I’ve found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I’ve already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done. Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or your job will consist of dealing with money and disputes.
Tag: life
How Do You Make Life-Changing Decisions? | RyanHoliday.net
Books. Books. Books. People have been doing [whatever it is your deciding about] for a while now. They’ve been moving West, leaving school, investing their savings, getting dumped or filing for divorce, starting businesses, quitting their jobs, fighting, dying and fucking for thousands of years. This is all written down, often in the first person. Read it. Stop pretending you’re breaking new ground.
The point isn’t to achieve everything, just to pay respects to one or two of the things one suspects oneself capable of.
Alain de Botton. Filed under: success.
Hypomnema – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
…a Greek word with several translations into English including a reminder, a note, a public record, a commentary, a draft, a copy, and other variations on those terms.
The context was Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, but it sounds like a good description of Tumblr, Twitter, and a number of wonderful things on the internet. I first came across hypomnemata (sleep + thread…) in The Present Alone is Our Happiness (recommended in Ryan Holiday’s super awesome reading list email archive).
Reading the Wikipedia entry, it made me realize what I often (mostly?) use this Tumblr for: to make notes to myself, shaping and re-shaping my perspective. Many of my favorite posts (tagged, e.g., work, opinions, empathy, arguments, happiness, death, travel, thinking, philosophy, stoicism, psychology) function as a sort of admonishment that I really do re-read every now and then. It’s an attempt to refresh and re-calibrate, internalize. This journaling/commonplacing thing isn’t new, but there’s something satisfying about knowing that one strand of the tradition goes back to an old Greek word. See also commentarii, commonplace, memoranda.
Man’s Search for Meaning
I got curious about this one after seeing Austin’s post. Good read. Author Viktor Frankl says:
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life–daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
This reminds me of a favorite blog post I came across several years ago: You don’t need a plan, you need skills and a problem (original blog now defunct?).
Screw your plans. Work on your skills. Apply them to a problem that is biting you. Flush and repeat until people believe you had a plan.
I love the sense of *action* that Frankl gets at. Meaning doesn’t happen to you or arrive through talk or navel-gazing, it’s something you do. You have to scratch around a bit. It’s part of a process, which itself is part of the fun, if you’re doing it right: Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing. Doesn’t mean it’s easy. Opportunity comes dressed in overalls, as they say. You’ll have to spend some time groping, listening, testing, accepting, discarding. And if you’re doing it right, it won’t feel good a lot of time: you can tell if it’s your own plan by how lost you feel.
Doesn’t mean you have to be super-choosy (although Family. Friends. Health. Work. Pick any three is helpful to keep in mind). Be careful what parts of yourself you give up on: “You can cut off a couple passions and only focus on one, but after a while, you’ll start to feel phantom limb pain.” And you have to keep in mind that, if you do ever succeed, having found your life’s purpose/calling/vocation/mission, it’s not going to extend your life and not necessarily make you *happy*. One year’s answer might not do for another. And by the way, “Don’t let yo’ happiness make somebody sad!”
It is hard to contend against passion, for whatever it craves it buys with its life.
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself, abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don’t regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours. How long, then, will you put off thinking yourself worthy of the highest improvements and follow the distinctions of reason? You have received the philosophical theorems, with which you ought to be familiar, and you have been familiar with them. What other master, then, do you wait for, to throw upon that the delay of reforming yourself?
Epictetus in The Enchiridion. Cf. Mike Tyson.
On the Problem of Form – Wassily Kandinsky
In practical life… one will hardly find a person who, if he wants to travel to Berlin, gets off the train in Regensburg! In spiritual life, getting off the train in Regensburg is a rather usual thing. Sometimes even the engineer does not want to go any further, and all of the passengers get off in Regensburg. How many, who sought God, finally remained standing before a carved figure! How many, who sought art, became caught on a form which an artist had used for his own purposes, be it Giotto, Raphael, Durer, or Van Gogh!
You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.
Jay-Z. Gotta say, I really liked his book. And it was only last December that I started paying decent attention to his music.
You can tell if it’s your own plan by how lost you feel. People who do their own plans feel lost most of the time. People who do other peoples’ plans feel on track most of the time.
I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I’m so far away from that life–now that I’ve got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers–that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be?
Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace. Just as it was started on its first day, so it will run; nowhere will it turn aside, nowhere will it delay.
Heaven knows! such lives as yours, though they should pass the limit of a thousand years, will shrink into the merest span; your vices will swallow up any amount of time.
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
Look back in memory and consider when you ever had a fixed plan, how few days have passed as you had intended, when you were ever at your own disposal, when your face ever wore its natural expression, when your mind was ever unperturbed, what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!
Seneca. I’ll probably have a few more from this one soon…
stevenberlinjohnson.com: Go West, Middle-Aged Man
When you’re in your routine, frequenting the same old haunts, time seems to accelerate – was it just four years ago that our youngest son was born? But all the complexities of moving – figuring out where to live, getting there, and then navigating all the new realities of the changed environment – means that the minutes and hours that once passed as a kind of background process, the rote memory of knowing your place, suddenly are thrust into your conscious awareness. You have to figure it out, and figuring things out makes you aware of the passing days and months more acutely. You get disoriented, or at least you have to think for a while before you can be properly oriented again.
So that is why we are moving: for the natural beauty, yes, and the climate, and the Bay Area tech scene, and the many friends out there we haven’t seen enough of over the past twenty years. But more than anything, we’re moving to slow down time.
We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
Mark Larson 