Beautiful day. Nothing to fear.
Finding inner peace through simplicity, technology, perspective, and other means.
Randy Murray on how you’re reading too fast:
There’s a difference between a walk in Central Park and zipping through it cab [sic]. You might see it, but you don’t experience it, understand it. Yes, you get from point A to point B, but what you missed, well, you missed the point of the park being there in the first place.
Exactly what I needed to hear today.
Today is the first day of Mark Sisson’s annual Primal Blueprint 30-Day Challenge:
So what’s the challenge? To get Primal, of course! I hold this 30-Day Challenge every year to encourage Primal beginners to give this way of eating, moving and living a try because I know it works, I know how empowering it is, and I know it changes lives.
As I mentioned last week, Mark’s Primal Blueprint has been the only health regimen I’ve stuck with for any significant period of time. The 30-day challenge is the perfect opportunity to get started.
Making a big lifestyle change is really difficult, but that’s the great thing about 30 days. It forces you to start right now, and while you’re making a commitment, it doesn’t have to last forever if you decide you don’t like it. Give it a try.
To get up smiling when the universe hits me in the mouth. To make something out of nothing, even if that something exists in a reality known only to me. To defy the Second Law as many times as I can before it beats me for good.
To be an anomalous crook on the arrow of time.
I wish I wrote that.
It’s a mantra for myself and for this website: we have control over almost nothing except our minds and how they deal with the world.
Simplicity is one way to combat the complexity of the universe. The more moving parts something has, the more likely one of them is to break. I keep my workflow simple so I can get more things done in more places, rather than be debilitated by a missing tool or a foreign location. If something contributes more complexity than harmony to my life, it gets simplified or eliminated.
The more simplicity, the less friction. The less friction, the less struggle. The less struggle, the more inner peace.
I spent the majority of Labor Day weekend home alone, camped out on my couch, playing an old video game from my childhood.
This was an odd occurrence, as I don’t do much video gaming anymore, but the urge to go back to the nostalgic pastime of my youth was unusually strong. I had just finished working a couple of six-day weeks, and I’d been putting a lot of time and effort into building this site for more than a month straight. I was tired.
At first, I felt a guilty about spending a long weekend inside, glued to a television screen. I thought, “I should go running,” or “I should write something new,” or any number of other more productive activities.
But then I realized that time off is a good thing. Joshua Becker, of Becoming Minimalist, just wrote a post about the underappreciation of rest in today’s society:
Rest has become confused with laziness. We live in a society that praises those who work 60hrs/week and makes faulty assumptions about those who work 40. We have confused rest with laziness. And while too much rest may indeed be an indicator of sloth, the regular practice of finding rest is not.
Sometimes, you need to do something mindless. It lets your mind and body recharge and recuperate so that you’re better prepared for what comes next. There’s no reason to feel guilty about not going to the gym once in a while. Your muscles — physical and mental — need time to recover. Forcing additional work from them when you’ve got nothing left in the tank will only run yourself into the ground, and then you’ll miss several days due to illness or injury.
When I was working in a cubicle and sitting at a desk for eight hours a day, I was exhausted. I’d wake up, drive 45 minutes to a building, sit there all day, go to class, and then drive 45 minutes home. Add in homework and finding time to sleep and exercise, and things weren’t all that enjoyable. I’d daydream about all the things I’d do once the weekend finally arrived and I had some time to myself. But when the weekend finally did show up, I didn’t do anything. I’d just spend it screwing around on the computer, not getting anything done that I’d wanted to. I was too tired to do anything but sit.
This is why the occasional mindless activity is so important. If you work too hard for too long, you get burned out, which can be depressing and actually make you sick. That’s your body forcing you to rest. When you take a rest voluntarily, be it with video games, or reading a book, or taking a walk, your mind and body get a chance to regain their strength. Once you’ve gotten enough rest, once you’ve done nothing for a while, you actually regain the drive and motivation to do things naturally, without having to force it.
After I finished my coursework for my master’s degree, I spent all of June and most of July doing a whole lot of nothing. I worked at my usual summer job, but otherwise I spent my time relaxing. Once I had gotten enough rest, I found that I wanted to start doing something, to start creating something, which turned into this website. If I hadn’t had that time to decompress and get back to neutral, I may not have created QLE. So those two months weren’t full of laziness, they were full of necessary rest, which gave me the strength to create something new.
