Who is John Ball?

John Ball is a golfer who was the first non-Scot to win the Open Championship. He did so in 1890. He also won eight British Amateur Championships.

Golf Digest described him like this:

“Coming home from that eighth British Amateur victory, Ball dodged the brass-band welcome and adulation from the Hoylake crowds by hopping off the train one stop early and walking home along the beach. He gave away all his medals.”

The Hoylake Club secretary and historian Guy Farrar put it this way: “No one has ever inspired greater hero worship. And no one ever courted it less.”

Something to aspire to.

If you happen to like reading, it can have a very powerful effect on you, an evocative effect, at least on me. It’s not as though when I read I’m gathering information, or indeed can remember much of what I read.

I know the books that grip me, as everybody does, but their effect is indiscernible. I don’t quite know what it is. The Leavisite position, more or less, is that reading certain sentences makes you more alive and a morally better person, and that those two things go together.

It seems to me that that isn’t necessarily so, but what is clear is that there are powerful unconscious evocative effects in reading books that one loves.

There’s something about these books that we want to go on thinking about, that matters to us. They’re not just fetishes that we use to fill gaps. They are like recurring dreams we can’t help thinking about.

Paris Review

h/t Austin Kleon

My thoughts on what blogging actually is change quite often but for right now, in this moment, this is what blogging is to me.

The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.

There’s more…

There’s not as big of a difference between collecting and creating as you might think. A lot of the writers I know see the act of reading and the act of writing as existing on opposite ends of the same spectrum: The reading feeds the writing, which feeds the reading. “I’m basically a curator,” says the writer and former bookseller Jonathan Lethem. “Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people’s attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.”

–Austin Kleon

Blogging is not much more than a collection of things you love organized in a way that you can show it off to the world and they can easily see and understand it.

I also love the quote “you can only connect the dots you collect.” That’s awesome.

This has become one of my favorite quotes of 2014:

“What’s true is what Samuel Rutherford said when he was put in the cellars of affliction: “The Great King keeps his wine there” — not in the courtyard where the sun shines.”

So much so that I have started a blog called The King’s Wine as a collecting spot for my favorite things about the Lord and His wonder.

You can see that here.

There’s a pretty popular Ira Glass quote going around that goes like this:

But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?

He’s talking about the difference between the work you’re creating and what you want that work to actually be. The Taste Gap, he calls it.

Adam Phillips takes it a step further.

You can’t write differently, even if you want to. You just have to be able to notice when you are boring yourself.

This is a very difficult thing. Your voice is your voice and that’s sort of what it is, Phillips argues. But to cross the Taste Gap you have to be honest with the work you’re making.

That’s not always easy.

Clay Shirky argues here that it’s not information overload that does us in, necessarily, but rather filter failure.

“The past always looks like a walk in the park and the future always looks like a cliff face.”

There’s an immense amount of front-end work that goes into filter success (I presume this is the opposite of filter failure) but as someone who condenses large subjects like “golf” into readable tidbits on a blog, I can tell you that all of that work is worth it.

Any time you might spend on the front end following the right people and news outlets and setting up the correct Google alerts and RSS reader filters you get back tenfold on the back end.

Always.

This chart frustrates me. It’s sort of in direct conflict with what I wrote about money here in that GDP doesn’t seem to correlate directly with individual income (maybe there were incorrect assumptions in that post?) but it’s also the best argument I’ve seen for owning your own business.

Not only can you (theoretically) make more, but you can also work less for what you need.

h/t Vox and you should read this post

All of this.

Common sense says “earning more money is a good thing.” There are few folks in our lives who have ever told us differently. It is the thread of Americanism that binds us, is it not?

We’ve already looked at what Einstein says about common sense, but let’s look at why that whole “earning more is always a good thing” notion might not be ideal.

I waded through a terrific New Yorker piece by Elizabeth Kolbert recently and had one lingering thought about something that was said at the end.

Here’s Kolbert on the difference between a wealthy man and a common one:

 Suppose that a Walmart clerk and a hedge-fund manager both decide to take the afternoon off to attend their kids’ baseball game. For the clerk, a half-day’s forfeited pay could come to less than forty dollars. For the hedge-fund manager, an afternoon’s worth of lost trades may cost millions, which is a lot to give up to watch little Billy strike out looking.

And what goes for the baseball diamond also applies to the school play, the anniversary dinner, even the annual family skiing trip to Vail; the disproportionately compensated have a disproportionate motive to keep on working.

That’s heavy.

The argument, I suppose, is that that $40 means a lot more to the Walmart fella than the million does to the hedge fund fella. I argue that it depends on where your margins are.

The hedge fund fella might be floating a life he can barely afford and the Walmart fella might have a 20 percent margin in his financial existence. Now who does the money matter to more?

There’s always a cost involved.

Make sure it’s one you’re willing to give.