Understanding that people are driven by innumerable motivations can help you learn to see their actions as a product of their inner selves rather than taking their behavior personally. Not taking people’s words and actions personally frees you from the need to react to them. You no longer have to perceive any negativity on their part as ill treatment, nor do you have to see their responses to you as a reflection of whether or not you said or did something wrong. Other people’s behavior and reactions cease to be a benchmark of your worth. When you choose not to take the words and actions of others personally, you can feel positive today even when surrounded by negativity.
Impersonal Understanding
January 30th, 2010 § 0
To be simple…
January 29th, 2010 § 0
To be simple in the whole, total process of our consciousness is extremely arduous; because there must be no inward reservation, there must be an eagerness to find out, to inquire into the process of our being, which means to be awake to every intimation, to every hint; to be aware of our fears, of our hopes, and to investigate and to be free of them more and more and more. Only then, when the mind and the heart are really simple, not encrusted, are we able to solve the many problems that confront us.
Knowledge is not going to solve our problems. You may know, for example, that there is reincarnation, that there is a continuity after death. You may know, I don’t say you do; or you may be convinced of it. But that does not solve the problem. Death cannot be shelved by your theory, or by information, or by conviction. It is much more mysterious, much deeper, much more creative than that.
- J. Krishnamurti from The First and Last Freedom
Book Review: Zorba The Greek
January 28th, 2010 § 0
Zorba invoked a very specific feeling for me: FREEDOM. Reading it as I got situated into life again in New York, it provided me the sense of escape from reality I had on my trip to India. The feeling that life goes on without you. And how comfortable that is, because you’re free to do what you like and truly understand how your unique ripple affects the flow of things.
Apathy has become such a vice and the majority of time I believe it is. Occasionally though, you get a glimpse of the beauty within apathy, seeing in it not despair but rather a serene peace knowing that if nothing matters, then you can simply be yourself.
Zorba keeps at this theme with a nonchalant frivolity of letting things be and being one with them by letting yourself be. You get the feeling that you can’t understand something by controlling it. Instead you must set yourself free of the biases surrounding you and understand where you personally stand. Realize where your confidence comes from so when the storm comes you know if and how you’ll weather it. You can’t understand life so free yourself to the chaos it presents. Don’t try to find order. Try to find your internal meaning because reality may change and you have to be ready for it.
I got all of that from Zorba and much more. I purposefully didn’t finish it because I want to nakedly go back in to bathe in that feeling. To come out of the subway knowing my mind will breathe fresher air for having read it for 10 minutes.
Where does it stop?
January 26th, 2010 § 0
This well-constructed, crescendoed post by John Halamka really strikes a chord. Stress Acceleration is worth reading start to finish for the writing quality as well as the content. A few snippets below:
Does this acceleration of stress bother me? Over the years of medical training and leading large complex organizations I’ve learned to adapt to just about anything. For every issue there is a process to resolve it.
Is it sustainable for society? I don’t think so.
…Can we sit and enjoy a meal without thinking about work or checking email? Can we go to a movie or concert for an evening without needing to stay connected? Can we turn off our social networks for a week without suffering withdrawal?
The level of stress I see around me is leading humanity to increase consumption of pharmaceuticals (have a problem – take a pill), eat poorly, and reduce the baseline of human kindness (driven in Boston lately?).
“Why me?”
January 16th, 2010 § 0
Thoughts of Haiti or any natural disaster like Katrina or the flash floods in India make me consider how unjustified the loss of life is. Who deserves such an unexpected fate? Is it fair? Why them? Why now? What possible meaning can we derive from this?
Our petty worries of “Why me?” when we don’t make the team or get pulled over lose their value in the face of such disasters. Eventually though we all go back to our daily routines and such menial things start once again taking on more value. I remember feeling this strongly a year after 9/11. Business as usual.
How can we learn to stay with that keen focus that results from realizing how ephemeral life is – how random fate can be? We can’t control for the unexpected. We can try preparing for it with sandbags and supplies and extra food, but to preserve what? To go back to live the way we’ve been living and prepare for the next big catastrophe?
It doesn’t add up. The preservation of life as it is seems banal. The trauma of loss can be an opportunity to evolve at an accelerated rate. To maintain the foresight of seeing life almost gone and suddenly saved at the last moment. To take advantage of a second chance that we so rarely get as adults unless we put ourselves through the minor trauma of moving, changing jobs, or leaving a loved one.
