Stories we can tell

February 2, 2019 Will Simpson

The habits we groove become who we are, one minute at a time. A small thing, repeated, is not a small thing.

How we interact is a big deal. The stories we perpetuate are a powerful influence on that happens in interactions. Repeating these stories builds their strength.

It is easy to fall for the sad story of the day. These stories of suffering and calamity are pushed on us from every direction.

These stories come at us so fast and are relentless. The shear volume diminishes the impact of each individual story until it has so little impact that it is forgotten. Forgotten but it has left its residual feeling tone on us and helped create a sullen, scared, frustrated, angry, us vs them feeling tone to our lives.

This same approach can be put into service for scrubbing our feeling tone fresh and imbuing it with optimism and possibility. Repeat stories about generosity, repeat stories about victories, repeat stories about connection, repeat stories of good fortune.

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.

Just like me...

February 1, 2019 Will Simpson

I’m grateful for the staggering advantages this accident of birth has given me!

Let’s introduce a little practice today. In a situation where you can see other people, maybe in a cafe, or classroom, or on a bus, or in traffic. Sit quietly and create a warm and open feeling tone to your experience. Then look at the people around you and say to yourself. “Just like me they wish for clarity. Just like me they want to be free from suffering, both mental and physical. Just like me they want their confusion clarified. Just like me...”

I’m going to try this practice and see what happens.

Hope you have an awesome day!

Credits — Pema Chödrön - Be Grateful to Everyone: An In-depth Guide to the Practice of Lojong

3 reading quotes

January 31, 2019 Will Simpson

The following two quotes are from different eminent philosophers. They have different feeling tones. I’ve gained some inspiration from both at different times. Depends on what you read.

“I cannot remember the books I have read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Contrasted with…

“Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”

— Epictetus

And a third — file this quote under “Rules for Reading Radicals”

“A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.”

— Nassim Taleb

Hope you have an awesome day!

Credits — Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness

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

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