So, don’t feel guilty about doing nothing once in a while, whatever your version of nothing may be. The gym will still be there tomorrow, and you’ll be able to hit it twice as hard. If we never stopped to rest, we’d still be doing everything we ever started, and that’s no way to get anything done.
Richard J. Anderson, in his essay, “On Doing Less, Better”:
How do I become better? The perfect may be the enemy of the good, as Voltaire claims, but how can one reach perfect without at least churning out a lot of good, mediocre, or downright awful things?
In my response to one of Richard’s previous essays, I stated that perfection is unattainable, which I still believe. Even if it is attainable, I think it’s such a remote possibility that the pursuit of it would only lead to discouragement. Or insanity.
The pursuit of getting better is much more realistic and accessible. Getting better at what you do is more sensible than trying to be perfect at it.
I want to be a better writer.
What does that mean? Writing better sentences? Having better ideas? Getting better recognition? I think yes to all three.
Whatever you want to get better at — writing, gymnastics, architecture, being a person, — knowing what constitutes that version of yourself is important.
But once the “what” is established, the question becomes, “How do I get there?”
I want to be taken seriously as a writer, and I want this website to be seen as professional. Now, maybe that’s because the site is young, and I feel like I have something to prove, which is probably true. Can I write something besides an academic essay and make it worthwhile? I don’t want to be another twenty-something with a Blogger account writing about my bad day.
I love writing this website, and I feel a great deal of pride for what gets posted here. I don’t know if it’s any good, but I’m proud of it. Proud enough to put my name at the top.
I want to make it better, and I want to write more, but as Richard hints at in his essay, it’s hard finding time for your passions in a world full of obligations. I’m trying to find a job, and a place to live, and time to exercise, and (don’t tell anyone) I have a thesis to write on Middle English lyric poetry. All while working and hopefully getting a good night’s sleep. Finding the time to write is a challenge in itself, and making actual writing come out is an even greater struggle.
But it’s the only way to get better.
How am I going to become a better writer if I don’t write? Thinking and daydreaming is nice, but it’s not the answer. No matter how many karate books you read, you won’t be a black belt until you put on a gi and get in the dojo. And even then, you’ve only just set foot on a path to a goal far off on the horizon.
But the thing is, every step forward brings you closer to that horizon. To be a better writer, I have to write. Every day. On some days, only crap will come out, and in the beginning, the crappy days will probably come one after another. Eventually, though, they’ll grow fewer and farther between. Or maybe they won’t, but the odds are much better than if I don’t write at all.
Perfection has a sense of finality to it. It’s an end result. Once you become a perfect writer, what’s the point in continuing to write? But the road to getting better is endless. You can always get better.
Richard:
What good is being done with something if you can’t look at it and say that, “Yes, that was worth the effort. That was me doing my best. Now, let me try to do even better.”
Right. That’s why I love golf. You’re never a perfect golfer; it’s something you can work on your whole life, if you wish. You don’t have to stop at a certain age, or when you graduate from school. The same goes for writing. You’re never done with getting better. That’s not depressing; it’s inspiring. If I write every day for 365 days, how much better will I be in a year? In five years? In ten?
Richard concludes:
What matters is doing the thing that inspires me, that makes me happy, that leaves me with a sense of pride, and that’s writing good stuff.
Writing this site inspires me, and it makes me happy and proud. I don’t know if it’s any good, but at the very least, I feel like I’m getting better. My chances of becoming a better writer are much greater now than if I was lying on the couch thinking about all the great essays I’ll write someday. As long as I don’t give up, I won’t be any worse of a writer. The more I write, the greater the chance something pretty good might come out. I like my odds.
There’s a discussion on Quora about the best ways to overcome writer’s block.
Lots of good tips, ranging from the practical by Matt McDonald:
Learn to type quickly: I find that if I can write as fast as I can think, that helps the transition from my brain to the page.
Write in your voice: This is a speechwriting bias, but I always write as I (or someone else) would speak. I don’t try to have a different voice on paper than I would have talking with a friend.
To the philosophical by Andrew Brown:
When I’m really motivated to write but don’t have anything to write, I turn off everything (computers, phone, music, sometimes even the lights) and just sit in silence, not unlike meditation. I let my mind wander wherever it wants, and it usually ends up somewhere strange, interesting, or otherwise crazy. Once I get the urge to write, I bottle it up, thinking it through for another couple minutes both to build anticipation and to clarify my thoughts, and then start writing.
