Category: advice

On being mediocre


People who have high standards fear being mediocre. I thought of that when I read this: Opinion | I’ll Never Be Rachmaninoff – The New York Times.

People without high standards never worry about that. They do stuff, and the result is what it is. It comes with no judgment, for the most part.

Being fearful of being mediocre is twice cursed. First, if you fear that, you likely will not attempt things that could bring you joy and happiness due to your fearfulness. Second, you are already mediocre at some many things already, and yet you turn a blind eye to them, convinced that the few things you excel at removes the label of Mediocre from you. I have rarely met people who are great at one thing not be mediocre at many other things. There’s only so much time, and greatness comes with tradeoffs.

Don’t fear being mediocre. You already are! Go out and enjoy what you can. You may find the things you start off being mediocre in at first are things you end up being good at later. Not that you need to get good!

Here’s some things you can get better at: being stronger, writing a book, become an artist. Or get a partner and learn tai-chi.

how to become artist in 6 steps, with 33 rules to follow


From this superb piece, Jerry Saltz: How to Be an Artist, come this:

Step One: You Are a Total Amateur
Lesson 1: Don’t Be Embarrassed
Lesson 2: “Tell your own story and you will be interesting.” — Louise Bourgeois
Lesson 3: Feel Free to Imitate
Lesson 4: Art Is Not About Understanding. Or Mastery. (It is about doing and experience)
Lesson 5: Work, Work, Work

Step Two: How to Actually Begin
Lesson 6: Start With a Pencil
Lesson 7: Develop Forms of Practice
Lesson 8: Now, Redefine Skill
Lesson 9: “Embed thought in material.” — Roberta Smith
Lesson 10: Find Your Own Voice (then exaggerate it)
Lesson 11: Listen to the Crazy Voices in Your Head
Lesson 12: Know What You Hate
Lesson 13: Scavenge

Step Three: Learn How to Think Like an Artist
Lesson 14: Compare Cats and Dogs
Lesson 15: Understand That Art Is Not Just for Looking At
Lesson 16: Learn the Difference Between Subject Matter and Content
Lesson 17: See As Much As You Can
Lesson 18: All Art Is Identity Art!
Lesson 19: All Art Was Once Contemporary Art

Step Four: Enter the Art World
Lesson 20: Accept That You Will Likely Be Poor
Lesson 21: Define Success
Lesson 22: It Takes Only a Few People to Make a Career
Lesson 23: Learn to Write

Step Five: Survive the Art World
Lesson 24: Artists Must Be Vampires
Lesson 25: Learn to Deal With Rejection
Lesson 26: Make an Enemy of Envy
Lesson 27: Having a Family Is Fine

Step Six: Attain Galactic Brain
Lesson 28: What You Don’t Like Is As Important As What You Do Like
Lesson 29: Art Is a Form of Knowing Yourself
Lesson 30: “Artists do not own the meaning of their work.” — Roberta Smith
Lesson 31: All Art Is Subjective
Lesson 32: You Must Prize Vulnerability
Lesson 33: Be Delusional

But read the piece: the comments he provides are what gets to the heart of it.

The math behind why you should take care of yourself

wΔz=cov(wi,zi)+E(wiΔzi)

That equation can be found in this odd article here: Evolution: biologist George Price’s life and death – Vox.

It tells the story of George Price and how his extreme altruism led to his death. Well worth reading, especially if you think self care is bunk.

In short, take care of yourself to some degree, or you end up not benefitting anyone. And if you are not benefiting anyone, you are not being altruistic after all.

There is such a thing as a guilty pleasure


Despite what the New York Times and others say:  ‘Guilty’ Pleasures? No Such Thing – The New York Times, there is such a thing as guilty pleasures.

Usually guilty pleasures arise out of inconsistency or lack of integrity with what you like versus who you are (or think you are). You want to be one way, but you enjoy doing something the other way.  People who say they don’t have guilty pleasures are simply saying that the things they like are consistent with how they perceive themselves. Or they are saying that they have no problem with occasionally being inconsistent. That’s fine, but that isn’t everyone.

