On the 8 Spot

So let’s not pretend that travel is always fun, or that we endure the jet lag for pleasure. We don’t spend ten hours lost in the Louvre because we like it, and the view from the top of Machu Picchu probably doesn’t make up for the hassle of lost luggage. (More often than not, I need a vacation after my vacation.) We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.

via Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Does Travel Make You Smarter?.

It’s not what you can find out, Frost and James and Poirier told us; it’s what you know. Truth is self-created through labor, through the hard, inefficient, unscripted work of the mind, through the indirection of dream and reverie. What matters is what cannot be rendered as code. Google can give you everything but meaning.

via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: It’s not what you know.

I actually shouldn’t even call them failures, because they were really just attempts. There’s a huge difference there. Everyone has failures, but most people never attempt things just for the sake of trying out something that looks fun, interesting, or challenging. For some reason, a lot of us reach a point where we stop doing things for the hell of it.

Why do you think I’m such a huge proponent of free work? Doing work for free forces you to find jobs where you can honestly say, “I would do this even if I weren’t being paid for it.” That’s an expression I took a bit too literally, but it is spot on.

My favorite part of The Dark Knight is when the Joker is talking to Harvey Dent in the hospital, and he says: “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just DO things… I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”

via Thoughts on tour « Hoehn’s Musings.

Read the whole thing. I’m guilty of this, I’ve fallen for the habit of trying to find the path to money from stuff that I do for fun.  Blogging started out with that in mind, It has since changed.  I now feel as if I need to write things down, as if things not written in the blog will just be forgotten. I have to DO!!!! Again, Read the whole thing!

Ultimately, I have a deep-seated belief that people should be able to do what they love from wherever they want to be, and that it’s my responsibility to make that true for myself and others. Portland will be an experiment that tests that belief. I’m looking forward to it, and time will tell if it’s the right fit for me and mine.

via Alex Payne — In Which I’m Not Alone.

This is Alex Payne on moving to Portland from SanFo.

Excesses of appetite are the ways we conceal from ourselves what we hunger for. Kafka’s Hunger Artist – the man in the story of that name, who does performance-fasting for a living – is asked why he devoted his life to starving himself in public; he couldn’t help doing it, he says, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you and everyone else”.

via Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess | Books | The Guardian.

loved this article! I’m reposting my favorite line. Hope you can read the whole thing, don’t agree with a lot, but it made me introspect!

Which points to the most irritating thing of all about management gurus: that their failures only serve to stoke demand for their services. If management could indeed be reduced to a few simple principles, then we would have no need for management thinkers. But the very fact that it defies easy solutions, leaving managers in a perpetual state of angst, means that there will always be demand for books like Mr Covey’s.

via The three habits… | The Economist.

We want easy answers, we want gurus to find the answers for us. Damn. The journey is the fun part, all the angst, all the ups and downs. Learn to Learn. Learn to target. Learn what to target. Read if you must (I surely do) but never forfeit the right to think!

“People with stronger friendship networks feel like there is someone they can turn to,” said Karen A. Roberto, director of the center for gerontology at Virginia Tech. “Friendship is an undervalued resource. The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better.”

via Well – What Are Friends For? A Longer Life – NYTimes.com.

Punitive taxes on compensation that takes the form of long-term restricted equity stakes is a dangerous and destructive move. If the compensation bill that emerges from the conference committee does not allow TARP-receiving companies to offer such SVCSs, then Obama should veto it.

And if the traders of Wall Street then quit en masse? If they say that they are going to “Go Galt” if they don’t get their traders’ options to take the money upfront after assuring us shareholders that they have made us a lot of money, that their positions and strategies are sound, and that they have prudently managed the risks? Well, then that tells us something about what they really think the true value of their work product has been.

via Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Needed for AIG and the TARP: Silicon Valley Compensation Schemes.

“The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce,

but the unwillingness to share.”

via Eric Musselman’s Basketball Notebook: Be willing to share.

People are realizing more and more that happiness is freedom, and freedom is to be able to “travel light”, not possessing a lot of things, because at the end of the day, the things start to possess you. I

Today’s Question by the reader : Annelise at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.