“Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.” Jules Renard
Sometimes failure is a feedback loop, you fail once and your failure follows you makes everything you do just a little bit harder. When this happens we sometimes over think the original mistake or even worse we become enmeshed thinking of all the mistakes we make. When this happens be glad when you have someone you trust who knows that this is just a growing pain and that things like these eventually makes us stronger better people. If you aren’t that lucky what happens? Well people advise you with cosmetic changes, or try to address the symptoms of the problem not really the problem which is that It is OK to fail, and that Failing is different than being a failure.
We are a failure if the mistakes we made didn’t help us grow but made us scared to live.
We are a failure if the mistakes we made only made us bitter people.
We are a failure if the mistakes we made helped started us stop believing in ourselves.
We are not a failure when we choose to learn.
We are not a failure when we choose to be thankful for what we have and have another go at things.
We are not a failure when we choose to live a life we will not regret.
A Life where we believe in ourselves and what our hands can do, our mids can imagine and our voices can say.
I must begin taking this advice.
“Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.”
Samuel McChord Crothers
Finding A Place Under The Sun
from here:
Florida’s enormously influential first book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” laid the sociological foundation for an idea many of us in the Bay Area had already understood intuitively: that creative people like artists, scientists and entrepreneurs – not big corporations, government offices, or generic infrastructure – fuel economic development.
The statement speaks for itself, but a little googling would show us that countries in general but specifically cities and technology hubs/areas are constantly trying to “move up” the technology output ladder.
Why is this?
Simply put the economic rewards of different rungs in the technology ladder is not linearly distributed. This is because of the productivity per rung is quite different. This makes evident the force multiplier that technology is, and with it the fact that even though we are all given 24 hours a day people from technologically superior places can do more work and earn more money with their 24 hours.
Take my country the Philippines as an example. Based on my personal experience (If the NSO published this in the web then I wouldn’t need to base this on my own experience, and yes I tried googling it ) NSO published statistics the wages of Filipino workers have been essentially stagnant (adjusting for inflation at 5.4%, NSO ). This would be very strange to anyone who has heard of call centers and BPO but the fact is Filipino “knowledge” workers are at the low end of the knowledge spectrum and are thus replaceable cogs in the knowledge sweatshops of “the Man”. The only way for the Philippines to get more revenues from the call center and BPO industries is to throw more people at it.
Why? As the early call center employees are finding out, positions for non executive, management work prefers people with some experience but are not too expensive. Put in another way: BPO if you do not have leadership skills or are not into teaching/training is simply not a career.
What then is a possible way out for my country in to this sideways movement? The highlighted qoute tells us this. You must foster artist, scientist, entreprenuers or creators in general. Only through the constant creative output of these people will we find ourselves out of the lower rungs of the tech ladder.
A positive effect of a relatively large group of young people with a relatively large disposable income is the fact that it tends to foster creative persuits such as bands, films, and the like. It has always been my belief that the resurgance of the local pop-rock, punk-rock or rock scene in general is due to call centers who give money to the fans who thus transfer these to the musicians. Not enough for the dream life, but enough for our artist to survive.
The final cog would probably be to internationalize the creative output of our artist, in the same way that the english speaking public is subsidizing the english rock bands, the chinese speaking public are subsidizing Chinovelas,Koreanovelas,Japanovelas. We must try to make south east asian countries along with the US,England etc all the countries where we have similarities with subsidize our artist and musicians specifically.
This has been a longish post and I salute your persistence in reading some musings.
re Post: The World As I See It by Albert Einstein
Reposted this because I felt for this essay by a man I admired greatly.
from: http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay.htm
“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…
“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.
“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”
Make It About You
read this over at Raganwald’s blog
It was about programming and always talking of a Fictional Third Person.
Although the post was about programming, I feel that it has a larger application for life in general.
Why do we have to make an excuse for how we feel about things. Why do we always have to hide behind another person’s, (even worse a Fictional Third Person.
Let us stop passing the buck in our lives.
We have so much control over what we accept and what we do not accept that it is downright foolish to concede this great responsibility because of useless shame.
More to follow!
Eyes Wide Open
A story from Robert M. Pirsig:
He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say.
One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.
When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.
It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.
He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.
She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”
Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing. — Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Often we are fooled by the Illusion that there is an easy path, that we do not have to take control of our lives. Do not give in to this desire. Often people try to not make decisions in general. Notice how when your in a group eating out we often have trouble deciding on where to eat? I continually see the pattern of people not wanting to be blamed with the mistake of choosing the wrong place to eat, but as this writer argues with blame comes hope.
Some friends mistake that I am good at getting places, travelling etc. The fact is I get lost a lot, and I am not generally scared of being lost , because of this I get to go to more places. It’s not being afraid of getting lost, and having this desire to just go places. It’s that fear of the unknown that is the source of too much suffering in this world. And I prescribe my own medicine of immersing yourself with your fears. Try it, get to know the other side, get lost, befriend that cute girl. Just please do something.