Urgent over difficult
How interesting and urgent doing the dishes becomes when you are about to start a creative activity. My mind is highly creative in inventing urgent things before difficult things.
I guess it’s that thing called Resistance.
How often can you hesitate posting something? One other such thing. Good enough is good enough. And here it is.
David Lynch’ Theater on youtube
David Lynch hosts a great channel on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/c/DAVIDLYNCHTHEATER
He makes a wooden iPhone stand. Closes with the remark that you can buy such a thing online as well. And that it is even better. But it is so much fun to make.
The Checking Stick is also wonderful.
The joy of reading old books
We are tempted to only read new books. Books on the NY Times best seller list, if you are American.
But consider reading old books. Books that have been around for some time. That have proven their value and are still being recommended.
Not necessarily Greek Philosophers, but also books like Moby Dick (from 1851), One Hundred years of Solitude (1967), Catcher in the Rye (1945), Catch-22 (1961), Alice in Wonderland (1862), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Meditations (ok that’s old – 170-180 AD), Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), On Writing (2000), Maus (written 1980-1991), Antifragile (2012).
On Antifragile, the approach to read old books probably much aligns with Nassim Taleb’s conviction to prefer grandmother’s wisdom over the opinions of self-appointed intelligentia. And also take the Lindy effect into account, and you are ensured you can enjoy the read much longer.
Thought of humility for modern day “geniuses” (video)
… genius isn’t the result of the great men that Carlyle proposed. Instead, the genius stands atop the shoulders of those that came before, whose small incremental advances led to the genius’ breakthrough.
…
It’s not brilliance, it’s simply progress “obtained naturally and cumulatively as a consequence of hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck.”
Taylor Pearson’s illegible margin
Taylor Pearson wrote a great article on the limits and dangers of rationalizing complex phenomena, and the opportunities of illegible ‘fat tail’ margins.
Some other gold nuggets in the article:
- The joy of reading (and logic of preferring) old books.
- Follow fingerspitzelgefühl – grandmother’s wisdom, Nassim Taleb, would say instead of modernist rationalizations.
- A tinkering budget (low downside, high upside) for the things we are exploring that are hard to see.
Push
Reminder to self. Push this one thing, every day. At least once every day. Do this year after year. Long form, short form, that does not matter. It is the consistency that builds the thing.
Kevin Kelly: eight uncopyable values
From Kevin Kelly’s essay in Change This: Better Than Free, eight things that are better than free, eight uncopyable values. Kelly calls these “generatives”, qualities that must grow through cultivation.
Immediacy
Personalization
Interpretation
Authenticity
Accessibility
Embodiment (music is free, a performance expensive)
Patronage (audiences want to pay creators)
Findability (creators need aggregators, which is why publishers, studios, and labels (psL) will never disappear; not for distribution, but for finding audiences and refine attention).
In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.
Save time
Free after Seth Godin:
Don’t watch television
Don’t go to meetings
Instead:
Look at the blank space beween you and the future.
What is high leverage work.
(versus what crappy task is there only to keep you from doing the real work).