Author: Craig Constantine

Kill it. Kill it with fire.

April 21, 2023

It was the briefest slice of light, a telltale shimmer, that revealed you. It glinted up your thread, running down from the ceiling to the lamp sitting incongruous in the middle of an unpacked living room. Did you stow away in that lamp, riding rough in the back of the moving van, those three long evening hours? I hope you did. You deserve this space as much as we do.

~ Peter Welch from, To the Tiny Spider That Came With Us From Brooklyn

slip:4usito1.

I don’t want to say I aspire to write as well as Welch. (I do. Just don’t want to say it.) I stumbled on his stuff pretty late in his writing arc. This piece makes me happy. Go ahead, click, it’s not too long. Perambulate through it. The more you perambulate, the better will be the ending.

…unless you don’t like Welch’s writing. Then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ move along. Nothing to see here.

ɕ

Shoes on your feet

April 19, 2023

A degree on your wall means you’re educated as much as shoes on your feet mean you’re walking. It’s a start, but hardly sufficient. […] Just as you can walk plenty well without shoes, you don’t need to step into a classroom to understand the basic, fundamental reality of nature and of our proper role in it. Begin with awareness and reflection. Not just once, but every single second of every single day.

~ Ryan Holiday

slip:4a1143.

Mwah wah wa wah wah

April 19, 2023

Friends’ mouths vanished. I roamed shops and streets suddenly filled with featureless people, their speech now as indecipherable as that of Charlie Brown’s invisible schoolteacher: wah wah wah wah wah. Whenever I saw the masks and thought of all they had erased, I felt dismay.

~ Rachel Kolb from, How Masking Changed My Experience of Being Deaf

slip:4uteie7.

I read lips quite well thanks to lifelong hearing impairment. When I was intensely working to learn and use French, it took me a while to realize that my subconscious lip reading was causing me trouble. Somehow, someone speaking French caused this subconscious stress from some part of my visual processing brain. I really don’t have words to describe it. I did not realize any of this, until I noticed I had developed a habit of not looking at people when they spoke French.

Obviously, masking affected people who rely to any extent on reading lips. But during our Era of the Masks I’ve been wondering how much the loss of visual information effects everyone. Everyone reads lips. And suddenly you’ve lost that visual comprehension component. Even if it’s subconscious, that’s going to effect us.

ɕ

Jimmy Davidson | Inescapable Fundamentals of Business

April 18, 2023

On Castbox.fm — Jimmy Davidson | Inescapable Fundamentals of Business

What are the challenges and strategies involved in building a successful Parkour-based business?

Identifying a niche and understanding your audience transforms Parkour teaching into a viable business.

If you are trying to sell to everybody, you end up selling to nobody. So you really need to understand what a niche is like, what is the very hyper specific area and group of people and specific avatar that you’re trying to sell to?

~ Jimmy Davidson (3:31)

The conversation explores the challenges of running a Parkour-based business, emphasizing the critical nature of understanding fundamental business principles. Jimmy shares insights about how entrepreneurs often lean on their Parkour experience but struggle to apply it to business challenges. Key topics include the importance of defining a niche, understanding the target audience, and recognizing one’s knowledge gaps.

The discussion also touches on the larger mission of spreading Parkour and the joy of movement to a million people. There is a clear focus on maintaining alignment with this goal while scaling the business and supporting the broader Parkour community. Jimmy acknowledges the tension between pursuing mentorship and staying dedicated to their existing business endeavors.

Takeaways

Understanding fundamental principles — Running a business requires mastering basic skills like sales and identifying a target audience.

Acknowledging unknowns — Entrepreneurs often face challenges because they don’t know what they don’t know.

Defining a niche — Trying to appeal to everyone can dilute the effectiveness of a business.

The role of mentorship — Supporting other entrepreneurs can extend a shared mission without diverging from core goals.

Mission-driven business — A clear purpose, like teaching a million people Parkour, can guide decision-making and strategy.

Resources

Fix This Next — by Mike Michalowicz, on identifying and solving business needs in order of priority.

Freedom in Motion Gyms — Parkour gym business with locations in Southern California.

@jimmydavidsonpk on Instagram, and Jimmy@freedominmotiongym.com

(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)

ɕ

Thank you

April 18, 2023

When someone reveals something that they’re struggling with, or something painful that happened to them, I often find myself saying, “I’m so sorry, thank you for sharing that with me.” Let’s acknowledge that you’ve just said something, that there’s nothing I can say that’s gonna lift that pain. By saying that, you’re focusing the conversation on what they’ve disclosed to you. You can also talk about how you’re talking about it. You can say, “I don’t know what to say right now. But I just want to tell you, I’m really sorry to know that.”

~ Anna Sale

slip:4a1108.

Discipline

April 17, 2023

To create a meaningful work of art or to make a discovery or invention requires great discipline, self-control, and emotional stability. It requires mastering the forms of your field. […] When you look at the exceptionally creative work of Masters, you must not ignore the years of practice, the endless routines, the hours of doubt, and the tenacious overcoming of obstacles these people endured.

~ Robert Greene

slip:4a1142.

Firsthand

April 17, 2023

Everyone is heavily influenced by what they’ve experienced firsthand, because what you’ve experienced is more persuasive than something you read about.

~ Morgan Housel, from Rare Skills

slip:4ucobo5.

That’s one small insight from a bunch in an article nominally about finance. Most of the others also apply to life generally. What’s that old saw from Twain? Something like, “holding a cat by the tail, you’ll learn something through experience that can be learned no other way.” I find it fascinating that, although I’d wager none of you have done that with a cat, we all have a good idea of what we’d learn in the doing.