Personally, I’m of the “relax and just write” persuasion. Even if it’s “I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write.” over and over again. As Merlin says, you have to make the clackity noise for writing to have any chance of happening.
Yesterday, my family made pizza on the grill for Labor Day. I wasn’t thrilled.
When I was younger, I had a long period when I actually didn’t like pizza. I know: what self-respecting kid doesn’t like pizza? I wasn’t an overly health-conscious adolescent or anything, but something about it didn’t sit right with me. Maybe it was the scalding hot tomato sauce, which to this day never fails to burn my mouth, or the abrasive crust, or the guaranteed messy fingers afterward.
Whatever the reason, I did eventually overcome my fears and learn to enjoy pizza. I still do, but yesterday’s feast was a struggle for me, and it led to me thinking about the issue of exceptions and how to make them effectively.
First, a little background…
A couple of years ago, I broke up with my then-girlfriend and found myself with considerably more free time on my hands. Up to that point, I had been adverse to any kind of healthy diet. I just didn’t feel inclined to suffer through eating grass and tree bark. I wasn’t even overweight, although I probably could have been considered skinny-fat.
But in that post-breakup moment, wherein I needed something new to focus on, I decided that the past 22 years of eating garbage had run their course, and it was time to get down to business. So, I started trying to eat healthier and exercise on a more frequent basis. I scoured the internet and found a solution that made sense to me and seemed like a sustainable lifestyle.
It took me close to two years to fully assimilate to my new and improved way of life. During that transition period, being consistently healthy was a struggle. You never really realize how unhealthy society is until you try to break free from it. Junk food is everywhere. Friends want to go out to dinner. People bring trays of cupcakes into the office for literally no reason. And sometimes, your mind just convinces yourself that one little bite is okay, even when it turns into twenty.
I stuck with it though, and now I’m at a point where I actually enjoy eating healthy more than eating junk food. It’s still tough sometimes, but on most days, I have no trouble avoiding cookies or turning down cupcakes. Even though they’re everywhere.
Now, back to my mention of exceptions.
Some members of my family, who don’t adhere to my personal health philosophy, have a hard time understanding the parts that seem controversial by conventional wisdom’s standards. I understand this difficulty because I would have felt the same way two years ago.
So, I was informed in advance that we were having pizza for Labor Day, and there was, essentially, nothing I could do about it. At first, I said I would eat beforehand and then come over, but I was told we were having guests, and that would be rude. My mom asked, “Can’t you just make an exception this one time?”
Of course I could. Did I want to? Absolutely not.
I know how I feel after an off-day of eating. It bums me out. It feels like all progress up to that point has been shot to hell. It feels unfair that I should have to sacrifice for others’ unhealthy habits. Did I have missteps once in a while? Obviously, but I would rather save those for instances when I had absolutely no control over the situation. If there was a way to avoid a misstep, why would I voluntarily choose not to take it?
Well, to make an increasing long story short, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. I understand manners, and sometimes there’s no point in creating an unnecessary argument. Sometimes, you just have to eat pizza.
So, I ate the pizza, but I also managed to enjoy it by altering my perspective so that it wouldn’t bum me out too badly. Here’s how:
First, one cheat meal is better than an entire cheat day. People like to have a Pop-Tart for breakfast and say, “Welp, the day’s shot. Might as well start over tomorrow.” That attitude is detrimental and does more harm to your goal than need be. In the grand scheme of things, one cheat meal is only a blip on the radar, and it won’t undo months of progress. Several cheat days, however, will take much longer to recover from.
Second, I still had a great deal of control even though I was giving in to the pizza gods. I ate healthy all day so I wouldn’t be starving at pizza time, which would have caused me to overeat. I tried each kind of pizza, but I didn’t scarf down enough slices to make me uncomfortably full afterward. You don’t always have to kill yourself on an off day.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, after dinner, I went right back to my old habits. The path is always there, waiting for you to step back on. I didn’t think, “Oh, the day is ruined!” and stay up all night eating cookies and ice cream. One misstep doesn’t have to lead off a cliff. I stepped off the path, then course-corrected and stepped back on. Nothing worth agonizing over.
This is the mindset that has been most effective for helping me deal with those inevitable exceptions to my rules. I think it works for me because I’ve been trying to adhere to this lifestyle for so long that exceptions themselves have become unwanted. People who are just starting out, who haven’t fully transitioned and possibly don’t even enjoy what they’re trying to achieve, often want to cheat. They want and look for excuses to make exceptions.
