this bifurcation of perception.............

 

     In the wake of the scientific revolution and certain deadening forms of modernist presumption, the trend has been to sever the bond between objectivity and subjectivity.  Consciousness in the modern West has been informed by trends the follow this severance.  Subjectivity and objectivity are commonly viewed as opposites, even at odds, rather than being component parts of an already reconciled whole.  The hard sciences have sided with objectivity against subjectivity.  The human sciences have done the opposite.  Errors of all kinds follow from this bifurcation of perception and being into two seemingly incompatible worlds of meaning, especially when one side of the dichotomy is elected over the other for arbitrary reasons.  But this is not how Chesterton experienced the world.  Arguably, this is not how anyone experiences the world, despite rationalizations to the contrary.

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

artful..........................

 

Be artful with your knowledge.  We've all known people who knew many things but who never did anything very innovative with their learning.  Heraclitus realized that the key to being more creative is being able to work and play with our knowledge.  Using our knowledge is a lot like cooking.  Getting a satisfying result depends on what things we add together and how we mix them.

-Roger Von Oech, Expect the Unexpected (Or You Won't Find It): A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus

Optimistic infection..................

 Much of modern society, including our endlessly fragmented media, protects us from having to truly engage with those who don’t share our politics.

That’s why the development of a political rift between the genders is so promising. What’s the most compelling common project of all? Sex - sex and love. Short of a mass conversion to homosexuality, many or most of these people are still going to hook up together and form partnerships and families, caveats about declining birth rates aside. Conservative-leaning young men who only seek out conservative-leaning young women will be fishing in a small pool; liberal women will only diminish the size of their pool if they stick to men who are as liberal as they are. Both sides therefore have a powerful incentive to forge relationships with people who hold political views different to their own. They can then infect each other with their different ideas, generating new syntheses, and moving us all along.

-as culled from this Ian Leslie post

via

On having skin in the game................

 Back in the 1950s, when the focal practice of baking was displaced by the advent of cake mixes, Betty Crocker learned quickly that it was good business to make the mix not quite complete.  The baker felt better about her cake if she was required to add an egg to the mix.

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft

Superpowers.....................

 It’s tempting to want to find the one big skill that will set you apart. But most incredible things come from compounding, and compounding isn’t intuitive because the incremental inputs are never exciting on their own. . . . Most things that look like superpowers are just a bunch of ordinary skills mixed together at the right time.

-Morgan Housel