Not to accept your mistakes is to increase them.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Mistakes →
That says it all →
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, The Outrage Cycle
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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 →
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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Desires →
It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.
~ Benjamin Franklin
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Forgetting →
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 →
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/»
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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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Discretion →
If there is any person to whom you feel a dislike, that is the person of whom you ought never to speak.
~ Richard Cecil
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Not just organizations →
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, Are You Stuck On Vision, Strategy, or Tactics? – Jacob Kaplan-Moss
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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 →
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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A self →
But in order to be self-aware, first one needs a self to be aware of. And that takes a while. Often an entire lifetime.
~ Hugh MacLeod
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