- You Should Own Your Favorite Books in Hard Copy (Lifehacker) — "Most importantly, when you keep physical books around, the people who live with you can browse and try them out too."
- How Creative Commons drives collaboration (Vox) "Although traditional copyright protects creators from others redistributing or repurposing their works entirely, it also restricts access, for both viewers and makers."
- Key Facilitation Skills: Distinguishing Weird from Seductive (Grassroots Economic Organizing) — "As a facilitation trainer the past 15 years, I've collected plenty of data about which lessons have been the most challenging for students to digest."
- Why Being Bored Is Good (The Walrus) — "Boredom, especially the species of it that I am going to label “neoliberal,” depends for its force on the workings of an attention economy in which we are mostly willing participants."
- 5: People having fun on the internet (Near Future Field Notes) — "The internet is still a really great place to explore. But you have to get back into Internet Nature instead of spending all your time in Internet Times Square wondering how everything got so loud and dehumanising."
- The work of a sleepwalking artist offers a glimpse into the fertile slumbering brain (Aeon) "Lee Hadwin has been scribbling in his sleep since early childhood. By the time he was a teen, he was creating elaborate, accomplished drawings and paintings that he had no memory of making – a process that continues today. Even stranger perhaps is that, when he is awake, he has very little interest in or skill for art."
- The Power of One Push-Up (The Atlantic) — "Essentially, these quick metrics serve as surrogates that correlate with all kinds of factors that determine a person’s overall health—which can otherwise be totally impractical, invasive, and expensive to measure directly. If we had to choose a single, simple, universal number to define health, any of these functional metrics might be a better contender than BMI."
- How Wechat censors images in private chats (BoingBoing) — "Wechat maintains a massive index of the MD5 hashes of every image that Chinese censors have prohibited. When a user sends another user an image that matches one of these hashes, it's recognized and blocked at the server before it is transmitted to the recipient, with neither the recipient or the sender being informed that the censorship has taken place."
- It's Never Too Late to Be Successful and Happy (Invincible Career) — "The “race” we are running is a one-person event. The most important comparison is to yourself. Are you doing better than you were last year? Are you a better person than you were yesterday? Are you learning and growing? Are you slowly figuring out what you really want, what makes you happy, and what fulfillment means for you?"
- 'Blitzscaling' Is Choking Innovation—and Wasting Money (WIRED) — "If we learned anything from the dotcom bubble at the turn of the century, it’s that in an environment of abundant capital, money does not necessarily bestow competitive advantage. In fact, spending too much, to soon on unproven business models only heightens the risk that a company's race for global domination can become a race to oblivion."
- Celebrate your wins
- Address your losses or weaknesses
- Note your "coulda, woulda, shoulda" tasks
- Create goals for next week
- Summarise it all in one sentence
- Trying (Snakes and Ladders) — "I realized that one of the reasons I like doing the newsletter so much is that I have (quite unconsciously) understood it as a place not to do analysis or critique but to share things that give me delight."
- 43 — All in & with the flow (Buster Benson) — "It’s tempting to always rationalize why our current position is optimal, but as I get older it’s a lot easier to see how things move in cycles, and the cycles themselves are what we should pay attention to more than where we happen to be in them at the moment.
- Four Ways to Figure Out What You Really Want to Do with Your Life (Lifehacker) — "In the end, figuring out your passion, your career path, your life purpose—whatever you want to call it—isn’t an easy process and no magic bullet exists for doing it."
Friday federations
These things piqued my interest this week:
Image: Federation Square by Julien used under a Creative Commons license
Even in their sleep men are at work
For today's title I've used Marcus Aurelius' more concise, if unfortunately gendered, paraphrasing of a slightly longer quotation from Heraclitus. It's particularly relevant to me at the moment, as recently I've been sleepwalking. This isn't a new thing; I've been doing it all my life when something's been bothering me.
When I tell people about this, they imagine something similar to the cartoon above. The reality is somewhat more banal, with me waking up almost as soon as I get out of bed and then getting back into it.
Sometimes I'm not entirely sure what's bothering me. Other times I do, but it's a combintion of things. In an article for Inc. Amy Morin gives some advice, explains there's an important difference between 'ruminating' and 'problem-solving':
If you're behind on your bills, thinking about how to get caught up can be helpful. But imagining yourself homeless or thinking about how unfair it is that you got behind isn't productive.
So ask yourself, "Am I ruminating or problem-solving?"
Amy Morin
If you're dwelling on the problem, you're ruminating. If you're actively looking for solutions, you're problem-solving.
Morin goes on to talk about 'changing the channel' which can be a very difficult thing to do. One thing that helps me is reading the work of Stoic philosophers such as The Enchiridion by Epictetus, which begins with some of the best advice I've ever read:
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you not be harmed.
Aiming therefore at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself to be carried, even with a slight tendency, towards the attainment of lesser things. Instead, you must entirely quit some things and for the present postpone the rest. But if you would both have these great things, along with power and riches, then you will not gain even the latter, because you aim at the former too: but you will absolutely fail of the former, by which alone happiness and freedom are achieved.
Work, therefore to be able to say to every harsh appearance, "You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be." And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.
Epictetus
Donald Robertson, founder of Modern Stoicism, is an author and psychotherapist. Robertson was interviewed by Knowledge@Wharton for their podcast, which they've also transcribed. He makes a similar point to Epictetus, based on the writings of Marcus Aurelius:
Ultimately, the only thing that’s really under our control is our own will, our own actions. Things happen to us, but what we can really control is the way that we respond to those things. Stoicism wants us to take also greater responsibility, greater ownership for the things that we can actually do, both in terms of our thoughts and our actions, and respond to the situations that we face.
Donald Robertson
Robertson talks in the interview about how Stoicism has helped him personally:
It’s helped me to cope with a lot of things, even relatively trivial things. The last time I went to the dentist, I’m sure I was using Stoic pain management techniques. It becomes a habitual thing. Coping with some of the stress that therapists have when they’re dealing with clients who sometimes describe very traumatic problems, and the stress of working with other people who have their difficulties and stresses. [I moved] to Canada a few years ago, and that was a big upheaval for me. As for many people, a life-changing event like that can require a lot to deal with. Learning to think about things like a Stoic has helped me to negotiate all of these things in life.
Donald Robertson
Although I haven't done it since August 2010(!) I used to do something which I referred to as "calling myself into the office". The idea was that I'd set myself three to five goals, and then review them at the end of the month. I'd also set myself some new goals.
The value of doing this is that you can see that you're making progress. It's something that I should definitely start doing again. I was reminded of this approach after reading an article at Career Contessa about weekly self-evaluations. The suggested steps are:
While Career Contessa suggests this will all take only five minutes, I think that if you did it properly it might take more like 20 minutes to half an hour. Whether you do it weekly or monthly probably depends on the size of the goals you're trying to achieve. Either way, it's a valuable exercise.
We all need to cut ourselves some slack, to go easy on ourselves. The chances are that the thing we're worrying about isn't such a big deal in the scheme of things, and the world won't end if we don't get that thing done right now. Perhaps regular self-examination, whether through Stoicism or weekly/monthly reviews, can help more of us with that?
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