Feel free to call your pleasures guilty if you want. Just try not to have any that harm anyone or anything other than your desire to be consistent.

How to walk better

There are few who would argue against a good walk. And any old walk will do. But if you want to walk mindfully, then Thich Nhat Hanh has a book that will help you do it. Quartz has a run down on it here: Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh explains how to walk more mindfully.

I think it could be great for people who have a hard time being mindful because they always need to be on the go. And for people who want to have more mindfulness in their life, it is also great. Read the article/book and improve your walks and your mind.

Congrats! You have a day off! What should you do?


Well, there’s a lot of options, if you go through this list: What to Do With a Day Off – The New York Times. My take is you can either tackle those things you have been putting off (hello! Finances!) or you can literally vacate your normal life and take it easy. Either is good. Better yet: consider being productive this time off and extra lazy the next time.

Enjoy your day. You deserve it.

A simple trick if you want to use pomodoro but find it hard to stick with it


The pomodoro approach to work seems smart. You set a timer for 25 to focus on a task. When the timer goes off, you take a 5 minute break. Then you repeat this process.

When I first heard of it, I thought: what a great idea! I tried it a number of times and failed. The reason I failed, and why you may be failing, is that I cannot focus for 25 minutes. It’s sad, but true.

The simple trick that works for me is to adjust the times from 25:5 to 15:5. I find I can focus for 15, and a 5 minute break is just enough.

I find that even though I take more breaks, I also have more focus time throughout the day, which means I still benefit. Plus, once I get on a roll, I skip some of the breaks.

If you want to get on and stay on the pomodoro bandwagon, adjust your focus time until you find your sweet spot. Your overall productivity will go up, I’m sure.

What you should do when you are facing a dilemma


According to this:

If you’re facing a dilemma, and can’t figure out whether to take the plunge, then all else being equal, you should.

Why? Partially because we tend to stick with the status quo, especially if all the options are bad. Also, because studies show that people that did take the plunge were happier than those that did not.

For more on this, see the Guardian article linked above.

Advice to young (and not so young) artists. (We are all artists in some way)


Here are two good pieces full of advice for artists.

One big: Advice to Young Aspiring Artists from Patti Smith, David Byrne & Marina Abramović | Open Culture

One small: None of us know what will happen – Austin Kleon

Key quote from the Austin Kleon piece is this, from Laurie Anderson:

The world may end. You’re right. But that’s not a reason to be scared. None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it. You know? What are you working for, posterity? We don’t know if there is any posterity.

(Image from pexels.com)

The things you reveal about yourself inadvertently when you post on Instagram


Suppose you post a lot of pictures with blue colours in them on Instagram. So what, you say? Well, according to this, What Your Instagram Posts Reveal about Your Mental State (and Why That’s Important) | Social Media Today, it shows you’re depressed. Whaaaaat? you say! In the piece, they state:

…. the researchers asked 166 Instagram users for permission to analyze their posts and also asked whether or not they had a diagnosis of clinical depression from a mental health professional. What they found was that people with depression over-indexed in several categories in regards to their Instagram post composition.

For example, people with depression prefer darker colors and more grays or blues than non-sufferers.

You might think this is not much better than phrenology, and I tend to agree.

Just keep in mind that all those pictures you post are being analyzed by someone to sell you something.

Read the article and decide if you want to reconsider what you post.

4 + 1 Rules for dealing with adversity

If you are struggling with adversity, then read this: Read This If You’re Going Through Adversity – Darius Foroux.

There are four rules in it:

    1. Do something good. By this, do something that makes you say, “I love life”.
    2. Ask for help. You know you need help when you are getting to the stage it all becomes “too much”.
    3. Write down your biggest fear. Get it out of your head and on paper. Write about it. You will be surprised how it shrinks on paper.
    4. Create a plan. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can be: I will do A and then based on that I will do either B or C. There! You have a plan to deal with things.
    5. Shorten the timelines. This is one I am adding. Often when we think of adversity we imagine it never ending. But it will. Don’t believe me? Go over past adversity. Even long running adversity. It always ends. It ends sooner than we think. This doesn’t mean you should passively wait it out. Write down how long you think this adversity will end, then make a plan, ask for help, tackle your fears and do something good.

