Sit at your desk and listen.
~ Franz Kafka
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Listening →
Tic-toc? →
When a person relies heavily on the clock to determine what to do and when to stop, research suggests they might also have a looser relationship with their own sense of control. This is because they look towards an external cue to guide their actions, according to Sellier, and that external cue, rather than something within them, is what seems to control the world around them. Event-time people appear to believe, more than clock-time people do, that their actions make a meaningful difference in determining what happens to them.
~ Shayla Love, from Is it better to live in ‘clock time’ or ‘event time’?
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This feels closely related to my point above about shifting my focus to longer time frames. I definitely use clock-time a lot. How would I go about being intentional about choosing one style over the other? I suppose simply asking myself: Is this thing better done in clock-time or event time? Because my default is clock-time.
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Meaning →
Those who can’t find anything to live for, always invent something to die for. Then they want the rest of us to die for it too.
~ Lew Welch
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Writing →
I juggle many things (recent days have been a lot of dirt moving related to garden beds). But I love sitting with a pen and paper. Working on an issue for Open + Curious.
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What will change your mind? →
What are you working on? When will you change your mind? What can you learn, what can you challenge?
~ Seth Godin, from What are you thinking about? | Seth’s Blog
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As is often the case, Godin asks really good rhetorical questions. Me? In recent weeks I’ve been challenging myself to shift my focus to longer timeframes. I’ve reached a level of sophistication where—give or take—what I do on any given day does not matter; I don’t go off the rails. What I do, is get anxious about “all the things” when I get lost thinking about too many things.
Instead of hyper-focusing on the right-now, I need to zoom out. What I just accomplished moves me towards a goal. Yes, even if I just blew off some scheduled thing to go play outside; That moves my health forward energizing me for another day. And each day making some progress is just exactly the right thing to be doing.
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Open to →
It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.
~ Richard Cavett
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Filed and lost →
Taking notes on the books I read was a great start, but it wasn’t enough. It did me no good to leave those notes sitting in a software program like a musty filing cabinet in the basement, never to see the light of day again.
I realized if I wanted to benefit from my reading, I needed to engage with the books I read on a much deeper level. I needed to make something out of them. Otherwise, I would continue to passively consume information with no lasting memory of what I learned.
~ Tiago Forte, from The Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books
Has anyone noticed that’s what I’m attempting to do with all my blogging and writing? Shirley, that’s obvious. (It’s not obvious, and don’t call me Shirley.)
I’ve always deeply loved movies. I was raised (on hose water and neglect) in the era when going to a movie was special. Remember when you had to use the phone (with a rotary dial, mounted on the wall) to call the theatre and listen to a looooong recording detailing what was playing and when? I could tell you so so so many stories about going to the movies. In more recent issues of 7 for Sunday, I’m feeling less inclined to stomp down the inside-joke movie references. If you find them even half as enjoyable to read, as I do to write them, then we’re both better off. I’m pretty sure that my recalling and retelling of all those stories about and around movies makes the entire movie experience more fun; yes the experience during the movie, but also all the stuff around it too.
No, I’ve not lost my own plot. Forte’s point about how to benefit from what one reads is the same thing. If you want to hold on to whatever it was that you’ve gotten from a book… you have to integrate it with the rest of your ongoing, lived experience. You have to go around telling the story of who gave you the book, what the book means to you in the context of your entire life, and what you think your interlocutor might get from it (like this, this, this, this, this, this or… you get my point.)
And as soon as you realize that’s fun for movies, and great for books, you should wonder if it could be a super-power for self-improvement if you could share the contents of your mind, with yourself, in that same fashion. Two suggestions: Start journaling immediately after reading this issue of 7 for Sunday, so you can then begin in a year, to regularly review your journals.
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Belief →
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
~ Ralph Hodgson
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Bullshit →
I bullshitted everybody and told them all my dreams and things I was going to do. And what happened afterwards? I became a total failure. I was full of shit and that’s the end of it.
~ Dennis Hopper, from Dennis Hopper
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How many years ago did Dennis Hopper die?
In that brief conversation there are at least 5 things which impressed me, all unrelated to the movie Easy Rider. Regardless what you think about Hopper (or even if you’ve never heard of him) it certainly takes guts, and perspective, to be able to be that clear about yourself.
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