On the 8 Spot

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Finally, there's the question of how we claim ancestors, a question that is more philosophical than biological. Africa, and African-America, means something to me because I claim it as such–but I claim much more. I claim Fitzgerald, whatever he thought of me, because I see myself in Gatsby. I claim Steinbeck because, whether he likes it or not, I am an Okie. I claim Blake because “London” feels like the hood to me.

And I claim them right alongside Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin and Ralph Wiley, who had it so right when he parried Saul Bellow. The dead, and the work they leave—the good and bad–is the work of humanity and thus says something of us all. And in that manner, I must be humble and claim some of Lee, Jackson, and Forrest. What might I have been in another skin, in another country, in another time?

via The Ghost of Bobby Lee – National – The Atlantic.

the pic is here

This print is the logo for an earlier incarnation of this newsletter, which I called “Crazy Deranged Fools”.

A CDF is my term for somebody like me, i.e. somebody who actually has the temerity to TRY to do what he loves for a living, as opposed to shlepping for his daily crust.

I'd say most of the people who read my work on a regular basis would consider themselves CDFs. The desire to “unify work and love” is a powerful driving force in society, and I see it getting more powerful by the day. The days of just turning up and getting paid well for it are over. The world is just too interesting and competitive now.

And Thank Goodness for that….

via .

You have to join Hugh’s Daily Cartoon here http://eepurl.com/gvoK

Loved reading this short post from my favorite Seth Godin.

Failure, success and neither

The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.

The killer is the category called ‘neither’. If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you’ll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that’s easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you’re after.

And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.

via Seth’s Blog: Failure, success and neither.

Jayson pa nakaw.

Lester Bangs: That’s because we’re uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don’t have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter.
William Miller: I can really see that now.
Lester Bangs: Yeah, great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love… and let’s face it, you got a big head start.
William Miller: I’m glad you were home.
Lester Bangs: I’m always home. I’m uncool.
William Miller: Me too!
Lester Bangs: The only true currency in this bankrupt world if what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.

via antala at kaligta: The Great Fudgee Complex: Almost Famous.

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A child would not hesitate to pack up a sleeping bag and sleep on a pier under the stars with you.

Since that flight, whenever people asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I replied, “I want to be a child.”

So if you ever wonder why I share so much of myself with the world, from the sacred to the profane, the answer is that I think everyone could use this license to be who they are and enjoy what that means. We do live in a society with norms about what we can and cannot share, what we can and cannot do, but as Einstein once said: “if the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.” That’s what I want to do – I want to change the facts.

Your wants are beautiful, your truths are powerful. Maybe you want to sleep on a pier or share a fairytale kiss under every triumphal arch in the world. Maybe you dream of diving the wreckage of a galleon or quitting your job and starting your own company.

They’ll say you’re crazy. They’ll say, “I wish I could be as impulsive as you are,” and that you should grow up. Life isn’t like that – there are norms, you know. There are ways to do things. You don’t talk to people at the security line at the airport. You get through it as fast as possible, go to your gate, wait for them to board you, sit down and be quiet. You go to your job, bust your ass, go home, change, go to some social thing, entertain the same questions, go home, watch bad television and do it all over again. Polite, proper, efficient. That’s life, right? Then you get old and maybe play some golf, then you die.

Fuck no.

via “a child would not hesitate to pack up a sleeping bag and sleep on a pier under the stars with you” | gapingvoid.

I’m in a state of flux right now. It really irking me.

Julian Sanchez Wins for All Time…

I bow before my master:

Grasping Reality With Our Gelatinous Meatsacks: Will Wilkinson is a little snarky about it, but basically right: Freddie DeBoer’s post on naturalism and the skeptical conclusions that follow from it is fuzzy philosophy. (The Sam Harris TED talk he’s riffing on is worse, but that’s another story.)  Regular readers will recognize this as one of my minor obsessions, an instance of theorizing “in the shadow of God.” I’ve applied the phrase in the past to describe worries that a naturalistic worldview—lacking space for deities or radically autonomous immaterial selves—creates all sorts of dire problems for morality or meaning. In most cases, I argue, the apparent problem actually stems from some hand-me-down conceptual furniture left over from the theological worldview.  And usually the way to untangle the knot is to make a Euthyphro move.  That is, you might worry that morality is in trouble without God until you grok that morality with God isn’t in any better shape: The deity turns out to be a black box that rather looks like it might do some heavy lifting on a tough philosophical problem, but on closer inspection it turns out not to make any difference…

via Julian Sanchez Wins for All Time… – Grasping Reality with Our Minions, Our Machines, and Our Mental Powers.

