questioning assumptions, cliches and group-think, different perspectives
I have some most excellent, scientifically correct news: We humans are a lot more than big old naked brains riding around in vehicles that are kind of like animated meatballs with feet. I have to admit that is a bit of a relief. (I like albondigas in their place, but life, it seems to me, is more than a tapas bar.) All during my growing-up years, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the prevalent paradigms that told me that my…
I’ve been circling around this latest concept I’ve stumbled across like I imagine an awestruck fan would do to take in Michelangelo’s Pietà at the Vatican. My head keeps going, “Wow…wow…wow.” My heart is drowning in the swelling sound of some Gregorian chant or something. OOOH! The idea that each human being’s ability to make choices can absolutely affect and shape both the forms their own lives take as well as the world in which they live is a mind-boggle…
John Milton (an English poet who wrote epic poems in the 17th century) once wrote: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” Milton did call it right. All of us humans do have one super-power. Every single one of us can shape our own reality and make up our own world. It’s why we find everybody else’s stories so fascinating, I suppose. Because we each have our own…
I didn’t get it; really, I didn’t. It took a long time, but finally a light dawned. The whole pseudo-argument about Life being a “journey” rather than a “destination” is a crock. I mean, think about it. How can you have a “journey” without having a “destination?” It’s sort of a package deal. If you’re a tourist yearning to go traveling, you’ve got all kinds of professionals – a whole industry — trying to help you find a way to…
[Writer’s Note: This post was written at the height of the Bitcoin madness, before it imploded and left gaping holes all over the place. It seems to me that I’m not the only one who got confused by the Bitcoin virtual world. Makes me feel less stupid, that.] ACK! I’ve been wandering around, lost, in the Bitcoin virtual currency world these past few weeks in (another) failed attempt to understand what the heck is going on with that. I chose…
Oh, finally! After beaucoup years of nonsense about “finding your passion” and “following your bliss,” people of influence are finally telling us more ordinary sorts a better truth. Passion is not a path. Passion is not a guidepost. Passion is really not a will-o-the-wisp phosphorescent light that dances ahead of you and maybe leads you into a bog or something. Passion is a feeling. It comes, it goes, it morphs, it grows. And, more than anything (like every other human…
The process-oriented mindset is one of several styles of moving to the beat of your own passion. Another name for it is “mastery.” One of the best breakdowns of the requirements and outcomes of pursuing “mastery” is the one the celebrated art curator Sarah Lewis delineates in her book, THE RISE: Creativity, the Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery. This 2014 book is a fascinating exploration of the constant pursuit of excellence that is pretty much what distinguishes…
Who has NOT heard it? If you want to be creative, the ubiquitous They tell us, you have to “think outside of the box.” The only problem is, it takes a different mindset to get out of that other-people-imposed box than our more usual ones. It makes sense that you do need to train yourself to climb or crawl out of that box in the same way that you train yourself to do some sort of physical discipline or other…
Poets give each other weird gifts. About ten or so years ago, a friend of mine gifted me with a chewy metaphor that I’ve gnawed on for a while now. He said he thought that, at birth, every person got issued two infinitely expandable notebooks. He said one of the books was a YES-book and the other was a NO-book. I imagined them to be like the kind I use for making my journals but with automatic pages or something…
It’s likely that anyone who is serious about the art of investing money has at least looked at author Bud Labitan’s fan book, THE FOUR FILTERS INVENTION OF WARREN BUFFETT AND CHARLIE MUNGER, which first hit the bookstores in 2008. It lays out the thinking processes these acclaimed money-meisters used to frame and make their financial decisions as they built fabulous fortunes for themselves and their clients. These “filters” are the rules-of-thumb Buffet and Munger developed to help them make…
