Better than free

What’s valuable when everything is free:

Immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, findability.

kk

Forward

In the novels, Joe Pike has bright red arrows tattooed on his arms, pointing forward.
We don’t stop, we don’t slow down, we don’t revisit past decisions, we don’t second guess.

pmarca on ferriss

The resistance

Writing isn’t hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
Resistance is the urge to procrastinate, delay, wait, the belief that you’re not ready.
Resistance is a sign you are doing something of significance.
Resistance never goes away: “Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five”.

The war of art

You are not doing the thing

Preparing to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Thinking about doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Scheduling time to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.
Reading about how to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading this isn’t doing the thing.

The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.

blog post

Execution

Developing a strategy is easy but that executing that strategy is much harder, especially if that requires a significant change in human behavior.

Most people are just trying to survive battling that whirlwind and don’t have the time or energy to do something new.

4DX

Turn pro

We all are haunted by the visions of the person we could be but aren’t.
Turn pro: show up every day. show up no matter what. stay on the job all day.
‘I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp’.

The war of art

Zero based thinking

Is there anything I’m doing today that, knowing what I now know, I wouldn’t get into today, if I had to do it over?

Is there anything you are doing because you are stuck in a recurrent scheme for which you can no longer find the why?

Brian Tracy / Erika Lemay

Serenity prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can; 
and wisdom to know the difference.

Keep your identity small

You can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants.
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

PG

The 2nd arrow

If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful? If the person is struck by a second arrow, is it even more painful?
In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is optional.

More zen stories

Hell Yeah or No

If you feel anything less than “hell yeah!” about something, say no.

Refuse almost everything. Do almost nothing. But the things you do, do them all the way.

Why would you ever choose to be with someone who is not excited to be with you?

Sivers post/book ; Mark Manson post

Life is short

If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that’s bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people’s mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.
If you’re a freelancer or a small company, you can fire or avoid toxic customers.
Things we like tend to become more addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions.
In middle school and high school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important thing in the world. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them.
Ask yourself whether you’ll care about it in the future.
You take things for granted, and then they’re gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die.
Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do.
Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short.

PG

Tomorrow

If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?

Most of us live programmed lives. Tomorrow is set, finished, done, and you haven’t even started it yet.

And we accept that as part of the deal in setting goals and reaching them.

But what about the tomorrow thirty days from now? Or a year?

If you could do those over, would you? How?

Seth

Goals vs. systems

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do.

James Clear’s post/book

Ignore sunk costs

What happened yesterday already happened. It’s a gift and an asset from your previous self. You don’t have to accept if you don’t want to.

It’s harder to change careers if you spent years in school getting a degree. But the correct approach is to ignore it, and change if the new thing will have a better payoff.

Seth

Bird by bird

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

Book

Don’t be a donkey

Buridan’s donkey is standing halfway between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. It keeps looking left and right, trying to decide between hay and water. Unable to decide, it eventually dies of hunger and thirst.
Don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.
If you’re thirty now and have six different directions you want to pursue, then you can do each one for ten years, and have done all of them by the time you’re ninety. It seems ridiculous to plan to age ninety when you’re thirty, right? But it’s probably coming, so you might as well take advantage of it.

Sivers

When to start

  • The best time to start is when you’ve got enough money in the bank to support all contingencies.
  • The best time to start is when everything at home is stable and you can really focus.
  • The best time to start is when no one is already working on your idea.
  • The best time to start is after you’ve worked all the kinks out of your plan.
  • The best time to start is when you’re sure it’s going to work.

Actually, as you’ve probably guessed, the best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now.

Seth

Be happy now

False beliefs:

  • You cannot be happy without the things that you are attached to and that you consider so precious. False. There is not a single moment in your life when you do not have everything that you need to be happy.
  • Happiness is in the future. Not true. Right here and now you are happy and you do not know it because your false beliefs and your distorted perceptions have got you caught up in fears, anxieties, attachments, conflicts, guilt and a host of games that you are programmed to play.
  • Happiness will come if you manage to change the situation you are in and the people around you. Not true. You stupidly squander so much energy trying to rearrange the world … What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head.
  • If all your desires are fulfilled you will be happy. Not true. In fact it is these very desires and attachments that make you tense, frustrated, nervous, insecure and fearful.

The way to love

How to lose time and money

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly.
And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day — days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. But the alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

PG

The world’s worst boss

If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you’d quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much of your time as you do, they’d fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under.

Seth

Before the law

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside.

…

Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper.

“So how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.

Abridged from Kafka

Maker’s schedule

The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

One meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

Those of us on the maker’s schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager’s schedule is that they understand the cost.

PG

Anger

A young farmer was padding up the river. He was in a hurry. As he looked ahead, he spied another vessel, heading rapidly downstream toward his boat. This vessel seemed to be making every effort to hit him. He rowed furiously to get out of the way, but it didn’t seem to help. He yelled at the other vessel, “Change direction, you idiot! You are going to hit me. The river is wide. Be careful!” His screaming was to no avail.

The other vessel hit his boat with a sickening thud. He was enraged as he stood up and cried out to the other vessel, “You moron! How could you manage to hit my boat in the middle of this wide river? What is wrong with you?”

As he looked at the other vessel, he realized that there was no one in the other boat. He was screaming at an empty vessel that had broken free of its moorings and was going downstream with the current. The lesson is simple. There is never anyone in the other boat. When we are angry, we are screaming at an empty vessel.

More zen stories

The top idea in your mind

Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else.

Most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time, which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

There are two types of thoughts worth avoiding: thoughts about money and disputes.

I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what’s the top idea in their mind at any given time. But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

PG

Meditations

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.
But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.
And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.

Book

Tao

Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference between success and failure?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!

Other people are excited,
as though they were at a parade.
I alone don’t care,
I alone am expressionless,
like an infant before it can smile.

Other people have what they need;
I alone possess nothing.
I alone drift about,
like someone without a home.
I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.

Other people are bright;
I alone am dark.
Other people are sharp;
I alone am dull.
Other people have purpose;
I alone don’t know.
I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.

Tao te ching

Investment

Think for a moment that I granted you a right — you can buy 10% of one of your classmate’s earnings for the rest of their lifetime.

There’s nothing wrong with getting the highest grades in the class, but that isn’t going to be the quality that sets apart a big winner from the rest of the pack.

You’d probably pick the person who has leadership qualities, who is able to get others to carry out their interests. That would be the person who is generous, honest and gave credit to other people for their own ideas.

The beauty of this is that you already own 100% of yourself, and you’re stuck with it. So you might as well be that person.

Warren Buffet