If you’re a pole vaulter, you need a long runway to pick up the speed required to plant the pole and flip over the bar. Odds are you are not a pole vaulter. You don’t need a runway of context, justification, and general flim-flam to be curious. It’s not really about you. Save everyone the time, and just ask the question.
~ Michael Bungay Stanier
slip:4a1144.
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.
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A coward flees backward, away from new things. A man of courage flees forward, in the midst of new things.
~ Jacques Maritain
slip:4a1109.
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.
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.
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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.)
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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.
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.
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.
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Reading time: About 6 minutes, 1100 words
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