On being you-ish.............

 

Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. . . .

The more you-ish you become, the less competition you have, because you are occupying your own niche. Less competition means you don’t have to be in a race; you can relax and focus on your strengths. You have the space to become even more you, and even less likely.

-Kevin Kelly, from this substack

History and human nature........................

 That’s usually how it works. Look at virtually any decade and you’ll see that the most important news story was something no one was talking about until the moment it occurred.

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It is too easy to assume that when faced with terrible circumstances people will only muster a normal response. But it’s never like that. Expectations reset, survival instincts unleash new creative juices, and people start thinking and acting in ways they wouldn’t have contemplated before the crisis.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

In praise of..........................

...............................................................................sandstorms?

What was previously thought to be dangerous and destructive turns out to have been clarifying and constructive. The desert needs the sandstorm to stay vibrant and vital. The overturning of the status quo is chaotic and dark, but what is revealed is bright and beautiful. For the desert to bloom, it needs to be cleansed from time to time; sandstorms make space for new growth.

The beginning of western philosophy........

     In 490-470 B.C. Sparta and Athens, forgetting their jealousies and joining forces, fought off the effort of the Persians under Darius and Xerxes to turn Greece into a colony of an Asiatic empire.  In this struggle of youthful Europe against the senile East, Sparta provided the army and Athens the navy.  The war over, Sparta demobilized her troops, and suffered the economic disturbances natural to that process, while Athens turned her navy into a merchant fleet, and became one of the greatest trading cities of the ancient world.  Sparta relapsed into agricultural seclusion and stagnation, while Athens became a busy mart and port, the meeting place of many races of men and of diverse cults and customs, whose contact and rivalry begot comparison, analysis and thought.
      Traditions and dogmas rub one another down to a minimum in such centers of varied intercourse; where there are a thousand faiths we are apt to become sceptical of them all.  Probably the traders were the first sceptics; they has seen too much to believe too much;  and the general disposition of merchants to classify all men as either fools or knaves inclined them to question every creed.  Gradually, too, they were developing science; mathematics grew with the increasing complexity of exchange, astronomy with the increasing audacity of navigation.  The growth of wealth brought the leisure and security which are prerequisite of research and speculation;  men now asked the stars not only for guidance on the seas but as well for an answer to the riddles of the universe;  the first Greek philosophers were astronomers.  "Proud of their achievements," says Aristotle, "men pushed farther afield after the Persian wars; they took all knowledge for their province, and sought ever wider studies."  Men grew bold enough to attempt natural explanations of processes and events before attributed to supernatural agencies and powers;  magic and ritual slowly gave way to science and control; and philosophy began.

-Will Durant,  The Story of Philosophy

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

     Charles Bukowski was an alcoholic, a womanizer, a chronic gambler, a lout, a cheapskate, a deadbeat, and on his worst days, a poet.  He's probably the last person on earth you would ever look to for life advice or expect to see in any sort of self-help book.
     Which is why he's the perfect place to start.

-Mark Manson,  The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*uck:  A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life

Unexpectedly..................................

Radio began its life as a two-way medium, a practice that continues to this day as ham radio:  individual hobbyists talking to one another over the airwaves, occasionally eavesdropping on other conversations.  But by the early 1920s, the broadcast model that would come to dominate the technology had evolved.  Professional stations began delivering packaged news and entertainment to consumers who listened on radio receivers in their homes.  Almost immediately, something entirely unexpected happened:  the existence of a mass medium for sound unleashed a new kind of music on the United States, a music that had until then belonged almost exclusively to New Orleans, to the river towns of the American South, and to African-American neighborhoods in New York and Chicago.  Almost overnight, radio mad jazz a national phenomenon.  Musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong became household names.  Ellington's band performed weekly national broadcasts from the Cotton Club in Harlem starting in the late 1920s;  Armstrong became the first African-American to host his own national radio show shortly thereafter.
     All of this horrified Lee De Forest, who wrote a characteristically baroque denunciation to the National Association of Broadcasters:  "What have you done with my child, the radio broadcast?  You have debased this child, dressed him in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie-woogie."  In fact, the technology that De Forest had helped invent was intrinsically better suited to jazz that it was to classical performances.  Jazz punched through the compressed, tinny sound of early AM radio speakers;  the vast dynamic range of a symphony was largely lost in translation.  The blasts of Satchmo's trumpet played better on the radio than the subtleties of Shubert.
     The collision of jazz and radio created, in effect, the first surge of a series of cultural waves that would wash over twentieth-century society.  A new sound that had been slowly incubating in some smalls section of the world - New Orleans, in the case of jazz - finds its way onto the mass medium of radio, offending the grown-ups and electrifying the kids.

