Category: Thoughts

Quite a month

by MAÔ, posted in Thoughts

March was, without a doubt, the strangest month that I’ve ever been privy to. It had ups, and it had downs. Mostly downs.

We’re still waiting for answers to questions over the health and wellness of the US, and the world at large. The financial sector continues to be in an uproar, and unemployment claims are skyrocketing. And all anyone can really ask is, “When will it end?”

The best news in times like these is to remember that it will end. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to move near-fast enough towards its resolution. But we don’t always get to control the speed. All we get to control is how we respond to it.

Some are better prepared. Some are less affected. Some are struggling to get by. Yet, we’re all a part of the new landscape, and its unclear still what the new normal will be.

Hitting bottom

by MAÔ, posted in Thoughts

So Dalio’s book caused me more introspection. This, coupled with my seclusion in Alaska, has brought some things to the forefront.

“Embracing your failures – and confronting the pain they cause you and others – is the first step toward genuine improvement; it is why confession precedes forgiveness in many societies. Psychologists call this ‘hitting bottom.’ If you keep doing this you will convert the pain of facing your mistakes and weaknesses into pleasure and ‘get to the other side’…”

If you were to rate days on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being the worst and 5 being the best, in my 12,000 or so days I’ve had twenty (estimate) days I would rate as a 1. That’s less than one bad day a year. But the fact is, those days tend to stand out more than any others. Those days rank higher in my internal auditing systems than any of the other days.

Richard Michael Hui wrote this enlightening piece on mistakes, and of those twenty or so days, I’d wager that 75% were from mistakes I had made. Maybe not specifically in that moment, but at least in the moments leading up to them. And if you’re able to learn from those mistakes – to accept and forgive yourself – you’re vastly ahead of the curve.

Opposing views

by MAÔ, posted in Advice

I was making my way through Dalio’s book Principles, and a passage stuck out to me:

When two people believe opposite things, chances are that one of them is wrong.

Principles, Ray Dalio, pg. 190

This led me down a rabbit hole of thought, and I’m not convinced of the premise. For every belief I have, there is someone who will disagree with me. But it’s because belief isn’t a statement of factual information, and maybe I’m just caught up in the wording.

Facts can be proved and disproved. Beliefs are much harder to handle in that regard, and while Dalio suggests a doctrine of thoughtful disagreement to get to the bottom of a problem, to “find out which view is true”, I can’t help but think that every belief is true, while at the same time it may not be.

This duality of truth/untruth in belief causes many disagreements. The book is about business principles, and I can see where this methodology of thoughtful disagreement can work exceptionally well for deciding matters where differing viewpoints may crop up – marketing practices, manufacturing, product development, and investment strategies. Beliefs in that sense will have some form of comparable quantitative data to support or contradict them.

But beliefs that revolve around more fundamental human conditions – religion, politics, life purpose, etc. – these are much more difficult to quantify. Likely that Dalio intended to avoid that train of thought in this section, but I felt like getting my head around it anyway.

 

Letting go of disappointment

by MAÔ, posted in Inspiration

Sometimes it won’t go the way you intend it. Sometimes you’ll make a mistake (or three). You’ll miss a deadline, you’re overestimate or under-deliver. There are a thousand-and-one ways to screw up. And at some point you’ll make that misstep.

But, it’s okay. It happens. More often than not it’s a revoverable misstep, and if it isn’t – it’s not the end of the world. No one has screwed up so badly that the world ceased to exist, because we are still here.

So let it go. Move on. It’s okay. There’s always tomorrow.

What we don’t understand

by MAÔ, posted in Inspiration

In the early stages of a panic fear takes over. A fear from not knowing much, of anything, for sure. The more information we have regarding a thing, the less fearful we become.

It comes from being huddled together in the dark, not seeing what happens just beyond the tree line. Once fire illuminated the shadows we were able to conquer those fears.

But as we are the ancestors of those early fire-starters, so too are our fears ancestors of those early shadows. It is important to light the night, and shine upon the unknown, to diminish our fears.

Impostor Syndrome

by MAÔ, posted in Inspiration

You want to know something? I don’t know what I’m doing.

Just about every day I ask myself twenty, thirty, fifty times, “What do I want to do? Where do I want to go?”

Sometimes that means what will I write. Other times, it’s where I want to live. Or work. Or play. And I can never answer in the long term.

There are times I feel guilty writing this blog because someone could read it. And, feeling the effects of impostor syndrome, I feel that the reader could have spent time reading something more valuable.

Yes, I try to provide value here. Tips I’ve found helpful, or stories I wanted to share. Places and things that were meaningful to me, or insights I’ve come across. But at the end of the day, it’s just me and my computer. or my notebook, and I don’t have a clue.

Thing is, no one does. Some people make more money or lead what we would call interesting lives. But they are just as lost as the rest of us, searching for answers in their own way.

I write here to practice writing. I write here to be present with something. I write here because it forces me to pay attention to the world so that I have something to write about.

But the hardest things to write are those things hit close to home. Admitting that I don’t know what I’m doing. Saying to myself, and whoever’s reading this, that it’s okay. It’s okay to not know. We’re not meant to know all the answers. It’s the journey that’s important, not the destination.

Weekly Rundown

by MAÔ, posted in Social
  • The Outsider… I wanted to watch this show but was waiting. I waited until I heard the Fresh Air interview from Terry Gross with Ben Mendelsohn. I hadn’t known he was Australian. The series is adapted from Stephen King’s novel of the same name and follows the story of a detective investigating a homicide that was committed while the main suspect was sixty miles away on camera. Supernatural and mysterious, the season finale airs this Sunday night on HBO.
  • Super Tuesday. There’s a lot of talk about this day being the day that a clear frontrunner emerges from the primaries. But, where did it come from? This brief history from NPR’s Domenico Montanaro gives the rundown of the term from its start in 1980 and illustrates which elections since then have enjoyed an absence of nomination battles.
  • A quote worth mentioning: “But the traveler’s world is not the ordinary one, for travel itself, even the most commonplace, is an implicit quest for anomaly.” – Paul Fussell
  • Stock Market ups and downs. It’s been an odd couple of weeks, with China being hit hard by the novel coronavirus, and pandemic fears reaching across borders. But, incredibly interesting to watch.
  • And a little bit more from Knives Out director Rian Johnson, this time on why a villain in a movie won’t use an iPhone.

 

A New Rundown

by MAÔ, posted in Social

Postponed the Rundown for me to ruminate on six months of daily posting yesterday. I still can’t believe it.

My goal with the weekly rundown was to share things of value, and not waste anyone’s time. I’m not sure that it’s been exactly as I intended. Most weeks I struggle to find something to at least list as what I’m listening to or doing. And they’re not actionable by anyone reading. Beyond that, I’ve been delinquent in monthly reading lists for December and January, so I need to rectify that as well.

What then should a weekly rundown from me look like? As I consider it, I’ll probably try a few different things. It’ll likely change with Alaska influencing me as well.

Anyway, here are just a couple of things I’m sharing with you this week.