Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.
~ Richard Chenevix Trench
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There’s a magnifying glass in the back there too. Extra pair of low-reflection reading glasses. Lip balm; don’t need it until I need it. Rubik’s cube so I can kill a few minutes without spinning off starting something that then turns into a rabbit hole. What do you keep at hand when working?
To achieve great things, two things are needed: A plan and not quite enough time.
~ Leonard Bernstein
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Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/25
Spearman was right that people differ in their ability to solve well-defined problems. But he was wrong that well-defined problems are the only kind of problems. “Why can’t I find someone to spend my life with?” “Should I be a dentist or a dancer?” and “How do I get my child to stop crying?” are all important but poorly defined problems. “How can we all get along?” is not a multiple-choice question. Neither is “What do I do when my parents get old?” And getting better at rotating shapes or remembering state capitols is not going to help you solve them.
~ Adam Mastroianni from, Why aren’t smart people happier?
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I’m left wondering if the very intelligent are those who can figure out if a problem is, or is not, well-defined. I blast through all sort of work—well-defined problems in Mastroianni’s article—but it doesn’t seem to fulfill me. As soon as I know the problem is well-defined, I lose interest. As soon as I can see a path provided by a solution, I lose interest. Sometimes, I go through the steps to actually do the work. But mostly I just lose interest as soon as know how it would be done.
All of which makes for a vicious cycle: my ability to generate work vastly outstrips my ability to do that work. And I feel the weight of guilt for not doing that work which I feel should be done.
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How can podcasts be designed and produced in multiple languages to serve specific, localized audiences effectively?
A podcast is used as a tool to bridge gaps in health education for rural communities with limited internet access.
[It’s the] whole process of editing that’s tripped me up. What I’ve noticed, and what I’m realizing, is with the HIV podcast, doing that podcast for the community—for other people—is motivation for me to like… knock out those episodes in the same afternoon.
~ Adam Greenberg (10:16)
The conversation explores the creative and technical challenges of producing a multilingual podcast for rural communities, focusing on a project aimed at supporting HIV-positive individuals. This initiative, designed by a Peace Corps volunteer, leverages podcasts to share local stories and facilitate discussions. Technical hurdles, such as managing multiple RSS feeds in different languages, are discussed, alongside strategies for hosting and distribution on a budget.
Adam reflects on the broader challenges of content creation, contrasting the ease of creating for others with the difficulty of personal projects. Topics include finding motivation, balancing creativity with logistics, and navigating the numerous rabbit holes that technology and content production present. The importance of mentorship, setting boundaries, and focusing on meaningful goals also surfaces as key themes in the discussion.
Takeaways
The importance of hyper-localized content — A podcast can be an effective tool to reach rural and underserved communities.
Multilingual podcasting challenges — Managing multiple language feeds requires creativity and resourcefulness.
Motivation from serving others — Creating content for community benefit provides a strong drive to complete projects.
Avoiding technological rabbit holes — Focus and guidance help to bypass unnecessary technical distractions.
Boundaries as a creative aid — Setting limits can foster productivity and clarity in creative endeavors.
Mentorship and guidance — Having trusted advisors can help navigate complex decisions and stay focused.
Personal versus community storytelling — Storytelling for a community often feels easier than personal storytelling.
Resources
HIV Positive Voices podcast — A multilingual podcast designed for rural education and health support.
WordPress — A content management system used for hosting the podcast project.
Peace Corps — Peace Corps Volunteers put their purpose, passion, and skills to work in partnership with host communities in more than 60 countries.
AltMBA — A leadership and creativity workshop mentioned for its insights on focus and boundaries.
(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)
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Think about what you will add to the world. Some lucrative professions, (e.g., ultra-high-tech finance,) are dubious applications of human brainpower.
~ Steven Pinker
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There is no change, no attempt, no reach that does not look strange to someone. There’s almost no accomplishment that is possible without calling some attention on yourself. To gamble on yourself is to risk failure. To do it in public is to risk humiliation.
~ Ryan Holiday from, Life Happens in Public. Get Used to It.
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I believe I’ve developed a healthy level of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when it comes to trying things with a risk of failure. I think this is one—possibly the only—upside to having terrible self-talk. I’ve told my self horribly critical things so many times… and then had that criticism proven to not be the case so many times… well, now I just try things.
Except for people’s names. I’m developing a phobia around saying people’s names. It just feels like the least I could do, when having a conversation with someone who I need to introduce to others… the least I could do is say their name correctly. Perfectly, even, on the first try. …in their native language’s proper pronunciation. What could possible go wrong?
