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Jellyfish →
Where we are →
That’s where we are as a culture. We run desperately to abstraction and avoid action at all costs. Thoreau’s man of “quiet desperation” has never been so prevalent. The world is full of men who are “stuck” in life. There has been some mass paralysis. Modern man has forgotten how to take action.
~ Kyle Eschenroeder, from 10 Overlooked Truths About Taking Action
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Curious: My self-perception is that I too often charge ahead doing things. By which I mean, I should more often take some time to reflect, think-through, etc. I am frequently way off on a tangent doing something, which from the hind-sight of next year, was clearly not a good expenditure of my efforts.
Curiouser: Others tell me that I spend way too much time figuring out systems and trying to sort-out/plan every little detail of something. When what’s needed is to make a few steps forward.
Curiouser and curiouser: What if both of these ideas are perfectly correct/true?
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90 days out →
Looking ninety days out, you have a good idea of what you can actually get done in that time frame, so your capacity estimations are about right and yet you can make some very substantial progress towards a big goal. It leads to moving faster without compromising strategy – being more agile. Having goals and visions for three or five years down the line is valuable, but it’s often not very helpful to try and plan out concrete steps—there’s just too much that has to get done which feels overwhelming and leads to inaction.
~ Taylor Pearson from, Why Successful People Plan Their Lives 90 Days at a Time
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I certainly find that if I spend a large amount of time planning way far out… that ends up never working out. For this year (2018) I’ve a few “visions” — some big picture things I’d like to work towards, but I’m trying to keep my plans/planning on a smaller scale. Makes it much easier to have daily successes too.
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A lifetime of successful training →
I had to change my expectations of how much I trained because I was in that mindset, the more training, the better. You can’t do more intense training, so now I probably train, if you look at it, still, I train maybe four or five hours per day, but three of those hours or four of those hours are watching video, or reading books, and researching because I can do that without damaging my body or going too far. For me, it’s not saying, “Well, I guess I’ll never be this good. Well, I’m just not going to have the expectation that I can get on the mat and grind it out with the 20-year-olds for five hours a day.” That’s not going to happen.
~ Burton Richardson, from Show Notes
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If you don’t know who Burton Richardson is… uh, think: Direct student of Bruce Lee, and 30 years of training with many of the greatest martial artists in history. Also, zero ego.
This interview with the legendary Burton Richardson is life-changing. My pull-quote does not do this interview justice. This 45-minute interview contains an insane amount of insight into training and practice for the long-haul.
…yeah, how many hours a day do I train?
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Expecting nothing in return →
It’s quite easily forgotten that it’s required that you respect yourself before you’re able to respect another. Because it’s always about respecting the other and getting respect from others. But how often is it the case that we are not respecting ourselves? I’ve been taught quit well that you can only give from your abundance. So if I’ve got 3 coins and somebody asks me to give them four coins I know I don’t have it. I only have three! Let’s say I need two for myself, then I’ve only one in abundance that I can actually share. The same goes for respect. If I don’t respect myself, there’s very little to give to others. If I do give — which most people do, they tend to give respect — it comes with expectations. You will expect something in return because you’re giving although you don’t have it. So you expect something in return because it hurts to give it away like that. You don’t give because of the joy of giving, of sharing. You’re kind of filling the bank with credit, and you think “ok, I want something in return.”
~ Paul Brand, from How to Improve Your Business with Change Management with Paul Brand
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I really do need to work on having respect for myself. My incessant internal monolog of, “Work harder! Work faster! Be better!”, turns out to be a brutal, abusive, destructive task-master.
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Being realistic →
Being realistic is the most common path to mediocrity.
~ Will Smith
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A telescopic view →
It has been a difficult year — politically, personally. Through it all, I have found solace in taking a more telescopic view — not merely on the short human timescale of my own life, looking back on having lived through a Communist dictatorship and having seen poems composed and scientific advances made under such tyrannical circumstances, but on far vaster scales of space and time.
~ Maria Popova, from In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective
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Not sure what it is about this winter, but I’m finding it notably harder to knuckle-down and dig in to prepare for 2018. Normally, the dreary winter months are generally depressing, but it’s the sort of dreary that “cozy up with a good book by the fire (and maybe some good Scotch)” takes care of. But this winter. meh I’ve got a lot of sorting out to do yet for 2018.
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Decisions →
If you want to achieve a goal you’ve set, the most crucial part is to DECIDE to manifest it. It doesn’t matter if you feel it’s outside your control to do so. It doesn’t matter if you can’t yet see how you’ll get from A to B. Most of those resources will come online AFTER you’ve made the decision, not before.
~ Steve Pavlina, from Cause-Effect vs. Intention-Manifestation
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Reaching my goals does NOT happen simply by my wishing for it. However, making a decision and visualizing the goal DOES get me on my way there. The more I believe, the more I push the boundaries, the more I explore while reaching for the vision, and the harder I work… the luckier I get.
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The ideal day →
The ideal day is not one which is completely fixed — neither fixed-the-same every day, nor fixed-the-same week after week. The ideal day is one in which I know my goals at various levels– daily, weekly, yearly. etc.. A day where I feel no worry about making progress, because I know I’m making progress. A day where I am presented with challenges I feel that I have chosen. A day where I get to work on things which are interesting to me, and useful to others. A day where surprises are interesting and add value, (as opposed to causing me to react by feeling stress, panic and existential crises.)
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The King complex →
That’s the reason it’s difficult for many individuals to leave the internet — even for as little as a few hours in the evening, over a weekend, or on vacation. In short, the internet makes us feel like kings. It is the ultimate concierge.
~ Blake Snow, from Why the King Complex Makes the Internet So Hard to Put Down
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I’ve read a lot about how parts of the Internet are designed to hold your attention, how social media services are designed to beaddicting, and how using “game” theories can get everyone to want to interact more, and how all of that leads to a slippery slope. But this idea—thinking of how the Internet caters to your every whim, and why you then drool all over it to get more of that—this is a new twist I’d not seen before.
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