I like the way Viktor Frankl puts it in Man’s Search for Meaning:
Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
The Power of the Internet
January 16th, 2010 § 0
The alternate reality of the internet becoming one with the offline world:
The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.
Full post by Clay Shirky here.
Why We Live Longer
January 15th, 2010 § 0
Profound, simple, and unknown:
It’s because we cleaned our water, developed vaccines, and invented antibiotics. We saved the children, and now modern medicine is flailing around selling relative snake oil to now try and save the old people who’ve terrorized their bodies since surviving childhood.
Full post by Jay Parkinson here.
Finding Time For You – Your Most Vital Commitment
January 13th, 2010 § 0
Even if you have achieved a functioning work-life balance, you may still be neglecting the most important part of that equation: you. “You time” prepares you for the next round of daily life, whether you are poised to immerse yourself in a professional project or chores around the home. It also affords you a unique opportunity to learn about yourself, your needs, and your tolerances in a concrete way. As unimportant as “you time” can sometimes seem, it truly is crucial to your wellbeing because it ensures that you are never left without the energy to give of yourself.
Full post here.
Pay attention
January 12th, 2010 § 0
As attention becomes more of a scarce resource, does it become a commodity for sale?
Marketing agencies must view attention in this way at times. The signals we’re bombarded with day-to-day are endless; tv, music, books, ads, and magazines are just a start. Everyone has an opinion too and they aren’t afraid to express it, the blogosphere being a great example.
Attention spans are only going to get thinner. Multi-tasking has a limit, so do you a) choose to scale back and unitask, b) limit the scope of what you pay attention to, c) don’t do anything and let yourself swim in the sea of messages?
It’s a tough choice, but no matter which path you choose, you are paying out something of yourself. Something much more valuable than the dollar in your pocket. If attention is the next scarce resource, buy-in is gold.
Who’s manning the sails?
January 11th, 2010 § 0
If we’re all oarsmen on a ship, who’s manning the sails?
The golden rule, both in economics and ethics, aims to find the balance with what we have today and we aim to have tomorrow. Knowing either can be very subjective; it’s defined relative to where you are in the world. It’s possible that boundaries exist for this very reason. To allow a society of individually capable members to construct a vision that balances the present and the future. To that effect, are boundaries actually working?
One of Drucker’s key qualitative metrics of success for an organization is each member having a general idea what the top three goals of the organization are. From the janitor to the middle manager to the CEO, being able to state 1, 2 and 3 without much effort. It could be the mission statement, but most often its much simpler; make money for stakeholders, increase speed of delivery, improve quality of care, educate X% of the population, and so on. That’s cohesiveness. The sails are set and the ship is moving.
The golden rule goes well beyond this in trying to optimize the decision making behind the three objectives. “Why?” do we set these goals in the first place and “How?” did we come to agree upon them. Put simply,
…if a society could choose a savings rate that maximized its own consumption, it would save nothing and consume everything. But that would leave future generations in a lurch as no capital would have been built to enhance future output and consumption. If, conversely, the current generation saved so much that future generations would in fact be better off than the current, then we are also violating “Golden Rule” as we are not doing unto ourselves what we have done for posterity. Thus, the “Golden Rule” condition is that the collectively-chosen or policy-imposed savings propensity is such that future generations can enjoy the same level of consumption per capita as the initial one.
When I studied economics, it was mathematically proven that in our current state, one generation (approx. a 25-year cohort) would have to maximize savings and reduce consumption to such an extreme point in order to create the foundation for an optimum savings rate for future generations. Implying our savings/consumption ratio in the past generations has been highly skewed to the lower end. Not much of a surprise.
I wonder now if we’re creating the psycho-social environment for that “sacrificial” generation to emerge. They certainly won’t view themselves this way and taking a step back and doing less will seem like the right thing to do. The trends towards reduced consumption didn’t just start with the recession. They’ve been building for a while, along with ethnic and gender equality, at least in some parts of the world. The global power struggle is still ongoing, but there’s definitely a trend towards the “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” philosophy. It’s certainly been repeated enough. Time to practice it. Daily.