Collecting these little ideas has become a major focus. Here’s this month’s installment.
- Art allows us to see through the eyes of others.
- If you can’t be X all day, try being X for the next second, minute or hour.
- Understanding and believing are not the same thing.—Gertrude Stein
- Failure will never stand in the way of success if you learn from it.”—Hank Aaron
- Figure out a way to take care of yourself, legal. Find somebody you can stand that can stand you. Pay your taxes. Take care of your teeth.—Duke Bootee
- What you think is boring now may become interesting in the future.
- Commit to something for life. It doesn’t matter what it is.
- Better felt than told.
- “If you absolutely can’t tolerate critics, then don’t do anything new or interesting.”—Jeff Bezos
- Think about the structure of choice, the Overton window of action.
- Carefully discern the cost and the calling.
- Average speed wins races.
- A good relationship means fighting fairly, strengthening yourself, then strengthening your relationship. Rinse, repeat.
- A focus on the human, the person in front of you this moment — and if alone that person is you — is always what is needed.
- Listen to the stories of others at the edges.
- We need to pick the futures we want and advocate for them loudly and repeatedly, cf. Madeline Ashby.
- Reject the predetermined future.
- Can it be beautiful? Is it already but our eye isn’t trained to see it?
- Too many experts in the comment section? Or not any?
- True originality is rare.
- Every great truth has an opposite truth.
- Life is a beautiful dare.
- As soon as you start to go for ‘volume’ of chips in your mouth, instead of taste. Put away the bag.
- Talk, loudly and frequently and in detail, about the future you want. You can’t manifest what you don’t share.—Madeline Ashby
- Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.—Ruha Benjamin
- Progress isn’t complete until it is experienced by everyone.
- Be careful of words repurposed by their adversaries.
- Don’t build what you cannot maintain.
- Design for repair.
- Hope for the future is a reasonable and necessary prerequisite for action.—Emma Marris
- Look for a track record of improvement.
- Without community, there is no liberation.—Audre Lorde
- Do not do anything you do not fucking want to do.
- Let go of the desire to be right.
- The place in which you’ll fit will not exist until you make it.
- The problem with algos is they censor the tedious and routine.
- Every generation revolts against it fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.—Lewis Mumford
- Individuality in the United States is often toxic, creating barriers to deep connection and intimacy.
- Family can be built from shared experience and values.
- Accountability is a practice of the self, not of community.
- Reach for grace and weave it through your life and those around you; a person is a person through others.
- A dream is an imagined reality.
- Not queer like gay, queerlike escaping definition. Queer like some kind of fluidity and limitlessness all at once. Queer like freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love could look like, and to pursue it.—Brandon Wint
- We cannot fully know ourselves without other people.
- The power of the Government to spin, delay, hide and smudge is almost limitless.
- Synthesize charted territory.
- “Don’t forget to tell your favorite people that you love them.”—Shirley Temple
- Grace favors the well-trained mind.
- Doing hallucinations is like trying to fix a Swiss watch with a sledgehammer.
- Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’—Erich Fromm
- Fret not after knowledge for I have none.
- Do you have any allegiances greater than knowledge and intelligence?
- Truth guarantees bad things will happen.
- Power plays a role in determining who gets to be an absolutist and who doesn’t.
- True persuasion is difficult, rare, and incremental.
- Not everything needs to be permanently documented.
- Working capital murders excuses.
- At what scale do you want to operate?
- Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish.
- Blame is a way to discharge anger.
- Do no harm.
- Keep your shit together.
- If all options are bad, look for more options.
- Follow instructions, and play well with others.
- You can’t let one bad moment spoil a bunch of good ones.”-Dale Earnhardt
- Don’t lead with the facts. Establish rapport. Ask questions. Listen to the answers.
- Instead of trying to enlighten someone else, start with your own blind spots.
- “I don’t expect you to understand anything I’m telling you. But I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends.”—William Saroyan
- Do it. Then, do it again. Then, do it again, ad infinitum.
- A teacher is never impressed by what we don’t know and is rarely impressed by what they don’t know.
- People care about how you treat them, how well you listen to them, the regard you give to their point of view, and if you are a good friend.
- Concentration and analysis aren’t the same thing.
- People are very open to suggestion, aka scripting.
- Wait 5 minutes. If hard, wait 500 days. Some things are so hard they require a lifetime, a generation, or an eon.
- Much can be learned by falling down and getting back up.
- The best way to predict your future is to create it.—Peter Drucker
- After every key decision or action, we should write down what we expect will happen. And some months later, compare the actual results with our expectations.
- Find where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it.
- If you have the emotional fortitude to last three years, you’ll succeed.
- For many, imitation is just as good as real.
- “Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.”—Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home
- “Do as little as needed, not as much as possible.”—Henk Kraaijenhof
- People that are happy over a long time scale have optimism, perseverance, a focus on relationships, and an appetite for risk. The last is key, it’s hard to develop deep held confidence that you’ll be okay in all circumstances if your appetite for risk isn’t high enough.—Ruth Grace Wong
- Noise might be signal we haven’t learned to process.
- There are different kinds of random.
- Interpretation is what matters.
- Grab your little joys and squeeze until you’ve throttled them between white-knuckled fingers.
- Ideas and the work are the easy problem. People are always the hard problem.
- Being right usually means someone else is wrong. People that are wrong usually either still think they are right. When they can acknowledge being wrong, they will generally dislike those that were right and think they suck, are arrogant, etc. Yin/Yang.
- Story’s are defined by therefore and but, not and then.
- Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
- The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.―Erwin Schrödinger
- To be publicly and widely mocked suggests that you may be doing something right.At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.—Somerset Maugham
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