On this day

September 15th

Somewhat wacky

September 15, 2023

At this point I’m resigned to my nature being unchangeable. I need structure to work within, and I cannot suffer long stretches of boredom. I’m comfortable knowing that at least some of what I do makes the world a better place; I’m comfy with my internal validation. I also know that if I start to focus too much on making money I lose my spark. What I’m left wondering is wether there is some thing focused enough that people could dig in and follow (in the sense of deeply understanding the thing, my motivations, and my goal.) I’m certain however, that without that clear thing I must continue to explore and satisfy my curiosity, and not focus overly on monetization.

If you’re thinking about running a membership program, you’re probably a bit wacky. Everything I write about membership programs should be filtered through the lens that: I live a somewhat uncommon, sometimes extremely wacky life. It’s good to keep that in mind. My work is mostly, inherently, non-commercial. Or less commercial than it might be “optimized” for. When people ask me: Who are you? What do you do? And I tell them — I walk, I write, I photograph, I make books, I run a membership program. Their suspicion is plainly visible: No, but what do you do to survive? As if the soul itself wasn’t a thing to be nourished. This is survival, I want to say.

~ Craig Mod from, https://craigmod.com/essays/memberships_year_four/

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I’ve tried several times to create membership systems around passion projects. The core problem I encounter is that bolting on a membership system creates in- and out-groups. Any passion project I’ve had feeds that passion through my connections to the other people who engage. The in-group has always been too small to sustain my passion. If you wish you can support my work. But for the foreseeable future, I’m focusing on the passion and not the monetization.

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Fear and misery

September 15, 2022

The Stoics knew that fear was to be feared because of the miseries it creates. The things we fear pale in comparison to the damage we do to ourselves and others when we unthinkingly scramble to avoid them. An economic depression is bad; a panic is worse. A tough situation isn’t helped by terror—it only makes things harder. And that’s why we must resist it and reject it if we wish to turn this situation around.

~ Ryan Holiday

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Men who are mortal

September 15, 2021

But what if my friends there should die? What else could that signify except that men who are mortal have died? Do you at once wish to live to be old, and yet not to see the death of any one you love? Do you not know that, in a long course of time, many and various events must necessarily happen? That a fever must get the better of one person, a highwayman of another, a tyrant of a third?

~ Epictetus

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Mastery, purpose, and autonomy

September 15, 2021

A highly influential book for me in designing Automattic was Daniel Pink’s Drive, where he eloquently introduces the three things that really matter in motivating people: mastery, purpose, and autonomy. Mastery is the urge to get better skills. Purpose is the desire to do something that has meaning, that’s bigger than yourself. These first two principles physically co-located companies can be great at. But the third, autonomy, is where even the best in-office company can never match a Level 4 or above distributed company.

~ Matt Mullenweg from, https://ma.tt/2020/04/five-levels-of-autonomy/

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I’ve read and listened to a bunch of stuff from Mullenweg and he’s consistently someone with his head on straight and his priorities—particularly those related to the many people working for his company—in order. If you just went, “Matt who?” definitely read that little post, and then, perhaps, dip into his podcast, Distributed. (Maybe try the episode, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on building a fully distributed company, to get a good taste.)

Also, yes, more autonomy for everyone.

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World’s Largest Audio-Visual Archive

September 15, 2020

After decades of technology breakthroughs, it brings a smile to my face to think that a vinyl or lacquer platter with mechanically implanted grooves is still, by far, our longest-lived audio format.

~ Kevin Kelly from, https://blog.longnow.org/02008/03/29/worlds-largest-audio-visual-archive/

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Digital storage is ephemeral. That hard drive you copied everything onto and tossed on a shelf? …it’s only ten years before you should no longer trust it to have everything still retrievable, exactly as you wrote it. Home-writable CD-ROMs and DVDs? …they’re about the same: 10 years. Heck, I have audio CDs from the 80s where the commercial-grade coating has failed, and I had to repurchase the albums to get a fresh CD to ‘rip’ when I lost my music collection once back in the 00’s.

I’m definitely not bashing on technology—I’m not a Luddite calling for a return to clay tablets… On the other hand, guess what really lasts? Stone, baby. Clay. Papyrus even.

