One of my hats is as the curator of the Not All News Is Badweb site and mailing list. Each day I post one positive story gleaned from recent news.
The criteria are rather simple: besides being relatively recent, the story should be something that most would agree is good news. At a more practical level it needs to make me smile.
It’s a great book. Not sure it makes the “favorite book of all time” list for me, but even having not completed the book I can already heartily recommend it. And yet, I’m setting it aside.
Why? Because of something I stumbled across elsewhere, and the fact that I agree with the message behind the book.
Fact check before sharing. It makes you more authoritative, and makes the world a better place.
Misinformation shared only serves “the opposition.”
Focus on what’s truly important.
My morning was derailed by three separate articles that really struck a nerve. The concepts are so simple and important, and yet so often ignored, I’m having a hard time thinking about much else.
We all fear what we do not understand.
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
I suspect that this quote actually pre-dates Mr. Brown’s 2009 book, but the original source is proving elusive. A longer, perhaps more telling version:
What we don’t understand, we fear. What we fear, we judge as evil. What we judge as evil, we attempt to control. And what we cannot control…we attack.
The author seems to be the exceptionally prolific, and in this case insightful, Mr. “unknown”.
All I can say is that humans apparently don’t understand a great many things.
Two days ago I wrote that I’d “techniqued” myself into inaction. I was trying to do so many things, seemingly all at the same time, that I could do none of them well, and some of them not at all.
There’s what I’ll call a fad right now that says improving yourself — be it your productivity, your accomplishments, your health, your whatever — is all about establishing the proper habits. There are a multitude of blog posts, articles, and books on how to go about doing that.
It has a fad-like feeling to me. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few years from now we’ll haved moved on to a different productivity or self-improvement fadtechnique.
And yet, at a practical level, I’m paying attention. Fads often carry nuggets of wisdom.
I’m not a self-improvement junkie, but it’s certainly something that I have interest in. The process began years ago when one of my managers at Microsoft introduced me to an assortment of books and resources on the topic, most notably Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Since then I’ve done a lot of reading, tried an assortment of time-management tools, watched videos, and tried various … I’ll call them “techniques”.
I was recently interviewed by Josh Spector, the man behind For The Interested, a curated newsletter of interesting articles and other information that Josh both finds and occasionally writes himself. There’s an associated For The Interested Facebook group made up of newsletter subscribers, and as part of an experiment to learn more about the people in it, Josh has been conducting a few short interviews.
(I’ll wait for everyone that knows me to stop laughing….)
I tend not to be terribly shy about sharing said opinions.
(Again, another pause for the audience to catch their breath….)
I recently read an article that discussed how the Dutch are somewhat more “brutally honest” when it comes to opinions, and are often puzzled when people don’t accept and understand that they’re offered with the best of intentions. My Dutch heritage apparently runs deeper than I thought.
Of late, though, I’m trying to take a different approach when I react and want to share something I think important. And a simple phrase is helping.
Hello, my name is Norma. I’m a spayed female Pembroke Welsh Corgi, born in 2017. I live in Woodinville, Washington, but I do travel a little, mostly in western Washington. If you find me, my owners would love it if you let them know. You can reach Leo Notenboom via the 206 number on my … Read more
I was talking to a friend yesterday about our meditation practices. The observation we both made was that meditation, mindfulness, and related concepts were becoming more and more mainstream. What was once considered a fringe and somewhat “woo” activity had made its way into common discussions around everything from personal performance, to medical and mental health discussions.
But on one observation we differed in an interesting way.
It brought a few things in to clarity for me, both with respect to my own ability to focus and dive deep into content, as well as how my audience is being impacted as well.
In mid-August, sixty days prior to my 60th birthday I started a writing exercise I called “60 Days of Gratitude“. Ten years ago I wrote a thought piece entitled “Half Century Mark“. I wanted to do something similar to mark the next decade, and using a writing exercise focussed on gratitude seemed an appropriate approach.
Now that I’m done I decided to capture some of what I learned in the process.
As I close in on the end of my sixty days of gratitude, one of the themes that’s become apparent is that many of the items I’ve identified are things we often take for granted.