Not to accept your mistakes is to increase them.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Author: Craig Constantine
Having a practice
What does it mean – “having a practice”? It is a very vague definition that can be used in many ways and can mean many things. As well as it can mean nothing at all, just referring to smoke and mirrors. The straightforward notion of “practice” in itself entails being involved in a process, repeatedly engaging in an activity with the end goal of achieving mastery in something. It can be both an empty description of a habit or it can be a phenomenon that fills human life with meaning.
~ Anna Bezuglova from, The Bamboo Body – Blog – Movement Practice Barcelona
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I’ve often mentioned the power of asking movement enthusiasts for, “three words to describe your practice?” The power of my question comes both from the difficulty in summarizing and from the difficulty in describing one’s practice. And yes, I’ve made a note to see if I can get around to talking with Bezuglova on the Movers Mindset podcast.
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Capability
Every person has within himself the capability to understand the life of all humanity. This capability is hidden deep in the soul, but it exists, and sooner or later, a person will find it.
~ Edward Carpenter
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Variance
However—fourth—over the last century there’s a huge relationship between how rich a country is and the variance in growth. The richest countries have low variance: They all stubbornly keep growing at around the same 1 or 2%. However, middle-income countries vary enormously.
~ “Dynomight” from, Do economies tend to converge or diverge?
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There’s several different interesting threads in this article. But this point about variance leapt out at me. I’m reminded of how just the other day, a piece about statistics that I mentioned was talking about variance (if you clicked through and read the article.) Variance feels like a sort of second-order thinking that I probably should be doing more often.
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Trust yourself and promise
What we seek out is someone who sees us and consistently keeps their promises to bring us the magic we were hoping for. Someone who has committed to rhyming with what they did yesterday. When you trust yourself enough to turn pro, You’re entering into a covenant with those you seek to serve. You promise to design with intention, and they agree to engage with the work you promised to bring them.
~ Seth Godin
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Creepy
Motility, and in particular directed motility, is decisively important for host colonization, as bacteria deliberately seek to colonize an organism and conquer all niches.
~ Ludwig Maximilian from, How stress hormones guide bacteria in their host
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*shudders* The article is about stress hormones in people, and research into how bacteria are (not “may be”) using our hormones to signal when they (the bacteria, *shudder* again) should go on the offensive and move. I don’t have anything to add. This just struck me as creepy.
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Virtue and vice
When the intellect becomes the slave of vices and passions, the supporter of lies, it becomes not only a perversion, but an illness, and we cannot see the difference between truth and falsehood, good and evil, virtue and vice.
~ William Ellery Channing
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That says it all
And worse, when something truly significant does happen, it blends in seamlessly with the continuing shitstream that is information in the social media age.
~ Mark Manson from, The Outrage Cycle
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Manson lays it out pretty much as he always does. He’s not swinging a baseball bat; No it’s one of those bats from a zombies movie with nails sticking out of it. But the point is valid none the less.
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Expanding our understanding
The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns us, “when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearances, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasure, torture-chambers or skeletons.”
~ Alain de Botton
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Physical or digital?
In the past couple weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not to keep my slipbox physical or if I should switch to a digital system. There are specific reasons for having it be physical:
- Physical “viewing” is vastly better. I can do countless things with markings, colored sticky notes, standing cards up/on-angles, pulling cards out and spreading them on my desk, it’s faster to make a few marks on paper than it is on digital. Some of that can be done with vastly complicated systems (always a bad idea to build those), but physical is simply better.
- The small size of each paper slip (I’m using 3″x5″ cards) is a feature. Any digital system is going to let me put way too much on each digital slip. There’s value gained by forcing myself to think about just what to put on a slip.
- It’s not digital. Any time I have to use a digital device, I’m that much closer to the things which cause me problems. Any time I can avoid digital systems, that’s a Good Thing™.