Good luck. Need more help? Read the article linked above. And congrats. You were likely facing adversity when you searched out and read this, and you decided you needed to get help. You’re already on your way to doing something about it. Well done!

The Twenty Minute Rule you need to manage your time

 


A smart approach to managing your time is allocating no more than 20 minutes to any task you need to do.  So says this: Everything should take 20 minutes | The Outline. 

The reasoning in a nutshell:

Think about a task you wish to or must complete, and imagine how long it should take you. If you are a right-thinking person like myself, the answer is “20 minutes.” A 10-minute task is hardly a task at all, more of a minor interruption, and anything that takes 30 minutes invites the thought that you could have watched a half-hour episode of television instead. Twenty minutes is, objectively, the ideal amount of time — the Goldilocks number when it comes to doing things.

Now you can quibble about it, but it’s a smart rule. If you are still unsure, read the piece.

If you need to toughen up mentally

Toughness is good and bad. When it is prioritized over other qualities, it is bad. When it seen as a reservoir to get through tough times, it is good. Regardless of your situation, if you want to improve your mental toughness, here are some books you might want to consider: The 5 Best Books for Increasing Your Mental Toughness | Inc.com

Be as tough as you need to be, not just tough for toughness sake.

The most relaxing vacation you can take is going nowhere

Good tips in this article on how to take a successful staycation. Key quote:

The key to a successful staycation, whatever you’re doing, is to just be. That’s not easy for people working in cultures intent on busyness. Yet it is a way we can reduce stress levels and return to work with more energy. “We shouldn’t associate relaxation with being away,” advises Quartz’s managing editor Kira Bindrim, who describes herself as an avid staycation advocate. “Reclaim the place you already chose to live!”

I think you can do staycations in a number of ways. Sometimes they are great ways to achieve a personal project. Other times they are good for exploring the city you live in. But if you want to have a relaxing staycation, check out that article.

Fifteen good links to help you manage your personal finances better


Lots of good stuff here, from how to save money on food, your kids, your transportation….and much more. From the New York Times, Vox, the Cut, and quite a few from a good site for this information called The Simple Dollar.

  1. When and How to Stop Paying Your Kids’ Bills – The Simple Dollar
  2. 13 smart ways to improve your finances in 2017 – Vox
  3. A Household Budget Strategy for People Who Hate Budgeting | Apartment Therapy
  4. 11 Lifestyle Changes That Will Help You Save Money & Depend Less On Consumerism
  5. What to Do When You’re Bad at Money – The New York Times
  6. How to Save Money But Still Have a Life
  7. What I Learned From Tracking My Spending for a Month – The New York Times
  8. 33 Productive Things to Do Without Spending Money | Apartment Therapy
  9. 5 Money-Saving Lessons I Learned in a Month of Budgeting – Bon Appétit
  10. The First Step Out of Debt – The Simple Dollar
  11. 10 Things You Should Never Pay For – The Simple Dollar
  12. Nine Frugal Strategies for Tackling the Winter Blues – The Simple Dollar
  13. Finding Meaning Within Your Job – Even If You Don’t Like It – The Simple Dollar
  14. Five Monthly Bills You Could Live Without – The Simple Dollar
  15. Five Things You Could Afford If You Didn’t Buy a New Car – The Simple Dollar

So you want to become famous on Instagram? You might want to read this first

Why? Because as this article shows, become famous on Instagram is a lot harder than you might think:  I Tried to Make My Dog an Instagram Celebrity. I Failed. – The New York Times.

Yes, I know you are not a dog, but the same lessons will apply.

My guess is that the ship has sailed on become famous on Instagram. Same for podcasts and any other social media that has been around for a few years. You need to get in early, work hard, and take advantage of network effects.

If you do decide to become Instagram famous and manage to pull it off, please come here and mock me and I will update this post. 🙂

Great advice for parents of older teens/young adults


Can be found here:  How Should I Talk to My Son About His Career Dreams? – The Atlantic. 