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Let’s consider another story, this time a tale of science fiction.
~ Stephen Pressfield from, Ins and Outs, Part Two
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“Ins and Outs.” That piece is short. It’s insightful. …and it’s about two movies that would definitely make my top 100, so there’s that.
Two things: The more I read from Pressfield, the more I want to open a bottle of scotch and weep that I will never write anything good.
And also, the more I read from Pressfield, the more hopeful I become that maybe something will absorb through my thick skull and mabye one day, just maybe, I’ll write something good.
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In 2016 I achieved my best physical condition in recorded history. Perhaps that sounds funny—”recorded history”—but I mean simply to disqualify everything before I was 25. Before 25 the degree of difficulty for staying in good condition was somewhere between “easy” and “trivial.” That’s not to say I was always in good physical condition before age 25, far from it. I only mean to imply that affecting change was easy before age 25.
My current downward spiral began in the summer of 2019 when I had the misfortune of meeting Mr. Borrelia Burgdorferi. Turns out he’s a total asshole. A full week apart, I had two fevers over 104°F with associated delusions and trips to the emergency room, before enough time had finally elapsed for a Western blot test to confirm that my immune system was intimately familiar with Mr. Burgdorferi. He is in fact a member of the Spirochaete crime syndicate phylum of bacteria, and he has several nefarious cousins who cause, for example, syphilis and yaws. He, and his cousins, have been kicking we humans’ asses forever. You may have heard of Mr. Burgdorferi’s preferred method of torture: Lyme disease.
(Alas, Lyme disease is named after Lyme Connecticut where it was first described, and actually has no relation whatsoever to yummy lime fruits. My hope had always been that it was actually Lime disease, and the preferred course of treatment was with stiff gin-and-tonics with copious fresh lime.)
The treatment—well, actually, there is no definitive treatment for Lyme disease… shit, we’d be happy to have a definitive test for diagnosing Lyme disease. The best intervention is to carpet bomb the entire host organism… that’s me. My physician soon introduced me to my new frenmy Doxycycline, which is a broad-spectrum antibiotic. Basically it kills every bacteria via chemical attack. You see, Mr. Burgdorferi and his cousins have a clever trick whereby they can completely change the protein markers on their outer layer—they can simply swap out their skeevy track suits on Thursday and completely evade the human immune system. Which is exactly why they are still around: They’ve evolved this trick of biologic track-suit-swapping; new suit, no more immune system response and the battle restarts. And now you know why syphilis goes through distinct stages, wins the war and kills your ass in horrible fashion. So the hope with Lyme disease and Doxycycline is that you caught Mr. Burgdorferi early enough and can obliterate all the bacteria via carpet bombing, since your immune system is unlikely to do the job on its own.
Geez, Craig! Where is this going?
Mr. Burgdorferi and a bunch of [mostly] self-induced stress (which I’m completely omitting the explanation thereof herein forthwith etc) were a wicked, one-two punch to my weight. Cue sound of plane going into a dive, and my downward spiral. “…and cut! That’s a wrap!”
Doxycycline wipes out your gut flora too. Each of us is simply a big meat-spaceship created to protect and transport the tiny things living in our digestive track. (I’ll wait here while you think about that.) Doxycycline kills almost all of the passengers in the meat-ship, leaving the ship, (that’d be me you recall,) mostly unscathed, but kicking off a recolonization race among the ship’s passengers. And of course the passengers you’d like to have aboard are the slow ones to regrow. In fact, if enough the of sleazy passengers move back in first, the good one can’t even get on board.
Doxycycline pro-tip: Your doctor will say “take this on an empty stomach, and drink plenty of water.” I call bullshit. Doxycycline comes in these standard pill capsules. And it floats. So it’s difficult to swallow. And the capsules are extremely sticky when you first get them wet. You absolutely will get at least one stuck way back in your throat. If it dissolves there, you literally get a chemical burn, in your throat. Here, I’ll save your life: Contrary to ALL pill swallowing advice, keep the damn thing in your mouth until it just starts to get gooey, and more importantly, slippery. That’s the capsule starting to dissolve after it has soaked up a bit of water. THEN, swallow it with water and it’ll go right down. Next, drink a big glass of water. And then drink another big glass of water.
Doxycycline pro-tip #2: And then it will make you vomit about 20 to sometimes as much as 40 minutes later. I’m talking about those sudden-onset waves of nausea giving you, perhaps, 2 seconds from I’m-fine-and-happy to barfing. I learned to plan ahead. Taking my daily Doxy was an hour-long planned affair.