I knew all that when I started. That’s why I created a physical slipbox. But lately, the following things have become a problem, and led me to reconsider going fully digital:
- I have a fairly small collection of things I refer to that I want to be able to find quickly when I have computers handy. Where’s that awesome grammar and punctuation site that I love? What’s that odd–ball command to do that thing I have to do only rarely? It’s all stuff that I could figure out again by searching the Internet, but if I just had a little digital note, I’d be moving forward again in an instant. For this type of lookup, the computer is faster than the physical slipbox.
- Sometimes I really do want to put a lot of content “on” one slip. For example, I have these fairly large digital files of research on people that I’d like to be able to connect to people who are in the slipbox. If I’m working with the slipbox, and I find Jane Doe, then I want to know that I have a digital file for that person.
- For those larger digital files, I want to be able to write a URL which instantly takes me to viewing them.
It’s that last item which is really a big deal for me. To solve those three issues I was considering changing the entire slipbox to be digital (and giving up all the other positives of a physical slipbox.)
Fortunately, I kept thinking, reading and experimenting and I figured out I can have both worlds.
I eventually realized that I already have really large “slips” in the slipbox. I already have a collection of digital books, essays, and articles that are in PDF format. For those digital files, their corresponding physical slip has a doodle (it looks like a piece of paper with one corner turned down) that reminds me there’s also a digital file. All of those files are currently “on” slips below the “2” address in the slipbox. (e.g.: The “2tu3” slip has a digital file doodle, and there’s a “2tu3 – Whatever the Title Is.pdf” file.)
For my item 2 above (big digital files of research on people) I just do the same thing for those people. “Jane Doe” would already be on slip “4c1do” (which is a listing of “Doe”, “Donatta”, “Droge”, etc.) I can simply toss in a slip “4c2do1” with a digital-file mark (and name the digital file “4c2do1 – Jane Doe”.) The next person on “4c2do” who needs a digital file gets to be “4c1do2”, and so on.
For item 1 in my list, there’s no reason I can’t have a bunch of files where I keep little “remember this” notes. So I added physical slip “4c3”, and then every slip that might ever go under that address is a digital file. For example, my grammar web site is on “4c3wi1a”. But I never have to know or remember that. I just search for “grammar” and I land on that digital file.
It was item 3 from my list that had me stumped until I remembered Obsidian!
I simply have a folder full of folders and text files in the same organizational structure as my physical slipbox. Where I once had a bunch of digital books, essays, and articles tossed in one folder; those are now all stored under “2”. And there’s a now a “4” folder, with a “4c1” for people’s digital files, and a “4c3” for those “remember this” items. Back over in the physical slipbox, any slip that has a digital-file mark, I’ll find the digital file in the parallel universe of this tree of folders.
Finally, I pointed Obsidian at the outermost folder. Voila! For anything in this tree of folders, in the Obsidian app I can click “copy Obsidian URL…” and I get a URL like this one which I paste anywhere I want:
obsidian://open?vault=Craig's%20Slipbox&file=2%2F2i%2F2io1%20-%20Inconsistent%20yet%20persistentI have the Obsidian app installed on all my devices. Any time I try to navigate to an obsidian:// method URL, it open the app, and Obsidian opens that file.
Physical? Digital? I can’t choose… How about: Mostly physical, but digital when it needs to be? Nice.
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The causes of evil
Look for the causes of the evil from which you suffer in yourself. Sometimes this evil is the direct consequence of your activity; Sometimes it happens after a lengthy period of transformation of an evil which you committed long ago. But the source is always in you, and salvation from it lies in changes in your actions, your way of life.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Or not
There’s no getting ahead with your podcast. There’s only adjusting your calendar and developing the discipline to keep separation between your production schedule and your publishing calendar.
~ Evo Terra from, «https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/why-youll-never-get-ahead-with-your-podcast»
Terra is laying out the eternal struggle which everyone who takes up podcasting soon discovers: You are beholden to the publication schedule. I mean, sure, you get to set your own schedule, right? …but then you…
Wait, why is that again? You know you can just publish whenever you feel like it. That’s what I do and hundreds of published conversations later across multiple different shows… literally no one ever has asked me when the next episode will be out. Nor why I don’t publish on a schedule. Maybe they’re all just ignoring me, or think I’m a weird podcaster. But know what I definitely am not? …beholden to a schedule.
