HOW TO LIVE WISDOM
In 2011, a video of a kid speechifying after learning to ride a bike went viral. His dad “interviewed” him after his accomplishment, asking him whether he had any “words of wisdom” for all the other kids who wanted to ride a bike.
PLAY A MEAN PINBALL (YES YOU CAN)
For weeks now I’ve been hung up on the saga of the resurgence of Pinball — that American-made quintessential mix of skill, chance, and enticingly challenging distraction in a glassed-in box that swept up the world and wrapped it up in the epitome of American “cool” and then nearly got killed off by the advent and rise of the now-ubiquitous video game. The pinball industry lay there gasping at the end of the 20th century. The death watch began around…
GET TO CLARITY
“Maintaining clarity of vision is an essential difference between those who conceive and realize great ideas and those who simply conceive great ideas,” it says here. That quote is from Carol Lloyd, author of CREATING A LIFE WORTH LIVING: A Practical Course in Career Design for Artists, Innovators and Others Aspiring to a Creative Life, a book that first came out in 1997. The book’s been through four editions since then. I’m re-reading my dog-eared, marked-up, well-worn copy of it…
SHIFT TO IDLE
MY BIG CONFESSION I am an incorrigible daydreamer. When I was a kid, of course, there were those Bigs around me who kept predicting dire consequences for the disrespectful, lazy Space Cadet who was not listening, who could not focus, who had the attention span of a flea. I was told to concentrate. I was told to go do something. I was told I had to develop my Work Ethic. I lost count of the number of times I got…
GET TIME-RICH
We don’t usually think about poverty in terms of time. After all, each one of us has the same 24 hours every day, right? How can one person be “time richer” or “time poorer” than another person? And yet there is this notion of “time famine” that’s been around since the 1990’s. It’s an epidemic, those guys who look at population trends tell us. In this brave new post-modern fast-paced world, more and more of us are wandering around moaning…
USE YOUR FEAR AS RADAR
How many times has THIS happened? You have a really crazy idea that you absolutely, deep down in the pit of your stomach, KNOW will be totally RIGHT for you. You want this. You irrefutably NEED this! You get a truly awesome limited-time chance to make it happen and it is imperative that you do this thing right now, or else….well, you just keep doing whatever you’re already doing. Right then fear will rear its ugly head.
GET BACK YOUR KID MOJO
Children fascinate me. The coolest thing about kids, I think, is this: They come into this world as a bundle of wonder and curiosity.
YOUR TURN TO TRY
Here’s another way of Un-Seeing, one involving time and space. Google what “Hawaiian time” means and you will probably get some variation of “late.” Sometimes the definition comes with a fifteen-minute grace-period added and, often, there’s a bit of humor-filled tolerance included. As more than one entry so delicately puts it, we island people are afflicted by a “relaxed indifference to precise scheduling.” Uh-huh.
STEPLADDER TO A DREAM
I am reading a fascinating new book, STICK WITH IT: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life – For Good. It’s by Sean Young, the director of the UCLA Center for Digital Behavior and the UC Institute for Prediction Technology. For over 15 years, Young and his team have been working on finding ways to help people change their behavior and make those changes last. In his work and in the book, Young puts together a framework that describes…
DO-BE, DO-BE, DO
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re busy, I’m busy, everybody’s busy. In fact, it seems like everybody’s drowning in busy, busy, busy. We bounce around doing this, handling that, rushing through our days, knocking off all of our bullets on that mile-long to-do list, steam-rolling through the obstacles, knocking off the challenges and so on and so forth. Rolling, rolling, rolling ‘til we drop. But, it’s good, right? Yup, yup, yup! Or…is it?
