One hour of thoughtful solitude may nerve the heart for days of conflict—girding up its armor to meet the most insidious foe.
~ Percival
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Thoughtful solitude →
December 17, 2023 — #63 →
Reading time: About 5 minutes, 900 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/63
Hey, pay attention →
I have a routine with my journaling. Over time, that routine has changed a lot and I’m sure it will evolve farther. Currently, I start a clean A5-sized face of a page for each day. I do not read the previous day’s entry; I’m never trying to continue where I left off in my thinking as I journal. No, the journal is simply a place for me to talk to my future self. Here’s why I did that thing I did. Here’s this really great idea… but I’m letting go of it, and writing it down hoping future-me gets a chuckle at the dumb idea I was wise to drop. Sometimes I record really big wins. Sometimes I record really big losses. A wedding! A birth! A death! But mostly, I’m just capturing how I feel, why I feel, what I think, why I think, … Sometimes I spend hours painstakingly handwriting long texts. Sometimes it’s just 60-seconds and a bulleted list. Vanishingly rare is a sketch. Occasionally a flourish of colored-penciling. There are often inset headings in block letters at the sides as signposts—first instance of this, last instance of that.
It helps me pay attention to my life.
~ Austin Kleon from, Why I keep a diary
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Yes, there’s much paying of attention to my life that happens in the writing.
But the true wizardry is in the years-later rereading.
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Consistency →
If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.
~ Maria Popova
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Lilliputian →
Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.
~ Mary Karr
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Dnt fd th trlls →
One of the challenges for any website that allows for user content — no matter the size of the website — is how to deal with trollish behavior. There are a variety of options available, including just deleting such comments, but one option that got attention in the mid-2000s was the idea of disemvoweling.
~ From Content Moderation Case Study
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Tee-hee. How did I never know about this?
But to be clear: No this isn’t something that I’m going to implement in any of the spaces where I wear anything like a moderator hat. It’s like amending graffiti; or trying to do censorship “correctly.” Those both are at best really hard, and at worst actually feeds the troll.
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You learn who is invested →
You learn who is invested.
~ Steven Pressfield from, Mistakes are Opportunities
You learn what they want.
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Recently I’ve been trying to do some fresh self-evaluation. I happened to be thinking about, and talking to others about, how I handle mistakes. I was thinking about it from the obvious point of view of self-perception. What is my behavior? Is that good? Can I make a change that would be better? How does my behavior affect others? (All in the context of when I make mistakes.)
…and then I fell over this great post by Pressfield from 2018. (My “website serialize” tool is the second-most useful piece of software I have ever written. It is an endless source for me of terrific things.)
Woa. I hadn’t thought about using my own mistakes as a way to gather information about other people. “How do others react?” is a pretty clear line of investigation. But the idea that who notices a mistake, and how they react, tells you that they are in some way invested in whatever it is… ok, that’s pretty light-bulb. Who’s invested? Why are they invested? What’s their interest? …and so on.
Exercise for the reader: All of the above, plus, what types of mistakes does one make?
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Someone has to be the first guinea pig →
The story behind episode one is challenging. How much do we want to know? How much do we want to share about the birth of the podcast? That all plays into Episode One. I picked Adam as the first guest because I wanted a guinea pig. I had bought a Zoom recorder and some microphones and cables. There’s a guy who did our audio editing for the first two years, and I had sent him some test audio files just to verify that when I press “Record” it does what we think it does.
I had been training with Adam for years, so I approached him and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about starting a podcast. You want to sit down and have a conversation?” In hindsight, I now realize it takes a lot of chutzpah to actually say, “Okay, I’ll sit down with microphones,” but he was totally up for it. I said, “I need a guinea pig. I’m going to screw it up, and I want you to just be game for a radical F-up.” And, sure enough, now I realize the zeroth rule of podcasting is always press “Record” and then double-check that you’ve actually pressed “Record.” These days we actually have a system, because sometimes it still happens. The person who sits in and listens actually takes notes and uses the time codes from the recorder. So you have to actually look at the recorder, and if the timer isn’t running, we know that I haven’t pressed “Record.”
(more…)The frost →
Young man,
Seize every minute
Of your time.The days fly by;
Ere long you too
Will grow old.If you believe me not,
See there, in the courtyard,
How the frost
Glitters white and cold and cruel
On the grass that once was green.Do you not see
That you and I
Are as the branches
Of one tree?With your rejoicing,
Comes my laughter;
With your sadness
Start my tears.Love,
~ Tzu-yeh, translated by Bruce Lee from, Bruce Lee the Renaissance Man
Could life be otherwise
With you and me?
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(hat tip: Martial Artist of Life by J Little.)
It isn’t clear just how old the original poetry is; How about if I guess a round 1,000 years…
The human condition is clearly something we all have in common. Youth. Senescence. Immaturity. Wisdom. Life is a journey.
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Marriage →
When your wife is a knitter, and insists on taking pictures of finished knitting projects… kill me now.
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That was waaay fun →
Had a blast trying (and failing :) a zillion challenges!
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Mother of god →
What wizardry is this?!
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Brooklyn Zoo →
Pushing the old comfort zone tonight in Brooklyn!
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Confirmation bias →
If you are thinking about buying a new car, you suddenly see people driving them all over the roads. If you just ended a long-time relationship, every song you hear seems to be written about love. If you are having a baby, you start to see them everywhere.
Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively.
The examples above are a sort of passive version of the phenomenon. The real trouble begins when confirmation bias distorts your active pursuit of facts.
~ David McRaney from, Confirmation Bias
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