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.” :/
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?
When people say they don’t want to embrace adulthood, what they really mean is that they don’t want to be a grownup themselves, but they want to live in a world where everyone else is. They want competent, effective politicians to represent them; they want their journalists and doctors to be smart and level-headed with a comforting mantle of gravitas; they want their children’s teachers to be dedicated and on-the-ball; they want customer service to be friendly and efficient; they want police officers to be honest and fair. They want the world to be stable, predictable…so they can afford to be erratic and irresponsible. They want to be kids, but live in an adult world, where grownups are at the ready to take care of their every need.
This was an enjoyable read that brought up a lot of good points. The basic question being explored is why is growing up harder “these days”? Brett spends a lot of time talking about what is different “these days” in society, in culture, in the human experience. It was a breath of fresh air from the more common “kids these days…” sort of screed.
Every day I have a choice between working on pointless little tasks or big meaningful projects. On days that I choose the former, I end each day feeling I’ve accomplished very little, even though I’ve put in a lot of hours at my desk. I’ve kept up, but all I did was spin my wheels for another day. But when I chose to do the important stuff first, I feel great, knowing that I’m on my way to producing major results.
More than 25 years ago, Steven Covey included a simple graph in a book. This task right here– is it important, and is it urgent?
Anything that’s not important, well, good– You just stopped doing that. Gaming, television, most of what you do on the internet, etc. If you’re still doing UN-important stuff… I don’t know what to say.
Now the important stuff is where the hard thinking begins. How important? Does it pay off now, or later? Does is pay off for me, my family (but not me), my family (including me), my tribe, the world . . . well, sorting out all the important stuff is IMPORTANT but not URGENT and so it gets skipped and pushed off. I’m happy to be the bearer of great news: You now know the most important thing to do: Sort out what is important to you.
Shakespeare may seem like an odd match for a group of hardened criminals, but Jack found that they understand the Bard on a level that most of us might not. It’s a play about murder and its consequences, performed by murderers, living out the consequences.
Turns out old Shakes knew what he was writing about.
Also, if you (unless I’m mistaken about how many felons are reading this) think you’ve understood Hamlet– well, *bzzt* oh, so sorry, thank you for playing, we have some nice parting gifts. These guys in prison, they understand Hamlet.
If you want to accelerate your rate of personal growth, work on becoming as honest as possible, both with yourself and others. The more honest you become, the more accurate will be your model of reality. And this will dramatically improve the success rate of your decisions and actions. Overconfidence and underconfidence are equally problematic, so strive for accuracy instead.
Certainly there is a time and place for emotions. (Appropriate emotions of course.) But my experience is that any time my emotions, or my beliefs get a hold of the steering wheel things veer badly. I do much better when I use my brain to think things through, sort wheat from the chaff, and make plans. I’m not sure where I’m going, but I sure know where I came from.
“I should lose weight. Specifically, I should lose some of this fat. …actually, a lot of this fat.”
Since I began my health tracking grids I had been regularly tracking my weight, building the habit of stepping on the scale every day. I’ve read several opinions that this is a bad idea. Because one’s weight can fluctuate significantly day-to-day, daily weighing can lead to “fear of the scale” and stress. I disagree. After stepping on the scale every day for about 10 years, it is now simply something I do. The scale shows me a number and I write it down.
One day I started reading more about physiology. How your body composition changes. How a strength building session increases muscle mass (duh) and that can make your weight increase in the short term. Suddenly, the scale going up can be a good thing.
…and then I wondered, “how much should I optimally weigh?”
At the time I began this “waist/weight ratio project,” I weighed about 230 pounds and the “male, 5 feet 11 inches tall” medical guideline is . . . 175 pounds. What?! I would be ecstatic if I weighted 220. I’m not sure what I would do if I weighed even 215— I’d probably fall down in a stiff breeze.
So how exactly should one “optimize” weight? Why should I select any specific weight target? Why 175 (as medically recommended,) or 220 (college body!). What if my weight isn’t changing as I make healthy improvements– how do I track that? I began to think perhaps I should optimize health markers: Blood sugar regulation, inflammation markers, and triglycerides, and that is far more complicated than “step on the scale.”
Waist-to-weight ratio
One day, I read the following article. It’s deceptively short, but quite complicated and subtle. You should go read this very carefully before continuing.
Suddenly, a decision I hadn’t even been aware I had made – giving up the thrill of movement for movement’s sake – seemed like a terrible mistake. I felt the same as if I had thrown out my entire music collection by accident.
I completely agree with this sentiment. By the time I realized how much I had given up, it was far too late for me to recover what I had lost. These days everyone says complementary things about how much I’ve changed, or how well I’m doing. All I’m thinking is, “if only I hadn’t . . .”