Serendipitously, flow or the notion of being lost in ones passion has brought two wonderful tidbits into view. The first is a short 18min video of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Feb 2004 talk at TED. View it if you have any interest in creativity and how to develop it. Csikszentmihalyi is an author and researcher that pioneered the work that lead to our current understand of creativity, fulfillment and coined the term “flow” to discribe the experience of immersion one has when lost in ones passion. Csikszentmihalyi states the it takes about ten years of study, practice or immersion in a field before flow is possible. I see it a little different. Little practice equals little flow, great practice equals great flow. Maybe ten years is magic maybe not. We’ll see. I’m developing a new skill of carving wooden spoons. Some how I got it in my head that I’ll have to make 400 before I’ll get any good. Yet already I’ve created some wonderful spoons and I’m only on 23. (21, 22 & 23 are being worked on at the same time.)

The second tidbit is via “The Writers Bag”, a blog on writing from which I continue to learn from a lot. Cool stuff indeed.

The Hindu sage named Patanjali wrote this in his Yoga Sutras ::

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations. Your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than what you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

Here is the audio of the inspiring commencement address given by Steve Jobs. In it he reminds us that death is always with us. Great stuff. Here is a text article on the speech.

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn’t know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn’t relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring,
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn’t have made.
I was slient when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on–distracted, lost in thought–
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

– Edward Hirsch

New year and a clean slate. Funny how we have to what for January 1 to see what is true in every moment. A new moment -> opportunity abounds -> the pond reflects the moon -> leaves fall on the trail.

---

Typically, I’ve toyed with a resolution at this time of renewal. Yesterday I read Steve Pavlina’s post about setting your primary focus. What I took away from this the idea of broadening the concept of a resolution. Instead of a narrowly focused goal like losing 15 pounds or working out three times a week he suggests that we look at very broad areas of life. An advantage of this over the usual resolution is that it is easier to remember and you can be creative in the execution.  So, while I was out on a walk with Mary and Boykan, it came to me. The Big Outdoors. Spend time outdoors! There it is, no expectations of more, linked to nature and the weather, a place of solstice. Just spend time outdoors. So many of the peripheral things in my life would be supported by spending time outdoors. Meditation, photography, exercise, health, fitness, poetry, walking, connecting with nature, exercising the dog, camping, snowshoeing, landscape maintenance, bicycling, backpacking, writing, stretching, service.

---

Of course this means less blogging and participation in Open Source projects. Or maybe I’ll just have to become more efficient by not reading the “River Of News” that comes to my rss reader. That alone would free up so much time. Trade one for two - still one. How to get rid of the one? Still busy doing.

When a thing is done, it’s done.
Don’t look back. Look forward to your next objective.
          ~ George Marshall

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule,
but to schedule your priorities.
          ~ Stephen Covey

---

Posted with Brad Sucks & Suzanne Teng in my ear.

The idea of applying the concept from economics called “Opportunity Cost” to our personal life can be helpful in a provisional way. The idea is can be expressed as the ‘cost’ of lost opportunities incurred when we choose to do one thing instead of something else.

Fellow photographer and podcaster, Brooks Jensen, podcasted about this today (click here to listen to the podcast — ~5mins. long). He more eloquently explains how to apply opportunity costs to our goals. Brooks used the example of the artistic costs lost because we choose to watch TV instead of get out and photograph or work on a print or read a inspiring book.

It is what you could have had but have given up in order to have something else. It is up to us to decide if it each thing is worth it or not. We often don’t look at life this way. We can slip into letting life happen to us. As we mature (code word for become old) and we begin to get a sense of our end, the idea of looking at the opportunity cost of doing things can be helpful. Everything we do has an opportunity cost. We only have so much time and energy to accomplish our goals so we look of ways to be skillful and choose wisely.

What we achieve is largely a function of how we use our resources. How we use our time and the actions we do. More examples include — blogging instead of exercising, reading poetry instead of science fiction, buying a new Canon 5D instead of saving for retirement.

It is not that one thing is always better than another. We have to remember that part of the ‘costs’ in terms of time and energy of reading poetry is that we are not doing any of multitude of other things we could be doing to grow. We grow to become more vigilant, watching ourselves, seeing that we don’t become lazy.

Like all the other beliefs, theories and axioms that we use to become more skillful in life, this one is provisional and only gets us so far then we have to let it go. We have to be open to living in the moment and not worrying about so called lost opportunities. In the absolute realm we only have our actions and this moment.

I was going to blog this morning on a cool little CLI tool I found but instead I looked at the ‘opportunity cost’ and decided to blog on this topic instead.

As I have said before, I’m an avid podcast consumer. In the right hand column of willsimpson.org, I’ve updated the listings of the various podcasts I subscribe to. I’m continually adding and subtracting podcasts and my interests and the topics of the podcasts morph. If you listen to podcasts, what are you listening to?

Add your Comment >>

Here is a cool little tool/diversion for those of us who have an interest in words. Whether you are a reader or writer, ‘Wordie‘ is pretty cool.

Exploring ‘Wordie‘ lead me to a new to me dictionary site called Ninjawords that is fast and cool. I’d call it the google of dictionaries because of the clean interface design and speed at which it returns results. It adds each of the words you lookup to the page so it is easy to compare words to get the ‘just right’ one (you can also do this by comma separting the words in the search box). Ninjawords uses Wiktionary for the source definitions. Cool stuff, check it out.

OneLook Reverse Dictionary

OneLook’s reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept.
Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word.

Warning — navel gazing ahead.

I’ve noticed that all my recent posts have included a photo. Today will be different.

I am a visual person and because my writing is a little lacking (OK a lot!), the inclusion of photo is my crutch. During my usual dish-washing brainstorming session last night, I got to thinking about why this is. The short answer is that I don’t understand who my audience is or what they want. More importantly, I often confused about what I want to give them. Starting without an end in mind?

I sort of ramble in my writing, one minute composing it as if it were a journal and the next moment I write as if I was addressing you the reader. So I’ve come up with three tips (more like challenges) for myself to improve my writing here.

1. Write with an audience in mind. If you don’t have a audience in mind when you start writing, make one up. Think of specific people, use friends, co-workers, relatives or plain strangers and make them specific. The tone and cadence of your writing will change depending on if you are addressing your friend’s five year old or the boss. Each topic has the appropriate audience. Look for them and keep on track.
2. Describe the scene to give the reader a sense of place. When I write I usually sit at a Stickley deck. It is new but modeled after those big old desks you used to see in banks. It has a knee-hole between two sets of drawers and Boykan, my Chocolate Lab, likes to curl up there to keep us warm. To my right is a computer mouse, my coffee cup and a ceramic vase full of pens, pencils, a staple puller, and scissors. To the left there is a reading lamp, a stack of books I’m reading, my iPod and a hipsterPDA card bleacher with cards for future blog posts and notes on a yoga asana. I use an old laptop for my main computer and the short monitor allows me to look over the top of the laptop and see the shop and woods beyond to the west. We feed the local pheasant and quail so sometimes they gather in the edge of the field jockeying for position and scratching up the ground looking for the last of the birdseed.
3. Remain focused within a blog post. New idea equals new post. So often I will start with one idea and add one or two more so I can get volume. This isn’t necessary. If an idea can be expressed quickly there is no need to fatten it up. Here is were we can get into trouble though. If the idea is no fully expressed or is foggy in some way, fattening it with unrelated ideas only serves to confused the reader. It also doesn’t fell satisfying to the writer. This skill only comes with practice.

Well they you go, dear reader. There tips, seeds of which sprouted in last night’s dish-washing water. This is the work I need to do. Practice.

How did I do? Comments  >>