Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/62
On this day
December 10thChop wood, carry water
There is a well-known trumpet player named Rick Braun. Although a few years younger, he was born in the same city and went to the same high school as my dad. And if my memory serves, they were in high school at the same time and at least knew of each other. My dad played the trumpet in high school, even performing in a band. Many year ago, my dad saw Braun somewhere—a concert I think—and had a chance to speak with him. The story goes that my dad said something complimentary about Braun’s ability and talent. (Yes, this is all hearsay.) Braun’s reply? “What a lot of people mistake for talent is simply a lot of hard work.”
At Time in the nineteen-fifties, the entry-level job for writers was a column called Miscellany. Filled with one-sentence oddities culled from newspapers and the wire services, Miscellany ran down its third of a page like a ladder, each wee story with its own title—traditionally, and almost invariably, a pun. Writers did not long endure there, and were not meant to, but just after I showed up a hiring freeze shut the door behind me, and I wrote Miscellany for a year and a half. That came to roughly a thousand one-sentence stories, a thousand puns.
~ John McPhee from, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/14/omission
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John McPhee is a stellar writer. He’s written a lot and, okay, sure, I get that. There are greatest-of-all-time musicians I’ve heard of who still do scales daily 30 years on. And McPhee wrote a thousand puns(!), a thousand titles, and a thousand one-sentence stories cut-down from larger stories. (And go read McPhee’s article right now, about omission.) And now here’s Braun’s comment. Frankly, I’ve heard this sentiment countless times in countless variations: The path to mastery? Chop wood, carry water.
The thing I’m not certain of though, from my dad’s story, is whether the takeaway for him was, “Oh cool, Braun’s just a regular guy who worked really hard!” or “Fudge, I shoulda’ stuck with the trumpet!”
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Assertion
Your spirit must constantly assert itself because your body is constantly exerting itself. As soon as you stop working at your spirit, then your body will have complete power over you.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Stretch yourself
There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest. It’s called the sweet spot.…The underlying pattern is the same: Seek out ways to stretch yourself. Play on the edges of your competence. As Albert Einstein said, “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”
The key word is ‘barely.’
~ Daniel Coyle
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Gateway to possibility
Why is play so powerful? Johnson explains that “humans — and other organisms — evolved neural mechanisms that promote learning when they have experiences that confound their expectations. When the world surprises us with something, our brains are wired to pay attention.”
And the whole point of play is to be surprised. The unknown factor is part of what entertains us. Play is a gateway to possibility.
~ Shane Parrish from, https://fs.blog/2017/08/value-play-driver-innovation/
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Have you seen the movie, Inception? There are a pile of mind-bending perspective shifts in there… something like a dolly-zoom, a long music descent, a rotating set that obliterates our sense of reality as the actors fall to the ceiling, that look on their face, M C Escher learns to use modern CGI for a city street scene . . . you get the idea.
surprise
unknown factor
gateway to possibility…
My understanding of what play is, and why we’re drawn to it, has fundamentally shifted.
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Questions
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
~ Naguib Mahfouz
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Before dawn
I’m not sure if it’s the silence, or the darkness. Maybe it’s the fact that pre-dawn there are two kinds of people, those who are sleeping and those who are up attacking their day and I prefer to be the later. (Although, it’s a physical fight with my body every morning.)
There’s a time and place for most everything. Writing, for example, seems best done in the early morning. Vacationing seems best done at the end of summer. Hard labor seems best done in one’s 20s.
I wonder when is the best time for introspection?
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On passion
There is a tremendous disparity between the passion and effort that goes into a work of art and the amount a person is likely to pay for it. Some areas pay better than others, and your passion may very well not create much in the way of salable value for anyone else.
~ David Cain from, http://www.raptitude.com/2009/12/what-passion-will-buy-you/
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This is such a critical point! Even if my passion, “comes through,” in what I create, that doesn’t necessarily mean others will value my work.
Worse, there’s always some amount of capriciousness to the valuation made by others. Even if I’m making something clearly of value, if that isn’t aligned with other people’s values, I’m still screwed. Passion is critical, but has little to do with success.
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The art of parkour
Next time you meet an expert in a field, don’t ask for her/his knowledge; just observe closely, go home and practice. No answers from the outside can ever replace the ones we grow from the inside.
~ Marcello Palozzo from, http://animalscholar.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-art-of-parkour-small-story.html
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Simple Food: Thoughts on Practicality
(Part 12 of 12 in series, Stephan Guyenet's "Whole Health Source")
We live in a society where most of the food is at a level of reward/palatability that our species has never encountered before. We’re surrounded by it, and everywhere we turn, someone is jockeying for our attention, trying to get us to purchase their food. We’re used to it– and for the most part, we like it. This professionally engineered food drives our behavior in a way that is only loosely under our conscious control, with a small percentage of the population succumbing to frank addiction. So I can understand why some people are resistant to change.
~ Stephan Guyenet from, http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/07/simple-food-thoughts-on-practicality.html
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Secret life of hats
We ducked into our car to avoid a summer thunderstorm and this happened…
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DevOps
It’s been said by a number of smart people that DevOps is largely founded in an organization’s skillful collaboration and communication, and the culture that results. I agree with that idea, and I also think that it’s one of the reasons why the term DevOps is sometimes difficult to explain, because these are ‘soft’ skills we’re talking about. These aren’t things you can graph or alert on, they only manifest in the resulting product and environment.
~ John Allspaw from, http://www.agileweboperations.com/devops-these-soft-parts
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Kyoto
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