People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thingârefusing to participate in activities that make life bad.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Improvement →
Calm companies →
Calm companies provide meaningful work, healthy interactions, and flexibility for people’s lives. If your kid is home sick, you can set work aside and take care of them. If it’s a beautiful day, you can go for a run on the beach.
~ Justin Jackson, from We need more calm companies
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It was only a little over a year ago (as noted in my Calm Technology post) that first heard of calm tech.
Calm technology is designed to be unobtrusive and blend in with daily life. The opposite is technology that is distracting and disruptive, creating agitation and stress.
And of course, what would oneâhopefullyâbuild using calm tech?
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Integrity with self →
Over time, if you work on developing the power of your word, it will become something you donât question. And then your word will be like a powerful magic spell you can cast anytime you need to make magic happen.
~ Leo Babauta, from Honoring Your Word to Yourself
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This reminds me of Stephen Covey’s comments about putting first things first.
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Back in my day →
I think Iâm doing better work than ever, and it is getting noticed, it just doesnât tip the needle anymore. Iâm not suffering for traffic, but ânewâ traffic is definitely coming from unusual and unpredictable places that are nearly impossible to capitalize on.
~ Brett Terpstra, from Back in my dayâŚ
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The root of the problem is simply that the pendulum swings. Back in my day (me saying that, although the “day” is the same as Terpstra’s) it took a bit of technical chops to really be using the internet. Those with the chops, also tended to build things; not necessarily build from scratch, but at least use the tools others built from scratch to build things. The big thing we all built was the Web. Today, people don’t much use the Web, and precious few still build the Web.
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On depression and meditation →
David Lynch has a variety of notions about what it takes to make art, but suffering is not among them. âThis is part of the myth, I think [âŚ] the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If youâre truly depressed, they say, you canât even get out of bed, let alone create.â
~ Colin Marshall, from David Lynch Explains Why Depression Is the Enemy of Creativityâand Why Meditation Is the Solution
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The cure for depression? My experience is that the only thing that works to avoid depression, in the long run, is meditation.
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Distraction →
The defenders of our freedom have failed to take into account our infinite appetite for distraction.
~ Aldous Huxley
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Will it last? →
[How do you know if something will last or not?] Well, you donât! Thatâs a form of arrogance! I think that if you can somehow tell some kind of truth or at least get to some sense of truth⌠Then it will last. Because then youâve reached some kind of primal understanding of something that will transport you over time. But I donât sit here and say, âIs this going to be great and last?â I donât think so. I just try to make it something that has a sense of something that matters, you know, that makes it of value.
~ Eric Roth, from Eric Roth
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Eric Roth wrote the screenplay for Forrest Gump, an adaptation of the book.
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Lists →
To-do lists tend to be long; Success lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; The other aims you in a specific direction. One is a disorganized directory and the other is an organized directive. If a list isn’t built around success, then that’s not where it takes you. If your to-do list contains everything, then it’s probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.
~ Gary Keller
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Time well spent →
âDagonâ has all the elements of a classic Lovecraft tale. Here, as in many of his later works â including âThe Call of Cthulhuâ (written in 1926), The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927), and At the Mountains of Madness (1931) â optimistic endeavours for knowledge, even the simple act of seeing whatâs on the other side of a hill, are thwarted by incomprehensible terrors and a horrifyingly arbitrary cosmic order. These revelations shatter the minds of Lovecraftâs truth-seeking characters, including doctors, archaeologists, lost sailors, metaphysicians and scientists of all kinds.
~ Sam Woodward, from Terrifying vistas of reality
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Some people must think that reading a bunch of Lovecraftâs work was time I wasted. I loved it. I didnât find it scary (Iâm not sure Iâve ever found any book scary. Movies, on the other hand, can scare the hell out of me.) But I deeply enjoyed Lovecraft⌠and yet I could never quite express why. After reading Woodwardâs thoughts Iâm thinking I enjoyed the experienceâbeing myself one of those âdoctors, archaeologists, lost sailors, metaphysicians and scientists of all kindsââof seeing people like me get the hell scared out of them.
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Converse →
Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.
~ R. W. Emerson
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