Recovery is key →

Published June 10, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 10  ·  

Not only do most deliberate practitioners not spend all day at it, they also devote a lot of time to recuperation and recovery. They sleep as much as their bodies need. They nap if necessary. They take frequent, refreshing breaks. Most of us understand that rest is necessary after physical activity. But we can underestimate its importance after mental activity, too. Deliberate practice needs to be sustainable for the long term. How long a person keeps at a skill is often far more important than how many hours a day they spend on it.

~ Shane Parrish from, The Ultimate Deliberate Practice Guide: How to Be the Best

I’m going to trot out a rare: HOLY CRAP! Because that post is a small book on deliberate practice. If you’re only up for some skimming, click through and smash-scroll to the summary and book list at the bottom of that post.

Then I’m going to briefly stride over one of my fave soap boxes: Sleep.

…and settle onto pointing out that I make a deliberate practice out of working on writing these blog posts. I’ve been working, (off-and-on, one break involved some lawn mowing,) for four hours this morning from that one Parrish post. I’ve read it, blogged [this] about it, posted about it in another community, captured a few quotes, learned more about the Oddyssey, and wrote a blog post about a common Homer quote.

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Sometimes I look stuff up →

Published June 9, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 9  ·  

Have you seen this quote?

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.

~ Homer

Honestly, that’s pretty sharp! There’s good wisdom about a few things packed in there: Picking your battles, perhaps; Knowing the seasons of things, the ages of Man and so forth; Setting managable goals or not tackling more than you can do in a day. That Homer guy with the wisdom!

Until you look it up, and it turns out to be just a throwaway phrase in a transition. Here, read the full paragraphs, XI.35-6 from the Oddyssey:

And Alcinous answered him, saying: ‘Odysseus, in no wise do we deem thee, we that look on thee, to be a knave or a cheat, even as the dark earth rears many such broadcast, fashioning lies whence none can even see his way therein. But beauty crowns thy words, and wisdom is within thee; and thy tale, as when a minstrel sings, thou hast told with skill, the weary woes of all the Argives and of thine own self. But come, declare me this and plainly tell it all. Didst thou see any of thy godlike company who went up at the same time with thee to Ilios and there met their doom? Behold, the night is of great length, unspeakable, and the time for sleep in the hall is not yet; tell me therefore of those wondrous deeds. I could abide even till the bright dawn, so long as thou couldst endure to rehearse me these woes of thine in the hall.’ (35)

And Odysseus of many counsels answered him, saying: ‘My lord Alcinous, most notable of all the people, there is a time for many words and there is a time for sleep. But if thou art eager still to listen, I would not for my part grudge to tell thee of other things more pitiful still, even the woes of my comrades, those that perished afterward, for they had escaped with their lives from the dread warcry of the Trojans, but perished in returning by the will of an evil woman. (36)

~ Homer

It’s basically, “sure bro’, if you’re up for it, I’m game to stay up and tell you the story of . . .”

Question: Is the quote at the top better, or worse now that you know what Homer actually wrote? (Yes, fine, he was actually writing in ancient Greek, but my point stands.)

It’s a cliché that our favorite quotes say more about us, then they do about who we’re quoting. (Left unconsidered is what it says about me if I collect thousands of quotes.) But that cliché is the entire point of being intentionally reflective: I’m searching out new things, (quotes in this discussion,) and I’m thinking about what they might mean; What the original author or speaker might have meant; How that meaning might change over time from original source to my time, and how it might change for me during my life.

See? There is a time for many words, and a time for sleep!

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The mind is a fortress →

Published June 8, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 8  ·  ,

Remember that when it withdraws into itself and finds contentment there, the mind is invulnerable. It does nothing against its will, even if its resistance is irrational. And if its judgement is deliberate and grounded in logic…? The mind without passions is a fortress. No place is more secure. Once we take refuge there we are safe forever. Not to see this is ignorance. To See it and not seek safety means misery.

~ Marcus Aurelius

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Parkour and I, six years ago →

Published June 7, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 7

It’s endlessly rewarding to regularly read through my old journals. Six years ago, June 5 2015, I can now see was a turning point for me. I hopped in a car with John G. and Nick R. and headed to Brooklyn for what would be a life-changing experience.

I had been jumping on stuff pretty seriously for a few years, and the “USA Motion Tour”—a merry band of a few Yamakasi—was rolling into New York City. Two people, now good friends of mine after many years, hosted me on their floor. That was my first true “parkour floor” experience; two square meters to sleep, wifi and a bathroom. I trained my heart out, in a good way, and it was a gateway to countless and continuing adventures.

To everyone who was there— I cannot thank you enough. On commence ensemble, on finit ensemble.

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Foucault’s Pendulum →

Published June 6, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 6

Over on the Astronomy Stack Exchange site, (obviously I follow the “new questions” feed in my RSS reader,) someone asked if it was possible, without knowing the date, to determine one’s latitude only by observing the sun. These are the sorts of random questions that grab me by the lapels and shake me until an idea falls out.