The strategies above are not excuses for stepping off the path; they are mental adjustments for coping with stepping off the path when you wish you didn’t have to. The smaller the step off, the smaller the step to get back on.
Happy Labor Day!
This weekend, there was a bit of an uproar over RSS and its ability to overload the user with information. The discussion was catalyzed by Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica, who wrote about why RSS is poisonous to productivity and sanity. (Via Forkbombr)
The headline is melodramatic, of course, but the concern is valid. She writes:
The Internet echo chamber is most apparent in RSS—mildly amusing items multiply across friends’ Tumblrs like rabbits on crack, and controversial items seem to invite commentary from every single person (and possibly some cats) who has access to a keyboard. This is, of course, one of the great benefits to the Internet—everyone has a voice—but it is not a great benefit to your productivity or sanity.
What makes it worse is that a huge number sitting in a little red badge over your RSS reader icon carries an obligation. “How many of those 342 items can I just mark as read, and how many of them do I actually have to pretend to read?” becomes a question that you ponder often. Even a ruthlessly curated RSS list can make you feel like you have to read the entire backlog—maybe even moreso, since you’ve now put time into making sure you’re following quality sources—and that’s just not a feeling that contributes either to getting things done or to relaxing.
I use RSS to keep up with websites and writers whose commentary I value. Currently, I have 89 subscriptions in my Google Reader. Like the number of people I follow on Twitter, I try to keep it under 100. This constraint ensures my feed is always curated with only the highest quality posts, and that I’m never overwhelmed with too much information.
At the very least, I do scan every RSS entry’s headline. I read short and/or pertinent posts on the spot, or mark them as unread for later reading. Long-form articles, or things that interest me, but aren’t pertinent, get sent to Instapaper.
I use Reeder on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro. I do not use unread badges on any of them. I check Reeder on my own terms, usually multiple times a day. That is, I read RSS when I want to read RSS. It doesn’t try to force its way into my day and steal my attention. I agree with Cheng that multitasking can be detrimental, which is why I don’t leave Reeder open on my Mac while I’m working on something. If I open those apps, it’s because I’ve consciously decided it’s time to look at them. Since I have to actively open Reeder to look at my feeds, it’s easy to forget about it completely when I’m writing or working on something else. Same goes for Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
Marco Arment, in his response to Cheng’s article:
RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites: sites that you’d never remember to check every day because they only post occasionally, and that your social-network friends won’t reliably find or link to.
This is exactly how I choose which sites to follow. I subscribe to very few big news sites. Lifehacker is the biggest one that comes to mind, and I could probably stand to unsubscribe and just follow their Twitter feed. All of my other subscriptions are independent writers. I don’t follow all of TechCrunch; I just follow MG Siegler. I don’t follow CNN, the New York Times, or any traditional news sites via RSS. I follow a couple on Twitter because it’s easier to scan a tweet than mark every news item of the day as read.
Ben Brooks, in his own response:
To claim that RSS is bad for you if you subscribe to too many feeds is absurd.
What’s bad for you is letting a tool like RSS overwhelm you, take over your life if you will. I have gone away for 3 days, as Marco suggests, and come back to thousands of RSS items, I read them all in time and it never bothered me.
If it bothers you, then blaming the tool is not the solution to this problem.
I agree wholeheartedly. The solution to dealing with information overload — be it via RSS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. — is self-discipline, not blaming the tool itself.
I love RSS. It’s a great tool, and Reeder makes it a joy to use, but I keep all of my feeds carefully curated. If someone starts tweeting way too much, they get unfollowed, or put on a list where I can check in less frequently. I have over 400 friends on Facebook (ugh), but a huge majority of them are hidden from my News Feed, so I only see the people I care about. This disciplined approach always presents me with a feed of high quality information, and it prevents me from getting bogged down and having to sift through meaningless posts.
Cheng asserts that it’s possible to get behind even with a highly curated feed, and that’s true. If I do somehow manage to miss a couple days on my RSS feed, I might have around 200 unread items. But like Ben says, I just get to them over time. I’ll set aside half an hour to clean up my feed. Reeder makes this an easy task. I don’t feel guilty about having unread items. The fact that I’m going to miss things is inevitable, but it’s also not going to kill me. Plus, by keeping my feed populated only with high quality sources, it’s much more likely that I’m going to want to work through the backlog, and doing so won’t be a source of stress.
