy here

We will be testing his theory......

 

    We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes.  Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation.

------------------------------

Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life. By the same token, life is adaptation.

     There are, however, limits on adaptability. When we alter our life style, when we make and break relationships with things, places or people, when we move restlessly through the organizational geography of society, when we learn new information and ideas, we adapt; we live. Yet there are finite boundaries; we are not infinitely resilient. Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results.

     Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)

Never...................

 

Guard your speech.  Never speak of yourself, your affairs, or of anything else in a discouraged or discouraging way.  Never admit the possibility of failure, or speak in a way that infers failure as a possibility.  Never speak of the times as being hard, or of business conditions being doubtful.  Times may be hard and business conditions doubtful for those who are on the competitive plane, but they can never be for you; you can create what you want, and you are above fear.  When others are having hard times and poor business, you will find your greatest opportunities.

Train yourself to think of and to look upon the world as something which is Becoming, which is growing; and to regard seeming evil as being only that which is undeveloped.  Always speak in terms of advancement; to do otherwise us to deny your faith, and to deny your faith is to lose it.  Never allow yourself to feel disappointed.  You may expect to have a certain thing at a certain time, and not get it at that time; and this will appear to you like failure.  But if you hold to your faith you will find that the failure is only apparent.  Go on in the certain way, and if you do not receive that thing, you will receive something so much better that you will see that the seeming failure was really a great success.

-Wallace D. Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich