Category Archives: Quotes

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

This entry was posted in Quotes, Technology on by .

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.

I really like this:

You are responsible for what you consume.

If I told you that you could watch just one movie this month, you might spend more time considering your choice. You’d pick carefully. If you were limited to just one hour of television a day you’d say no to most programs. If you lived on bread and milk and had just one meal a week of your choice you be careful not to waste the opportunity.

Your options are virtually unlimited. And you, you alone are responsible for limiting your options. You are.

Pick one.

– Pick One — First Today, Then Tomorrow by Randy Murrary.

Because more than you need to makes it personal.

Because work that belongs to you, by choice, is the first step to making art.

Because the choice to do more brings passion to your life and it makes you more alive.

Because if you don’t, someone else will, and in an ever more competitive world, doing less means losing.

Because you care.

Because we’re watching.

Because you can.

via Seth’s Blog: “I’m making money, why do more?”

Manti Te’o and Inspiration Stories

This entry was posted in Quotes, Sports on by .

The fact is, this story exists because sports media wanted it to exist: It’s exactly the sort of easy, “inspiration” narrative that Notre Dame has specialized in for decades. But this isn’t a Notre Dame story; this is what happens when you report on sports as if they are some sort of metaphor for life, or that athletes are somehow more “inspirational” than regular people.

via The media scrambles to backtrack on Manti Te’o. | SportsonEarth.com : Will Leitch Article.

Two days, two posts that build off Will Leitch quotes? Yes!

Even though I am a sports fan, I still get frustrated with most of the stuff beyond the playing field. Whether it’s the athletes-as-role-models-by-default mentality, or how quickly we lift them up even further (or tear them down with relentless speed) when they do the smallest things, or how easily they get off (comparatively) when they do really horrendous things.

For me, it takes away from the game and competition… and at its simplest it comes down to the same concept as yesterday’s post: money, popularity, and “shininess” distract us from what’s truly important. We then feel obligated to pay attention, in some way or another, simply because of those factors.

How about we treat everyone with the same basic level of respect, reverence, forgiveness, empathy (etc, etc) to start and then adjust, versus automatically assigning them roles and importance? (For good or bad.) Seems simpler and a lot less dramatic, at least.