Obviously, Jacqui Cheng is a tech reporter, and her job dictates that she stay on top of every news story coming down the pipeline. I can’t say what’s best for her. As for me, I’m thankful for having a tool that makes it so easy to read my favorite writers. I use the tool; it doesn’t use me.
I try to post something worthwhile here every weekday, whether it’s original, a link worth reading, or some combination of the two. Subscribing via RSS is one of the best ways to support QLE and keep a steady, but hopefully not too overwhelming, stream of posts coming.
I don’t do much video gaming anymore. I used to when I was younger. I’d spend hours and hours exploring virtual worlds, battling evil, and living lives far more exciting than my own. Those were the days.
I miss it a great deal from time to time. Nowadays, video games don’t hold my attention like they used to. Even when I get excited and buy a new one, which is an increasingly rare occurrence, I never end up playing it for very long. I just don’t become immersed in the game’s universe like I once did.
Part of me thinks that games today are just “too good”, with their flawless graphics and amazing technical specifications. It’s like hearing a record that’s overproduced, or a movie that’s been redone and repackaged ad nauseum. Too shiny, too slick. No charm, no heart.
Part of the magic of those old video games was their flawed nature. Deformed character sprites, 8-bit musical scores, sans voice acting. Sigh.
At any rate, I stumbled upon this internet gem: a YouTube user named Garudoh has miraculously compiled a series of videos called, “From Bleeps to Beats: The Music of Video Games”, of which there are over 500 entries. I’m not ashamed to admit I was up until the wee hours of the morning listening to all the old soundtracks from my favorite games. They still hold up.
Some of my favorites:
So. Good. And so impressive for games that are about fifteen years old. I get so much joy from listening to these.
Bask in the nostalgic auditory bliss of my childhood!
Federico Viticci on venturing beyond his most used apps:
iOS devices are now playing an important role in our lives, and we shouldn’t stop exploring all the ways to make them better with new apps, and different workflows. But I believe no one can blame us for choosing the trusted system when it’s time to work, and stop tinkering.
Agreed. The search for my preferred writing app shouldn’t prevent me from actually writing.
Apps I trust:
These apps are reliable to the point where I can use them effortlessly, without thinking. They actually help me get things done, rather than put things off. I follow the developers and know I can count on them for regular, thoughtful updates. I was also glad to pay for each of them, which both supports the developer and invests me in the app’s success. Paid apps also usually indicate quality. I’d rather pay $2.99 for an app that just works than waste time trying and discarding several free apps, especially if I plan on using the app everyday.
Once I find an app that fills a particular need well, I’m content. I’m not opposed to hearing about new Twitter apps or RSS readers, but my trusted apps have set the bar very high, and thus they’ve earned my loyalty.
The future of technology is this: extreme usability coupled with extreme simplicity.
In other words, not this.
As usual, James Shelley presents a great mind-bender with his article, Unhappy With Happiness:
But as counter-cultural as it may be, I have serious misgivings about the pursuit of happiness. There is a massive, irreconcilable clash between our modern obsession with happiness and the lives of our cultural heroes like Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Teresa — people who would have never inspired us had they simply taken the path of least resistance in order to achieve their own happiness. No, these individuals followed a trajectory set by a pursuit of meaning, justice and purpose. Values set their respective frameworks for making decisions (and significant sacrifices) in life.
This post has thrown me for a loop because I’ve been assuming happiness is the ultimate goal for quite a while now.
The people James lists above are exceptional individuals — once-in-a-lifetime human beings. It’s true that they might have endured much less adversity had they only been concerned with their own happiness, but they also wouldn’t be the heroes of humanity they are today.
Can one aspire to be an individual of the same caliber as Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa? Sure, why not? But I question the likelihood of such an outcome given most of our comparatively sheltered existences. How can a college graduate from suburban Connecticut become a cultural hero?
Before reading James’ essay, I was always focused on my own happiness, and I don’t mean that in a selfish way. Various influences throughout my life taught me that I can’t control anything except my mind and how it deals with the world around me. That sounds pessimistic, but it was actually liberating because it showed me that no one was in control of my happiness but me.
In college, as I started to become interested in Eastern philosophy and minimalism, I began focusing on ways to eliminate friction in my life. I might not have known what job I wanted, or where I wanted to live, but I did know I wanted to be happy, content, and fulfilled — wherever I was, whatever I was doing. I thought, “We only get one shot here, so why not make it as smooth and enjoyable as possible?” It seemed like a worthwhile and achievable long-term goal.
