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my notebooks
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009Inspired 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 [...]
on failure
Friday, January 16th, 2009I utterly adore this one:
Failure is the intrusion of reality into our perception of ourselves
It’s Jackie Danicki paraphrasing Chris Yeh. Two people whose minds and sense-talking I appreciate a lot.
Anyway, what an absolutely perfect and powerful definition! Most definitions of words emphasise one main interpretation- if you look up nearly any word in a [...]
Hugh Macleod’s “crofting” metaphor: thoughts on why & how to do various different jobs at once
Monday, October 20th, 2008I 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, 2008Seth 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 [...]
How not to plan your life
Saturday, October 4th, 2008I’m reading (and working through) Martha Beck’s Steering by Starlight, which is a quite new-agey self-help book and lots of fun if you like that sort of thing, which I very much do. This passage made me laugh out loud, and also sums up pretty well what it is I like about Martha’s use of [...]
Success! what for?
Friday, September 26th, 2008I’m a bit obsessed with the issue of success: what is it? do you need it? why? how is it measured? and so on. I don’t know what about this idea especially fascinates me, especially as a person who opted out of the “rat race” early on to raise and homeschool my kids. Maybe because [...]
#1 entrepreneurial skill
Monday, July 14th, 2008My 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 [...]
fear of rejection
Monday, July 7th, 2008I commented on Penelope Trunk’s great post here about the downside of shared care (both parents working and doing childcare part-time).
The fact is, any combination of parenting and work is going to involve some kind of sacrifice compared to your liberated no-kids-yet existence. It’s even quite easy to figure out the choices- just pick [...]
“When you are doing the work you are meant to do, it feels right.”
Monday, June 16th, 2008That’s not me, it’s Oprah, in her Stanford speech. It’s that time of year when American students line up in gowns collecting degrees to a hundred verses of the school orchestra playing Land of Hope and Glory, which is about England so don’t ask me why that is (perhaps you know) (Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance [...]
Things I’ve learned at the farmer’s market
Sunday, June 15th, 2008One of the reasons I thought it would be a good idea to create a small business that could be part of our local farmer’s market was to learn more about how selling stuff actually works, in an immediate, obvious kind of way. Lots of people like me who grow up being academically clever etc [...]
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