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.

Read the rest of the tips at the linked site!

IGNORE EVERYBODY

So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years.]

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

via Book – Ignore Everybody | gapingvoid.

Loved reading this.

What can’t I imagine happening next?

Here’s the truth: an awful lot of lives go through the same progression as my own. Not in the sense of the specific things that change, but in that the specifics of their life change so drastically in even a few years. And we don’t see it coming, either.

At each of those times above, I thought my future would go on more or less the same way that it was going right then. I was repeatedly wrong.

The best thing you can do with your money and with your skills is prepare for change. Why? Because things will change.

via The Simple Dollar » What’s Coming Next?.

Nice article on faith and doubt. I somewhat feel that I’ve posted this before but I loved reading this so why not.

The cognitive turn made faith hollow and fragile, an egg sitting on a wall. And modernity came along and pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall.

Given this situation I suggested to my class that we recover a richer, fuller, more biblical notion of faith. Faith as bouncy ball rather than egg. This biblical notion of faith helps overcome the weaknesses of the intellectual Humpty Dumpty view of faith. First, a richer and fuller view of faith allows room for doubt. Since faith isn’t dependent upon intellect alone the Christian can still “have faith” even when intellectual doubts are at their most extreme. This goes a fair way in reducing the emotional distress associated with doubt, in both the doubter and the loved ones of the doubter who are looking on. Doubt should and can have a jolly facet to it. The whole world shouldn’t be at stake. Second, a more biblical view of faith allows us to be more open to outsiders. Eschewing unshakable intellectual confidence as the mark of faith we are in a much better position to listen to people who disagree with us. Maximally, this means that we are protected from the violent excesses of “faith.” Minimally, it helps us not be assholes. (Sorry for the language, but that really is the best word for it.)

So what is this richer, fuller view of faith? That would take a much longer post, but I pointed the class in two directions. In contrast to a purely intellectual faith I suggested two other kinds of faith:
Sacramental faith:
A faith with and through the body. This is the faith of the book of James, the faith of obedience. It’s the faith of discipleship, moving one’s body through life the way Jesus moved his body through life. It is the faith of orthopraxy (“right practice”). The first Christians were called followers of “The Way.” This is the faith of the path, what Eastern religions call the dharma.

via Experimental Theology: Faith and Doubt After “The Cognitive Turn”.

Yes, there is a part of me that wants to move abroad. It’s the part that believes Silicon Valley/New York/London is where the tech action is. Where I’d likely find people of like or at least similar aspirations. Take for instance the Philippine Tech Community. Its the same faces, and there is a reason for this, for keeping an 8 hour job and still coding/blogging/learning new programming languages/coding up personal projects is tiring and people who are either not rich/not very very smart/ very very productive/ very very lucky can do it. Life get’s in the way. I consider myself lucky , and this is the only reason why I am at least at the periphery or maybe the first row at the outside of the Philippine Tech Community, not quite there yet but slowly inching inwards. Sometimes it’s not about greener pastures. It’s what a musician and a dancer working in Hong Kong Disneyland says when interviewed by Kara Davin in last weeks episode of OFW Diaries, It’s the opportunity to practice something you love.

And I think that to a certain extent, people make these choices based on conceptions they have about themselves and the people they’d like to be. If you see yourself as someone who is interested in art, you may move to New York, not just because there is a lot of great art there, but also because you’ll meet people there who are themselves interested in art and who will nudge you toward more involvement with art and artists. Or you might move to Denver, because you want to be an outdoorsy person. People you meet there will typically be outdoorsy, and they’ll make it easier for you to become this outdoorsy person that you hope to be. At a more general level, people may simply feel that they’re “destined for bigger things”, or ready for a “simpler life”, and they may choose cities based on these feelings. Not just because they’re going where they want to go, but because they’re committing themselves to a certain lifestyle, and placing themselves in a situation where the people they come to know will act as constraints on them, pushing them to behave in a certain way. After all, you can love art in Denver and be outdoorsy in New York.

It seems to me that people want to be a lot of things that they can’t necessarily become on their own. A move can be a means to commit oneself to a certain course, and to make it harder to back away from a desired goal or style of life.

via The Bellows » Paper of the Day the First.

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

WSJ: The last five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?

CM: I don’t think there’s any rich period or fallow period. That’s just a perception you get from what’s published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote, and she said, “Because I was good at it.” And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.” And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.

via Cormac McCarthy on The Road – WSJ.com.

I have to confess that I know I’m a little less fun to hang with the past year, I was complaining a lot, I get irritated easily and I developed this passive aggressive  stance that I’m working towards eliminating. this was a nice read.

One reason is I (like most people) really enjoy complaining. It makes us feel more important. But like a drug, the high wears off and we are left with nothing truly accomplished. We also are afraid of making our goals less vague. If they remain vague and cloudy, then we can’t really fail at them, can we?

This year, I’m back on the path described above. Back to nixing this habit of complaining. Back to visualizing some future awesome accomplishments behind me. So far so good, and I’m happy again with the results.

via Inkling Corporate Blog – Business Intelligence Using Prediction Markets: Complaining is like a drug. We get addicted to the euphoria of self importance, but inevitably it leaves us unfulfilled..

Published platforms

December 23, 2009 by mlq3

Filed under Daily Dose

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See my previous entries, Platforms and Platform time begins November 30.

In chronological order, the platforms thus far, are the following.

via Published platforms : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose.

Manolo Quezon is a gem. He has compiled all published platforms of Presidential Candidates to the 2010 National Elections of the Philippines.

Well, tell your dead grandpa the old German (Goethe) saying: “The longer you look, the more stars you see…” I prefer that to going crazy. It’s the same with meditation, how you can find the entire world in a single object or activity. Once you commit your life to a passion, you find that things open up. Still, it seems like a paradox. Most people never fully commit to their art, out of fear of losing options. But commitment brings more options than you’d ever lose.

via Letters of Note: Your own private book event.

Read the whole letter. This was written by Chuck Palahniuk. (The Author of The Fight Club.)

I loved reading the whole thing so hope you see the scanned original. From the marvelous blog Letters of Note!

Pushing back

Posted by Abi Sutherland at 06:36 PM * 31 comments

I gather from the Interwebs that August is going to be a heavy month for health politics. The fight back against any change to the way that America deals with health care and health insurance is starting now, and it’s going to be intense.

They’re going to say it can’t be done, that health insurance and health care are inevitably expensive. They’re going to shriek about rationing, and ignore the fact that the US already rations health care on the basis of ability to pay—one of the most barbaric and obscene metrics conceivable.

And they’re going to say that health care in the rest of the world isn’t really that good. That the American system, for all its flaws, is the best there can be.

via Making Light: Pushing back.