Wouldn’t you rather burn out doing something you love than plod along doing something you merely put up with?

Don’t get me wrong; I have no plans of going down in flames in the foreseeable future. I have a close circle of trusted advisors that I listen to carefully. If they told me I was in danger of exhaustion or boredom (the latter being more dangerous, I think), I’d pay attention and make some changes.

But my close advisors are also the kind of people who understand that I shouldn’t always be making the safe choices. They know me, and they know I’d die a slow death if I slowed down too much. I went in the bank the other day to open a new account and looked around at everyone working there. I felt like I aged three days in the 40 minutes I sat in the chair filling out paperwork. I just can’t fathom the idea of a life like that.

All things considered, I’d rather regret something I did than regret something I wanted to do but was restrained by fear or insecurity from going for it. In other words, I want a full life. I don’t want to miss out on anything. There will always be time to sleep later.

via The Art of Non-Conformity » Notes on a Full Life, Live from CX 883.

You can develop an absolutely incorrect perception of yourself as a great manager when, in fact, you haven’t implemented anything. You haven’t fired anybody. You haven’t introduced a product. You haven’t supported a customer. All you’ve done is make spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

You can also throw venture capital into this pile. Going into venture capital straight out of school is a big mistake because entrepreneurs start sucking up to you and ask you stuff you know nothing about — like how to run a company.

Jobs for college graduates should make them gain knowledge in at least one of these three areas: how to make something, how to sell something or how to support something.
–Guy Kawasaki on the difference between recommending and doing. HT: Alex Tsai

via The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: The hard part of managing.

I found this an excellent read. I seem to periodically ask myself this question. How do you live your life and say at the end I wouldn’t have changed a thing. In a way this is the goal I’ve been crawling towards.

When I was about 29 years old I got a spiritual  “assignment” on an Easter morning in the old city of Jerusalem. According to this assignment my job was to live as if I had only 6 months left to live. I was in perfect health and in the middle of a ten-year round the world trip, so this interruption was unexpected and strange. I’ve told the full story of that curious mission on the very first episode of This American Life, the public radio storytelling hit, 10 years ago, so I won’t go into further detail because you can hear my account  on this streaming audio file from the NPR site.

The short version is that what I decided to do in my last 6 months surprised me, and that living with only 180 days in front of me turned out to be harder than I thought. But I did live with a very conscious countdown toward the final day; I remember that last day very well.

via Conceptual Trends and Current Topics.

Loved reading this, finish the whole thing at the linked site. The comments at Overcoming Bias are really topnotch!!!!!

Praise Polymaths

By Robin Hanson · February 12, 2010 9:15 am · Discuss · « Prev · Next »

Once upon a time folks who traveled far were treated with suspicion. Sure if you were rich and traveled like the rich you weren’t more suspicious than other rich. But those who traveled more than their class were suspected, correctly on average, of being less loyal to their neighbors.

Today travel is mostly celebrated; people love to talk about their trips and admire the well-traveled, even beyond the wealth it signals. But travel today doesn’t much threaten loyalty – intellectual contact with locals is limited, and usually selected to be like-minded. Ooh look, another pretty building. True intellectual travel, where you actually take the time to see things from different perspectives, is rare, more valuable, and yet elicits more suspicion than admiration.

You see, our beliefs are severely distorted by our culture and training, and intellectual travel remains our only remotely reliable remedy. We all know that we would have been inclined toward different beliefs had we been raised in different cultures or disciplines. We see consistent differences between folks trained in West vs. East, science vs. humanities, economics vs. sociology, and in different schools of thought of most any discipline. We like to think that we correct for this, but when we realize how hard that is, we throw up our hands saying “what ya gonna do?”

via Overcoming Bias : Praise Polymaths.