Doxycycline pro-tip #3: When your doctor, who is normally pretty quick with discussion and decisions, pauses and seriously considers whether to prescribe you 14 days or 21 days of Doxy, ask why. It turns out that recent research has shown that 14 days is just as effective as 21 days. My doctor was weighing the fun of taking Doxy against the efficacy. On day 15, when my script ran out, I wanted to buy him dinner.
Meanwhile, I gained 10 pounds in 15 days. Afterwards, my physician—why do we say “my” physician? I’m certainly not responsible for him… Afterwards, my physician goes, “Yeah, sorry, that’s a known side effect, but I don’t tell people that up front because it just stresses them out further.” Thanks Doc. (Tangent for the reader: Go research why they give antibiotics to, for example, cows. Yes, it prevents infection, but—you guessed it—it has the unexplained side effect of fattening them up.)
Anyway, it’s now been several moths of working on what I’m eating as a way to re-reinvent my gut flora as I did 10 years ago when I last started changing my life to pull out of a downward spiral.
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Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.
~ Isabel Allende
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Ten Bucks is a lot of money. So you need to respect it. Ten dollar bills are not just food stamps or amusement park coupons that you fork over by the dozen to get restaurant meals, smokes, strippers, drinks, tourist attraction admission, and assorted domestic services. Each Ten is a critical brick in the Early Retirement castle you are building.
~ Peter Adeney from, A Millionaire is Made Ten Bucks at a Time
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His pseudonym is silly, but don’t be distracted. Don’t mistake a fun way to discuss things with not having excellent advice.
…also, go read it all, flip –– via one small change here, another tweak there — your entire westerized consumerinsane lifestyle on its head.
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(Part 3 of 13 in series, Changes and Results)
The bulk of this series is about the various major changes I have made. In the big picture sense, it’s just a long list of posts with actionable ideas for you to consider. Unfortunately, accomplishing any of these changes requires you to be able to break old habits and create new ones.
There’s plenty of information available on habit change, so I’m leaving the psychology of habit change out of this series. Instead, I’m going to suggest one activity: Keep a habit journal. I started my habit journal, began by trying to fix my sleep, and slowly began my upward spiral.
For the rest of this series I won’t – I promise! – tell you the back story of how I discovered and explored each change I’ll be describing. Instead, I’ll compress each as much as I can, with as much actionable intel as possible. But for this “Strategy” part of the series, I want to tell you the story of how I discovered and started my habit journal.
This entire “Changes and Results” story begins with me realizing I needed to get more, quality sleep. It was a slow realization, and it sprang from some online articles I had stumbled upon. As I read more, I became curious about my sleep, and found I was often thinking about my sleep and how to improve it.
To make any change, new knowledge is required; What would the change look like? What are healthy sleep cycles, duration and times-of-day? What temperature, light and sound levels are conducive to good sleep? What room details (the bed, the colors, the room layout) and room uses (is the room multi-use or a space where I only sleep) are conducive to good sleep? It turns out that all of that knowledge is out there, and so I dug into it to varying degrees until I felt I had satisfactory answers to some of my questions.
But, all that new knowledge accomplishes nothing.
I had identified a problem, (“get better sleep”,) which gave me new questions. From there, my curiosity led me to new knowledge. At that point, I knew what I wanted to change, but right there is where I had always failed.
Enter, stage left, Benjamin Franklin.
One day, still frustrated and making no progress on improving my sleep, I read an article about Ben Franklin. Franklin had set out to improve himself over the course of several years. He came to the conclusion that there were too many different things to focus on for him to improve himself in one broad effort:
It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; Habit took the advantage of inattention; Inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.
I had reached the same conclusion, (but, alas, without the same eloquence,) when I was unable to change things by simply desiring them to change. Goals such as: sleep better, be less grumpy, and lose some weight, all failed to materialize.
Franklin went on to create a grid, with a row for each virtue and a column for each day of the week. At the end of each day, he put a mark if he felt he hadn’t lived up to that virtue on that day. The goal was then to have no marks on the grid at the end of the week. Each week he would focus particularly on one virtue (and he cycled through his 13 virtue goals.) He began each week by re-reading a small reminder he’d written about the week’s focus virtue (for example, “Humility: Be not Achilles; Imitate Socrates.”) He would then set about focusing on that virtue during the week. Franklin was working on a list of virtues such as Tranquility or Temperance, but his system works perfectly well for anything.
[O]n the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.
