crafting a gift...............

 

No matter how marvellous the mountain-top epiphany, no matter how deep the vigil in the forest, if you cannot craft a gift from the experience, in the end the encounter will never quite accomplish itself.

-Martin Shaw

Ah, experience.................

 

Like all of life’s rich emotional experiences, the full flavor of losing important money cannot be conveyed by literature. You cannot convey to an inexperienced girl what it is truly like to be a wife and mother. There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin by words or pictures. Nor can any description that I might offer here even approximate what it feels like to lose a real chunk of money.

-Fred Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: Or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street

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

 

So it's not about whether we feel depressed or happy; rather, it's about our willingness and ability to participate fully in any and all of our feelings.  The experience of freedom arises not from acquiring our preferred lifestyle and our preferred state of mind but from a willingness to stay with ourselves—to be completely committed to experiencing our lives—regardless of circumstance.

-Bruce Tift, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation

the quest........................

 

     Life is full of experiences—touching and seeing and looking and doing and acting—but you're going to lose the lessons of those experiences if you don't take time to reflect.

     We can all learn to gather up the past and invest in the future.  Gather up today and invest it in tomorrow.  Gather up this week and invest it in the next week.  Gather up this year and invest it in the next year.  Many people simply hang on one more year.  They are just hanging in there, seeing what's going to happen.  I am asking you to choose a different path, to learn, study, and reflect.  This is a major part of personal development: the quest to become better than you are now.

-Jim Rohn

When drinking largely sobers us..............

 

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,

In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts;

While from the bounded level of our mind

Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise

New distant scenes of endless science rise!

So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,

Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;

The eternal snows appear already past,

And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

But those attained, we tremble to survey

The growing labours of the lengthened way;

The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,

Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise! -Alexander Pope

The 95/5 rule................

 

     It was a step in the right direction, if not the perfect solution; I did miss the orderly abundance of a fully replenished case.  But the experience showed me that creativity was going to be the main ingredient in striking a true balance between restaurant-smart and corporate-smart. . . . 

      We threw ourselves into the project.  Jon proved to be an extremely dangerous co-conspirator.  For example, he found a company in Italy making amazing, tiny blue spoons.  How amazing could a plastic spoon possibly be?  You are going to have to trust me on this: they were paddle-shaped, extraordinarily well designed, and completely unique.  They were also preposterously, heartbreakingly expensive.

     But I had to have them; the Sculpture Garden deserved them.  Nothing else would do.

     The first time my boss saw one of those spoons, she narrowed her eyes and asked me what they had cost.  I told her, and her eyes got even narrower: "We'll talk about this later."  But a month later, we sat down to review the first P & L for the cart, and I never heard another word about those spoons.

     I'd managed 95 percent of my budget aggressively, leveraging MoMA's brand to get excelled gelato at a steep discount, and a beautiful cart for free.  I'd earned the right to splurge on those spoons, the one small detail I believed would dramatically transform the experience of getting an ice cream at the cart.

     This is what I would later call the Rule of 95/5.  Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent "foolishly."  It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it's anything but.  Because that last 5 percent has an outsized impact on the guest experience, it's some of the smartest money you'll ever spend.

-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

On the importance of literature........

 

And literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience in yet another invaluable direction; namely, from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation. . . . 

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin – interred alive throughout their lives – are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from this 1970 speech

It's simple, really...................

 

Experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime.  A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind that loves diagnosis involving multiple variables.  And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

-Charlie Munger

on retentiveness...................

 

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

-George Santayana

utilize.......................

High-hope people take every experience they have as a learning experience—no matter the experience.   Everything happens for them, not to them.  They utilize every experience to improve how they live and approach life.

-Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, 10x Is Easier Than 2x

encroachment..................

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial.  Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.  The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. 

-Louis Brandeis

I'd pay to watch this....................

 Have said this before but all the attention is currently on college football and their situation but the real changes to college sports will more greatly affect college basketball. Imagine how places with great post grad programs will do when they can award unlimited NIL and unlimited eligibility. How would you like to play a Harvard or Stanford in March Madness when their starting 5's are 24-years old with 5-years of experience each? One and done superior talent will be at a great disadvantage.

-Chris Lynch, from here

I see what you did there........................

Everyone says the new speaker, Mike Johnson, has no experience, but that claim just makes me smile. If our current condition is the result of “experienced” politicians, how could “inexperienced” politicians be any worse? Besides, I thought this whole “self-government” thing meant ordinary Americans could participate fully in the exercise of state power. At this point, any of the Johnsons of Rockridge would do, since nearly all House members are fluent speakers of authentic Beltway jibberish.

-Steven Hayward, from here

 

Having fun with 107,000 friendly folks..........

 A friend offered two tickets to the OSU-Penn State game last Saturday noon.  Hard to pass that up.  Seats were pretty fantastic.  Game wasn't bad either.  An experience worth having.

Band passed the spelling quiz again.

embracing............................

 Makes you wonder, today as people endlessly “pursue perfect” — the perfect family vacation, the perfect athletic experience, the perfect house, the perfect life, are we missing the point? Instead of “searching for perfect”, should we instead be searching for unique experiences and embracing whatever this pursuit brings?

-Ted Lamade, from this guest post

On the question of questions.....

 The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers.

But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?”

-Morgan Housel, from here

A new year recommendation:

 To experience the world in a useful way.

-Seth Godin

On finding out........................

 We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil—seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what's worth knowing.

-David Abram, Becoming Animal:  An Earthly Cosmology

Shadows................................

       The quality of the outcome casts a shadow over our ability to see the quality of the decision.

       We want outcome quality to align with decision quality.  We want the world to make sense in this way, to be less random than it is.  In trying to get this alignment, we lose sight of the fact that for most decisions, there are lots of ways things could turn out.

       Experience is supposed to by our best teacher, but sometimes we draw a connection between outcome quality and decision quality that is too tight.  Doing so distorts our ability to use those experiences to figure out which decisions were good and which were bad.

Annie Duke, How To Decide:  Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

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