macro
Prioritizing wellbeing
In Adam Smith’s earlier work, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” which I think is just as important, he made the observation that the value of any government is judged in proportion to the extent that it makes its people happy. I think that is a good founding principle for any group of countries focused on promoting well-being. None of us have all of the answers, not even Scotland, the birthplace of Adam Smith. But in the world we live in today, with growing divides and inequalities, with disaffection and alienation, it is more important than ever that we ask and find the answers to those questions and promote a vision of society that has well-being, not just wealth, at its very heart.
Source: Why governments should prioritize well-being TED Talk by Nicola Sturgeon
#wellbeing #happiness #quote
Life is short, don't wait
If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for something, you should try to eliminate it if you can…
Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don’t wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don’t need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn’t wait. Just don’t wait.
Source: Life is short by Paul Graham
#mementomori #quote
Balancing the accounts
Just because we’re working to fill one account (our bank account), doesn’t mean we should diminish our life and health account in the process. We need both accounts in good standing to have a good life.
Source: Your other account balance by Paul Jarvis
#wellbeing #productivity #worklife #quote
RIP blogging?
Here’s the thing: there are good blogs to read. Some old ones are gone, but new good ones are created all the time.
And there are good RSS readers which you can use instead of (or in addition) to Twitter and Facebook.
And — most importantly — nothing is stopping you from writing joyfully and creatively for the web! You can entertain, you can have fun, you can push the boundaries of the form, if you want to. Or you can just write about cats as you develop your voice. Whatever you want!
Source: You Choose by Brent Simmons
#writing #quote #blogging
Instructions for living a life...
Pay attention Be astonished Tell about it
Extract from Sometimes by Mary Oliver
Source: You do not have to be good by Austin Kleon
#poetry #MaryOliver
Creatives are...
People going through some endeavour trying to build or create or make something. I don’t mean artists or painters, just FYI. I mean people who are taking a risk to express some part of themselves.
Source: Sunni Brown on Self-Compassion in the Creative Process
#quote #creativity
Money doesn't fix everything
Interesting analysis of the problems at Manchester United (emphasis my own):
“It’s interesting because we keep hearing they need to buy more players. You know they have spent a lot of money in headline terms and yet the whole thing is a horrible incoherent mess. It’s just a brilliant reminder that there is more to every area of life than simply having and spending lots of money and football seems to be really struggling to process this. Why isn’t that rich person happy… Why isn’t money everything? Well because there are other things like care and intelligence and wanting to be doing this thing together. And what’s missing there is not spending money, you know people have tried desperately and in a haphazard fashion to spend money. It’s intellignce, care and love and being involved in that project. It’s a brilliant lesson that we should all heed and watch endlessly on a loop.”
Source: The Guardian Football Weekly
Carry your life lightly
Carry your life lightly Don’t overcompensate, Or turn the wheel too sharply But if you keep the handbrake on, you’ll never know The joy of moving free, countering gravity No need for fear Even at speed you can correct a swerve
Source: Carry your life lightly by Anna Starkey
#poetry #wellbeing
Look after yourself
Do less and achieve more. Take quality breaks. Take the occasional retreat. Spend time re-charging. Get enough sleep. Read for inspiration. Spend more time with those who encourage and less time with those who criticise. Look after yourself.
From How to Be Brilliant by Nicholas Bate
#selfcare #quote
Progress might mean doing an about-turn
Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then going forward does not get you any nearer.
Matt Haig shares this quote from C.S. Lewis in Notes on a Nervous Planet. He follows it with this insight of his own:
Forward momentum, on an individual or social level, is not automatically good simply because it is forward momentum… progress might mean doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.
It seems to me that often our egos get in the way of these about-turns. We’re too fragile to admit, to ourselves as much as anyone else, that we made a mistake and so we just keep ploughing forward.
If we can get beyond that, and check in with ourselves on a regular basis to ask if we’re still heading in the right direction, then maybe we can avoid going too far along the wrong roads.
#progress #change #mistakes #ego
herein, I only talk about the things I like
This was an important decision for me, made some years ago. It is great fun to annihilate something in a storm of arch Menckenesque hail, and I’ve done it in the past. But I came to the place where I questioned its utility here. If I’m spending time and space on something that is bad, then that is time and space not be used to boost the awareness of something good. And that is a poor trade-off, these days…
I’ll only ever tell you about things I think are good. Because, really, that’s all we should be spending our time on, and all we should be raising up into the conversation…
Here, we only do the good shit. Okay? Okay.
Source: Warren Ellis, Orbital Operations 9 June 19
What should we be teaching?
schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keeps up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products - you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.
Source: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by #YuvalNoahHarari
Bridging critical thinking and hope
Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. I try to live in this place between the two, to try to build a life there, because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving our situation produces resignation of which cynicism is a symptom and against which it is the futile self-protection mechanism. But on the other hand, believing blindly that everything will work out just fine also produces a kind of resignation because we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better. And I think in order to survive, both as individuals and as a civilization, but especially in order to thrive, we need to bridge critical thinking with hope.
Source: Maria Popova: Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age, OnBeing with Krista Tippett
False promises
When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. And there are no more answers only better and better lies.
Wise words from Jon Snow in Game of Thrones, S7:E7.
#lies #meaning
Lincoln's logic
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.
#quote
Democracy and the media
If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realise this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth.
Source: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by #YuvalNoahHarari
Invention
Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely
Source: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by #YuvalNoahHarari
Your network is your net worth
Your network is your net worth. The people you surround yourself with most have a significant influence on your behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and performance.
– George Raveling
Source: George Raveling’s newsletter 30/03/2019
#quote #networks
A Lopsided Arms Race
Notes from the introduction and chapter 1 of Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
In the introduction, Newport highlights:
“the necessity of cultivating high-quality leisure to replace the time most now dedicate to mindless device use.”
The emphasis in the quote above is my own, this mindless device use is something I’m very aware of in my own life and something I’m actively trying to eliminate. In a world where we’re all feeling increasingly busy and like we don’t have time to do the things we want to do, we need to identify the activities we do that have little benefit and replace them with something more rewarding. I’d say this is my drive behind reading the book.
Chapter 1 takes us back to the early days of smartphones and social media. Reminding us of their original selling points, for example the key feature of the first iPhone was that it combined your mobile phone and mp3 player into one device. It evolved from there to become something far more ubiquitous:
“We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke up one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it.”
From this point, the rest of the chapter goes on to argue that our autonomy in this area of our lives has been taken away.
“People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.”
The question here is that if we now know this, why do we continue to engage with the technologies, and the companies who make them, that are apparently doing more harm than good? The two reasons Newport gives are intermittent positive reinforcement and social approval, both of which are manipulated by features of the systems, eg tags and likes.
Come the end of the chapter we’re well primed to hear how Newport’s philosophy of digital minimalism can help us regain control.
#CalNewport #technology #DigitalMinimalism
Personal productivity
Bookmarked: Why time management is ruining our lives
“Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness.”
There are some very interesting points in this Guardian article, relating to productivity and procrastination. Focusing on how I do my work, rather that actually getting on and doing it, is something I’m certainly aware of doing myself. It’s even something the very people who have come up with the productivity techniques we strive for are concerned about, eg Merlin Mann, who came up with the system of Inbox Zero.
#bookmark #time #productivity #busyness