In a previous post I wrote about how I believe shared curation let’s us get the best of the Internet, while skipping the tech-giants’ ad-driven content feed.
Here’s a great addition to that thought: data-driven newsletter of links in other newsletters: pudding.cool/projects/newsletter/
Being on the private email list of Derek Sivers has some advantages (anyone can be on the list, it is not something elitist, just go here: https://sive.rs/list). One advantage is getting early access to Derek’s new work. How To Live is Derek’s new book, he pointed me to through the email list. I bought it and read it.
The book is a great guidance to life, as the title suggests. It is packed with great advice, categorized into 27 topics. The advice is sometimes contradictory, and Derek does not hide that: he gave the book the subtitle: “27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion”. And I don’t care either; life is contradictory.
Much of the advice Derek has thought up or gathered in this book may have its origins in Buddhism and Stoicism, and I think it also build on folks like Nassim Taleb (Antifragile), Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin.
The book is way too dense to summarize in anyway. Just some parts by topic that I found useful for myself.
Instead, do what you’d do if you were the only person on Earth.
You and your best friends don’t decide anew each day whether you’re friends or not. You are friends, without question. You’re committed to each other, even if you’ve never said so. That’s what’s wonderful about it. Commit to your habits to make them rituals.
Never have the same thought twice.
Expressing your anger doesn’t relieve it. It makes you angrier. Actions often have the opposite of the intended result. People who try too hard to be liked are annoying.
The stock market takes money from the active traders and gives it to the patient.
Imagine your future self judging your current life choices. When making a decision, ask yourself how you’ll feel about it when you’re old.
We overestimate what we can do in one year. We underestimate what we can do in ten years. If you take up a new hobby at the age of forty, or whatever age you think is too late, you’ll be an expert by the age of sixty.
Your future self is depending on you. Your descendants are depending on you. Our future generations are depending on us. Use the compounding amplifier of time.
Remember them all. Document everything, or you’ll eventually forget it. Nobody can erase your memories, but don’t lose them through neglect. Journal every day.
Turn your experiences into stories. A story is the remains of an experience.
Pick one thing and spend the rest of your life getting deeper into it. Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.
Concentrating all of your life’s force on one thing gives you incredible power. Sunlight won’t catch a stick on fire. But if you use a magnifying glass to focus the sunlight on one spot, it will. Mastery needs your full focused attention.
Define “success” for yourself. Describe the outcome you want. You can’t hit a target you can’t see.
You need to understand something very counter-intuitive about goals. Goals don’t improve your future. Goals only improve your present actions. A good goal makes you take action immediately.
Once you get momentum, never stop. It’s easy to continue, but if you stop, it’s hard to start again. Never miss a day.
Take tiny breaks when working, to go longer than most.
Pursue your mission at the expense of everything else.
You do it for the journey, not the destination.
Let the random generator decide what you do, where you go, and who you meet. When doing creative work, let the random generator make your artistic decisions, shaking up your usual style.
Random stuff happens. All you can control is your response. Every day, you’ll practice how to react to chaos: with dignity, poise, and grace.
Comfort is a silent killer. Comfort is quicksand. The softer the chair, the harder it is to get out of it. The right thing to do is never comfortable. How you face pain determines who you are. Be a famous pioneer.
This is the power of the pioneer: To enable the impossible. To open a new world of possibility. To show others that they can do it too, and take it even further.
Work as a futurist and technology journalist. Stay on the cutting edge of things so new they barely exist.
Old friends and family see you as you used to be, and unintentionally discourage your growth.
Be aware if the Lindy effect I mentioned in a previous post – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect and Grandmother’s wisdom of Nassim Taleb.
The longer something lasts, the longer it will probably last.
The world of news is noisy, because they have to hype it.
Get out of your room and try out a new skill in the real world. Go to the physical place where it’s happening, and put your ass on the line with something to lose. A vivid, visceral feeling of danger will teach you better than words.
Rules must be absolutely unbreakable. If you try to decide, each time, whether it’s OK to break the rule or not, then you’ve missed the whole point of rules.
Discipline turns intentions into action. Discipline means no procrastination. Discipline means now.
Choose the pain of discipline, not the pain of regret. Self-control is always rewarding.
They win by being playful, creative, adaptive, irreverent, and unbound by norms.
Comedy is tragedy plus time. Time belittles anything by showing it’s not as bad as it seemed. Humor does that instantly.
Vividly imagine the worst scenarios until they feel real (Seneca of course). Accepting them is the ultimate happiness and security. Realize that the worst is not that bad.
The best marketing is being considerate. The best sales approach is listening. Serve your clients’ needs, not your own. Business, when done right, is generous and focused on others. It draws you out of yourself, and puts you in service of humanity.
The most extreme version of living for others is becoming famous. Do everything in public, for the public. Share everything you do, even though it’s extra work.
Money is nothing more than a neutral exchange of value. Making money is proof you’re adding value to people’s lives.
