When you learn how to make or do something you can normally afford to take for granted, you become less afraid. After all, a thing once far beyond your grasp is now understandable. It loses its magic. Shipping, for instance, becomes just another everyday task.
Tag: wisdom
Don’t Hide Behind Good Advice
Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.” – Christopher Hitchens People get confused by conflicting prescriptions for success because they go about the process of analyzing advice all wrong. Advice is an invitation to explore. Nothing more. When you uncritically act on…
Political Poisoning
I certainly don’t talk about politicians. So it’s interesting how my daughter has picked up on the Trump hate from… somewhere. Maybe the Roblox gaming videos she watches on YouTube, I suppose. I can’t think of anywhere else.
Commitment Isn’t the Starting Point
Before you try to figure out what you love, take some time to follow up on what you like. Instead of seeking a big epiphany about what you want to do for your entire life, make a small effort to explore a few things that seem interesting to you right now. Commitment isn’t the starting point for creating your life. Curiosity is.
Impatience
I am extremely impatient for humankind to start using their brains, and consequently the gift of logic, to end behavior such as war, greed, and territoriality. But now I am reading a book that is making me take a much longer view. The book is titled This Will Make You Smarter, edited by John Brockman.
The Human Capital Purist Case Against Tax-Funded College
In the Soho Forum debate on “All government support of higher education should be abolished”, I heavily based my argument on the signaling model of education. But if I were a human capital purist, I still would have defended the abolitionist position – albeit less triumphantly. Here’s how.
5 Things I Do To Recharge After Long Workdays
Nights and mornings are times for me to both reset from long work days and prepare for long work days to come. As I grow further into my work, my evening recharge times have become precious. If you’re going for it during the work day, you’re going to feel that, too. If you’re reading this post, you might be wondering how you can build regular(ish) practices into your evenings to ensure that recharging happens.
The Boring Truth About How To Get People To Do Things
Patience persuasion relies on two extraordinarily mundane and dirt-cheap things – reminders and time. Of course, this all assumes that you have a good reason to want someone to do something, and that you have clearly articulated how it is in their best interest to also do that thing. Don’t skimp here.
The Myth of Institutionalized Learning
This weekend conversation exposes the deep, underlying myth in our culture that children cannot learn unless they are systematically taught. Whether in school or school-at-home, children can only learn when they are directed by an adult, when they follow an established curriculum, when they are prodded and assessed. How could a child possibly know how to identify plants if it wasn’t part of a school-like lesson?
75 Times Around the Sun
Yesterday I observed the 25th Anniversary of my 50th birthday. On the original occasion, I opined that, like Merle Haggard, I could say “my life’s been grand!” I said at the time that I had lived a great half-century, therefore no matter what happened to me after that I could say that most of my life had been grand. The facts of the matter are that the continuing quarter-century has been even grander.