the battle......................

 

     Upon the battlefield of the human soul two masters are ever contending for the crown of supremacy for the kingship and dominion of the heart; the master of self, called also the Prince of this world, and the master of truth, called also that Father God.  The master self if that rebellious one whose weapons are passion, pride, avarice, vanity, self-will, implements of darkness; the master truth is that meek and lovely one whose weapons are gentleness, patience, purity, sacrifice, humility, love, instruments of light.

     In every soul the battle is waged, and as a soldier cannot engage at once in two opposing armies, so every heart is enlisted either in the ranks of self or of truth.

-James Allen, From Poverty to Power

choosing...................

 

You are always responsible because you are always choosing. In every moment, you are choosing how to respond, how to react, how to see things.

-Mark Manson

Willingness.................

 

Deliverance is out of time and into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things.  We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in the "state of grace."  All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality.  We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

-Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

Acceptance.................

 

Acceptance is not surrender. It is the moment you stop wasting energy on what is already true and start using that energy to decide what to do next.

-Shane Parrish, from this week's edition

Insourcing vs Outsourcing.............

 

We have immersed ourselves to a few mega social media platforms. Angertainment is all the rage. If you think doom scrolling, keeping up with Jones’, and entrusting your engrossment to algos designed to keep you in a constant state of anxiety is the path, have at it. Come for the social isolation and stay for the subsequent depression.

-Tony Isola, from this post

choices........................

 

In judging myself, I confront what is inferior in me and recoil from it. Yet none of us can measure our true worth. I can only live in the hope that those around me might say: he is honest; he is kind to the helpless; when the powerful struck, he stood his ground. Such judgments point to generally discoverable moral truths. We have always possessed Taylor’s shared “standards of value”—we have always loved the higher and shunned the lower, even when pretending otherwise.

From the reformation of character follows the public affirmation of the conditions to which good character should aspire. I would do so humbly, guided by truth as I perceive it. Fit is better than fat, for obvious reasons. Together is better than alone, and together for life better still. Strong is better than weak. Let me name the one and pursue the other, knowing that we are flawed vessels, hostage to fortune, and bound often to fall short. Still, all of us can inch toward our highest selves.

-Martin Gurri, as cut-and-pasted from here

Across the threshold............................

 

.........................................of too much.

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

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

Leading....................

 

     Leadership isn't a burden—it is an opportunity and obligation.  It affords us power and influence and, as much as is possible, control.  It gives us what we all want most—freedom.  We gain freedom to make decisions, and to determine in every way possible the outcomes of our lives.  Leadership prevents us from being victims.  It's how we mitigate the risks caused by external forces and pressures.  It's how we avoid lying face down in the dirt waiting to die. It's how we win.

     On that day in Iraq, I was lucky.  But relying on luck or hoping circumstances will change on their own is not a good business plan, not a solid approach to leading a team.  And it's definitely not a good way to build a marriage or raise a family.  Your luck will run out at some point, and you will end up a victim to your situation.  The check engine light in your car won't go off on its own—you have to do something to fix it.  The same is true everywhere.  You need a strategy, some plan of action, when the external threats arise.  You need to be leading through each aspect of life,

     So, lead in every situation, under every circumstance, no matter how mild or severe or routine a problem appears.  Don't wait, don't sit back, don't assume you have no course of action and become a victim of the world around you.  Lead.

-Dave Berke, The Need to Lead: A TOPGUN Instructor's Lessons on How Leadership Solves Every Challenge

unraveling.................

 

     Our unraveling continues, even accelerates.  Political institutions and geopolitical norms are fracturing.  Far-right and nationalist movements are ascendant.  Democracies around the world look vulnerable; the sturdy-seeming institutional bulwarks that loomed solemnly around them now sag under pressure like rotten wood.  There is no more staggering an indicator of the profound misoperation of American society that its decision in 2024 to return Donald Trump to the office of the presidency.  It is madness to have put him there, and is our madness that keeps us from perceiving—collectively—the absurdity and destructiveness of our choice.   But the world as a whole is sheathed in confusion.  In all likelihood, the postwar era of liberal hegemony is ending, and it is honestly difficult to say why.  In America and around the world, we look at each other bewildered, unable to comprehend the reality that others perceive or to fathom their motivations.

-Ryan Avent, In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies

Somewhere on my journeys through the Intertunnel I found a recommendation for this book, so I bought it.  Enjoyed the first three pages, then came to the above paragraph.  All I can say is that Avent needs to get out more.   A few stray thoughts:  first, one of the problems with our elections is that the choice is binary.  Donald Trump or Kamala Harris was our choice in 2024.  Reasonable people may disagree, but it was certainly not madness, or far-right, to prefer Trump over Harris.  A majority of the country made that choice.  Second, Avent finds it difficult to understand why the "postwar era of liberal hegemony is ending".  Maybe, in good faith, he should take a closer look at the quality and character of those people passing as "elites" in government, media, and in our world-at-large these days.  Open your eyes, Ryan.  Anyway, if the quality of thinking does not improve, I will not be finishing this book.

the divide..........................

 

Two children are looking at screens.

One has an infinite iPad: videos, feeds, colors, and recommendations carefully designed to ask nothing of her other than her attention. The other has an AI tutor: patient, demanding, adaptive, and often hard work. It asks her what she thinks and why one answer is better than another.

It’s the same rectangle and the same general class of technology, but it is doing opposite things to the child. That is the divide I care about: how AI deployed two ways can form two different people.

-Brendan McCord, as quoted here

two ways....................

 

This I believed: there are two ways we could have gone, the way of the Titan, Prometheus, or the way of the dolphin.  In the Promethean way we shape nature to suit us, in the way of the dolphin we let nature shape us to suit it.  Everywhere there is evidence that we have chosen wrongly.

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

Choices................

 

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

-Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

Choosing...................

 

    At the same time, we must take care to protect the sovereign domain of our personal tastes and proclivities as well as our sense of wonder.  Choosing the right music for pleasure or for healing is never going to be one-size-fits-all affair.  Even setting aside therapeutic uses, our tastes change over the course of a life or even a day.  If I've just heard my favorite song six times in a row, I may not want to hear it again.  The right music is whatever music is right for us at any given time and place.

-Daniel J. Levitin,  I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

Wondering about Francis Bacon...........

 

The contention that knowledge is power, as advanced by Bacon, secularized the previously occult dictum to great effect. Disinterested curiosity was not Bacon’s only goal; he also envisioned the command of nature, its subjugation and bondage, in the advancement of human comfort, wealth, control, and power. And his vision would shape the dominant ideology of the next half-millennium. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” claimed Bacon in Novum Organum, charting the passage of that supposedly unsinkable ship of civilization toward the brighter and more prosperous future that enlightened men had long dreamed of. All that was required was a ritual sacrifice of the mystery that had suffused the world in the millennia the scientific revolution. 

-as culled from this Hedgehog Review essay

The problem is never just the problem..........

.......It's the response to it that defines your team.

from this Tanmay Vora post

Choices...................

 

We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

-Omar N. Bradley, one of only a handful of 5-Star Generals in U. S. history, from a 1948 speech

gardening...............

     The human mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild.  But whether cultivated or neglected, it must and will bring forth.  If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall, accumulate, and will reproduce their own kind.

     Just as the gardener cultivates the plot, keeping it free from weeds and cultivating the flowers and fruits which are required, so may we tend the garden of our mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts. 

-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh

a choice................

 

Your economic future is not going to be determined by the economy, but rather your own philosophy.

-Jim Rohn, as culled from Leading an Inspired Life