For me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets.
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Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention.
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Tom reminds us: “The ancient Greek word for ‘leisure’ or ‘free time’ was ‘skole’ which turned into the Latin word for school.”
Austin Kleon (the author of Steal Like An Artist) shared the “Manifesto for Slow Learning” and the free book Slow Learning about “A path to a meaningful and mindful future of learning” which a team of 15 authors, artists, and teachers came up with. Recommended read!
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36. Kindness is vastly underrated. Everyone can be kind – it requires no special skill or training, yet has an immediate, positive impact. It is perhaps the ultimate life hack.
Chris Guillebeau shares this wonderful little gem and other ‘life hacks’ in his 36 Ways to Live Differently shared on his personal blog:
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- The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
- Nothing of importance must be on his mind, he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
- He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
- He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
- The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
- Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
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Proponents of this new science believe that experiencing awe may be an essential pathway to physical and mental well-being. By taking us out of ourselves and expanding our sense of time, it counteracts the self-focus and narcissism that is the root of so much modern disenchantment. To experience awe, to fully open ourselves up to it, helps us to live happier, healthier lives.
A rather extensive article by Henry Wismayer, but well worth the read: Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor. Really enjoying the articles Noema Magazine puts out lately.
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There is brave in soft.
There is wild in simple.
There is peace in thunder.
There are songs in stillness. -
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When a person aspires to be a brand, they forfeit everything that is truly glorious about being human. Building any brand requires consensus. When we position ourselves as a brand, we are forced to project an image of what we believe most people will approve of and admire and buy into. The moment we cater our creativity to popular opinion is the precise moment we lose our freedom and autonomy.
Designer and brand consultant Debbie Millman about The personal brand paradox and how social media (with its followers, likes and click-throughs) is pushing the long-lasting concept of the ‘personal brand’ at the present time.
wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/personal-brand-paradox-debbie-millman
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They found that when people made a very subtle shift moving from ‘What should I do?’ to ‘What could I do?’ they generated many more solutions and better solutions.
This is how to solve problems more effectively with one simple change by Daniel H. Pink.
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When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, ‘You’re too this, or I’m too this.’ That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.
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© Jody Mac (via YouTube)
The reality of your life is always now.
The backgroundmusic is quite corny and the clips are mainly stock material, but I still really like the video Jody Mac put together using excerpts from the amazing talk “Death and the Present Moment” by Sam Harris. His entire talk (about an hour) is on Youtube, too, if you want to start your year with some excellent food for thought:
You really can change the world if you care enough.
Design is intelligence made visible.
