That’s how I got mitochondria.
~ Randall Munroe, from Stromatolites
No one asked me, but if I was asked to summarize Munroe’s work I’d say: He’s mastered the art of finding insight by shifting the scale. Why is that hard? Why is that helpful? Why is that great? Because to it at the mastery level (as Munroe does) requires one to have integrated a lot of knowledge. A lot.
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A well-composed song strikes the mind and softens the feelings, and produces a greater effect than a moral work, which convinces our reason, but does not warm our feelings, nor effect the slightest alteration in our habits.
~ Napoleon
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My blog has an enormous amount of photography. There are over 2,000 images posted, and while many are simply me saving typing a thousand words, many of them are gorgeous. I’ve cherry-picked the best of them into a Featured Photography page.
…actually, since I’m me, I set up some code that creates pages of images arranged into gallery-carousels, and I have only to tag the images behind-the-scenes rather than manually edit them into the page. I digress.
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Writing itself makes you realize where there are holes in things. I’m never sure what I think until I see what I write. And so I believe that, even though you’re an optimist, the analysis part of you kicks in when you sit down to construct a story or a paragraph or a sentence. You think, ‘Oh, that can’t be right.’ And you have to go back, and you have to rethink it all.
~ Carol Loomis
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What if, instead, we could be flexible and travel through life lightly, flowing with changes?
~ David Cain from, Staying Light & Flexible While Traveling
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You should interpret that sentence both in the physically traveling without too much physical stuff, and in the sense of traveling without too much mental baggage.
Traveling lightly—both without physical stuff and without mental baggage—will serve you well. Over the years, I’ve tried to explain my thinking around these points via blog posts: One series on physical practicalities and tips is, Travel Gear. And, another series about the mindset of traveling is called, Parkour Travel.
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SILENCE — “Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
Everything you do is initiated by triggers. “X” happens to me, so then I do “Y.” Creating a new habit is difficult because we don’t realize we need to attach it to a trigger.
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Arrived in the middle? Visit the first post, Where to begin?
(The entire series is available to download as a PDF ebook.)
When you’re feeling overwhelmed about how much you have to do (and who isn’t, really?), it’s difficult to focus on ensuring your life and work is moving in the direction you want to go. That’s why it’s important to get control of your daily tasks before working on your big-picture life planning.
~ Josh Kaufman from, 10 big ideas from GTD
GTD is a “bottom-up” approach to productivity. The goal is to establish a sense of comfort and control over the work that’s on your plate right now, so you can free up some mental energy and space to think about the big stuff.
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I have a few posts tagged Getting things done if you want to learn more. But this little article—it’s almost a listicle—has a nice list of 10 key points about the Getting Things Done system.
You know those questions, “If you could go back in time and give yourself advice, what would it be?” I used to say something trite like, “I wouldn’t because all my mistakes made me who I am.” I’m changing my tune: I wish someone had BEATEN me over the head with a copy of the GTD book the day it was published in 2001. I was long out of college, and well on the road to who I am now—granted I was still going downhill. But if I had found this stuff in 2001… There’s a reason this is one of the books I keep extra copies of on hand to give to people.
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You’ll feel much less of a need to control outcomes, which — in a brilliant instance of irony — frees your capacity to control your response, and create an outcome you like. If there is some action you want to take, you can take it with grace and cool-headedness instead of frustration and desperation.
~ David Cain from, How to Make Life Agreeable
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This reminds me of my thought about enjoying standing in line at the post office. Not in the sense of, “I’m great, I have this mastered.” Rather in the sense that I recall what it has felt like and I recall the impatience and urge to get away from situations which I had decided were disagreeable.
Obviously I’ve not mastered this; there are still plenty of instances where I judge a situation unworthy and begin my squirming to escape. But, I’m making progress. I’d go so far as to say that I’m getting comfortable sitting in my inability to sit comfortably in situations I’d normally resist.
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Having to do everything turned out to be a real benefit later on, I was comfortable with such diverse things as communicating with customers, designing UI, identifying and tracking plans, architecture, and other non-programming tasks. With today’s roles unless you are in a startup environment (sometimes not even there) as a programmer you rarely get to do anything but write code. People even joke about programmers doing other things like designing.
~ Andrew Wulf from, How Many People Does It Take To Write Software
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I certainly didn’t do anywhere near everything. (Notably, it doesn’t seem I got very good at communicating via the years of my early experience.) But I agree with the general sentiment. It’s all the peripheral stuff that I had to sort out, figure out, build, do, etc. which I think turned out to be the keys to my later — dare I say it — “success”.
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Humans are very efficient walkers, and a key component of being an efficient walker in all kind of mammals is having long legs,” Webber said. “Cats and dogs are up on the balls of their feet, with their heel elevated up in the air, so they’ve adapted to have a longer leg, but humans have done something different. We’ve dropped our heels down on the ground, which physically makes our legs shorter than they could be if were up on our toes, and this was a conundrum to us (scientists).
~ From Why we walk on our heels instead of our toes
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Turns out heel-to-toe rolling gives longer *effective* leg length. Our lower legs are exquisite.
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Wonderful food and laughter with new friends after our last eve at ADD Quebec!
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Julia spotted this swirl on rue St Jean. #swirlsOnTheMove
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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
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The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it’s just wonderful. And … the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.
~ Douglas Adams
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