There are people who build things and people who tear things down. Just remember which side you’re on.
~ Sharon Ann Lee
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Wisdom
Make it meaningful
Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days.
~ Dalai Lama
An old day passes, a new day arrives.
The important thing is to make it meaningful:
A meaningful friend — or a meaningful day.
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Be specific about what you don’t do
Following “via negativa” may seem like a defensive and risk-averse way to live. But by focusing on what you don’t do, you actually put yourself in a position to be more aggressive with life. The man who has never been arrested, doesn’t have debt, and doesn’t have the drama that comes with bad relationships has more opportunities presented to him and more money, energy, and willpower to capitalize on those opportunities when they appear; the man who has gone though life making stupid mistakes, doesn’t. In other words, you’ll never get a chance to work on the “shalls” if your life’s been wrecked by ignoring the “shall nots.”
~ Brett McKay from, http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/01/05/via-negativa-adding-to-your-life-by-subtracting/
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How to be polite
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, https://medium.com/message/how-to-be-polite-for-geeks-86cb784983b1
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Feelings AND actions
Positive thoughts are not enough.
~ unknown
There have to be positive feelings and positive actions.
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Coaches must possess character
One of the great myths in America is that sports build character. They can and they should. Indeed, sports may be the perfect venue in which to build character. But sports don’t build character unless a coach possesses character and intentionally teaches it.
~ Joe Ehrmann from, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Ehrmann
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June 6th, 2014
Today is the 70th anniversary of the landings for the Normandy invasion.
A friend asked rhetorically, “Would I have boarded one of those ratty boats and waited for the door to come down?” I can only imagine that the training and “esprit de corps” would carry the day, because otherwise, attempted as individuals, what they accomplished seems inconceivable.
Unfortunately, those two most horrible wars feel as far away now as to be ancient history. I hope that humankind has subsequently climbed far enough up the moral ladder that we no longer need the visceral feeling of the wars to provide us with guidance.
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Finding meaning in the mundane
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.
~ David Foster Wallace
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It occurs to me that I’ve no idea who gave the commencement address at my graduation. After a bit of digging…
Robert W. Galvin, chairman of Motorola, delivered the main address yesterday to the 1,150 graduates at the 125th commencement of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.
Mr. Galvin received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree.
~ from the May 31st NYT archives listing several school’s commencement addresses.
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The mundane
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.
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OK plateau
And so we get to the so-called “OK Plateau” — the point at which our autopilot of expertise confines us to a sort of comfort zone, where we perform the task in question in efficient enough a way that we cease caring for improvement. We reach this OK Plateau in pursuing just about every goal, from learning to drive to mastering a foreign language to dieting, where after an initial stage of rapid improvement, we find ourselves in that place at once comforting in its good-enoughness and demotivating in its sudden dip in positive reinforcement via palpable betterment.
~ Maria Popova from, http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/17/ok-plateau/
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Compassion
All cruelty springs from weakness.
~ Seneca
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Walk the path
To follow the path:
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.~ unknown
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Fear, anger, suffering
Fear is the path of the Dark Side.
Fear leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering.~ “Yoda“
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Stop pissing people off
5. It’s Not What You Said, It’s What You Didn’t Say
4. You Accidentally Asserted Power Over Them
3. They Think You Owe Them
2. You Wasted Their Time
1. You Assumed That Because You Were OK With a Situation, Everybody Washttp://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-youre-accidentally-making-everyone-hate-you/
Cracked.com is not what I’d call a bastion of insightful commentary. But then, they do occasionally bust out pieces like this, which … well. Uh, yeah, note to self.
But you definitely want to click through to read the why/how/what-for’s on that punch list.
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One’s legacy
Therefore when we build let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such Work as our descendants will thank us for and let us think as we lay Stone on Stone that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them and that men will say as they look upon the labor and the wrought substance of them, ‘See this our fathers did for us.’
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That’s sure has a nice ring to it. We need more people with a rock-solid work ethic, who are self-starters, able to be detail oriented, capable of anticipating problems and acting in advance, and who can think things through. These are things worth striving for.
All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
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The time-sink of video games, the distraction of mindless television, the constant interaction with others (twitter, text messages, etc) without real communication, the seeking of incessant stimulation without actually feeling anything, the inundation with information with no chance for finding knowledge; These things we can do without.
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Fools and fanatics versus the wise
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
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This seemed to be trite commentary until I realized that one could also read it to be actionable instructions: The key to solving big, real world, problems is figuring out when one is being the fool/fanatic versus the wise.
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