notes

↻ 2024-11-04

principles (your own)

own mistakes, inclusive of your team
keep plans simple, clear, and concise
perform without ego, or accounting for its effect
figure out your priorities, and act on them one at a time
clarify your mission or plan
engage with and keep in-the-loop your superiors
act decisively, particularly in chaos
have a bias toward action

ideas you’re testing (your own)

It’s the way we live in the world that should be passed on. How we made it habitable, how we survived, tolerated, were comfortable. This is your time to make what you will of a physical manifestation, engineer your environment to suit you, it’s what the higher life forms do.
[consciousness] all thought is metaphor (McGilchrist)
[destruction] the oldest things aren’t in present-day cities (self)
[spontaneity] all cuisine is accidental (Czula)
[responsibility] the world is becoming, never being (Rovelli)
[innovation] we sequester innovation, this is why expensive initial development is not wasteful if properly recorded
everyone is either an asshole or an imbecile

leadership

Leadership is service. You are a catalyst, not a director, and to lead with positional authority, without anyone appointing you, you must:

step up to the task
be evidently fit for the task
prepare for the task by doing the required work ahead of time
maximize value to everybody
do it all with humor and obvious good will

personal responsibility

Alan Watts

“This is therefore to say that the transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated so long as we think of it as something that I by myself can bring about, by some sort of wangle, by some sort of gimmick. Because, you see, it leads to endless games of spiritual one-up-man-ship. And of guru competition. Of my guru being more effective than your guru. My yogas are faster than your yoga. I am more aware of myself than you are. I am humbler than you are. I am sorrier for my sins than you are. I love you more than you love me. There’s this interminable goings on where people fight and wonder whether they are a bit more evolved than somebody else and so on.”

“All that can just fall away. And then we get this strange feeling that we’ve never had in our lives except occasionally by accident. Some people get a glimpse that we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe. And you are creating it at every moment. Because you see, it starts now. It didn’t begin in the past. There was no past. If the universe began in the past, when that happened it was now. But it is still now and the universe is still beginning now and it’s trailing off like the wake of a ship from now and as the wake of the ship fades out, so does the past. You can look back there to explain things but the explanation disappears. You will never find it there. Things are not explained by the past. They’re explained by what happens now. That creates the past. And it begins here.”

“That’s the birth of responsibility. Because otherwise you can look over your shoulder and say, ‘Well, I am the way I am because my mother dropped me. And she dropped me because she was neurotic because her mother dropped her.’ and we go way way back to Adam and Eve or to a disappearing monkey or something. We never get at it. But in this way you are faced with that you’re doing all this. And that’s an extraordinary shock.”

“So cheer up! You can’t blame anyone else for the kind of world you’re in… And if you know, you see, that the I — in the sense of the person, the front, the ego — it really doesn’t exist, then it won’t go to your head too badly if you wake up and discover that you’re god.”

(Not What It Should Be But What It Is)

thingness

Carlo Rovelli

“Even the things that are most “thinglike” are nothing more than long events. The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace of Neolithic humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, an example in a book about time, a metaphor for an ontology, a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception—and, gradually, an intricate knot in that cosmic game of mirrors that constitutes reality. The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.”

“We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being.”

(The Order of Time)

discipline

Will Durant

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” (The Story of Philosophy)

Nir Eyal

“All motivation is a desire to escape discomfort. Traction moves you toward goals, distraction moves you away from goals, and triggers prompt actions which are distraction or traction. Consider each action and whether it is moving your toward or away from a goal as you consider whether it is something in which you want to engage.” (Indistractable)

teaching

Bertrand Russell

“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.”

communication

Socrates

Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, is it true. At the second gate ask, is it necessary. At the third gate ask, is it kind.

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