I don’t believe our species can survive unless we fix this. We cannot have a society, in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.
Take control of your use of the Internet — that is to say: Do not let it control you. Choose what apps, sites, etc you use. WHENEVER YOU CAN, PAY FOR SERVICES AND APPS. If something is free, then realize that YOU are product being sold to whomever is paying for the service.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer has now classified overnight shift work as a Group 2A carcinogen. This means that staying up late repeatedly, and working overnight, is a strong enough cancer-causing agent to be lumped in with lead exposure and UVA radiation. That might sound crazy, but there s now a ton of scientific data showing exactly how this happens.
A while back I wrote a piece on Sleep. It turned into three parts and after writing it, I felt I had only scratched the surface. Then I stumbled over this book.
I read the book and it’s really good! I blasted through it agreeing all the way. If you know everything about sleep, you’ll still enjoy seeing it all laid out in an approachable fashion. If you have NOT YET MASTERED SLEEP — wait, what is wrong with you?! Sleep is the single most important thing in your life. It is the activity you spend the most aggregated time doing. Remind me why you have not spent time studying sleep and improving yours?
We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there’s no limit to the betterments we can obtain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.
I feel constantly pushed to take on a myopic and biased view that the sky is falling, that this moment right now it the last chance to avoid catastrophe, that the human race has never been closer to the brink of– blah, blah, blah.
I choose to celebrate progress. I choose to shine light on the people who are making a difference. I choose to point out the positives. I choose to engage with only a tiny few of the myriad of complex issues the world faces because that’s the scale where I can make a difference. That’s the scale where each person makes a difference: Individual reasoned thinking, enlightened discourse, and responsible action.
If one believes in objective order and value, then the failure to feel the proper sentiment in the face of a particular stimulus cannot be justified on the basis of mere personal preference, casually categorized under the rubric of “to each their own”; rather, it must be frankly countenanced as a deficiency in one’s human make-up. As Lewis confesses, “I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself — just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind.”
The caveat is that this quadrant can be mistaken as something that shouldn’t be part of life, but that is not true. It is really important to have a balanced life between work and your personal life. You need downtime to not get burnt out and that is where quadrant four comes into the picture. The challenge is you allocate most of your time to quadrant two, with just enough of time spent in quadrant four to get by.
Everything in the UN-important half (the lower half in the diagrams) of the quadrant is the Bad Lands to be avoided. There’s no such thing as “work life balance.” I spent decades trying to fiddle with that balance. There is only life. I strive to do only important things. I strive to only do NON-urgent things by paying attention to what I should be doing. I strive for a wide variety of activities which are all necessary, important and not urgent. One might even say: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
I have control over only two things: My thoughts and my actions.
What principles can we learn from integrating movement, play, and systems thinking to foster personal growth and collaborative learning?
Jesse Danger takes time out from teaching parkour to share thoughtful insights on topics such as systems thinking through game design, the role of novelty, and how to work with a group toward a single focus while still honoring the individual. Along the way we also discuss life lessons learned through playing chess.
Nothing will ever be the same as it was. Things are constantly changing. So everything is novel all the time.
~ Jesse Danger (14:00)
The conversation centers on Jesse Danger’s journey from being a parkour practitioner to a facilitator and educator. Topics include his personal experiments with consistency in training, the philosophy behind his organization, and how business serves as a tool for sharing his vision. Jesse highlights the transformative power of systems thinking, particularly through game design, as a method for teaching life skills and movement principles.
Jesse and Craig also discuss the role of novelty in personal and group development, emphasizing how new experiences can level the playing field and foster deeper connections. The conversation touches on broader themes like balancing individual needs with group goals, overcoming the constraints of competition and authority, and cultivating an integrated, holistic approach to learning and living.
Takeaways
The transition from practitioner to facilitator — Jesse reflects on how his consistent personal training evolved into a broader leadership role in the parkour community.
The Movement Creative’s philosophy — A focus on creating a business that aligns with personal values rather than conventional success metrics.
Systems thinking through game design — Teaching movement and life skills through intentional, co-created games that adapt to participants’ goals.
The importance of novelty — Novel experiences can equalize skill levels, spark creativity, and deepen interpersonal connections.
Balancing individual and group needs — Strategies for fostering collaboration without alienating individual autonomy.
Unpacking competition and authority — How overcoming personal challenges with competition and authority shaped Jesse’s teaching philosophy.
The role of play in growth — Play as a tool for exploration, skill-building, and connection.
Life lessons from chess — The shift from finite to infinite games and their impact on personal growth and perspective.