Inspired by Franklin, I began my habit journal more than ten years ago. At the beginning of each month I create a table with the dates across the top, and a row for each thing I’d like to work on that month. Initially, I had a small notebook just for these monthly habit journal tables. I started with rows for 6, 7 or 8, hours of sleep and put a corresponding mark for each day. This created a rough graph running across the month. That visual graph really gave me a push: “Yesterday’s mark is 6.5 hours, if I go to bed right now, I can put tomorrow’s mark at 7.” (I’ll go into the details of my sleep changes in the next post.)
Eventually, if something becomes an ingrained habit, I remove it from the grid; If it becomes a problem again, I add it back and work on it again. Sometimes I don’t get around to filling in the table, and the next day, I’m thinking, “Not two days in a row! Fill it in!” Which serves to further reinforce my paying attention to my daily goals.
(When I travel, I usually leave the habit journal behind and track nothing. Generally, I don’t have the time and my schedule is changed, so filling it in or even sticking to the habit plans would be tough. But such trips — little breaks from the habit journal — serve as test runs with the training wheels off. A three-day weekend, for example, gives me a lot to think about when I pick up my habit journal upon returning home to my normal routine.)
The monthly habit journal tables grew in size and complexity as I added and tracked more things, and eventually tracked many things. But there’s no need to start with complexity. Start with columns for the days of the month, and make a row for that one thing you want to work on first. Next month, assess how you did, adjust as necessary, and add a row if you want to work on a second thing.
In the very beginning, I used a small, square-gridded, notebook, but my tables eventually outgrew the page size. Years later, I started journaling and I didn’t want to have both a habit journal and a “regular” journal. So I invested the time to copy all the historical grids into my journal so I’d always be able to refer to them.
So what does this actually look like? Here’s my (recopied) habit journal table from the very first month, December 2006:
…and here is the table from, February 2017:
That’s really all there is to it. These little grids are the framework on which I hang whatever it is I’m trying to change.
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I early learned that there were two natures in me. This caused me a great deal of trouble, till I worked out a philosophy of life and struck a compromise between the flesh and the spirit. Too great an ascendancy of either was to be abnormal, and since normality is almost a fetish of mine, I finally succeeded in balancing both natures. Ordinarily they are at equilibrium; yet as frequently as one is permitted to run rampant, so is the other. I have small regard for an utter brute or for an utter saint.
~ Jack London
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Nice day to ride topless!
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Yes!
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Dreary in #NYC this morning. Strollin 8th ave to Penn Station. #Boston bound!
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Being in balance is an amazingly complex process that our body handles at all times – sitting, standing, walking or simply moving. Without balance we would fall. And moving in diverse environments creates the need of very good balance. But as stated in the beginning, it is very complex. Because how do we even define balance? Is it the ability not to fall? Or is it the ability to react to falling – and adapt – in that specific moment?
~ Marcus Grandjean from, Balance the Edge
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Many people have asked about “the trains”; If you knew my father, then you know that most of the 20×30 upper room in the garage was a model railroad. This is but a tiny glimpse of what he created.
I saved only a few pieces of rolling stock from the train layout before we sold the house. These now have a permanent home in this little display case in my office.
“Model railroad” as in: It was a model. Of a railroad. Not “toy trains” by any stretch of the imagination. He took the rolling stock apart, rebuilt them, detailed them (rust, markings, dull coat so they aren’t shiny plastic, etc), added little people, scratch built buildings, setup little scenes all over the railroad, little guys in rowboats fishing, people on benches, everything lit and remote controlled. You could run multiple trains at the same time, assemble trains in the yard, stage them out of sight… so a train rolls by and then you don’t see it again, and then a different train appears a few minutes later.
Some of the details in the photo: There are “live load” logs on the flat cars — if I get ambitious I could add the tie down cables to the logs. The ore cars (the short brown ones) have properly colored and scale-sized loads… he sifted “speedy dry” (like cat litter, but for cleaning up oil) into different tiny grain sizes, then spread it out and spray painted it, in batches of different colors, then mixed it back together… So it looks like the iron ore that goes in the cars in real life. Then he individually relabeled the 30, (40? I didn’t count) ore cars so they all have unique numbers and markings. Every piece of rolling stock was converted to Kadee couplers — which look and act like real train couplers and can be remotely decoupled with magnets hidden in the track. He would replace the tires (the part that rides on the rails) with metal ones if the kits had inferior plastic ones. He’d add weight to cars to make them move more realistically on the layout. And on and on.
30 years of work.
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