On top of that, I also found this anonymous quote:
You must love yourself before you love another. By accepting yourself and fully being what you are, your simple presence can make others happy.
As you may know, it’s my favorite quote, and I’ve tried to ingrain it into my conscious as a way to become the person I want to be. I fully believe it, too. If you don’t love yourself, how can you possibly love another? Learning to love yourself is an act of acceptance for who you are. If you can achieve that state, that love will emanate from you and spread to others.
So, my ideal version of happiness is one that allows me to be who I truly am, which is hopefully a person other people enjoy and benefit from. I think this is different from a pursuit of happiness where you only care about yourself or material possessions.
James:
Sheer happiness for happiness’ sake leads to numbness. I can not imagine any other consequence. For once happiness is achieved, what remains? Does not the bubble of the happiness economy eventually burst under the surplus of indulgence?
It seems like a case of “too much of a good thing”, but I don’t think happiness is a state with any sort of permanence or finality. It’s not like we finally get to the happy state and then never have to worry about it again. My happiness rises and falls multiple times over the course of a single day. I don’t think happiness can ever reach a state of an “indulgent surplus”. If you were permanently happy once you achieved happiness, then yes, I would agree that it sounds boring and unfulfilling, although you might not recognize it. It reminds me of an atheist asking what people in Heaven do all day.
Like minimalism, I believe happiness is a constant struggle. I’m constantly editing and refining my life to keep it simple and frictionless. It’s not something that’s just achieved, over, and done with. You can’t just set it and forget it. Even if I can learn to be happy most of the time, I’m still going to have bad days when I just don’t feel like doing anything. That’s human nature.
James concludes:
Once personal happiness is dethroned as the crown jewel of existence — once the dream of a tension-free life is finally disregarded as the rhetoric of infomercials — the world explodes with opportunities and possibilities to pursue causes drenched with meaning. This is, I think, what Viktor Frankl was pleading with us to acknowledge:
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
If not today, then someday, the choice will confront each and every one of us: do we choose the path of happiness or the path of meaning?
I guess what I’m struggling with is why it has to be one or the other. Since when is happiness a meaningless pursuit? I can see how some versions of happiness could be interpreted as selfish, like buying fancy cars or a huge house because you think it’ll make you happy. The pursuit of that happiness is certainly questionable. But I think the quest to love yourself so that you may pass that love onto others is worthwhile.
To suggest that we need to have Gandhi-level achievements to have meaning in our lives is obviously unreasonable. I don’t think Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi were unhappy people just because they pursued meaning, justice, and purpose. Being happy with myself and making other people happy gives my life plenty of meaning. I value simplicity, and removing friction, and finding inner peace, among other things. The pursuit of those things makes me happy, yes, but also fulfilled.
I would think people who consider themselves to be happy don’t feel their goals and lives are meaningless. Everything you choose to include in your life should contribute to your overall sense of well-being, be it people, places, or things. That includes goals. Whatever you’re pursuing, if it brings you fulfillment, it’s okay in my book.
Chris Guillebeau lists some things they have no right to tell you:
Here’s my subjective experience, which I will now objectify for you as universal truth. My definition of success is the only one that matters, even though it has shifted over time in accordance with my unique journey through life.
I have no space in my brain to accommodate the fact that your experience might be completely different than mine.
Obviously, these are things I want to avoid on this site, as I coincidentally wrote about just yesterday. Funny how the Internet works.
Randy Murray on why he writes for you, not robots:
I consider myself a columnist. I write a column and publish it online five days a week. I get no pleasure from robots and spiders walking my site, but it’s gratifying when real people do.
This is the mindset I share for QLE, and it’s what I was getting at in my post, Fine Writers & Content Creators.
Leo Babauta on wanting stuff:
I don’t, however, buy the iPhone. I’ve lusted after the iPhone since it first came out in 2007, and for more than four years, I’ve resisted getting one. Not because I like torturing myself, nor because I think I’m too cool for an iPhone, but because I don’t want to give in to the lust. I know I don’t need the iPhone, and I know my brain has been tricked into wanting it.
I love minimalism as much as the next guy, but I don’t fully agree with this.
What is the fear here? What will happen if you buy something you’ve wanted for four years, or “give in to the lust,” as Leo calls it, with scary music in the background.
