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“we need haters to help us grow … they are in your life for a reason”

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

Uma Thurman deals with haters in her own way
This is from a great essay by Danny Choo on BoingBoing (read it all):
Society has all walks of people and we would never be able to successfully get through life without experiencing haters and learning how to deal with them. Remember that we need haters to help [...]

my notebooks

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Inspired by this post- 25 years, 85 notebooks (hat tip Kathy Sierra on twitter), I’m kicking off today with a couple of pictures of two of my own notebooks. They are nothing like as edibly gorgeous as Michael Bierut’s- I think and write nearly always just in words- but there is something so glorious about [...]

out of focus

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

I had one of those moments of blinding insight on reading this tweet by gapingvoid this morning. Like a lot of things Hugh Macleod says, there’s plenty of underlying meaning to it, which I can’t presume to extrapolate fully, but the life/ blogging connection is meaningful to me, and immediately explained something I have pondered [...]

Hugh Macleod’s “crofting” metaphor: thoughts on why & how to do various different jobs at once

Monday, October 20th, 2008

I am very interested in Hugh Macleod’s idea about combining multiple career paths, “crofting as a metaphor for the new world of work?” The metaphor describes a way of work that puts life first- independence, doing your own thing, doing what it takes (nb. I’m reading the metaphor here, not Hugh’s mind). It’s about combining [...]

money first, then art?

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Seth Godin’s post, maybe you can’t make money doing what you love, adds to a longstanding cultural debate about whether you can or should try to do “what you love” for a job. There is a Boomer idea that yes you can and should, sometimes that success can be defined by so doing, which Penelope [...]

older isn’t necessarily better for parenting

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Here is a passage from the book I bought today, Through the Children’s Gate by Adam Gopnik. It’s about how people have kids older these days, and how older parents (or older dads like himself, anyway) are more emotionally involved in the lives of their kids:
My own dad- father of six, grandfather of fourteen- said [...]

#1 entrepreneurial skill

Monday, July 14th, 2008

My thoughts on what Ben Casnocha raises, namely deciding whether to apply radical change or persistent determination when things go wrong:
1. Use your intuition. Intuition is not the same thing as instinct. Intuition is psychic powers, and instinct is what animals learn from Pavlovian training. Intuition is never wrong, whereas instinct is usually wrong. But [...]

mad housewife tips on getting started

Monday, July 14th, 2008

I tend to think my personal little ways of doing things are probably too bizarre and peculiar to be relevant to Other People, who all run their lives according to a sort of clockwork collection of routines and schedules to which they perfectly submit themselves with grace and tranquility. As that is rubbish, however, here [...]

try a new thing every day

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Have you done a new thing lately? Ben Casnocha asks, and a very good question it is too.
My first reaction would be that every day is always new and every time you do something it is different than before… usually. Being about a hundred years older than Ben, I think I did so much new [...]

temporary pause

Monday, July 7th, 2008

I’m trying to change a few things round this week, starting a 24/7 childcare period after that, and probably won’t be blogging much over the summer. It always takes more time and effort to write a post than I expect/ intend, and not just because of the post itself, I fear- it’s just too easy [...]

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