Stuff I learned

There are 62 posts filed in Stuff I learned (this is page 5 of 7).

Working for only what we need

There was a tremendous piece in the New Yorker recently about the way we work and how much time we give of ourselves to different things.

The basis of the article centered around a prediction from John Maynard Keynes in the early 1900s that by this time in our evolution as people we would only be working 15-hour weeks.

Elizabeth Kolbert noted the following:

The size of the global economy, he forecast, would increase sevenfold in the following century.

In reality? It’s increased more than that.

Since “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” was published, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown, in real terms, by a factor of sixteen, and G.D.P. per capita by a factor of six.

But nobody I know works 15 hours a week.

Why?

That’s what I want to focus on.

The easiest answer? We need too many things.

Several contributors to the volume attribute Keynes’s error to a misreading of human nature. Keynes assumed that people work in order to earn enough to buy what they need. And so, he reasoned, as incomes rose, those needs could be fulfilled in ever fewer hours. Workers would knock off earlier and earlier, until eventually they’d be going home by lunchtime.

 

Yeah, right.

But that isn’t what people are like. Instead of quitting early, they find new things to need. Many of the new things they’ve found weren’t even around when Keynes was writing—laptops, microwaves, Xboxes, smartphones, smart watches, smart refrigerators, Prada totes, True Religion jeans, battery-powered meat thermometers, those gizmos you stick in the freezer and then into your beer to keep it cold as you drink it.

This is actually quite sad.

The part that isn’t addressed that I feel needs to be is corporate America’s desire to create this necessity for us to trade hours for money. How do you escape that? That’s a question that needs to be wrestled with.

I don’t know that the 15-hour workweek is a hill I’m going to die on but certainly the undisciplined pursuit of more is one I will.

I hope you only work for what is essential and not drown yourself in the chase for more. And with that extra time you hopefully have, I hope you steward it wisely.

Connecting worlds

The real beauty of the Internet and this era in which we’re living is how easy it is to connect two worlds. The cartoon above is a pretty extreme example but I believe the future in blogging belongs to those who do this better than everyone else.

Anybody can get on NYT.com and check out the headlines. It’s an art to connect the dots and present them in a way that makes someone else laugh or think or cry.

The beauty of syntax

I recently read Donald Miller’s Father Fiction. It was decent, not great, but it wrapped me up at the end.

Particularly a section near the last page about learning.

“My friend Gregg used to teach teachers, and he states emphatically that students who are driven by delight will learn more than those driven by discipline.

“I take this to mean we should move to other subjects if we don’t find ourselves enamored. Literature, theology, and psychology fascinate me, and so I consider the subjects a calling. While I find a salamander boring, syntax stops my heart.”[1. Me too.]

I’m not sure anyone has every freed me up in this way — to think like this. To be okay to think like this.

In Tim Layden’s recent piece about the horse California Chrome, he wrote and referenced some beautiful stuff. Some stuff that stopped my heart.

A sampling:

Racing loves a good legend. In 1963 the late Daily Racing Form columnist Charles Hatton wrote this about a blindingly fast colt: “Raise a Native worked five furlongs along the backstretch at Belmont Park this morning. The trees swayed.”

That’s a tremendous sentence. Gorgeous in simplicity, thunderous in power. It’s awesome.

It moves me. I used to think that was weird but I’m learning that it’s actually okay to be stirred by syntax.

What I Learned: Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

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The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs

I thought this book was going to be better than it actually was.

This book’s title is everything. It’s everything I want you to learn and to know and to understand. Maybe it isn’t everything but it sure implies everything.

I did like that Jacobs encouraged reading a variety of literature. He’s not hung up on high-brow reads an he understand the joy of being lost.

This was beautiful:

“This is why attentiveness is worth cultivating: not just because it is good for you or because (as Gallagher also says) it can help you ‘organize your world,’ but because such raptness is deeply satisfying. It is, really, what Whim is all about; what Whim is for.”

May you always pursue what being “rapt” brings.

Photo via NPR

The value of 54,750 minutes

I think people seriously underestimate what 15 minutes a day for 10 years will do versus 10 hours a day for a year. If you do little bits and pieces every day, after a while, you have this body of work.

–Austin Kleon to 99u

That’s 54,750 minutes vs. 21,900 minutes and it’s incredibly important. I also liked what Kleon said about creating a daily ritual that is a launching pad of sorts into other work:

I think that’s why it’s so important to have a daily practice that you do no matter what you are working on. My thing is that I make one of these blackout poems every day. I just do it every day, no matter what. It gets me in the zone. Then, from there, I can work on different things.  

My “thing” for my Oklahoma State sports blog is what I’ve dubbed the “Bullets.” A roundup of OSU stories from around the web. From there I get ideas from posts and plan out my day. It’s my, as Kleon called it, “launching pad.”

Positions of power

I’m reading a book right now called The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and I came upon a passage that hit me sideways a little bit. Those are my favorite passages, of course, and this one has been on my mind all day.

The Russian polymath Mikhail Bakhtin — one of the titanic minds of the twentieth century, though too neglected now — believed that in a dialogue the position of primacy is with the person who listens rather than the one who first speaks. 

After all, he said, we do not speak unless we anticipate a response; and we shape what we say in light of possible reactions.

This applies to writing, too. The way people respond shapes what I write. I don’t write into a vacuum.

People like to opine about writing “because they must” which I guess is a thing but it seems to me a fairly unique one.

I write because real people read and maybe I was wrong all along about which of us holds the cards.

Seth Godin on being brave

“What we need to do is say, ‘What’s the smallest, tiniest thing that I can master and what’s the scariest thing I can do in front of the smallest number of people that can teach me how to dance with the fear?’

Once we get good at that, we just realize that it’s not fatal. And it’s not intellectually realize — we’ve lived something that wasn’t fatal. And that idea is what’s so key — because then you can do it a little bit more.”

Brain Pickings