March 2011
2 posts
Ricky Gervais on Not Having a Real Job - HBR... →
Money’s never excited me. I’ve never done anything for a million pounds that I wouldn’t have done for free. Likewise, joking aide, the awards, they’re a thrill, but deep down I know it’s only the opinions of a few people and it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. What matters is the work, the work you did. You tried your hardest and you’re proud of...
November 2010
1 post
WatchMerlin Mann—finding and bringing the goods:
merlin:
Full Metal Parka
October 2010
2 posts
I’m too greedy to wish you much luck, but if you can break through without stepping on my head, I hope you make it.
—Hunter S. Thompson.
This is from a letter to William J. Kennedy on 10 August 1960, collected in The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967. Lines like this one are why I’ve become a fan of HST this year. This is what complimenting or...
In this season of ads for political candidates, I thought this was quite appropriate:
History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish, and capable of being given many meanings. Reality is built on our prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge.
—Salman Rushdie. “‘Errata’: or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s...
September 2010
1 post
Advice you’re given when you have a job that’s...
Advice you’re given when you’re laid off that’s also good running advice
Relax
Keep your head up
Don’t clench your fists
Stop if it hurts
Go out to the unemployment office and back
You’ll bounce back from this
Maybe you should write a novel instead
Poop before you get started
It may suck, but it sucks for everyone
Advice you’re given when you have a...
May 2010
4 posts
5 tags
I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.
—Edward Abbey, “Down to the Sea of Cortez,” Beyond the Wall, p. 147, 1984.
5 tags
Within minutes my 115-mile walk through the desert hills becomes a thing apart, a disjunct reality on the far side of a bottomless abyss, immediately beyond physical recollection.
But it’s all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure—they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days to come, like a treasure found and then,...
5 tags
Since what we experience is reality, as far as we are concerned, we can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Happiness Revisited,” Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, p. 20, 1990.
3 tags
This paradox of rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit...
April 2010
12 posts
5 tags
One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.
—Edward Abbey, “A Walk in the Desert Hills,” Beyond the Wall, p. 28, 1984.
5 tags
I wish I had the courage to travel light, like John Muir, with only raisins and a crust of pumpernickel in my pockets. But he was wandering in the friendly High Sierra, where brooks babble and berries ripen in the placid sunshine.
—Edward Abbey, “A Walk in the Desert Hills,” Beyond the Wall, p. 27, 1984.
3 tags
‘If you knew,’ I told them. ‘If you only knew how boring it is.’ It was again the contrast between their lives and mine. They, who spent their days freely using their intelligence, could never conceive of work such as mine. ‘You couldn’t even imagine it.’
—Shirley Hazzard, “Chapter Ten,” The Bay of Noon, p. 129, 1970.
3 tags
They had a notice, Please do not touch the paintings; they should forbid the paintings to touch you.
—Shirley Hazzard, “Chapter Six,” The Bay of Noon, p. 68, 1970.
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I had no cause to regret my lost innocence, for it had never done me any good: I have lived a much more virtuous life without it.
—Shirley Hazzard, “Chapter Five,” The Bay of Noon, p. 47, 1970.
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The question ‘What is it?’ took on, here, an aspect of impertinence; one might only learn what it had successively been.
—Shirley Hazzard, “Chapter One,” The Bay of Noon, p. 15, 1970.
2 tags
3 tags
You may say, “But I’ll get fired for breaking the rules.” The linchpin says, “If I lean enough, it’s okay if I get fired, because I’ll have demonstrated my value to the marketplace. If the rules are the only things between me and becoming indispensable, I don’t need the rules.”
—Seth Godin, “Becoming the Linchpin,” Linchpin, p. 75, 2010.
3 tags
If you seek out critics, bureaucrats, gatekeepers, form-fillers, and by-the-book bosses when you’re looking for feedback, should you be surprised that you end up doing the things that please them?
They have the attitude that there is an endless line of cogs just like you, and you better fit in, bow down, and do what you’re told, or they’ll just go to the next person in line.
...
3 tags
“Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Show me a specialist, and I’ll show you a man who’s so scared he’s dug a hole for himself to hide in.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Almost nobody’s competent, Paul....
3 tags
“In order to get what we’ve got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them—the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, “Chapter 18,” Player Piano, p. 175, 1952.
3 tags
Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University:
The question really is, who at the end of the day is going to make the determination about what your talents are, and what your interests are? That has to be you.
—Sue Shellenbarger, “When Success Follows the College Rejection Letter,” The Wall Street Journal, 24 March 2010.
(via GMAT Club)
3 tags
“A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.”
Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded. “Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them...
March 2010
23 posts
3 tags
“If Checker Charley was out to make chumps out of men, he could damn well fix his own connections. Paul looks after his own circuits; let Charley do the same. Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, “Chapter 5,” Player Piano, p. 60, 1952.
3 tags
Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.
—Sherman Alexie, “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor,” The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, p. 164, 1995.
