Daily

My parents spent World War II in Nazi-occupied Holland.

As you can imagine, I heard several stories of that time. My sense, though, is that I did not hear all the stories. The stories I heard were of successes, things that worked, hiding from the Germans, and some of the tricks my parents and grandparents used to work around some of the shortages, or prohibitions, of the time.

There’s one story, of which I certainly only have fragments, that almost always comes to mind when I think about them during that time.

The time my dad and his brother escaped from a Nazi prison camp.

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My attempt at a daily writing exercise is only one part of my overall approach to honing my skills.

Another exercise that I’ve adopted for some time now is about idea generation. I’ve now read about variations on this technique in several places, and have adopted my own variation.

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It’s a scenario I see repeated often: a group of people go to a restaurant to share a meal. At the end of the meal the bill comes and all chaos ensues. Relatively intelligent people become failures at basic math. Friends become adversaries. “Fairness” becomes a thing that’s hotly contested.

Let’s just say it’s one of my pet peeves. I tend to sit quietly by and roll with the punches, but still … it often frustrates me.

Sometimes I wish that people could let go of their egos long enough not to end a meal on a sour note.

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If you’ve used technology for any length of time you’re probably already acquainted with the cool things that are possible, and the new frontiers it can open for us all.

You’re probably also familiar with the excitement you feel when something works.

My take is that a) the excitement is real, b) it’s somewhat misplaced, though c) it’s also somewhat of a sad reflection on the state of our technology.

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At one point while at Microsoft I had an employee who had some interesting notions about communication. He was a smart guy, passionate about his work and the quality thereof, but when it came to getting his ideas across — particularly his opinions — things fell a little short.

I challenged him, to which he responded with words to the effect of “if I know that I’ve stated what I mean clearly then it’s not my fault if someone doesn’t understand me”.

Wrong,

Wrong, wrong, wrong. So wrong.

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All in all it was a pleasant way to do nothing.

I was sitting on a guardrail along the Seward highway a couple of miles outside of Girdwood, Alaska. The sun was out and felt warm on my face, the view was amazing, and I found myself taking a few moments just to let it all soak in. The only real downside was roar of the traffic flying by a few feet in front of me, and the fact that many of them weren’t really slowing down to avoid the U-Haul truck with a flat tire on the narrow shoulder.

The U-Haul that I was baby-sitting.

For me the day had also started out as eventfully.

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Ideas are only the combination of things which already exist.
– Todd Brison, The Creative’s Curse

I don’t remember why the thought struck me, but I realized the other day that absolutely everything is recycled.

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I’ll arrive at the airport today about three hours before my flight.

Yes, I err on the early side, much to the occasional frustration of my wife.

In this case, however, two hours are the traditional “arrive early” instructions from the airlines, which I simply incorporate into my travel routine. The additional hour? That’s best classified as “risk management”.

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We tend to throw a lot of blame at our elected officials when they take action contrary to our values. It’s often with a “how can they possibly support X”, where “X” is the incendiary topic of the day. (And there have been a lot of incendiary topics of late.)

Here’s the problem: if the system is working even half-assed the way it’s supposed to, it may not be their fault.

They’re just doing their jobs.

Exactly as the system encourages.

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If you read any self-improvement, time management. or productivity literature in recent years you’re likely to come across the Jerry Seinfeld story.

I was thinking about it just yesterday, and lo and behold, it pops up in The Daily Stoic as today’s entry.

Once again it seems that the universe is trying to tell me something.

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I was reminded this morning by an article in our local paper about a course being offered by the University of Washington: “Calling BS in the Age of Big Data”.

It’s not enough.

It’s not enough to call BS, and it’s not enough to consider just “big data”.

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I went to the hardware store earlier today looking for something. It wasn’t something specific — more like an idea I had for which I was looking for a solution. The solution could come from just about any department, but I’d know it when I saw it.

I didn’t see it.

But what I did see was something that sparked an idea.

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I’m not really a goal-setting kind of person. While I certainly have short term projects I want to accomplish — say six months to a year at most — I keep reading how I “should” have longer term goals. My approach instead has been to become more comfortable with just setting a general direction, watching for opportunities, and enjoying where life takes me.

And I have been enjoying it. 🙂

Every so often, though, I bow to so-called conventional wisdom when it comes to goal setting, usually because it’s positioned as some critical aspect of a self-improvement book I’m in the process of reading.

Apparently that’s where I found myself five years ago. The other day as I was revamping my usage of Evernote I stumbled into — you guessed it — a note written in 2012 outlining goals for five years hence. Aka today, in 2017.

I hadn’t looked at it in five years. It was an interesting, and surprising find.

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I think that if my parents were alive today they’d be shaking their heads a little over the current craze that seems to be “mindfullness”. From their perspective I’m sure it’s not anything they hadn’t seen before.

In fact, it’s very likely that it’s something they’d been asking me to do since I was a small child.

They just used other words.

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My daily writing habit has become somewhat less than daily. 🙂

In reflecting on it some, I think I’ve identified at least one of the reasons. It both surprises me, and yet it makes sense.

I want to matter.

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I recently finished the book 1984. Technically it was a re-read, since I’d read it many years ago in high school, as, I suspect, many of my generation were required to.

There’s been a renewed interest in the book due to the current political climate, and sales have been soaring, putting it back on the best seller list at many book stores. I’ll admit I did my part – purchasing the book again simply to increase the attention that it so deserves.

As I read it I was heartened by what was no longer relevant. And yet, on further reflection, it raised enough analogous issues that could still apply to remain an appropriately cautionary tale.

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An imagined response to an imagined comment….

I’m glad of what you’ve accomplished. It was no small feat. You’ve done something significant, something that you can be rightfully proud of.

I, too, have accomplished something similar. It, too, was no small feat, and something that I have some small amount of pride in having done.

In essence, you and I have arrived at the same destination.

But we’ve done so via very different paths.

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I produce a lot of content. Ask Leo! articles, books, and videos, of course, as well as The Ask Leo! Tip of the Day, but I also facilitate HeroicStories, curate Not All News is Bad, and manage social media posts for Ask Leo! on Instagram. I also have no fewer than three WordPress blog migrations in progress for friends and organizations I support, as well as my own random experiments (like tweaking my video studio, or playing with a ChromeBook “just because”).

Then there are the Corgi web sites and activities I either support, own, or administer, my ongoing stress relief with my Night Elf Druid in World of Warcraft (don’t judge), the occasional “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” animal-related call out, and radio-related emergency preparedness and volunteer support.

I get tired just writing all that. (And, heck, I probably overlooked something.)

And yet, what keeps nagging at me is simply this: I could be so much more productive, if I would just start.

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This post runs the risk of becoming one of those “old man” posts … the kind where some old fart expresses wonder at the current state of something-or-other, and then compares that with the way things used to be. You know, posts of the “walked uphill both ways”, or “kids today don’t know how good they have it” kind.

I’ll try to make this more about the former (wonder), and less of the later (kids these days). 🙂

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I can’t stress this enough: before you like / share / forward / recommend something online, do the work to make sure that it’s accurate. If it’s not worth the work, then don’t pass it on.

I encountered another case of something  shared and re-shared on Facebook that encouraged people to take some kind of action to prevent an unwanted result. (I’m going to avoid specifics so as not be distracted by them. I’m sure you can imagine any number of current and relevant issues.)

The problem? It was both wrong and potentially out of date. The action being taken was ineffectual. The time spent – even just reading it – was time wasted.

Now, normally, that might not seem like such a big deal. I mean, I’ve talked about this with respect to urban legends for decades. This is different. This is more important. In the worst case it can be used against the very things you might care about.

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