Quit your yakkin’ and get busy. Quit wasting time obsessing about pimping your ass and checking your stats. Instead, MAKE stuff. Make AMAZING stuff. Make stuff that is so good that people have no choice but to find out about it. Otherwise, you REALLY are just wasting your time. This game is already TOO hard and TOO BIG a time suck to fritter away on what is, for the most part, a big ol’ distraction.
~ Hugh MacLeod
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But if progress is real and important—how do we judge this? How do we justify that improvements to material living standards are good? That technological and industrial progress represents true progress for humanity?
~ Jason Crawford from, Progress, humanism, agency
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In a few dozen words, this article goes from zero to gloves-off, let’s take about the nature of what is good. Yes, please. Lets discuss this more often. I find, without exception, it’s completely pointless to discuss anything—the climate, energy sources, guns, health, rights… choose your favorite third-rail topic—if myself and the other(s) don’t share the same values.
And I mean the big values of philosophy. When I start thinking about what does human autonomy mean? …what rights and/or responsibilities does consciousness confer? …what is truth? Big yawning questions! …when we don’t agree on that stuff, then no wonder we’re at odds on the other things.
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The mode of locomotion should be slow, the slower the better, and be often interrupted by leisurely halts to sit on vantage points and stop at question marks.
~ Carl Sauer
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Nothing you create is ultimately your own, yet all of it is you. Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence, and is not intrinsic to you, rather it is a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.
~ Nick Cave from, Nick Cave on Creativity, the Myth of Originality, and How to Find Your Voice – The Marginalian
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This is a thought which seriously concerns me; What exactly, if anything, am I accomplishing in the totality of my life? In a very micro sense, I’m simply holding back entropy ever so slightly in one minuscule niche of the universe. I like to imagine this is like pushing the cuticles of my finger nails back: Comforting and aesthetically pleasing, but ultimately pointless because my nails continuously grow until they don’t at which point I won’t care any more. I’m not being morbid or pessimistic here. There’s nothing wrong with that micro-scale getting things done. I take comfort in the fact that pushing entropy back a bit is—quiet literally—all that anyone can do.
It’s when I shift to a much larger scale that things look quite rosy. I sleep well at night, (both literally and figuratively,) because I like who I am becoming, and I plan to keep at it. Along the way, a quite large number of people have said the equivalent of “what you did there made my life a little better.” What more could one attempt?
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We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
~ Longfellow
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Experience often deeply embeds the assumptions that need to be questioned in the first place. When you have a lot of experience with something, you don’t notice the things that are new about it. You don’t notice the idiosyncrasies that need to be tweaked. You don’t notice where the gaps are, what’s missing, or what’s not really working.
~ Chris Sacca
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Don’t let ease tempt you. Don’t fall for its false promises. What you gain in ease, you lose in meaning. What you gain in ease, you lose in excellence.
~ Hugh MacLeod from, «https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2022/07/08/follow-the-yellowbri-road-to-greatness/»
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This topic came up today in an outdoor Parkour class. Being outside, training, sweating, and overcoming challenges with friends old and new is always a treat. (“If this isn’t nice…“)
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Never throw mud. You may miss your mark: But you must have dirty hands.
~ Joseph Parker
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It’s the relative appeal of the two paths that determines which one you take. You can equalize these by improving the intended path (making public transit better), obstructing the desire path (making driving worse), or a combination.
~ “Dynomight” from, Things you’re doing but don’t want to be doing
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This article starts with a simple concept and then iteratively goes far into the weeds to see where else it can be applied. I love minds which explore that way. I have so many habits, idiosyncrasies, and ancient brain quirks that it’s a miracle I ever get anything done. Everything figuratively within my reach is wearing down and coming undone, (entropy wins in the end.) I’ll take any opportunity—as this article suggests—to tip things towards my desired path.
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