The tribe’s responsibility — Supporting individuals’ unique needs while fostering collective growth.
Resilience, adaptability, and delusion — Key principles in Jesse’s personal and professional practice.
The reason for the strange behavior of energy prices near limits is because the system is very interconnected. It is a self-organized system that gradually changes over time. New customers are added over time. These customers are often also wage-earners. They decide what to buy based on their own wages, and based on other considerations, such as the prices of competing products and whether inexpensive financing is available.
Supply-and-demand is a model. There’s nothing wrong with the model. Does the model still fit reality as we approach the limits of how much energy our economy can consume? (tl;dr: it does not.)
Most of the programming I do — if you were to watch — looks very much like me sitting and staring suspiciously at my computer. Occasionally I sip a beverage. Occasionally I will rub my chin. Sometimes I will grudgingly type some code, knowing full-well I’m building something I’m going to curse about later.
What makes Michelangelo: A Life on Paper all the more intriguing is that, by extending an invitation into Michelangelo’s private world of words written for his eyes alone, it raises the question of whom we create for — ourselves, as tender beings with a fundamental need for self-expression, or an audience, as social creatures with a fundamental desire to be liked, understood and acclaimed.
I have reached the point of no-return on books. The first, undeniable demonstration of my mortality is the stack of “to read” books. Every year I read more than in the previous year. And every year the stack of books gets taller. I am saddened when I find books such as this, and know that I will never get around to reading them.
In this case, however, the perpetrator didn’t try to port Rosenzweig’s phone number: Instead, the attacker called multiple T-Mobile retail stores within an hour’s drive of Rosenzweig’s home address until he succeeded in convincing a store employee to conduct what’s known as a SIM swap.
Free swapping of SIMs is a feature making it easy to change phones [which might require different SIM card sizes] and to recover from entirely losing your device.
Age-old axiom: If you can imagine a situation where you would prefer to not use the feature, then someone can imagine a way to abuse that feature as a security vulnerability.
…and just a few days ago I was talking about not using your cell phone as a “second form of authentication.” :/
I want to be the person that is the first person there and the last person to leave. That’s who I want to be, because I think the road to success is through commitment, and through the strength to drive through that commitment when it gets hard. And it is going to get hard and you’re going to want to quit sometimes, but it’ll be colored by who you are, and more who you want to be.
Those of us accustomed to making life livable by superimposing over its inherent chaos various control mechanisms — habit, routine, structure, discipline — are always haunted by the disquieting awareness that something essential is lost in the clutch of control, some effervescent liveliness and loveliness elemental to what makes life not merely livable but worth living.
I spend significant time swerving between the two extremes of schedule-and-organize “all the things,” and running around like a dog fascinated by everything. New item #1 on my list of 42 things (all numbered “1”)…
The Internet made it easy to gather together vast swaths of humanity and allowed them to communicate with each other at scale. These mostly anonymous ginormous nations of humans have no shared purpose and no shared values. With no common understanding of how to treat each other and no incentives to do so, communication in these “communities” rapidly degrades to the lowest common denominator where uninformed hate is a typical knee-jerk reaction to differences.
There’s a bunch of insight about social networks (digital and in real life.) Also worth reading if you are interested in leadership and haven’t yet found the Rands Leadership Slack team.
Security is never something we actually want. Security is something we need in order to avoid what we don’t want. It’s also more abstract, concerned with hypothetical future possibilities. Of course it’s lower on the priorities list than fundraising and press coverage. They’re more tangible, and they’re more immediate.
I think the only thing “protecting” us from someone successfully hacking an election, is the sheer number of polling places. You’ve voted, right? Sure, it’s a busy spot with maybe a dozen machines and hundreds of poeple… but there are thousands and thousands of polling places, and the voting machines are not networked. Yet.
Don’t misunderstand: This is security through obscrurity, is not actually security at all, and is a recipe for disaster.
If we support a foreign war or oppose it, it’s because of what effect it’s having on us, either individually or collectively. Our soldiers are dying. Our President is making us look bad. Our corporations are manipulating us. Our national debt is out of control. My taxes might go up. My budget might be stretched. My family member might be killed. We aren’t encouraged to consider such situations from the viewpoint of planet earth as a whole, or how our actions today might affect future generations. We perceive each other as separate and distinct individuals as opposed to cells in the same body.
This isn’t about “us” versus “them. It’s about “I”. How do I see my world? How do I see myself? Have I been conditioned? (duh. Of course I have.) Now that I’ve discovered I have a brain, do I like how I’ve been conditioned?