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Speaking of carbon dioxide..............

That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts? 

Indur Goklany has assembled a massive collection of evidence to demonstrate two facts. First, the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are dominant over the climatic effects and are overwhelmingly beneficial. Second, the climatic effects observed in the real world are much less damaging than the effects predicted by the climate models, and have also been frequently beneficial. I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence. Goklany and I do not claim to be infallible. Like the climate-model experts, we have also evolved recently from the culture of the cave-children. Like them, we have inherited our own set of prejudices and blindnesses. Truth emerges when different groups of explorers listen to each other’s stories and correct each other’s mistakes. 

-as excerpted from this Freeman Dyson post

thanks matt

Serendipity...........................

Nicholas Bate, with his Seven S Spring Clean, offers the wonders of serendipity.  Sent me off to see what else I could (quickly) find.

"3. Serendipity: boost the number of great but unexpected things happening in your life. Work hard, do great things, build your network, listen to-but do not bow to-your critics, stay off the easily and well trodden tracks, help others. And serendipity will support you."
-Nicholas Bate

Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, 
and realize that what you've found is more suited to 
your needs than what you thought you were looking for.
-Lawrence Block

Self-sown flowers provide a lot of serendipity, which is 
one of the reasons people garden. When they come up,
 it's a delight.
-Renee Shepherd

Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless 
you create it, can't feel delight until you play,can't know 
serendipity unless you risk.
-Joan Erickson

Risk-taking, trust, and serendipity are key ingredients of joy. 
Without risk, nothing new ever happens. Without trust, fear 
creeps in. Without serendipity, there are no surprises.
-Rita Golden Gelman

Life is full of surprises and and serendipity. Being open to un- expected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it - and then, not now, think about what comes next. -Condoleeza Rice

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.
-Elizabeth Berg

When love feels like magic, you call it destiny. When destiny has a sense of humor, you call it serendipity. -unknown If there are no miracles then we need to find another word for the existence of life – the existence of you and me – on earth. Call it a gift from spirit (God or god in whatever form works for you), serendipity, happenstance or plain good fortune. I invite you to look at your life as if it were a miracle. To treat your life in any other way seems to me to be a terrible waste of your unique presence on this planet. -Robert White Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult. -Erin McKean Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter. -Julius Comroe Jr.

A faster horse...........................

      "Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.'  But that's not my approach.  Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do.  I think Henry Ford once said, 'If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!' '  People don't know what they want until you show it to them.  That's why I never rely on market research.  Our task to to read things that are not yet on the page."
-Steve Jobs

In return..........................

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.” 
-Anaïs Nin

image via

The entitlement society...............

thanks Greg

A take-your-breath-away moment.........

Susan Boyle meets the World.........................

Hate it when that happens...........

Charlie Chaplin entered into a Charlie Chaplin look-alike 
contest in San Francisco.  He failed to make the finals.

I'm shocked, shocked...........

On risk avoidance.............

On the importance of getting lost.........

"The closer man gets to the unknown, the more inventive he
becomes - the quicker he adopts new ways."
-Buckminster Fuller

To enter into the unknown (to partake in an experiment)
involves the willingness to full experience and study things we
don't understand, and to embrace that lack of understanding.

There are different ways of 'getting lost.'  There is the literal
lost, as in being lost in the woods unable to find your way
back to the starting point.  Or there are metaphorical
examples of being lost:  lost in one's head, a lost soul, lost in
time.  In the context of exploring we can think of it in terms
of 'existing in a state where you do not know exactly where
you are headed.'  In this sense we may choose to become
either literally lost, exploring a place we've never been before,
or lost in the sense that we enter into a relationship with
objects and ideas without knowing what the outcome will be.

-as excerpted from Keri Smith's How To Be An Explorer Of
The World:  Portable Art Life Museum