Much better is to rebuild the skill entirely with a different approach, one that directly addresses your perennial snags. Instead of slowly getting better at your familiar, limited way, you embrace the awkwardness of learning an unfamiliar but stronger method, as though you’ve never done the thing before at all.
In the article Cain mentions spending as much as 10 minutes in reading one page as part of his larger anecdote from which he’s drawing this lesson. Sometimes it takes me a long time to find enough tranquility in my mind just to feel ready to read. I always have so many thing on the to-do and should-do lists. By the time I get enough of the urgent items beat back into the shadows, often, another days has passed with too little reading. I should do something about that…
How does photography, particularly portraiture and movement photography, influence people’s self-perception and their ability to express authenticity?
Movement photography captures authenticity in ways still photography often cannot.
The idea of a portrait is to crack this mask and get into the persona, so I actually have a genuine persona, rather than their predefined version of how they think they should look.
~ Viktor Andersson (12:07)
The conversation focuses on the intersections of photography, movement, and self-expression. Viktor describes how portraiture aims to break through individuals’ preconceived notions of how they appear, to uncover a more authentic representation of their persona. He explores the idea of “masks” people create based on societal and personal expectations, contrasting this with the rawness of movement photography, where authenticity often shines through physical action.
A key theme is the importance of making subjects comfortable, whether in photography or coaching. Techniques such as relatability and creating a safe environment are highlighted as ways to help individuals overcome the discomfort of being photographed or performing challenging movements. Viktor also shares a personal philosophy tying their movement practice to their photography, emphasizing the values of strength and usefulness in their work.
Takeaways
Breaking through masks — A portrait should uncover deeper authenticity beyond the subject’s predefined self-image.
Relatability in photography — Building trust is essential for capturing genuine expressions.
Movement versus stillness — Movement photography often reflects authentic emotions compared to the calculated nature of portraiture.
Overcoming obstacles — Photography parallels Parkour in helping individuals face fears and challenges.
Empowerment through portraits — Subjects can experience transformative shifts in self-perception during photo sessions.
Practicality in art — Photography should not only be aesthetically pleasing but also serve a meaningful purpose.
All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
This one’s for Mike, who’s been waiting very patiently after reading about the first time.
At any golf course there are people known as the greenskeepers. There are different roles, and it’s a massive undertaking. There’s one superintendent who oversees everything, with different people working on specialized tasks. There’s one person—or I suppose a team at a really important course—who is responsible for the pins.
What I tell young people is if you identify your goals, and have the willpower to overcome difficulties—there will always be certain difficulties—and you find the right people to help you, you will be successful.
There are of course some games simply not worth playing. (For example, Global Thermonucler War, which is, “[a] strange game. The only winning move is not to play.“) For most of my life I’ve thought of games as something I first decided to do—”let’s play a game!”—and then sorted out what sort of game—board games, tag, charades, etc.. Even sports games worked this way; “I feel like playing baseball…” and then round up my friends, or “I feel like getting good at baseball and playing a lot…” and then join a league. In all the cases, the game itself was the point.
Then, back around 40 when I was busy rediscovering movement, I realized that one could start by having a goal, or an idea one wanted to explore, and then one could deploy games as the vehicle for accomplishing that. On the one hand, it’s still fun to simply play for play’s sake, but it’s empowering to have fun playing while intentionally accomplishing something of your own choosing.
I already made the case in 2020’s The End of the Beginning that tech history was best understood as consisting not of multiple eras — mainframes, PCs, mobile, etc. — but rather as a multi-decade transformation from a computer-as-destination to computing-as-background.
I love the little aphorism that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic isn’t unreal! You will believe a magic “trick” if the magician is willing to spend more time, money, or both than any sane person would, (to paraphrase Penn Jillette.)
There is no super-natural magic. But today, there is an amazing amount of the real kind of magic. …it’s just not evenly distributed, (to paraphrase William Gibson.)
Any society which is not improving is deteriorating, and the more so the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually king of his company.
If you think of your mind as a library, three things should concern you. […] There is no point having a repository of knowledge in your mind if you can’t find and apply its contents (see multiplicative systems).
Don’t panic it’s not simply a catalog of library metaphors. There are great points about being intentional about what you choose to put into your brain, what your brain is good at doing, the utility and danger—which I humorously typo’d as “dander”—of filters, and more. I’m going to go in a different direction here however: Rather than trying to figure out how to assess the library of my mind, I’ve been trying to more often let people see what it’s doing. As I’ve said many times, this blog itself is a form of me working “with the garage door up.” …and I regularly reread these blog posts myself to make sure the thoughts still look reasonable after some time sitting on the digital shelf.