Readings: 14 Nov 2015
Temple Grandin – in a Q&A with Grist – calls out the danger of inexperience with skills constrained by physicality.
We’ve got to figure out sensible things to do. The thing that worries me on a lot of these issues is that we’ve got more and more people getting involved who have never done anything practical, because schools have taken out all the cooking, sewing, woodworking, and art. And in the real world of practical things, nothing can be perfect. You can work to make it better, but it won’t be perfect.
Abby Covert recommends getting rid of all notifications, not taking your phone to bed, setting start & stop times for your own internet checking each day, and creating routines that build up the person you want to be.
I used to be a person who left everything about my personal life and self-care up to the moment and day at hand. Everyday was like a snowflake, which I thought was good for me. I was wrong. There is a remarkable improvement that happened to me when I started adding routine to my life. All of a sudden I was the person I had always thought I could never be.
James Somers argues for doing things faster to build momentum and energy.
Found myself browsing through older Austin Kleon posts after he linked to an article about how Deerhoof “jams econo”.
Following Tony Hsieh’s total adoption of Holocracy as the governance structure of Zappo’s, I went looking for more on the topic and discovered this quote from David Allen:
What you’re saying is that it is an inappropriate use of love and care, to use love and care to get something done.
In the United States, where almost everyone’s employment is at-will, the idea that it is not right for a company to rely on social loyalty to function strikes me as important.
The utility of a particular technological artifact depends on the network of artifacts in which it is used; if the raw materials or energy cost of one piece of the network become prohibitively expensive, the utility of the whole network can evaporate.
The formation of RNA in the prebiotic soup may have been the higher entropy state in the presence of energy flux from the sun.