3 tags
When I got back to the reservation, my family wasn’t surprised to see me. They’d been expecting me back since the day I left for Seattle. There’s an old Indian poet who said that Indians can reside in the city, but they can never live there. That’s as close to the truth as any of us can get.
—Sherman Alexie, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in...
3 tags
But I am surely a great admirer of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Gamblers Anonymous, and Cocaine Freaks Anonymous, and Shoppers Anonymous, and Gluttons Anonymous, and on and on. And such groups gratify me as a person who studied anthropology, since they give to Americans something as essential to health as vitamin C, something so many of us do not have in this particular civilization: an extended...
3 tags
But, no matter what they do, keep walking, keep moving. And don’t wear a watch. Hell, Indians never need to wear a watch because your skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always now. That’s what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. We are trapped in the now.
—Sherman Alexie, “A Drug Called...
3 tags
Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
—Bill Bryson, “The Richness of Being,” A Short History...
4 tags
Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.
—Bill Bryson, “The Richness of Being”, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 360, 2003.
4 tags
We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.
...
5 tags
A virus is a strange and unlovely entity—“a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news” in the memorable words of Nobel laureate Peter Medawar.
—Bill Bryson, “Small World,” A Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 316, 2003.
4 tags
Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to...
2 tags
I resigned from television writing against the advice of my agent, a man who had wisely vacuumed up all the young talent discovered by the Smothers Brothers. He said plainly, “Stick to writing.” Which was a polite way of saying that my performing was headed nowhere. I took this warning with a strange delight. It was, in a way, the necessary ingredient in any young career, like...
2 tags
One night I realized I had been on for twenty minutes and had not gotten a single laugh from the dead Tuesday-night crowd. I thought, “Why not go for the record?” I set my mind to it and finished the show without having roused one snicker. However, there was a sign of encouragement from these early jobs, and years later I heard it phrased perfectly by Bill Cosby. He said that...
4 tags
Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.
—Steve Martin, “The Bird Cage Theatre,” Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, p. 80, 2007.
3 tags
The Yellowstone eruption of two million years ago put out enough ash to bury New York State to a depth of sixty-seven feet of California to a depth of twenty. This was the ash that made Mike Voorhies’s fossil beds in eastern Nebraska. That blast occurred in what is now Idaho, but over millions of years, at a rate of about one inch a year, the Earth’s crust has traveled over it, so...
1 tag
“Just about everything worth doing is worth doing because it’s important...”
– Seth Godin, “We can do it,” Seth’s Blog, 13 March 2010.
3 tags
For a start, his radical notions questioned the foundations of their discipline, seldom an effective way to generate warmth in an audience. Such a challenge would have been painful enough coming from a geologist, but Wegener had no background in geology. He was a meteorologist, for goodness sake. A weatherman—a German weatherman. These were not remediable deficiencies.
—Bill Bryson, “The...
2 tags
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.
—Bill Bryson, “Muster Mark’s Quarks,” A Short History of Nearly...
On Motivation
Have you ever wondered where the source material for entertainment like Dilbert comes from? Real life, man, REAL LIFE. For example, from the emails-I-received-from-my-boss’s-boss file:
All - Just want to commend you on a great job filling out timecards. Last week was the lowest “late timecard” result we’ve had ever, at 2%. This was among the best numbers across...
2 tags
Suggested Reading, A Walk in the Woods
The following books were listed in the “Suggested Reading” of A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson:
Attenborough, David. The Private Life of Plants. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Bailyn, Bernard. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.
Brooks, Maurice. The Appalachians. Boston: Houghton...
3 tags
“Anyway, we did it,” Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression. “Hiked Maine, I mean.”
I looked at him. “Stephen, we didn’t even see Mount Katahdin.”
He dismissed this as a petty quibble. “Another mountain,” he said. “How many do you need to see, Bryson?”
I snorted a laugh. “Well, that’s one...
Hark, a vagrant: Canadian Stereotype Comics →
Funny — damned funny.
“WHY HELLO! IT’S SO NICE TO SEE YOU ALL!”
4 tags
Tennis has a Dip. The difference between a mediocre club player and a regional champion isn’t inborn talent—it’s the ability to push through the moments where it’s just easier to quit. Politics has a Dip as well—it’s way more fun to win an election than to lose one, and the entire process is built around many people starting while most people quit.
The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates...
February 2010
22 posts
3 tags
I was perched on the edge of the sleeping platform lost in a little reverie along these lines and absorbed with trying to get a small volume of water to boil—quite happy really—when one of the middle-aged guys drifted over and introduced himself as Bob. I knew with a sinking heart that we were going to talk equipment. I could just see it coming. I hate talking equipment.
“So...
4 tags
All the books tell you that if the grizzly comes for you, on no account should you run. This is the sort of advice you get from someone who is sitting at a keyboard when he gives it. Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life.
...
4 tags
That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion...
3 tags
And if I really wanted to understand the Rarámuri, I should have been there when this ninety-five-year-old man came hiking twenty-five miles over the mountain. Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn’t. No one ever told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home. You live up to your own expectations, man.
—Christopher McDougall, “Chapter...