Self-awareness

Some ironic distance

September 9, 2022

Finally, when it comes to your own self-opinion, try to have some ironic distance from it. Make yourself aware of its existence and how it operates within you. Come to terms with the fact that you are not as free and autonomous as you like to believe. You do conform to the opinions of the groups you belong to; You do buy products because of subliminal influence; You can be manipulated. Realize as well that you are not as good as the idealized image of your self-opinion.

~ Robert Greene

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Named your fear must be

September 9, 2022

Sometimes, our heads won’t stop thinking about something. Our thoughts will spin around and around, not willing to let go, obsessing. It might be about another person, a big event coming up, or about ourselves. It might be overthinking a decision, big or small.

~ Leo Babauta from, https://zenhabits.net/obsess/

I read this the other day after its being queued for ages. It was eerily apropos of a really bad mood that I was in. Except I read it just after I had deployed Babauta’s “face the fear” strategy that he describes. It definitely works. And for some reason, Yoda’s admonishment that, “named your fear must be, before banish it you can,” sprung to mind.

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A rare repeat

August 30, 2022

Because sometimes I experience small periods of blissful serenity. I’d particularly like to be able to go there on a more regular basis. It seems to me that spending about 10 days doing nothing but meditating in silence would be a delightfully mind-altering experience.

~ Me from, https://constantine.name/2019/08/30/waiting-for-the-next-one/

I’m a process maniac. I have automation that feeds me links to my historical blog posts. This one from three years ago was something I really needed to reread (and was therefore very glad I was given the nudge to do so.)

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The message

August 26, 2022

There are mountains of content. None of it is new. How do we decide what to practice or teach? A message can clarify this. There was a time when I did not have a message. I delivered great content, accumulated from various teachers I’d studied from. The participants had fun, but my lack of messaging left me without answers to questions like, “Why does this much strength (or mobility) matter?” or “Why have you chosen these moves and not those moves?”

~ Kyle Fincham from, https://www.kylefincham.com/post/what-s-your-message

It used to be, that when I read things like this article, I would be launched into deep thinking. It’s nice to know what my message is. It’s nice to know why, specifically, each piece of my menagerie is in my care, why I continue feeding it, and what my hopes for it are. It’s nice. I point this out not in some attempt to jump on my soapbox about how everyone should sort their own menagerie out… no. I’m literally just pointing out that my experience of it is nice.

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That says it all

August 20, 2022

And worse, when something truly significant does happen, it blends in seamlessly with the continuing shitstream that is information in the social media age.

~ Mark Manson from, https://markmanson.net/the-life-cycle-of-outrage

Manson lays it out pretty much as he always does. He’s not swinging a baseball bat; No it’s one of those bats from a zombies movie with nails sticking out of it. But the point is valid none the less.

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Your best

August 11, 2022

To me, quality means doing the best you can with what you have to work with. Your environment. Your equipment. Your voice. Your experience. Your level of comfort. All of those things are part of your overall “working with” toolset.

~ Evo Terra from, https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/making-your-commitment-to-quality-podcasting

This is something I often struggle with. Terra is writing about podcasting specifically—something I spend a lot of time doing—but I have this problem more generally. It would serve me well to be thinking: Is this the best I can do now, with the tools, knowledge, situation, and skills I have now? If so, terrific! That’s great enough.

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Forgetting

July 26, 2022

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

~ Joan Didion

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One reason why I journal

July 16, 2022

When we conjure up what it will be like to start a new practice, form a new habit, knock an item off a bucket list, we see the fun but not the work. We see an image in which all the drudgery has been edited out, and only the montage of rewards left in.

~ Brett McKay from, https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/advice/sunday-firesides-do-you-like-the-idea-more-than-the-reality/

Great points from McKay. I often enjoy inverting problems like the one he’s describing. Let’s say I thought a lot about the idea and the reality and decided far in the past to start something—for example, a daily podcast of me reading quotes. Then the inversion of the problem McKay is writing about would be to figure out, in the present, if my current experience of the reality matches what I expected the reality to be, back when I made the decision. Because, if I don’t do that, how do I get better at making the idea/reality choice McKay is discussing?

This is one reason I journal. For every project (and much more) in the last decade I’ve journaled about it. An idea begins to appear repeatedly in my journal entries. Sometimes it grows into my laying out the expected reality—the work this is going to require, the physical and emotional costs, the expected outcome(s), the rewards, etc.. Then I regularly reread my old journal entries and see how much of an idiot I was. ;)

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Not just organizations

July 5, 2022

When this happens, I’ve found a useful model for understanding what’s going on. I like to ask: is the organization stuck on vision, strategy, or tactics?