Obviously, none of us need an iPhone like we need food, shelter, and love, and I don’t think everyone should have one. But the notion of “resisting” buying an iPhone for four years seems counterproductive. That’s four years of internal struggle because of a cell phone.
Minimalists often recommend a 30-day waiting list to avoid impulse buying. When you see something you want, you write it down and see if you still want it in a month. If you genuinely do, go ahead and buy it guilt-free. I think this is a practical idea and not too extreme of a suggestion. But why does the iPhone not apply?
I agree with Leo that advertising convinces the mind that we need much more than we actually do. His tips for reducing desires are great, and I adhere to most of them. But I don’t think owning an iPhone turns me into a victimized consumer either.
Leo’s tweet about Steve Jobs received a decent lashing, and I was among the criticism. My life is different because I own an iPhone, and I’m not ashamed to admit I believe it’s been for the better. As I wrote in my post on why the iPhone is minimalist, it makes my life easier. It makes communication and learning easier, which makes growing easier.
Leo responded to his critics shortly thereafter:
If you have been convinced a product changed your life, then it has. That’s how the magic works.
That’s not magic; it’s common sense. Your perception is your reality. If I believe the sky is red, then to me, it is. The logic here is so circuitous that it’s almost impossible to refute. The more I protest, “But the iPhone really has changed my life!”, the more effective Steve Jobs’s trick was, according to Leo. All of us who tweeted back only made him feel more validated.
Leo takes pity on us in his article, saying its not our fault. We’re only human and easily tricked. My problem is with insinuating that Steve Jobs set out to trick us with his shiny devices. Unfortunately, arguing either way is futile. If that’s what you believe, then that’s what he did.
This issue is a matter of semantics. There’s no convincing either side otherwise. I believe Apple has changed our lives regardless of whether we own any of its products. If you agree, you agree. If not, then in your eyes, I’ve been duped. I just don’t think an iPhone, or an iPad that allows a 99-year-old woman to read and write, is the same as a commercial telling you to buy unhealthy food or pointless possessions. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
I advocate minimalism because I think it solves problems. There are many different degrees of minimalism, which work for many different people. Leo’s way works for him, as mine does for me. However, what I don’t advocate is implying that people who do not adhere to a certain level of minimalism simply by having a passion for a tangible object are somehow worse off. Again, the argument is cyclical. These people have only “given into the lust” if you believe they have. Such language, intentionally or not, plays on fear by making people think, “Oh no! I don’t want to give in to lust! Lust is bad! I don’t want to be tricked!” That’s not constructive; it’s minimalism-mongering.
The iPhone is not harmful enough to warrant four years of mental struggle. Leo will be fine whether he owns an iPhone or not, and so will the rest of us.
The choice of a typeface, the care given to kerning and to readability—it all sends a powerful signal. When your business card is nothing but Arial on a piece of cardboard, you’ve just told people how they ought to think about you… precisely the opposite of what you were trying to do when you made the card in the first place.
I love typography. I don’t know if I’m any good at it, but I do think about it regularly, and I’m learning little by little.
At the very least, I promise you’ll never see Arial on this website.
J. Eddie Smith, IV on the absent self-leverage genre:
I’ve learned that the most helpful self-help books are those that I read like a shattered mirror. They were helpful to the extent that I saw my own reflection cast back. It wasn’t that the author didn’t ask me to change; it was that I didn’t ask myself.
Since this site is still in its infancy, I’ve been struggling a bit to find its proper tone, particularly for the inner peace articles, which could be considered “self-help” posts.
I do want to help people through this website, but I also want to avoid falling into the trap of always saying “you should do this”, or “you should act more like this”. I’m not perfect. Only you know what’s best for you.
So far, I think I’ve been a little careless with the second-person pronoun. When I say “you”, I’m really just thinking aloud and talking to myself as much as I’m talking to my readers. I hope I haven’t offended anybody by seeming like I know how you should think or act.
From now on, I’m going to try to write more from a “here’s what I struggle with, here’s how I’ve tried to fix it, here’s what did or did not work” mindset. If that helps you in some way, great. If not, that’s okay. Do what you will with my information, and let me know about your own experience so we can learn from each other.
Richard J. Anderson on being an “aspiring writer”:
After all, I hadn’t published a novel, sold a story, or landed a gig writing for pay in any form. Until something along those lines happened, I felt unfit to actually call myself a writer, no matter how much or how little I wrote. Dropping the qualifier has gone a long way to make sure I actually live up to the title I assign myself.
