Embracing Imperfection
Nearly three months ago to this day, I suggested I report back in a week. Better late than never, some say, so here I am “a week” later, reporting back.
Archive
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The Probability of Success
In a week, I will have willingly given up a steady monthly income and taken on the unavoidable uncertainty and incalculable risk of building a small business with my partner.
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Adagio
As I approach the end of my first trimester and watch the ebb and flow of grief, I’m learning that certain experiences won’t be rushed, no matter how much you’d like them to be.
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What the hell is water?
In the four months I’ve been away from my blog, my father succumbed to cancer and my mother moved in. I think about David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” and I wonder if this is water.
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Rhythm and Speed
Reading Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” and Boyd and Zimbardo’s “The Time Paradox” has been chipping away at idioms like “time is money.” Do I know anything about time?
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Life is a Spinning Progress Wheel
You know that spinning progress wheel? The one that just keeps going until you get fed up with it and you just ctrl-alt-delete and restart the damn thing? Life is that spinning wheel, but there’s no restarting the damn thing.
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Helping Fellow Humans
I’ve spent much of the year thinking and talking about how challenging, annoying, frustrating, and just so freaking imperfect human beings are…
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My Grail Keyboard?
I just got myself a ZSA Moonlander in an effort to alleviate progressively worsening shoulder and wrist pain. I am typically a 80–90wpm typist. Today, I’m feeling good at 50wpm.
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Total Autonomy, Really?
It is difficult to fully own our decision-making. While we chafe at the idea of being restricted and contrained, there is a measure of comfort we overlook in accepting that some decisions—and the resulting responsbility—might be better outsourced.
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My Life’s “Big Bang”
On October 8, 2022, I decided to measure my year from birthday to birthday. To commemorate, I started doing morning pages. I had a healthy streak going—one measured in months, not days or weeks—until life forced me onto the field of play.
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Color is Distracting
I stumbled into the decision to use
filter: grayscale(1);, and I don’t think I’ll go back anytime soon. I find it soothing enough that I may even take it even further and make my entire site shades of gray. -
Taking Stock
A pause in my usual routine to take a look at where I’m at and where I’d like to be. It’s been quite the ride diving back into HTML and CSS and dipping my toe into Javascript.
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A Manifesto for Human-Centered Writing
Every writer creates in solitude. This is especially true when writers book an airbnb in the middle of nowhere. But still true when writers have creative friendships and rivalries. And true even when writers belong to writing groups, cohorts, and communities.
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Stopping by a Boulder on a Sunny Day
The rocks are gritty, high and steep, But I have a promise to keep, And holds to go before I sleep, And holds to go before I sleep.
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Asking Good Questions
School conditions us to look for and present the right answers. There are right and wrong answers to every kind of question: multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer, even essays.
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Frameworks for Sentences
Five experiments to diversify stale sentences, from the book “25 Great Sentences and How They Got That Way,” with examples.
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The Enemies of Progress
Facing perceived failures has been a lifelong struggle. From hiding my report cards to throwing out credit card bills unopened, I have classically failed to look my perceived failures in the eye.
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Open-Ended Questions
I think about open-ended questions like they are French doors. Sometimes, we have burning open-ended questions we are just *itching* to ask. This is how I imagine it going.
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I Respect Your Time
When you are “respecting someone’s time,” are you really making excuses for yourself?
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Making Mistakes in Public
Cancel culture is an example of how the psychology of crowds normalizes judgment at a large scale. It serves to cull the unproductive individuals from society. It accepts the premise that we should be defined by and judged for our worst mistakes.
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Taking the Leap
There’s an interesting dynamic you have to deal with when you try to carve out your own little space online. You’ll learn that there’s a line you have to cross before you can connect with other people on a social (human) level.
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The Hard Thing About Hard Questions
I’ve always hated hard questions because I have always wanted to have the right answer. Perhaps it’s because I spent more than a decade identifying as a good student. And we all know that a good student has good grades because they know all the right answers.
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Acceptance
There’s a power to accepting reality as it is. When you no longer invest your energy in denial and frustration, you’ll find yourself free: free to invest in working within the constraints (or if you prefer, working creatively despite the constraints).
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The Value of Frameworks
The blank page can be a scary place. The first mark, we think, can commit us to the wrong direction. We worry that course correction will be impossible.
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A New Kind of Relationship
Working with myself, for myself, has felt like the closest thing to self-care in a while.
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an epiphany: balance
today I had an epiphany. maybe. the point of balance isn’t to even the score or even... to even out the good stuff and the bad stuff.
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Change is Hard to See
The true paradox of humanity is really that we all share in one universal truth: we are all unique. We seek patterns to group and categorize people and our interactions with them so that we may smoothly navigate our interactions with other people...
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How to Pick a Solution
The best solutions are tailored to a single, specific situation. All other solutions, especially the ones that supposedly work "out of the box" or are "done for you," will always be subpar.
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The Art of Craft
Crafting anything—everything—takes time. It takes brainstorming (vision). It takes planning (direction). It takes doing (action and execution). Eventually, it takes reflecting and making changes (revision).
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Change is a Spiral
Change is a non-linear path, one that may not lead us where we think it will. All change begins as mindset work. The more I listen to methods for behavioral change, the more apparent this becomes.
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The Cartesian Split
The road to awareness is paved by good intentions and it’s a slippery slope. Once I began to bring awareness to a part of my experience, I began to bring awareness to other parts of my experience by accident.
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The Path to Ease
It doesn’t get easier. Even after you learn more and get better, it still feels hard, not easier. If you're trying to move forward in the hopes of things getting easier, you'll be sorely disappointed.
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A Quiet Voice in a Noisy World
Today I’ve noticed that it’s difficult to bring awareness to anything without accompanying judgment. A simple habit awareness exercise of listing my habits—just the current ones—brought up a lot of questions and concerns about not doing enough... and also, not giving myself enough credit.
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Success is Surviving
We’ve been listening to James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits.” He reframes the idea of winning and success as surviving.
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Is This Self-Care?
The ultimate self check-in is the act of sitting down, closing your eyes, and tuning in. This simple practice is crucial to connecting with yourself.
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The Hunt for Meaning
Most of my life has been centered around a constant search for meaning. As early as I can remember, the idea of being useful or contributing in a meaningful way has been paramount.
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The Tapestry of Experiences
How we react, respond, and reflect on our experiences is crucial to how it’s recorded and then understood. The experience and resulting emotional state become part of a tapestry of experiences that we call "our history." That history informs all our future behavior and how we find meaning in our lives.
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Fixing What We Can See
We can sometimes get swallowed up in “fixing” the things we can see: how our bodies look and how we can use them to perform. Even if you’re a professional athlete, taking care of your mental and emotional health is paramount to your success and happiness in life. Being physically gifted only gets you so far.
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Love and Other Words
To me, love seems to be understood in two ways: as acceptance and/or as caring. Sometimes, the idea of utility (usefulness or productivity) can enter the picture. It’s hard to know, really, since it’s been described in so many ways by people from all walks of life... through all types of media.
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Yes and No
“Yes” and “no” are so much more than responses to requests and questions from others: they can signify commitment, rebellion, acceptance, rejection, victory, defeat.
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Come As You Are
In our society, we strive for the biggest, most visible gains; we look for and celebrate the “zero to hero.” It seems only natural to think that the most effective way to improve is to look for the biggest weaknesses we can find and “fix” that.
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The Meaning of Home
What is (my) home? Where is it?
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What Work-Life Balance?
The desire to find a “work-life balance” has always troubled me because it positions work and life on opposite sides of the scale. It implies that “adding” to one side means you must “subtract” from the other side to stay balanced.
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Practice for Practice’s Sake
I’ve always thought that practice was all about repetition in order to perform better. In other words, the goal of practice was to work on your weaknesses and eliminate them.
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Courage by Association
Bayles and Orland's “Art and Fear” suggests that what artists learn from other artists is not just history and technique.
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Beginner’s Mind
I like being good at things and despise being bad at things. It’s struck me lately that I am especially bad at being a “good” beginner, that is, someone with a beginner’s mind. The “beginner’s mind” is a concept from Zen Buddhism: it is an attitude towards learning that is open, eager, and unencumbered by expectations.
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Career Wanderlust
I enjoy traveling to learn about different cultures (and their foods), but I don’t love to travel in general. I never Google new places to visit and I don’t have a travel bucket list. I’m rarely seduced by swaying palm trees, serene lakes, or the grandeur of man’s greatest monuments. I don’t wish for a taste of another life in another place. I do, however, constantly shop around for different careers.
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Hard Days
Some days are the kind of days that make you wish you hadn’t gotten out of bed… and that you could just get back in once you’ve realized that it’s one of those days. Those days ask you if you’re a fighter, if you are resilient, if you can forgive yourself. In short, they ask you what you’re made of. Today was one of those days… and tomorrow is a different day: one full of possibility.
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Sharing Activities
What we do for fun or for work does not necessarily correlate to a specific set of values. Just because you meet a potential partner (friend or otherwise) doing the same activity does not mean you necessarily value the same things in a relationship, much less in life.
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How to Help
It can be very easy for me to lose sight of the fact that we are all so different. When I stumble on things that resonate with me and help me, I just want to share them with everyone. I feel this great, positive energy that I want to gift to the world. I completely forget that what works for me doesn’t work for everyone.
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Permission to Meditate
I’ve heard meditation compared to juggling: you have to try not to try. Once you start trying and thinking about how to juggle or how you’re doing, the balls will fall right out of the air.
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Forgiveness
The art of forgiveness is not one I’ve practiced much… and I do believe that it is an art: It requires talent, or in the absence of talent, the hard work and time of deliberate practice.
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Starting Anew
Rob and I started YogaGlo’s “Foundations of Flow” program, led by Jason Crandell, and for the first time, I believe that practicing yoga is finally going to “stick.” One of the crucial things for me has been shifting my focus from coming to the practice to achieve to coming to the practice to learn.
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What’s Real
If you truly seek connection and trust, before you jump to judgment and conclude something someone did was meant to harm you, consider your reality, their reality, and look for common ground.
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Assume the Best
Trust and connection are built through looking for what’s probably real, not through looking for trouble and judgment. People’s behaviors can be interpreted through one of two lenses: 1. looking for what’s probably real (for them) or 2. looking for trouble (which usually doesn’t exist, except when we look for it).
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Ask Better Questions
I bought 26 pounds of litter and 12 pounds of dry cat food at our local pet store. The retail associate asked me, “Do you need help carrying these to your car?” My instinctive response was “Nope,” and shortly after, I thought, “Why would I?!” Sure, it was a gut reaction, but I was irritated enough that I took a moment to consider why.
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Making the Intangible Tangible
Of the terms we use to describe the maintenance stage of change (the period of time when you’re working to keep the change you’ve made going)—maintenance, the status quo, continuity, inertia—the only positive one of all of them is probably continuity. Now, consider the words we use that are similar to evolution: progress, positive change, improvement. Just by looking at the terms available to us, we can see what our society values.
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Being Busy
As a society and culture, we struggle with time. I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard friends and strangers alike talk about how they would do this thing that is SO important to them, but they just don’t have the time. There’s a shift in perspective that needs to happen here: what we are really thinking about is how much energy we have.
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Closing the Gap
There is a constant struggle in self-improvement to close the gap between our actual selves and our ideal selves—often we have a set of goals that we hope gets us closer to becoming this idealized person.
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Wabi Sabi
I’ve always thought the concept of wabi-sabi was reserved for aesthetics and beauty. Wabi-sabi is closely linked to transience and imperfection—and, perhaps most importantly—the acceptance of those aspects of existence… and their role in experiencing joy and delight.
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Take Responsibility
Writers have a responsibility to their audience and to their craft to seek truth and make themselves clear. Words fucking mean things. It’s time to realize that words have immense power and with that power comes the responsibility to use it wisely.
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How Not to Start
What makes it difficult to start a new project, of any kind and any magnitude: a website, a brand, a blog entry? Or how not to be obsessed with how....
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How to Thrive Under Uncertainty
Why uncertainty makes us uncomfortable, some myths about uncertainty, and how to deal with it...
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How to Learn and Explain Things
How we learn and acquire knowledge: the role of experience and explanation, and the timing of them...
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How to Read Books
How to keep a reading journal and how reading is connected to learning about one's self...
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How to Live with Scarcity
How to cope with imperfection and what it means to have enough and be enough...
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How Not to Climb
An open letter—a rant, really—to new climbing couples... (Warning: snark alert!)