Category: Life
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Seasons
People who seem to get a lot done don’t make progress on everything at the same time; rather, they make focused progress in spurts on one thing at a time. These experiences can seem like seasons, though it can happen more than four times per year (i.e., quarterly planning). One perspective is microseasons. Another is…
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Stone soup
This is a classic fable about a group of travellers showing up to a village with an empty pot. The villagers are unwilling to feed the travellers, so the travellers put a stone in the pot and boil water. The travellers offer to share their stone soup with some of the villagers, though the soup…
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Stir the pot
There’s a special type of luck that emerges just from taking enough action; enough shots at bat. You gather a hundred pieces of information. You take notes on a dozen of them, and they find your way into your brain. One of those notes enables you to understand people’s problems. You talk to dozens of…
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Do it
“If you hear a voice within you say, ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” Vincent van Gogh
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Forgetting and updating
Andy Nulman writes at Medium, “The “Forgetting Curve” I am championing though is way more self managing and practical. It would require — no, force — us to let go of old ways, preconceived notions, out-of-date processes and deeply-ingrained predispositions.” Forgetting isn’t always a bad thing; it’s sometimes just as important to forget, or to…
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A different consistency
You and I, as human beings, are not consistent. Still, our brains tend to think other people are consistent (fundamental attribution error), and our brains have a need for consistency (cognitive dissonance). A very literal application of this: scheduling. To say I appreciate habits and fixed routines would be a huge understatement. (I’m a virgo!).…
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Off timing
Every hit comes with a lot of misses. The problem is you and I only see people discussing the hits—and we don’t see them discussing the misses so often. Everybody is missing every day. Sometimes, we’re just too early; we build BlackBerry apps instead of iPhone apps, we discovered YouTube before the entertainment industry recognizes…
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Where’s the opening?
“Low hanging fruit” has become an excuse to do boring things, so we need a new one. I liked this one I came across in therapy: “Where’s the opening?” Most action plans are set too far into the future; we must start closer to where we are right now. If you want to write a…
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Complaining vs. caring
NetNewsWire is at the top of Hacker News right now. It’s a familiar name; with a quick Google Search, I dug up an article I wrote over a decade ago for Guiding Tech that mentioned it. I didn’t have a Mac yet—I do now though, so I’m finally trying it again. It’s nice, and I’m…