So my first thought was: Well if you’re in the arctic or antarctic polar circles you could get a good idea… when you don’t see the sun for a few days. Also, COLD. But that feels like cheating and doesn’t give a specific value. Which left me with this vague feeling that it would take me several months of observations. I could measure the highest position of the sun over the passing days and months and figure out what season I was in…

…wait, actually, I should be able to use knowledge of the Coriolis Force—our old friend that makes water circle drains different in the northern and southern hemispheres, and is the reason that computers [people who compute] were first tasked with complex trigonometry problems when early artillery missed its targets because ballistics “appear” to curve to do this mysterious force because actually the ground rotates . . . where was I?

Coriolis Force, right. But wait! I don’t need the sun at all! All I need is a Foucault Pendulum and some trigonometry… Here I went to Wikipedia and looked it up—which saved me the I’m-afraid-to-actually-try-it hours of trying to derive it in spherical trig… anyway. A Foucault Pendulum exhibits rotation of the plane of the pendulum’s swing. Museums have these multi-story pendulums where the hanging weight knocks over little dominos as it rotates around. Cut to the chase: You only need to be able to estimate the sine function, and enough hours to measure the rotation rate of the swing-plane and you have it all; northern versus southern hemisphere and latitude.

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Fries →

Published June 5, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 5  ·  

Giving the public what the public supposedly wants is like asking your kids what they want for dinner and they say, “oh, we want fries.”

~ Francis Ford Coppola

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Culture →

Published June 4, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 4

The Halo Effect tells us that we will find a lot of false positives. The attributes we think are causal of success are the same ones we often deem causal of failure when company performance deteriorates. This is the strategy paradox.

~ Shane Parrish from, Culture Eats Strategy: Nucor’s Ken Iverson on Building a Different Kind of Company

It’s an interesting post about culture. I’m interested in Iverson’s memoir— But to be honest, I don’t have time enough as it is to read the shelves of books already in my possession. (Let alone the hundred in the “wishlist” queue.) So ima let this one pass.

But culture does interest me. I’m apparently an inveterate systems builder. For better, but often for worse, I’m drawn to build processes and communities. Once— just once— I’d like to see something I create grow on its own. Not, “…and make me rich” nor “…and make me famous.” Just simply grow on its own. A great idea is not enough. Skill and knowledge are not enough. Timing is not enough. Vision and charisma are not enough. There’s something ineffable—because if I could describe it I’d go do it rather than write rambling blog posts casting about for something I think, despite my efforts to look around, is always just out of my field of view… There is something ineffable which I am missing.

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Where’s the cake? →

Published June 3, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 3

Forty years ago, we had cake and asked for icing on top of it. Today, all we have left is the icing, and we’ve forgotten that the cake was ever there. If code isn’t licensed as “free,” you’d best leave it alone.

~ Cory Doctorow from, Cory Doctorow: IP

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This is a sweeping tour of software, and licenses and litigation and … well, it’s a sweeping tour of 40 years as software evolved into what people made of it. Humans move at human speeds. The best of us type north of a 100-words-per-minute, and we’re writing code that actually writes lower code that writes… about 5 layers deep. And day after day we invent new things and new ways to combine those things. We imagine great things and build great things and some of us imagine stupid shit and try to take advantage of others. But most of us just follow our “hey, that’s interesting…”

What’s going to happen in 40 years?

Hah, you thought I was going to end, as usual, on a question. No, I want to say clearly: I have not idea what’s going to happen in 40 years. I know that 30 years ago, I had not the slightest, tiniest, sliver, of an inkling of a clue what any of what we were scotch-taping together would become. A whole bunch of people, whom I had/continue-to-have, the distinct pleasure of exchanging ideas with… Well there’s a whole bunch of people building cool stuff, solving hard problems, and just generally moving the human race forward. Pretty durn happy to be tinkering away in my little corner of The Bazaar.

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Embracing the obstacles →

Published June 2, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 2  ·  ,

External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now. If the problem is something in your own character, who’s stopping you from setting your mind straight? And if it’s that you’re not doing something you think you should be, why not just do it? —But here are insuperable obstacles. Then it’s not a problem. The cause of your inaction lies outside you. —But how can I go on living with that undone? Then depart, with a good conscience, as if you’d done it, embracing the obstacles too.

~ Marcus Aurelius, 8.47

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The unimaginable future →

Published June 1, 2021  ·  All posts on Jun 1

It’s an idiosyncrasy to which we are dedicated. It’s nerdy fun, but it has a serious point, too. As our co-founder Stewart Brand points out: the present moment used to be the unimaginable future.

~ Mikl Em from, Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home

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I’ll do the nerd stuff first: They take the leading zero in their representation of years so far, they’ve even figured out how to get it into their WordPress blog URLs. No, I’m not doing that. Yes, I am a supporting-member of The Long Now Foundation. And yes, of course I am on the waiting list to visit the clock they’re well-into constructing—in west Texas, I think it is?

I could easily wax obnoxious for a few thousand words rattling off a few things which are today blasé for me. But instead, I’d like you to hit reply and tell me: What’s something your primary-school-aged self would be astounded to learn about you?

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