Instead I can do what I want to do (have great conversations) when I am able to arrange that. And then I publish them. *mic drop*
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A burden
I have a burden on my soul. During all my long life, I did not make anyone happy, neither my friends, nor my family, nor even myself. I have done many evil things. […] I was the cause of the beginning of three big wars. About 800,000 people were killed because of me on the battlefields, and their mothers, brothers, and widows cried for them. And now this stands between me and god.
~ Otto von Bismarck
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Tasty numbers
For five years as a data analyst, I forecasted and analyzed Google’s revenue. For six years as a data visualization specialist, I’ve helped clients and colleagues discover new features of the data they know best. Time and time again, I’ve found that by being more specific about what’s important to us and embracing the complexity in our data, we can discover new features in that data. These features can lead us to ask better data-driven questions that change how we analyze our data, the parameters we choose for our models, our scientific processes, or our business strategies.
~ Zan Armstrong from, Stop aggregating away the signal in your data – Stack Overflow
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This one just has neat graphs in it. And it has some interesting insights about what data analysts do. The phrase “big data” has been tossed around a lot in recent years—the way “quantum mechanics” gets tossed around by people who have no idea about that either. This article isn’t about truly big data sets, but it’s a neat dive into energy usage as an example of some spiffy data analysis.
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Knowledge
The title “scholar” suggests that a person has gone to school, and that he studied, but it does not mean that he has acquired any truly important knowledge.
~ George Lichtenberg
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What would make it amazing?
This process starts with identifying the things you want in your day, as if you were curating a small but thoughtful collection. What handful of things would make your day amazing?
~ Leo Babauta from, 5 Ways to Simplify Your Life – Zen Habits Website
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Sometimes I’ve not the least interest, let alone hope, of getting to “amazing.” Sometimes my days are all spiders, paper-cuts, stubbed toes, and sepsis. And then I think: well, actually, what would it take to get to “amazing?” The answer is invariably two-fold: I would need to cut loose from something-or-other, and doing that would burn a bridge, (money, relationships, etc.) Then I waiver. Usually, I decide not to strike the match. But sometimes… I just want to strike the match and watch my world burn.
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Reward for virtue
The reward for virtue is the understanding of the good deed.
~ Cicero
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Better choices
And Stoicism, it could be said, is a philosophy about how to make better choices. This is what we see in a book like Meditations. We see Marcus Aurelius journaling, working to get better at choosing. Choosing the right things to value, the right things to think, the right things to focus on, the right response to a difficult situation.
~ Ryan Holiday from, Life Is Up To You: 8 Choices That Will Make Your Life Better – RyanHoliday.net
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One of the first things you learn about philosophy is that the word means “the love of truth.” It’s the sort of clever thing a much younger version of myself would have bludgeoned others with. “See me study philosophy!” I long ago learned to set aside such cleverness.
Fortunately I learned that philosophy—at least, the sort I’m interested in—is about self-improvement. The proof of my work shows in myself… in my actions and the way I think, and is noticeable to those who care to pay attention. (I’m not suggesting that everyone should pay attention to me.) Surprisingly, at the deeper level of self-improvement, reminding myself that “philosophy” means “the love of truth”, has returned to being a great thing to trot out regularly… as a reminder to myself.
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Ignorance
A precondition of becoming knowledgeable may be a resignation to, and accommodation with, the extent of one’s ignorance, an accommodation which requires a sense that this ignorance need not be permanent, or indeed need not be taken personally, as a reflection of one’s inherent capacities.
~ Alain De Botton
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Rumblings from the slipbox
I hear a rumbling sound coming from my slipbox. It’s a rumbling sound like that of a distant summer thunderstorm, after dark. It’s the sound of a giant, grumbling in the next valley over. It works fine. I’ve simply had an idea for something that I can only do, if the slipbox were digital. I’m tinkering with some tools to see how exactly I want to set things up if I switch to digital. Interesting times!
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