Great point. Often, the qualifier gives us an excuse to fail. If I call myself an “aspiring writer”, by definition, I don’t need to write everyday. I’m just aspiring. I might as well call myself a “struggling writer”. In that case, I pretty much can’t write everyday, or I wouldn’t be struggling, at least not in terms of output.
This website is the first instance where I’ve been writing creatively everyday. Up to this point, any possibility of calling myself a writer was tied to the fact that I was a pretty good English major. Any and all writing I did was for the classroom. Even then, I don’t think I considered myself a writer because I was only writing things out of fear for my GPA. Every college student has to write papers; what makes me a writer instead of them?
Like Richard, I felt I needed to have something to show for myself. Notebooks filled with original works of literary art. Articles published in newspapers and magazines. But that’s not true. As many have said, “A writer writes”, and I think they write because they want to, even when it’s hard.
Now that my academic career is winding down, I’ve been able to start writing this website consistently, Monday through Friday. I committed to publishing the site without fail for a month, succeeded, and kept on going.
I love it.
But the thing is, I still haven’t told anyone what I’m doing. I have zero readers. Does that mean I can’t call myself a writer? I don’t think so. Richard asserts it nicely:
I commit myself to writing, ergo I am a writer. No matter how good my work is, no matter how many or how few read my work, it’s still writing. If I do everything a writer does, I’ll be a writer.
Do I have aspirations for my writing? Of course. But having five readers or five thousand readers doesn’t make me any more or less of a writer. Readers don’t make a writer. Writing makes a writer.
I am a writer; I just happen to have an aspiring website.
Last night, I decided to take a couple of hours and purge my iTunes library.
I started with 16,716 songs. That’s a cumulative 129.23 GB of music, which would take 64 days to listen to from start to finish.
By the time I reached the end of my library, I had whittled it down to 12,170 songs. I deleted almost 40 GBs of music. Now it would only take me 44 days to listen to my entire collection. Decent.
How’d I do it? Songs and artists I don’t like, but had some how acquired (Taylor Swift): gone. Songs I don’t mind, but would never consciously decide to listen to (Aerosmith): gone. I kept artists who I’m interested in, but haven’t gotten around to listening to yet, and I obviously kept all my favorite artists.
So, why the merciless deletion?
For one, I’m working toward being able to get all my music on my iPhone so I can stop carrying around both it and an iPod. Up to this point, the iPhone’s 32 GB hard drive has been too small for me to comfortably fit everything; my music collection was/is too big to selectively comb through every song. My library is still pretty enormous, but with the larger hard drives coming up, an iPhone-only setup is definitely doable in the near future.
Second, I keep all of my music on a 750 GB external hard drive because I like knowing that if my computer crashes, it’s all safe and sound. I don’t miss not having my music on my laptop because I either A) have my iPod with me, or B) have access to the internet and any number of music streaming solutions, Spotify and Grooveshark chief among them. These alternatives allow me to keep my computer lean and fast; I don’t have to take up valuable hard drive space with thousands of songs, many of which I don’t listen to regularly.
I want to start backing up this drive, and the more refined my music collection is, the easier that’ll be. Deleting all of my songs-I’m-never-going-to-listen-to also frees up a considerable amount of space on my external drive, thus prolonging the time when I’ll need to upgrade to something larger. Plus, I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to finally delete Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen.
Additionally, letting go of all those never-played songs feels great. It’s easy to think that the more songs you have in your iTunes, the more sophisticated and eclectic a person you are. But the truth is, no one cares. The feeling of not having to wade through thousands of unplayed songs far outweighs the tiny bit of reassurance you might get from knowing those songs are there if you ever need them, which you probably won’t.
It was time to eliminate all of the musical clutter I’d accumulated over the years, and I recommend purging all types of files every once in a while. It feels awesome, and your computer will thank you.
Shawn Blanc just announced his new website:
Tools & Toys is a collection of items for the pickiest of gadget geeks, software aficionados, snowboard junkies, music lovers, writers, coffee nuts, and all around collectors of fine paraphernalia.
It’s already awesome. Great insight on great gear. Check it out.
Hello. I’m Andrew Marvin. This is my website.
The Flowdown is a thrice-semesterly podcast featuring conversations with Three Rivers students, faculty, and staff.
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