Create your own business. Come up with a brand name that can be attached to any business. (Perhaps it’s your name.) Use it for the rest of your life on everything of quality. A recognized brand can charge a premium price, earning more than unrecognized names.
Use other people’s ideas. Ideas are worth almost nothing. Execution is everything.
Be separate—in a category of your own.
Nothing destroys money faster than seeking status. Don’t show off.
I meet this young salesman he had a good year. From the bonus he bought his wife a Landrover for shopping. The car cost him more than 2000 euro per month. Quickly he realized his mistake and sold the car, 10000 down.
You only need to get rich once. When you win a game, you stop playing. Don’t be the dragon in the mountain, just sitting on your gold. Don’t lose momentum in life. Once you’ve done it, take it with you and do something else.
Your past is not your future. Whatever happened before has nothing at all to do with what happens next. There is no consistency. Nothing is congruent. Never believe a story.
At every little decision, ten times a day, choose the thing you haven’t tried. Act out of character. It’s liberating. Get your security not from being an anchor, but from being able to ride the waves of change.
In other words – be Antifragile.
Break down the walls that separate you from others and prevent real connections. Take off your sunglasses. Don’t text when you should talk.
The hardest part of connecting with someone is being honest.
Notice how you feel around people. Notice who brings out the best in you. Notice who makes you feel more connected with yourself—more open and more honest.
Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. All that matters is what you’ve launched. Make finishing your top priority.
Suspend all judgment when creating the first draft. Just get to the end.
Most of what you make will be fertilizer for the few that turn out great. But you won’t know which is which until afterward. Keep creating as much as you can.
Stay in situations where you’re forced to show your work to others.
Keep a counterweight job. Something effortless that covers your bills. Something you can do a few hours per day, but otherwise not think about. It gives discipline and regularity to your life. It gives deadlines and freedom to your art.
Let the deadline of death drive you. Create until your last breath.
Avoiding failure leads to success. The winner is usually the one who makes the least mistakes. This is true in investing, extreme skiing, business, flying, and many other fields. Win by not losing.
Most of eating healthy is just avoiding bad food. Most of being right is just not being wrong. To have good people in your life, just cut out the bad ones.
People who avoid mistakes are fragile, like the robot that only walks. Your million mistakes will make you someone that can’t be knocked down.
Don’t accept anything as-is. Everything you encounter must change. Preservation is your enemy. Only dead fish go with the flow.
Begin by righting what’s wrong. Look for what’s ugly: ugly systems, ugly rules, ugly traditions. Look for what bothers you.
If you can fix it, do it now. Otherwise, aim lower until you find something you can do now. Make it how it should be.
Don’t worship your heroes. Surpass them.
All bad things in life come from extremes. Too much of this. Too little of that.
When you’re balanced, you’re unlikely to get stressed. You’ve got a stronger foundation and a resilient structure. You can handle surprises, and make time for what’s needed.
Schedule everything to ensure balance of your time and effort. Scheduling prevents procrastination, distraction, and obsession.
Even creative work needs scheduling. The greatest writers and artists didn’t wait for inspiration. They kept a strict daily schedule for creating their art.
As said, this is the things I found important. The book is fully packed with things for you. Get the book through Derek’s site: https://sive.rs/.
I read The Salt Path and immediately bought Wild Silence, its sequal, sort of. I read Wild Silence in the same blow I had read The Salt Path.
I cried a little. I never cry reading books. But it was so good.
Raynor continues her story after a lucky finish of walking the coastal path, and finding a friend that could rent Winn and her husband a small house. Moth is studying at his old age but his disease seems to get hold of him now.
I closed the book, overwhelmed with the sadness of the thought that the day would come when Moth couldn’t remember what we did. The day when CBD had crept so far that the clear, magical, wild experience we’d shared was lost to him forever and I’d be left alone with the memory. The day when the guidebook would be the only record that our walk had ever happened. Where the hell was he?
As a last resort to retain their shared memories she decides to write the story of the coastal path. As a present for her husband.
‘What is this? Is this what you’ve been doing?’ ‘Yeah, I’ve been writing it for you.’ I felt shy and nervous, as if it was the first present I’d ever given him. ‘All that time and it was for me.’ ‘It’s the path, the book of our path. So you can always keep the memory.’
Even more than in The Salt Path itself, the detailed description of nature and surroundings Winn creates, remind me of the beautiful rigorous details that Tim Robinson uses in his books.
Following the coastal path down from the skylark fields, through the gorse, to the steep dip in the land where winter storms funnel high winds into a jet-powered blast of air, making it hard to stay on your feet.
The health of Moth, the shyness of Raynor, the death of her dominant mother, the development of a writer, her love for Moth, many threads run through the books, that could make the reading cheesy but that never happens.
Don’t ‘be careful on the stairs’, run up them, run as fast as you can, with no fear of clocks ticking or time passing. Nothing can be measured in time, only change, and change is always within our grasp, always simply a matter of choice. I closed my eyes and let the sounds come, let the voice come.
