Special enough

January 30, 2019 Will Simpson

Is this what I want to be doing when I die?

Today at work..
Breakfast…
This thing you're making…
We act as if we have time. We lose sight of our eminent death.
Is what we do special enough to be the thing we are remember for?
What we do today may be the last thing we get to do.

Remember when you dress in the morning that what you put on, are the clothes you may die in.

Hope you have an awesome day!
Credits — Seth Godin

This journal is meant as a reminder to encourage my future self. Where I work on my mental fitness and ‘adulting’. A reminder to him to operate in the world with love and compassion and some tips put together in a moment of clarity to help him when he is less clear and caught up in stuff the he can’t control. Continue the conversation anytime: will@kestrelcreek.com.

Thinking Practice

January 29, 2019 Will Simpson

Sell myself the best hour of the day! Time for thinking and reading and planning.

I have a non-thinking practice - meditation and it helps me a lot. It is systematic and regular. Why couldn’t the same principles be applied to a thinking practice. Recently came across a article by one of my favorite writers Shane Parish of Farnman Street in which he was reviewing Richard Hamming’s book, Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. In it he stated:

“Hamming dedicated his Friday afternoons to “great thoughts.” Setting aside time to think is a common of people that do great things. Not only does this help you live consciously it helps get your head out of the weeds. The rest of us are too busy with the details to ask if we’re going in the right direction. ”

— Shane Parish

This is what has got me thinking about formally setting aside a few hours each week for a meeting with myself. Consider this the most important meeting of the week. All the usual meeting etiquette rules apply, no phones, be on time, be prepared, follow through.

Start slow and let this grow organically. This can be hard to fit in with other obligations but try and start with 15 mins. Friday before lunch.

Hope you have an awesome day!

Credits - Hamming, Richard R.. Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

Positive Deviant

January 28, 2019 Will Simpson

What you measure tends to get paid attention to, and what you pay attention to, tends to get better.

7 practical methods for becoming more of a 'positive deviant'.

Ask an unscripted question. Then see if you can keep the conversation going for more than 2 sentences. Listen and ask for more details.
Don't complain.
Notice and count something interesting, become a scientist.
- If you count something interesting you will learn something interesting.
Write something - anything.
Change. Be an early adopter.
Create an orderly life
Live modestly

Positive deviant here means be more than 2 standard deviation above the norm in the range or spectrum of social behaviors. It is easy to be 1 standard deviation above the norm, just by smiling but hard work to apply these behaviors. These behaviors will make you stand out.

Hope you have an awesome day!

Credits — Atul Gawande - Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Creatives keep journals

January 26, 2019 Will Simpson

I either know I'm ignorant or I have no idea I'm ignorant

Write in a journal to guide and you test your reflections.

In doing so you shape yourself into a mature, intellectual craftsman. This is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit. This is a huge confidence builder, one becomes confident in one’s uncertainty. The more one learns the more one becomes intimate with their ignorance. Journaling also helps you build up the habit of writing.

The intellectual craftsman should keep a special file for his master agenda. Rewrite and review by himself and perhaps discussed with some like minded friends. Review carefully when relaxed.

May Sarton writes about how writing creates a soul via building a self, and opus. Sound mystical and a very poetic but is another way of saying writing builds knowledge.

“ Thus, every man, in the course of his life, must not only show himself obedient and docile. By his fidelity he must build—starting with the most natural territory of his own self—a work, an opus, into which something enters from all the elements of the earth. He makes his own soul throughout his earthly days; and at the same time he collaborates in another work, in another opus, which infinitely transcends, while at the same time it narrowly determines, the perspectives of his individual achievement: the completing of the world. It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it—and I do and always have—then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it. ”

— May Sarton -- Journal of a Solitude

Hope you have an awesome day!

Credits — May Sarton
Credits — C. Wright Mills The Social Imagination

Sweet work

January 25, 2019 Will Simpson

As a person, I need to fully embrace the fact that in a conversation or interaction, I am the one ‘on stage’ that everyone is looking to for love, information, entertainment, validation, collaboration, a smile, a hug.

Heart felt work, life long learning. Historically work was about using our muscles - braun, in the more recent past work is about using our brains, the knowledge we acquire. In the future work will be about our ability to make connections and satisfy. Work will be a sharing of feelings, a long conversation, a relationship, an interaction.

Work connected to these feelings has always lead to success and happiness.

"And the good news is that we all start with the same advantage.” Start any time.

Hope you have an awesome day!

Credits — Bernadette Jiwa

Questions

January 24, 2019 Will Simpson

The path to success is progressive and iterative. We get there by being brave enough to ask the hard questions along the way.

Euphonious dichotomy a pleasant sounding question that is messed up, confused, wrong, divisive.

Better questions. Ask better questions, practice. This helps drive conversation which drive connections. Asking others leads to asking myself better questions which leads to better thinking as thinking often is answering self generated questions.

What questions are worth the time and which are not? Just because a question can be formed doesn’t give it value. Questions can be helpful, insightful, well formed, add meaning, lead to expansion of knowledge or happiness, foster collectiveness, and/or are just nice. Some questions are the opposite, non sensical, questions for questioning’s sake, leading to divisiveness, formed without presence or awareness. I wait to spend my time on the first category of questions and stop, lose, avoid the second. This is what it meant by: The hard thing to know is to which notions to be ‘only don’t know' about and which are not worth the time.

Hope you have an awesome day!

Atul Gawande

January 23, 2019 Will Simpson

“Don’t grab defeat from the hands of success. Just when you’re about to succeed don’t let defeat butt in.

It is surprising how little it takes to defeat success in life. ”

— Atul Gawande

Hope you have an awesome day!

Credit - Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande