Musings
A collection of interesting…
Here’s what I’ve been musing on, this week:
I wrote an article on Medium about how we can’t expect to come up with good solutions if we don’t ask good questions — and we aren’t teaching people to ask good questions.
https://medium.com/mugging-the-muse/ask-better-questions-6dca7617b26
In a lovely article over on “Brain Pickings”, Maria Popova talks about Oliver Sack’s essay on the elements of creativity. One of the lines that stuck out for me was towards the end, a quote from poet Mary Oliver, who said “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Go read the whole article.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/11/09/oliver-sacks-the-river-of-consciousness-the-creative-self/
I’ve been seeing a number of pieces online talking about how people are leaving social media — and that it’s a good thing. Some are even going so far as to say that social media will eventually be looked back upon as a failed social experiment, an inherently bad idea like giving cocaine drops to teething babies. That may or may not be true, but there certainly are problems and dangers to social media, and here’s one of the best descriptions of why.
https://this.org/2017/11/15/social-media-is-keeping-us-stuck-in-the-moment/
Do you want to make more friends? Be a better writer? Try being more interesting, which starts with being interested.
https://austinkleon.com/2017/11/24/have-you-tried-making-yourself-a-more-interesting-person/
As you go out and do the things you’re doing, there’s two things you should do: type quickly, and always carry a pencil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89vzfTFu1Vw&feature=youtu.be
What I’m reading:
Fiction:
I was excited to hear this past week that Netflix is going to be releasing a series based on Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. I read this book and the ones that follow in the series last year, and completely enjoyed them. Netflix has a (mostly) good track record of doing justice to source material, but I would still recommend reading the books, because they’re excellent stories and they (and the author) have gotten less acclaim than they deserve. That might change after this Netflix release, though. But then you can say that you read the books before the show came out…
Non-Fiction:
The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
This book has been a huge seller, and I can see why; it breaks down a number of key principles for focus and productivity into bite-sized, digestible chunks. Which may also mean that while I found this book helpful in terms of its clarity, I also found it a bit trite and repetitive. If you struggle with focus, and feel like you can’t get things done because you’re constantly being pulled in multiple directions, this book will be very helpful. If you’re looking for more advanced material on focus and productivity, this will probably just bore and irritate you.
I just finished a course on the Complexity Explorer site, “Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos”. The course is very well done, and offers very accessible exploration of ideas like the butterfly effect, how chaos results from rule-based systems, and why we can’t predict so many things, like the weather. If you’re looking to expand your mind (or have it blown) check them out and take a course or two.
If you have 17.5 seconds, write a comment about the links, or give me some book recommendations, I’d love to hear from you.
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