A Secret to Dad Greatness

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Appreciate your child’s love for you.

Do this every day, whenever you see your child, and even when they’re not around. This love for you is a gift, and it manifests itself in so many ways: in the way they want your attention, your affection, your approval, your pride in what they do. In wanting to spend time with you. In watching you to see how to live life. In learning from you whenever you talk to them.

via A Secret to Dad Greatness : zenhabits.

Parents: the whole thing is quotable, so take a moment to read it. Great post for Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, and every day in between.

Rehearsing

This entry was posted in Buddhism, Quotes on by .

Merlin Mann (Back to Work / Episode #120 / “Egg MacGuffin”) on rehearsing versus doing:

You haven’t spent your life rehearsing on how to be happy with what you’ve got. You spend your life rehearsing what’s going to happen when this big, fantastic Mr. Roarke scenario comes down and you’re finally never going to have to worry about anything again.

And then later:

I don’t think you are going to get a lot accomplished by sitting around and being envious of other people and I don’t think you are going to get a lot accomplished by hoping you are going to hit a number one day.
[...]
How ironic would it be if what you did turned out so great you actually made some money from it… instead of working that backwards and saying all I need is all of this money and then I can finally be happy and make something.

So great.

I think he touches on something that can apply to many aspects of life. Whether it’s never being satisfied with material possessions or happy with life, in general. The fact is, whether it’s “if I get this iPhone I will be happy” or “if I [INSERT ANYTHING] I will never have to worry about [ANYTHING] again”, the feeling is temporary and you will have new challenges to deal with or new gadgets to lust over or some other new thing that is super appealing to you. The grass is always greener on the other side and it’s even more so if you get comfortable and stop growing and challenging yourself.

And then there’s the classic question that’s supposed to help you discover your true calling: “If you won the lottery, what job would you want to do?” But in reality, you’re setting yourself up to believe that’s the only option for that dream to come true. I see the appeal in the lottery or any windfall, but when it comes down to it you have a 1-in-175 million chance to hit the Powerball jackpot. The odds of hitting any other lottery aren’t much better (how does 1-in-5 million sound?!)

As much as you hear about the high rate of small business failure, you have better odds of success at that, by far. Yes, it costs more. (Though that cost is continually dropping due to technology.) Yes, it’s more work. And far, far harder work. But, that dream job will be reality and you’ll have a real chance at turning that dream into something that can support yourself and your family. It’s the active pursuit of your dream versus continually dreaming, hoping, and rehearsing for that windfall. 1

So… what would you do if you won the lottery? What can you start doing now to make that a reality?

  1. And, please, PLEASE, charge money for your service/site/whatever. Make a decent living and work hard to build it up into a sustainable long-term business. Relying on an acquisition from Google/Facebook/Yahoo/Microsoft/whomever is no different than rehearsing for that lottery win. ↩

This is Water

This entry was posted in Buddhism, Education, Quotes on by .

If you have 10 minutes to spare today, I highly recommend viewing the video above, created by TheGlossary.com and based off David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College in 2005.

His speech does an amazing job at communicating one of the most important aspects of education (and life), learning to think:

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

This arrogance, he says, comes from our default setting of self-centeredness:

We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

His advice to the students centers around choosing what and how to think about experiences, versus defaulting to the self-centeredness — essentially being mindful:

I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

He goes on to explain why this will be so important:

The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.
[...]
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

This reminds of a zen parable from Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen: Love & Work:

Suppose we are out on a lake and it’s a bit foggy–not too foggy, but a bit foggy – and we’re rowing along in our little boat having a good time. And then, all of a sudden, coming out of the fog, there’s this other rowboat and it’s heading right at us. And… crash! Well, for a second we’re really angry – what is that fool doing? I just painted my boat! And here he comes–crash! – right into it. And then suddenly we notice that the rowboat is empty. What happens to our anger? Well, the anger collapses… I’ll just have to paint my boat again, that’s all. But if that rowboat that hit ours had another person in it, how would we react? You know what would happen! Now our encounters with life, with other people, with events, are like being bumped by an empty rowboat. But we don’t experience it that way. We experience it as though there are people in that other rowboat and we’re really getting clobbered by them.

The world would be a much better place if we just ignored the default more often and treated a larger number of negative experiences (or in many cases, potentially negative experiences) like an empty rowboat. At least we’d be a little less angry and frustrated.

Being able to navigate and deal with the hundreds of other people and stories you experience each day is an important life skill. All of those people have their own motivations, expectations, goals, fears, internal demons, and life experiences that drive their decisions and actions. It’s almost always not about US specifically. They are just trying to live, get through the day, and be as happy as possible. Just like us.

Matthew Smith on the unlimited web

This entry was posted in Digital Analog, Quotes, Technology on by .

I think we designed the wrong Internet. We’re creating rapidly for the Internet and we’re creating things that are life-changing for people. I think that smart people with good ethics need to make hard decisions about what we’re making. For example, I think about the feed, which invites us to come, be obsessed, and compare ourselves to everyone, all the time. Who came up with the idea of endless content constantly streaming toward us? There’s this unlimitedness that concerns me because it is so unlike the rest of the human experience and I think it confuses the human mind and puts us into a space where we aren’t at our best. I want to make sure that no matter the project or company I’m involved with, I’m always asking if it’s serving the human best and helping us be at our best.

via The Great Discontent: Matthew Smith.

Louis C. K. on trying to make everyone happy

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From a great NY Times Louis C.K. interview:

It’s a desperate thing to need everybody to be really happy with everything you say. To me the way to manage is not to have 50 versions of yourself — I do this thing, and the next time you’re going to hear me is the next time I do another one. As soon as you crack your knuckles and open up a comments page, you just canceled your subscription to being a good person.

via For Louis C. K., the Joke’s on Him – NYTimes.com.

I saw him a few weeks ago at Kleinhan’s in Buffalo — he ended the show on a related note, talking about the two worst versions of ourselves: driving a car and on the internet. How these two settings give us the protection (whether inside a car or a browser window) to say and do things that we’d never do in person.

I think a lot of life today comes down to effectively managing the multiple versions of yourself and consolidating those versions into an authentic, reasonable, and manageable number. Otherwise you are going to spend a lot of your time, attention, and money trying to make other people happy.

Be sure to read the rest of the interview, as he touches on all the indie things he’s done recently on his own terms — from tour tickets to comedy specials. Very inspiring.

The New Stability

This entry was posted in Productivity on by .

Robert Kirkman (creator of The Walking Dead and partner at Image Comics) on forging your own career path vs. relying on companies:

They make the rules. A lot of people have fooled themselves into thinking that’s stability but are now realizing that it’s the exact opposite. The real stability is controlling your own career and being in a position to hire yourself, generating ideas that are enough to make you a sustainable income, and also controlling those ideas and your own destiny. That’s the new stability and that’s something people are realizing. I’m very optimistic that it’ll be something that is here to stay.

via Graphic Novel and Comic Book Creators in New York City – Graphic NYC.