A few years ago my wife and I spent our holidays in Cornwall. We traveled from north of Cornwall through Plymouth to the south of Cornwall, back up to Minehead, passing places with the names Lizard’s End, Mousehole and Land’s End. We walked parts of the Coastal Path. The lanscape is rough and beautiful.
A week ago I got a novel about this area, The Salt Path. It has become a famous book, I read on the back and then on the Internet. I loved the book. Immediately after finishing it, I bought its sequal, Wild Silence.
In the Salt Path Raynor Winn tells how she and er husband walk the coastal path of Cornwall that I had seen parts of that summer. They follow Paddy Dillon, a travel writer and experiences hiker, who followed the path a few decade before them. Dillon wrote a book about his trip, South West Coast Path – Plymouth to Poole.
Winn and her husband Moth have just went bankrupt and lost their house to a untruthful friend and Moth has been diagnosed with an incurable disease of the nerve system.
Their view of life changes as they follow the path. Stangely, Walking seems to improve Moth’s health.
Op een zondag in juni sprak ik af met een vriend voor een fotowandeling bij Wijk aan Zee. In het binnenland was het zonnig, maar over de kustrand hing zo’n typische strook mist. De zon kon er geen vat op krijgen. Op zich leverde dit moeilijke licht wel aparte beelden op, maar je moet er van houden. Na langs het strand bij Wijk aan Zee te hebben geslenterd, verplaatsten we ons naar de pier verder zuidelijk, het wordt daar Velsen-Noord. Dezelfde mistige beelden van strandgasten in de mist.
Duane Denison is a very special guitarist. He is most know as the guitarist in The Jesus Lizard. In this video he geeks out on electric guitar things. Wonderful person.
For those not aware what an amazing band The Jesus Lizard was, watch this. They have made a couple of classic albums and songs. The song Gladiator is my all-time favorite.
Gisteravond bij IJmuiden foto’s gemaakt. Geparkeerd aan de Harlingenstraat, aan de noordkant van het jachthaventje van IJmuiden aan Zee (als het zo heet). Tussen de Harlingenstraat en de zeekant is een hoge betonnen muur opgetrokken. Aan de andere kant is een duin gemaakt waartegen twee lange rijen strandhuisjes zijn neergezet, met een klein strandje als voortuin. Het strandje, zo lees ik later op Google maps, heet dan ook het Kleine Strand. Rechts, voor de bewoners, uitzicht op de Hoogovens/Tata/Corus.
Ik loop over de pier langs het strandje, met de bedoeling bij het grote strand van IJmuiden uit te komen. Helaas heb ik geen rekening gehouden met de haveningang, die het onmogelijk maakt via deze weg het strand te bereiken. Ik herinner me nu dat ik er al eens eerder in was getuind. Om het strand te bereiken vanaf hier moet je helemaal om het jachthaventje heen lopen, of rijden. Ik besluit het laatste te doen, en slenter terug naar de auto.
Aan de andere kant is een enorme parkeerplaats. Ik parkeer bij het hotel vooraan de Kennemerboulevard, en slenter over de boulevard naar het strand. Halverwege zit een Chinese familie te dineren.”Een oorlel zo groot als een biefstuk, door die wespensteek,” vang ik op.Het strand is behoorlijk leeg. De laatste dagjestoeristen verlaten het strand en de strandtenten zijn aan het opruimen. Alleen bij de strandhuisjes is nog leven. Hier een nog langere rij van drie etages strandhuisjes.
Beachvolleybal in de ondergaande zon. Twee vrienden zitten op een blok beton naar de horizon te kijken, een fles aan hun voeten.
Ondanks zijn gebrekkige realisatie en de uiterst onvriendelijke ondersteuning, is de Nederlandse Museumkaart een onmisbare uitvinding waar we toch een beetje trots op mogen zijn. Musea zijn enorm duur, losse kaartjes voor een beetje museum kosten ergens tussen de 10 en 20 euro, maar voor 65 euro, en de helft daarvan voor jongeren, koop je de Museumkaart waarmee je een heel jaar lang alle Nederlandse musea in kan.
De Museumkaart bracht ons vandaag naar Ruurlo, waar in kasteel Ruurlo een overzichtstentoonstelling is ingericht over het werk van Carel Willink. Willink experimenteerde met meerdere stijlen, maar is vooral bekend geworden om zijn werk met een sterk realistische stijl.
Zijn weergave van stof is geweldig. Ik zie een knoop in een gehaakte stropdas die uit een schilderij springt, en een portret van Henri Isaäc Keus in een tweed pak dat meer een portret van een tweed pak is met een man er in. Willink steekt Zurbarán, de Spaanse meester van het afbeelden van stof naar de kroon. Maar mijn vrouw wijst me ook op de handen van de mand, die vlezig op de leuning van een stoel liggen. Je ziet de aderen van de man kloppen.
Andere, landschappelijke schilderijen doen met denken aan Beeple, een moderne digitale realist.
I had never seen Dinosaur Jr live, and was massvely impressed what a well-oiled machine this band is.