~ Jacob Kaplan-Moss from, https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/16/where-is-your-team-stuck/

Just a few years ago, I was lacking vision. At the time, I didn’t understand that was the problem. I had a feeling of diffuse frustration arising from not knowing how to decide what to work on. I’ve always had so many ideas, combined with so many opportunities. I had figured out that I needed to learn to say ‘no, thank you’ to basically everything in order to create the ability to focus on a small number of things; That’s the only way to be effective. I could not figure out how to decide on which things to focus and that led to a downward spiral. It’s taken me years just to convert to an upward spiral, and my recovery continues.

What I’m wondering today, as I write, is whether knowing what I know now about vision, would be useful to my long-ago self. Learning about, and clarifying, vision helped greatly a few years ago. But would it have been useful farther back. Would it have been useful when I was 30? …20? …16?

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Going full circle

July 4, 2022

No matter where your adventure takes you, most of what is truly meaningful is still to be found revolving around the mundane stuff you did before you embarked on your adventure. The stuff that’ll be still be going on long after you and I are both dead, long after our contribution to the world is forgotten.But often, one needs to have that big adventure before truly appreciating this. Going full circle. Exactly.

~ Hugh MacLeod

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Broke my but

June 16, 2022

In my journey writing thousands of blog posts I’ve developed certain habits and a style. There have been a precious few points where I’ve intentionally made a significant change. I used to lead with the URL followed by the pull-quote, before changing to a more normal style of a quote with a following attribution. At one point I started adding slip addresses, and at another point I started reigning in my use of exclamation marks.

Recently I asked one of my mentors, Jesse, for feedback on some copy, and he made a comment about his personal rule to be very intentional about using the word, “but”. I didn’t think I was overusing it, but [oh no!] I often used it as a conjunction— I often used it as a way to connect two sentences to create a point and counter-point structure— Dammit, Jesse. Now I cannot unsee every “but” as a weasel word. You suck. Thanks for making me better.

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12% battery remaining

June 2, 2022

Productivity hacks are fun, but they don’t always produce the greatest returns on your time. If you care about productivity, be sure to invest in your energy levels.

~ Chris Bailey from, https://alifeofproductivity.com/dont-forget-the-basics-of-productivity/

I don’t do productivity “hacks.” I do productivity. My aversion to “hacking” anything runs deep. All of my productivity comes from doing things which return, the way compound interest returns. Whenever I can, I try to do the hard work up front. I am literally trying to pass gifts, (of time, energy, money, sanity,) to my future self.

It’s wise to occasionally erase the whiteboard to see what something could be like if built from scratch. It never ceases to amaze me when absolutely nothing happens nor changes when I entirely stop doing things. I recently removed an entire project—no one has even noticed. I recently was completely unreachable, (by everyone other than my wife,) for four days—no one noticed. If you started from a clean slate today, what would you choose to do?

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Equilibrium

May 17, 2022

After all, you had the amount of body fat and lean body mass that you had because they were the optimal amount to keep you at the optimal temperature given your environment. Then, without changing your environment, you forcefully overrode your body’s attempt to maintain these optimal levels in order to change the level of fat mass you have, and accidently your lean body mass.

~ Brad Pilon from, https://bradpilon.com/muscle-building/weight-training/will-you-lose-weight-and-keep-it-off-if-you-diet/

That first sentence is sublime. As far as I can recall, it’s the sentence which best describes everything I know—from both knowledge and experiene—about controlling one’s body composition. As I wrote previously in, Exercise, “I am the sort of person who…” has been the gateway each time I’ve been able to affect my body composition. Each time it’s been because I’ve changed my behavior or my environment (or both.)

At the beginning of this week, because I am the sort of person who looks ahead for the major goals and hurdles of the coming week, I realized I needed to get two runs in before Friday; I can’t count on running at the end of the week on Friday, Saturday, nor Sunday. (Monday is the first day of the week for me.) I planned to run Tuesday and Thursday. Wednesday night, because I am the sort of person who makes a plan for tomorrow as part of preparing to go to sleep, I realized it was going to be chilly, wet, and drizzling around 7am when I was thinking it would be nice to go for a run. Fortunately, because I am the sort of person who enjoys running in the chill and drizzle the weather forecast didn’t faze me. And Thursday—this morning—, because I am the sort of person who follows through on plans, we were out the door around 7.

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