Creating anything of consequence or magnitude requires deliberate, incremental and consistent work. At the beginning, these efforts might not look like they are amounting to much. But with time, they accumulate and then compound on each other. Whether it’s a book or a business or an anthill or a stalagmite, from humble beginnings come impressive outcomes.
~ Ryan Holiday
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Creating anything of consequence or magnitude requires deliberate, incremental and consistent work. At the beginning, these efforts might not look like they are amounting to much. But with time, they accumulate and then compound on each other. Whether it’s a book or a business or an anthill or a stalagmite, from humble beginnings come impressive outcomes.
~ Ryan Holiday
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Sometimes I manage to remember that lesson.
…usually that my remembering happens during my morning routine. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but: I regularly read things which spur the sorts of thinking I’d like to do more of; I spend time writing in, and re-reading, my journals; time reading good-old printed-on-dead-trees books; time thinking about how to create some thing I’m building; lots of thinking and jotting in outlines.
Things take me vastly more time and work than it appears from the outside.
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One of life’s great lessons lies in knowing how to refuse, and it is even more important to refuse yourself, both to business and to others. There are certain inessential activities—moths of precious time—and it is worse to busy yourself with the trivial than to do nothing. To be prudent, it isn’t enough not to meddle in other people’s business: You must also keep them from meddling in yours. Don’t belong so much to others that you stop belonging to yourself.
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Your education shouldn’t end when your schooling does. If you want to get an edge in life, you must be constantly learning, not coasting along on what you already know. Lifelong learning requires the ability to reflect on your mistakes, a lot of reading, and testing what you know.
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Your education shouldn’t end when your schooling does. If you want to get an edge in life, you must be constantly learning, not coasting along on what you already know. Lifelong learning requires the ability to reflect on your mistakes, a lot of reading, and testing what you know.
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That quote from, https://fs.blog/2015/11/lifelong-learning/ , is one of the too-rare times when, upon reading something, I want to leap to my feet knocking my chair over behind me while shouting, “Hear! Hear!”
It’s true that there is some learning which I prefer to observe, rather than directly experience. In such cases “conceptual” learning, rather than experiential learning, is just fine by me. (eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYtF0UlznC8 )
In general however, ain’t nothing finer than reading something, making a new connection, writing a blog post about that… or spending weeks figuring out how to bend some javascript-DOM-AJAX thing to do what I want… digging in the innards of an automobile to make a new stereo-unit work… digesting some tome from the anti-library… running a year-plus experiment just to see what happens… just generally being all like, “I’m wondering . . .” And then find out where that curiosity leads.
What’ve you been up to in the learning department lately?
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Of course, Odysseus isn’t unique. He is us. He’s the human condition in a nutshell. As Blaise Pascal put it, “all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room.” Because we cannot be happy, because we can’t just be, we waste years of our life.
~ Ryan Holiday from, Can You Be Still?
Holiday puts forward an interesting theory, (and, in my opinion a correct one,) that Odysseus is a tragic figure. Odysseus is doomed by his inability to see his own fatal flaw.
Given that I can be tenacious when tenacity seems needed… Enduring when endurance seems needed… Focused… I’ve been wondering: Can I be still? Quiescent? Tranquil, even, when those would be appropriate?
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Remember: You shouldn’t be surprised that a fig tree produces figs, nor the world what it produces. A good doctor isn’t surprised when his patients have fevers, or a helmsman when the wind blows against him.
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At a 2.3% growth rate in energy, within 1000 years, assuming all energy is consumed on Earth, the temperature of Earth’s surface will have to become equal to Sun’s surface temperature.
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Wait. wat?
It’s often really helpful to look at things from a different perspective. (Granted, “from the surface of the sun,” is not a perspective I would like to see from.) This little article is a fun read. It’s got a bunch of small, clear statements, some vertiginous graphs, a few videos—which, mind you, I didn’t look at all… caveat emptor there. Reading it would be like playing hopscotch where someone hid an alligator in the last square. As the Talking Heads put it, “Well? How did I get here? (chorus) Letting the days go by!”
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What we need is something sustainable. Something balanced. Something deliberate without being forced. Purposeful without being obsessed with productivity. We need something like a great Saturday—or one of those Mondays where you’re not sure if it’s part of a three-day weekend, resulting in just enough work that it’s productive, but not so much that it’s a chore.
~ Ryan Holiday from, You Could Have Today. Instead You Choose Tomorrow.
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Sustainable. Yeah, I’ve no idea what that means.
It occurs to me to make a note to have, “…but holy crap did he get a lot done!” put on my tombstone.
And I’m instantly reminded of my favorite de-motivational poster: “It could be that the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.”
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There is no forest, there is no cave, there is no mountaintop where one can hide from oneself.
~ Wu Hsin
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