7 for Sunday

7 for Sunday is a weekly serving of 7 things for you to savor. — It’s an email containing my reflections on interesting things I find laying about, seasoned with some quotes from my collection. See https://7forsunday.com/.

Ever-present mental stress

March 7, 2018

Most people have been in some version of this mental stress state so consistently, for so long, that they don’t even know they’re in it. Like gravity, it’s ever present — so much so that those who experience it usually aren’t even aware of the pressure. The only time most of them will realize how much tension they’ve been under is when they get rid of it and notice how different they feel. It’s like the constant buzzing noise in a room you didn’t know was there until it stops.

~ David Allen from, Getting Things Done

slip:4uliwo2.

The key insight for me was once I realized there are two “directions” to thinking: I was always good at vertical thinking, going down thru a project (big or small), planning, organizing and doing. This was simply “thinking”, and how could there be more than one “direction” in which to think?

Unfortunately, I often got stuck when my brain started doing this other direction of thinking for which I had no name; no concept to attach: The horizontal thinking. The hopping from project to project — and I use “project” in the most broad sense of ANY thing involving a goal (“remodel house”, “send holiday cards”), any size (“seven years of projet management and contractors”, “buy stamps, buy cards, stuff, mail” ), and any number of steps. My mind hopped uncontrollably from thing to thing, around and around, across all the open loops, as the same things came up over and over and over.

These days, having a solid capture and review system enables me to close those mental loops. I can often read for a half an hour without my mind once interrupting me with some random, “I need to do this,” or “I need to remember that,” thought. (And if it does interupt me, I simple capture that thought once. Done. Freedom.) In the beginning I used paper notecards, then notebooks, software, and on and on. The exact system does not matter. It only matters that you trust your system. Only when you truly trust your system will your subconscious close all those open loops.

ɕ

Stop aspiring

December 7, 2017

But if aspiring was our true fulcrum, you’d be on your throne already. Here’s the truth: It’s not the heights we aspire to but the FLOOR WE PUT UP WITH that determines our place.

~ Bryan Ward from, Stop Aspiring

slip:4utiai3.

A good friend recently said something to the effect of, “Life is full of compromises which you cannot avoid. So don’t compromise with yourself.”

I find both of these things are very useful for me to keep in mind.

ɕ

The keys to life

October 4, 2017

The keys to life are running and reading. When you’re running, there’s a little person that talks to you and says, “Oh I’m tired. My lung’s about to pop. I’m so hurt. There’s no way I can possibly continue.” You want to quit. If you learn how to defeat that person when you’re running, you will know how to not quit when things get hard in your life. For reading: there have been gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There’s no new problem you could have–with your parents, with school, with a bully. There’s no new problem that someone hasn’t already had and written about it in a book.

~ Will Smith

slip:4a510.

More load on the arch

January 4, 2017

Despite of all this seeming weight, a certain part of ourselves remains unmoored. We don’t lack for tasks, but we do lack meaningful ones. We haven’t made any goals since college. We don’t experience the tension that emerges in “the gap between what one is and what one should become,” because the gap simply doesn’t exist – at a certain point we stopped aiming for anything above paying the bills and checking off to-dos.

We think we want rest and relaxation – the absence of all labor and responsibility – but what we really crave is the presence of meaningful work and interests. We don’t want a complete lack of tension, but a different variety of it.

We don’t need less stress, but more of the right kind.

~ Brett Mckay, from More Load on the Arch

slip:4uaomo1.

This piece is a clear manifesto that coincides with my efforts of the past couple years: “Load the arch intentionally!”

ɕ

Tired of chasing

February 11, 2015

Giving up and moving on are two very different things. There comes a point when you get tired of chasing everyone and trying to fix everything, but it’s not giving up, and it’s not the end. It’s a new beginning. It’s realizing, finally, that you don’t need certain people and things and the drama they bring.

~ Marc Chernoff

slip:4a537.

How to be polite

January 19, 2015

The practice of politeness is a collection of habits of mind and expression you do on a daily basis. You learn to say “thank you” because you are honestly grateful and “I’m sorry” because you honestly don’t want to contribute to the pain of the world. You learn to say “it’s ok” because you’re honestly forgiving and letting go of small things other people do wrong. This practice makes the rate of unproductive and acrimonious conversations go down, and the enemies you make are usually only the unavoidably unpleasant.

~ Quinn Norton, from How to be Polite… for Geeks

slip:4umeme1.

ɕ

Royal road to simplicity

January 12, 2015

No character can be simple unless it is based on truth — unless it is lived in harmony with one’s own conscience and ideals. Simplicity is the pure white light of a life lived from within. It is destroyed by any attempt to live in harmony with public opinion. Public opinion is a conscience owned by a syndicate — where the individual is merely a stockholder. But the individual has a conscience of which he is sole proprietor. Adjusting his life to his own ideals is the royal road to simplicity. Affectation is the confession of inferiority; It is an unnecessary proclamation that one is not living the life he pretends to live.

~ William G. Jordan

slip:4a540.

You don’t have a job, you have a hobby

January 11, 2015

That’s the only test that counts. It’s not how hard you work, it’s what happens if you stop. If quitting means real hardship for you or your family, you have a job. If you keep at it even though you could spend the rest of your life skipping rocks at your house by the lake, you have a hobby.

I’ve got nothing against hobbies. The Weekly Sift is a hobby. One way to describe the Marxist vision of Utopia is that we’d all be hobbyists, and the world’s work would get done by people who just wanted the satisfaction of doing it. (That vision even works sometimes: Wikipedia, open source software, and so on.)

~ Doug Muder from, Rich People Don’t Have Jobs

slip:4uweri1.

ɕ