On this day

May 11th

The discard pile

May 11

I think part of being a designer is to fail every day, to try things that don’t work out. In a way, every project fails every day until it succeeds! That’s what the iterative process of design is about. The projects that don’t launch, this is sometimes due to the fact that they’re too early but that doesn’t mean they don’t come back a few years later as ideas integrated in different projects. Timing in many ways is key.

~ Yves Béhar, from Yves Béhar – The Talks

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I’m reminded of the idea of one’s discard pile. Béhar’s work can fail (the idea of success versus failure in trading with others is baked into the way we use the word “work”), so he’s aware of “failure” as a salient feature of his creative efforts. Here on the ‘ol blog, this isn’t about “work” so it’s not possible for it to “fail.” But I do often think about the discard pile: I don’t actually create blog posts and then discard them rather than post them. But I do often read and find things, imagine what I could post about them… and then I don’t post it.

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The specific outcome

May 11, 2022

The specific outcome is not the primary driver of our practice. […] We can begin with this: If we failed, would it be worth the journey? Do you trust yourself enough to commit to engaging with a project regardless of the chances of success? The first step is to separate the process from the outcome. Not because we don’t care about the outcome. But because we do.

~ Seth Godin

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Reaching the end isn’t the point

May 11, 2022

Much better is to rebuild the skill entirely with a different approach, one that directly addresses your perennial snags. Instead of slowly getting better at your familiar, limited way, you embrace the awkwardness of learning an unfamiliar but stronger method, as though you’ve never done the thing before at all.

~ David Cain from, How to Level Up

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In the article Cain mentions spending as much as 10 minutes in reading one page as part of his larger anecdote from which he’s drawing this lesson. Sometimes it takes me a long time to find enough tranquility in my mind just to feel ready to read. I always have so many thing on the to-do and should-do lists. By the time I get enough of the urgent items beat back into the shadows, often, another days has passed with too little reading. I should do something about that…

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Lifelong learning

May 11, 2021

Your education shouldn’t end when your schooling does. If you want to get an edge in life, you must be constantly learning, not coasting along on what you already know. Lifelong learning requires the ability to reflect on your mistakes, a lot of reading, and testing what you know.

~ Shane Parrish

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That quote from, https://fs.blog/2015/11/lifelong-learning/ , is one of the too-rare times when, upon reading something, I want to leap to my feet knocking my chair over behind me while shouting, “Hear! Hear!”

It’s true that there is some learning which I prefer to observe, rather than directly experience. In such cases “conceptual” learning, rather than experiential learning, is just fine by me. (eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYtF0UlznC8 )

In general however, ain’t nothing finer than reading something, making a new connection, writing a blog post about that… or spending weeks figuring out how to bend some javascript-DOM-AJAX thing to do what I want… digging in the innards of an automobile to make a new stereo-unit work… digesting some tome from the anti-library… running a year-plus experiment just to see what happens… just generally being all like, “I’m wondering . . .” And then find out where that curiosity leads.

What’ve you been up to in the learning department lately?

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Tell me if this sounds crazy

May 11, 2020

All of our books have a small dot on their spine.

It’s one thing to try to keep your books physically under control. It’s another task for Sisyphus to keep track of your books in general. Here’s how I do it:

  • Create a free account over on LibraryThing. Set up three collections: One for the books currently in our possession; “Library.” A second for books we’d love to have join us; “Wishlist.” A third for books that have passed through; “Previous.”

  • Get some small stickers, (1/4″ round ChromaLabels work great,) and some sticky notes.

  • Add each book to your “Library” collection in LT and put a sticky note inside the cover marked “LT”. I also track digital books, so I tag all the books in LT with “physical” or “digital”. Then put a dot on the spine so you don’t have open the book to check if there’s a sticky note inside.

  • Why both? Some books can’t accept the spine sticker, and sometimes the dot falls off. So the sticky inside the cover is the definitive mark that a book is in LT.

  • New book arrives? Add it to LT’s “Library” collection, tagged as “physical”, insert sticky note in the front, and add a dot to spine.

  • Book leaving my possession? Remove the dot and sticky note, and shift the book to the “Previous” collection in LT.

As you come across books you might want to read, add them to your Wishlist collection in LT. My Wishlist contains hundreds of books. (That’s not a brag, that’s a confession.) LT has a notes field and I often leave a clue about where/why I’m adding the book. When I later—having forgotten all about that book—go into LT to add it, only to discover it’s already there… “Hmmm, that’s twice now I’ve ‘discovered’ this book. Maybe I should read this book sooner than ‘some day’?” Such books I then tag, “priority.” I’ve about ~20 books tagged priority at the moment.

Yet another reason this is useful is that you can search via the LT website, or the mobile app, to see if you have/have-had any book. You can even wander through a bookstore, and know that your Wishlist is always in your pocket.

Does that sound crazy? Dammnit, that does sound crazy now that I typed it all out.

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Sort out what is important

May 11, 2018

Every day I have a choice between working on pointless little tasks or big meaningful projects. On days that I choose the former, I end each day feeling I’ve accomplished very little, even though I’ve put in a lot of hours at my desk. I’ve kept up, but all I did was spin my wheels for another day. But when I chose to do the important stuff first, I feel great, knowing that I’m on my way to producing major results.

~ Steve Pavlina from, Conscious Procrastination

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More than 25 years ago, Steven Covey included a simple graph in a book. This task right here– is it important, and is it urgent?

Anything that’s not important, well, good– You just stopped doing that. Gaming, television, most of what you do on the internet, etc. If you’re still doing UN-important stuff… I don’t know what to say.

Now the important stuff is where the hard thinking begins. How important? Does it pay off now, or later? Does is pay off for me, my family (but not me), my family (including me), my tribe, the world . . . well, sorting out all the important stuff is IMPORTANT but not URGENT and so it gets skipped and pushed off. I’m happy to be the bearer of great news: You now know the most important thing to do: Sort out what is important to you.

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How art can change your life

May 11, 2017

No, I don’t think you’re born with it. You have to hear stories and you have to live stories. You have to have a bunch of experiences and be able to say ‘Here’s something that happened to me yesterday….’ And if you can make people laugh by telling them what happened to you, then you are telling the story well. So that’s what I learned in improv.

~ Bill Murray

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Our oil predicament

May 11, 2015

A person might think that oil prices would be fairly stable. Prices would set themselves at a level that would be high enough for the majority of producers, so that in total producers would provide enough–but not too much–oil for the world economy. The prices would be fairly affordable for consumers. And economies around the world would grow robustly with these oil supplies, plus other energy supplies. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work that way recently. Let me explain at least a few of the issues involved.

~ Gail Tverberg from, Eight Pieces of Our Oil Price Predicament

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