I’ve previously expressed disappointment in people who seem to go out of their way to find fault in good news. They work to snatch negativity from the jaws of the positive.
There’s a related mindset I see that isn’t really negative … but it’s not really positive, either.
It’s something I see arising from black and white thinking and an instant gratification mindset.
I publish a daily newsletter called Not All News Is Bad. Several years ago I found myself in need of a reminder that there’s more going on in the world than the shitshow most news sources seem to focus on.
I forced myself to find at least one good news story every day. I started sharing that publicly, and eventually it became the daily newsletter. At this writing, it goes out to about 1,500 subscribers every morning.
It doesn’t happen often, but one thing that makes me shake my head is when a recipient of a good news story goes digging for negativity.
I have a fond memory of the song Radar Love by the Dutch group Golden Earring.
It’s 1973 or 1974. I’m one of the principle photographers for my high school year book. Our track team is competing across the state at Washington State University’s facilities, and I’m driving the 300 miles (one way) to be there take pictures, and then driving back the same day. The radio of my Toyota Corona is tuned to the local top-40 station at the time (KJR Seattle), and then its sister station (KJRB Spokane) as I make my way east.
And playing loudly, and often, in all its tinny cheap-AM-radio glory, was Radar Love.
We all want to live a long and healthy life. We want to be the ones making it far through the bell curve of life expectancy. I know I do.
There’s an unanticipated problem with succeeding.
I was recently chatting with someone, and the topic turned to a business trip to Munich I’d taken many years ago.
One evening, I encountered a street performer playing an accordion in an archway near one of the city plazas. The acoustics were amazing. He had chosen his location well. He was selling cassette tapes, so I bought one. I thought I’d digitized it, but for the life of me I’ve been unable to find the result.
SO. Internet to the rescue, I hoped.
We often judge opportunities based on the potential benefit or “up side” as it’s often called. If we do ‘X’ we get ‘Y’. Typically the risk we consider is simply not getting ‘Y’ if we fail to accomplish ‘X’.
I’ve come to rely on an additional approach to judging both opportunity and risk. I call it the “cost of failure”.
It’s quick, easy, and now one of my most important evaluation tools.
Is it possible to be simultaneously content and passionate about something?
By content, I mean in the Buddhist sense of acceptance of the present moment.
By passionate, I mean wanting something more, and feeling strongly about it.
It’s something I wrestle with.
Pictured above is an aerial photo I took of the grocery store I was working at in 1977. I’m in the process of digitizing a large collection of my old photos, and it’s one that resurfaced. A friend of mine was a private pilot, and on one of our flights we flew over the location.
Here’s the location today, courtesy of Google Earth.
We love our opinions. We really do. We’re so proud of them, and we’re so eager to share them with anyone who’ll listen, and many who won’t.
And yet, there’s the adage: “Opinions are like assholes: everyone has one, and no one wants to see yours.”
Social media gets a lot of negative press. It’s blamed for the increasing political divide, for increased rates of depression, particularly among teenaged girls, for being some kind of spying tool used by corporations and foreign governments, and more.
And, to be completely honest, much of that is probably accurate.
But it also overshadows the fact that there are some very positive things happening on social media as well.
I started 7 Takeaways it for myself, to “force” me to consume higher quality content more consistently. Apparently I start newsletters to make myself do things.
Curating for others was never on the agenda, not really. Besides, there are so many other curated newsletters, and many of them are so much better. Hell, I get some of my ideas from them!
I “retired” in 2001 at 44, after an 18-year career at Microsoft.
There was a spreadsheet (in Excel, of course) that calculated I was done. The meteoric rise of the Microsoft stock price and the serendipitous timing of my joining came together to give me options (including literally stock options), for which I am forever grateful.
However.
I was recently reading some articles discussing the traditional transition from the work-a-day world — aka a “job” — to a world of leisure and choice — aka “retirement”.
I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with the assumptions and preconceptions of what it means to retire.
Walter was a sweet boy, with a penchant for bread. We’re pretty convinced that given the choice between steak and bread, it’d be bread every time. (Though, to be fair, his tastes grew to encompass anything “bread like”.)
It almost feels trendy to talk about anxiety these days.
In part, I suppose, because it’s become more prevalent due to the pandemic, and politics, and social media, and, and, and …
But has it though? Has become more prevalent, or just more visible?
Based on my experience I would say: why not both?
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Which step?
Which step is the first step?
Where does the journey begin?
It’s not uncommon for people to pick a theme or a word for the new year. I’ve been seeing a few over the past few days as we enter 2023.
It’s not something I’ve ever done. I tend not to do the New Year’s resolution thing. To quote a friend: “I long ago realized I didn’t have to wait for an arbitrary date to make changes in my life”.
However, this year a few things have come together in a moment of serendipity that’s making me think a theme might be in order.
For my essay Musings on AI, Learning, and Copyright I decided to ask ChatGPT to compare the ways humans and large language models consume information and then how they use that to create content.
My prompts, and ChatGPT”s full responses are below.
I need to rant a little.
As you might expect, my “day job“, and a lot of my not-so-day-job, involves answering questions. It varies, of course. Some questions are simple yes/no, some are translating consumer terminology into more accurate terms and returning a “search result” from one of my websites to help, and so on.
Mostly it’s pretty simple Q&A.
Sometimes it’s less simple.
Sometimes it’s iterative. And sometimes that’s very, very frustrating.
“Every day is an experiment” (also “everything is an experiment”) is a mantra, of sorts, I adopted some years ago. It’s a mental model I find both freeing and empowering.
Treating the world, or life, with the idea that everything you do is an experiment of some sort to be learned from is also an exceptionally powerful path for growth.
It was in our faces the entire time. Right there in the lower left.
Perhaps the most important piece of life advice ever was provided by Microsoft, and we didn’t even realize it.
And then they took it away. We still call it a “Start” button, but the text admonition has disappeared.