Related, I once managed—mostly successfully—to wrangle a 6-foot iguana which had horrifically befouled itself, into a warm, steamy shower enclosure, myself remaining outside. It occurred to me to use long oven mitts, to grab from behind, and to keep her oriented so her thrashing tail swung in a plane not including any of me. Through that experience I learned a lot about an iguana’s claws, the true range-of-motion of that body plan’s limbs, and the level of focus and determination she had from millions of years of evolution. We also developed a new relationship: me, wary. Her, indefatigable drive to some day murder my pasty, clawless ass.

ɕ

A form of movement

April 16, 2023

If you do not have a movement practice or access to a good movement teacher, then finding a physical practice that you enjoy and makes you feel empowered is a good place to start.

~ Soisci Porchetta from, «https://www.humanpatterns.net/blog/2018/10/3/why-we-should-all-have-a-form-of-movement-practice»

You already love moving, (or nothing I write is going to convince you.) The only question then is where are you in your journey? Are you in the age of roots, fire, water or air? It’s very important to realize there are going to be major transitions in one’s journey through life. I consider myself typical in that movement played a huge role when I was young. There was a significant period in my 30’s where I lost the plot. I was lucky that I didn’t lose touch with movement for too long. Looking back from 20 years on, I believe that I was trying to hold onto an identity.

At the time, what I was doing was a big part of who I saw myself as. I didn’t understand that who I am, was going to change—is supposed to change! Naive, I denied the feelings which were suggesting I change. As I said, it turns out I was lucky.

As is often the case: No takeaway. Just food for thought.

ɕ

Ridiculous

April 15, 2023

The moral? That there is no greater homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.

“To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: It does not constitute it.”

Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.

~ Alain de Botton

slip:4a1107.

Taking note

April 14, 2023

As it happens, my journalism often requires I read a mountain of material. For any given Wired column, for example, I might read dozens of white papers, reports, and news articles. I’ll also do ten or twelve interviews and transcribe them. When I’m researching a longer feature for a magazine? This number quickly grows to scores of documents, and several dozen interviews. And with a book — like my last one, Coders — we’re talking about literally hundreds and hundreds of documents (books, papers, etc) and several hundred transcribed interviews.

~ Clive Thompson from, How I Take Notes When I’m Doing Research

slip:4umeho1.

I love when people take the time to explain some of the effort which goes into writing, then writing well, writing articles well, and writing books well. I’m still on level, “writing” and knowing what goes into writing well (let alone writing articles or books well) keeps me from developing any delusions of grandeur. I read Thompson’s article (which I hope you can read on Medium if you wish to click through) and I loved it. That’s enough to make the reading worth doing. Being able to quote, share, reflect and sometimes integrate what I’ve read? Priceless.

Also: Thank you for reading. I don’t take your attention for granted. :^)

ɕ

Sometimes I weep

April 12, 2023

What focus means is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else.

~ Jonny Ive from, The Ultimate Productivity Hack is Focus

slip:4ufofo2.

I have a lot of ideas. (Perhaps your experience is similar?) For most of my life I thought all of my ideas where good ones. Sure, there were some insane bicycle accidents and spectacular snow-tubing disasters, but in the minutes following an incident, I still thought it was a good idea. Poorly planned, poorly executed, or both, sure. But life seemed to be an endless parade of good ideas each affording an opportunity to grab life by the choose-your-own-metaphor. In hindsight, I think it was all simply poor—or, if I’m honest, a complete absence of—impulse control.

In recent years it has become apparent my time on Earth is limited. (Perhaps your experience is similar?) These days that stream of ideas continues. What if I installed a motion-activated auto-targeting water sprinkler filled with Capsaicin-laced water to keep the squirrels away? (Yes, really.) …and okay, well, the ideas don’t all seem like good ideas anymore. Fine. I’m cool with having limited time, limited resources, and possibly some added social awareness.

But every once in a while, I have an idea which is blindingly awesome. Even if I have one such idea only once in a while, that still means I have more than I can try, and then I have to choose. I have to choose some, and say no to others.

ɕ

Jesse Danger | Embrace Challenge

April 11, 2023

On Castbox.fm — Jesse Danger | Embrace Challenge

What insights can be gained from using diverse learning models to create thriving environments in physical and social practices?

The conversation explores the transformation of complex teaching philosophies into accessible frameworks.

The mental model is a framework to say that we’re diverse learners, and we want to create spaces where people of all different learning abilities can thrive.

~ Jesse Danger (3:45)

The conversation emphasizes the importance of creating learning environments that accommodate a range of mental, physical, and social dynamics. It explores frameworks that simplify complex teaching philosophies into practical approaches, making concepts more accessible. One key topic is the shift from long, unresolved discussions to concise, impactful interactions, demonstrating how frameworks can bridge gaps in understanding.

Another focus is on how specific mental models allow educators to engage diverse learners effectively. These models divide learning into quadrants based on complexity and directionality, supporting both structured drills and open-ended exploration. Participants reflect on how these strategies foster personal and group growth, ensuring inclusivity and clarity in coaching practices.

Takeaways

Frameworks for teaching — Simplifying complex ideas into models enhances understanding.

Diverse learning styles — Acknowledging varied learner needs creates inclusive environments.

Quadrants of learning — Balancing simplicity, complexity, and directionality enriches education.

Communication challenges — Articulating ideas clearly bridges gaps in understanding.

Empowering participants — Involving learners in model creation increases engagement.

Resources

The Movement Creative — Organization behind the discussed book and learning frameworks.

jesse@themovementcreative.com

(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)

ɕ