What I’m saying is that we currently do not have any set-it-and-forget-it digital storage. Instead, you need to be thinking about MOVage—not STORage—keeping your digital files moving forward from copy to copy, from medium to medium.

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How to be mindful

September 15, 2018

Slowly add mindfulness bells. A mindfulness bell can be anything in your environment. Thich Nhat Hanh suggested using traffic lights as a mindfulness bell — when you see one, instead of getting caught up in the stress of driving, allow yourself to become present. You can slowly find other mindfulness bells — your daughter’s face, opening your computer, having your first cup of coffee, hearing a train going by.

~ Leo Babauta from, https://zenhabits.net/always/

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Finding ways to trigger making conscious decisions is the key to increasing the amount of time you are mindful. The possibilities are endless!

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Photo gallery for this series

September 15, 2016

(Part 1 of 36 in series, 10,000 Reps Project)

This post presents a gallery of ALL images in this series. You can click on any to enlarge; you can even click on the first, sit back, and it’ll run them all as a slide show. The gallery is dynamic so it will automatically grow as I add more posts to this series.

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Photo gallery for this series

September 15, 2016

This post presents a gallery of ALL images in this series. You can click on any to enlarge; you can even click on the first, sit back, and it’ll run them all as a slide show. The gallery is dynamic so it will automatically grow as I add more posts to this series.

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Post class thoughts

September 15, 2015

(Part 5 of 37 in series, Study inspired by Pakour & Art du Déplacement by V. Thibault)

As I expected, I pretty much forgot about this project once I was on my way to class. So this is just my looking back at my experiences in class through the lens of this first section of the book. (I’m betting this is what’s going to happen another 89 times.)

I’m not going to pick apart every moment from class; I’ll just go over a few that come immediately to mind:

Balancing at height – We started practicing purposely bailing off a low rail and worked up to some climb-over tasks in a playground. Eventually we worked up to a “find something that’s high enough to be moderately uncomfortable” level of individual balancing. I headed for a 7-foot high long bar (like where swings would hang. sorta.) and struggled my way up onto the bar — that was a challenge in and of itself. So I definitely went straight at something that was challenging — falling from standing on a 7-foot bar is not trivial. I down-graded though after falling, because climbing up multiple times wasn’t worth the little bit of balancing I was managing.

Balancing on a rail – We were working with partners. We ended up mostly taking turns challenging each other. Try this, try this variation, etc making it increasingly difficult. At one point, I quietly headed off to the side for a rail to work on a sequence of variations. (Off to the side so as not to be a distracting, apparent-show-off.) So again here, definitely operating in the mind set where “the obstacle is the path”.

QM exercise – We ended with a laps challenge. For me, 3 laps of QM around a small-ish basketball court, followed by a running lap around the school. I pushed this really hard and it was here that I think the mind set really paid off . . .

In a discussion with Tracy after class, I came up with the idea that I seem to be using this mind set as a “razor”; An immediate yes/no testing tool. Your mind is busy with a stream of thoughts as you grind you way through hard work. In hindsight, I realize I was fast-processing everything with this combination of the mindset and a dash of stoicism. “Caution, quad nearly cramping,” is something I can affect; pause and unload that leg, or stretch it, or slow down. “Ow, stone in my hand,” shake it off when next I lift that hand. “I want to quit,” what? no, that’s not going to move me forward towards my goal. “How is [other student] still going so fast,” ignore that I cannot affect that. So it seems to have been just this long (long LONG) series of thoughts. Sometimes I’m certain I wasn’t finished with one thought before another preempted it; Which is fine, the really important stuff will preempt silly thoughts about a cool drink of water.

So it was nice to come away believing that I’m already applying this mind set in a big way.

Light bulb

But wait a second, here’s a new [for me] thought: This mind set also means there’s a difference between “stopping” and “quiting”, even though outwardly they look identical to an observer. I can STOP for the RIGHT reason, or QUIT for the WRONG reason. Stop before an actual cramp, verus quit because I’m demoralized. That’s another facet of using this mind set as a “razor”.

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