Category: Personal Growth

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Personal Growth Reflection

Describing an expansive existence

Liked Towards Better Postcards by JeremyJeremy (weblog.restlesslens.me)

Like the Inuit with all their words for snow and the Scots with all their words for rain, I wonder if, as we confront the tumult inside of us, we need an expanded vocabulary to describe the subtle differences among the environments of our selves. I think the LGBTQIA+ community, using a string of letters that marches on toward a plus implying always more, has made an important contribution here: recognition that once we begin to focus our honest attention inward, we find a world as diverse and worthy of vocabulary as the one outside…

Categories
Health Mental Health Personal Growth Work

Assuming no change is an option

Replied to The devil you know | everything changes by Mandy Brown (everything changes)

I had spent months chewing on the various dangers and risks of each step I could take, and had not at all considered the dangers and risks of staying put.

I can see now that I was, in fact, making several mistakes. Principal among them was that I considered no change at all to be a viable option. It wasn’t, and not only because the present circumstances were untenable, but also because they were not static.

The second, related, error was that I assumed that all the risk was in moving, that by definition staying put was the prudent option.

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Entrepreneurship Personal Growth

Overcoming fear and internalized norms to create a new routine

Replied to When your inbox owns you by Jenni Gritters (Mindset Mastery)

Luis would need to tolerate the anxiety of not addressing his email during those few hours, so we came up with some tactics: Listening to calming music, going on a walk, and repeating to himself: *I have the power to choose my routine*.

I could see his brain rewiring in real time: He no longer believed that his clients hired him because he was always available. He was starting to see that it was safe to wait a bit before responding. It was even safe, in some cases, to not respond to emails at all.

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Categories
Art and Design Personal Growth Technology

Defined by failures

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it.

— Brian Eno

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Seeing the strings attached by Austin Kleon

That bit about the strings the signs of the human hand made me think about the way AI blends images together — you can’t see the seams!

The seams are what is so good to me about collage. The seams show the different origins of the material. They tell me that a human made it.

And to a certain extent it’s true for all the art I like: the imperfections…

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“Artists; you do know, don’t you, That your mistakes are your style.”
—Jerry Saltz

(via Austin Kleon)

Categories
Personal Growth Relationships

Living through loneliness

Liked Loneliness by James G (jamesg.blog)

I felt like I needed to protect myself from what other people might think about me.

I tried to read people’s minds, as if I could know what they were thinking. What did they think of me? Was I interesting? Did they like talking with me? I knew, intellectually, this was impossible. By that time, the pattern was etched in my mind.

I asked myself a lot of questions. What if people were looking at me? What if I said the wrong thing?

There’s so much in this essay that I relate to! I’ve been lonely a lot of my life, and tried for many years to compensate with self-sufficiency. I refused to let having no one to go with stop me; I went to concerts alone, I hiked alone. But concerts aren’t that fun on your own, and hiking alone has its risks.

About ten years ago, I’d finally had enough of not having friends nearby and was determined to make them. I built a group of friends around writing, which ultimately broke apart a couple years ago. In the time since, I’ve discussed what went wrong with the friends I kept individually, and grown much closer to them as a result of honest conversation.

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Categories
Getting Shit Done Personal Growth Work

Read What Works

Read What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting by Tara McMullin

What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting is not really a book about goal-setting. It’s not a book about achieving anything. It’s a systematic deconstruction of the stories that keep us hustling, striving, and always looking for more. It’s also a guide for reconstructing an approach to personal growth, planning, and productivity once we’ve shed those stories.

Loved this! So much writing about work doesn’t acknowledge the pressures of the system we are in, and how those can influence our priorities and practices in ways that are unhealthy and unfulfilling. This was a full excoriation of the effects of toxic individualism, capitalism, and the Puritan work ethic on our approach to productivity and goal-setting. It offers a framework for digging into the psychological barriers to making progress on what really matters to us, and both recognizing and resisting the draw of conformity to these systems.

“I want to help give structure and meaning to growth based on curiosity instead of achievement.”

“Every day is an opportunity to practice satisfaction rather than striving.”

Categories
Getting Shit Done Personal Growth

Catching perfectionism

Liked “The longer you leave it, the better it has to be” and other weird, wrong ideas from my perfectionist brain (Rach Smith’s digital garden)

…I felt an old familiar anxiety around the first thing I wrote and published after my short break. I was examining where it came from when I realised that I was telling myself that *the longer I put something off, the better it needs to be when I actually do it*.

Categories
Personal Growth Reflection

Evaluating your fears

Bookmarked Fear-Setting: The Most Valuable Exercise I Do Every Month by Tim Ferriss (tim.blog)

I do an exercise called “fear-setting” at least once a quarter, often once a month. It is the most powerful exercise I do.  
Fear-setting has produced my biggest business and personal successes, as well as repeatedly helped me to avoid catastrophic mistakes.

I’m a little iffy on Tim Ferriss but this sounds like a helpful exercise.

Categories
Comics Personal Growth

Say what you want

Liked 10 Steps to Becoming Annoyingly Capable by Jessica Hagy (This Week’s Top Ten)

Make your allies proud & your haters butthurt.

STEP 3: Talk about what you want. Don’t assume anybody knows what you’re after until you articulate it.

Good business and life advice: don’t expect anyone to read your mind. Say what it is you want.

IIRC We Should Get Together or Frientimacy talked about this in friendships specifically.

STEP 4: Leave what you know. There are no awesome gigs to take in The Shire.

A good reminder for me right now 😉

Categories
Memoir Mental Health Personal Growth

Read Wintering

Read Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult T…

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.

A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.

Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.

Liked some of this, wasn’t sure about other parts. The second half I liked better than the first. She has a keen eye for observation and describes her feelings vividly. I liked the bits of other places and natural history — dabbling in other people’s cultures less so. I’m not sure it all pulled together for me though I thought she ended it well.

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