Being a parent is never easy, no matter what age your kid is. There is lots of good advice for people with infants and young children but not much for when your kids are older. Glad to see pieces like this and to promote them.

Hang in there, parents!

(image via pexels.com)

Joan Benoit Samuelson at age 60 and what that means

This piece is a must read for anyone trying to maintain their fitness later in life. It’s not easy, even for legends like JBS. Take solace in seeing how even the greats adjust as they get older, and read this:  How a great marathoner — Joan Benoit Samuelson — keeps going at age 60 – The Washington Post

 

why the best white noise machine might be the Google Home Mini

I have had a number of white noise devices with some of them costing a lot more than the Mini. They are not hard to set up and once you do you can ask it to play rain sounds or relaxing sounds or whatever sounds help you relax or sleep it work. Plus you get all the advantages of having it to find out the weather, get news, set appointments and more. If you don’t mind having one in your house – and some people do – then you can buy them everywhere, like here: m.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product/google-home-mini-charcoal/11615336

The problem with carpentry and how it differs from IT

It is near impossible to learn how to do carpentry from either books or the Internet. I know because I’ve tried really hard.

Let’s say you decide you no longer want to buy bookcases from Ikea but you want to make you own. You decide a book case is simply a box and decide you want to learn how to make a box with a few tools and some simple instructions.

If you go search for help with your box, you may very likely come across instructions like this: www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to-plans/how-to/g1591/how-to-make-a-box/

It makes assumptions that you have lots of tools and you can do hard things like cut joints. After a few hours of searches, you will find most sites are like this: tailored to woodworkers making wood pieces that are hard to do and not anything near modern looking.

IT is different. For any technology out there, you can search for the name of the technology and “tutorial” and find something. You can be up and running using the technology in the time it takes you to give up looking for carpentry skills.

I am not sure why that is. Maybe there is more interest in IT so there are more tutorials on it. You could argue carpentry is harder but I have done both and I disagree.

I especially disagree because there is one site I could that actually does make it easy to make furniture and that is Ana White’s. Because of her I have made a wide range of furniture with basically a hammer, a jigsaw and a drill. The furniture isn’t fancy but it was cheaper and better and as modern looking as Ikea.

I think that is a problem with a lot of woodworking sites. They assume you want to do fine woodworking. Find woodworking is fine, but for people starting out, they likely want to make a simple table, a bookcase or set of shelves, perhaps a storage chest. A good joint may be best, but most Ikea furniture is held together with dowels and screws. If you make a book case with dowels and screws and glue, it will last and hold lots of books.

I wish there were more introductory sites on the internet that help people who wanted to learn how to make furniture and do carpentry, like there is with IT. Right now all I have found is Ana White’s site. I highly recommend it.

It’s RRSP season in Canada. You may feel: why bother contributing? Read this then.

If you are daunted and dismayed with the impossibiity of saving for retirement, then read this.

A few thoughts:

  1. It’s written for Americans, but it works just as well for Canadians. (Replace 401K with RRSP).
  2. You may still not be able to retire, but the more you save, the more cushion you have for later.
  3. It may help you get to sleep at night when your brain starts saying: you are doomed to die old and poor!

A great list of interchangeable ingredients to turn to when you are cooking, from Mark Bittman

Is this list.

Print it off, leave it in the kitchen, add your own items.

I often use sriracha for dried chilies, or even any hot sauce, for when you just need some heat. Likewise, if you don’t have jalapenos, you could also replace them with some of other heat source. (If it is a lot of jalapenos, you might use regular peppers with some chilies or other hot things to add the appropriate level of hotness.)

Finally, I’ve seen people suggest replacing creme fraiche with full fat greek yogurt.

Things you don’t need and the one thing you do

This struck me today: I had these two posts I found interesting, both starting with “You don’t Need”. This is good: I think I will stop pursuing something because I think I need something first. Recipes help. And have free time to make things helps. But don’t use things you think you need stopping you from doing what you want.

Here are the two pieces. The only thing you need is a desire to make things.

  1. You Don’t Need to Quit Your Job to Make
  2. You Don’t Need a Recipe – The New York Times

C’mon, It’s Just 7 Days – a good challenge for next week

You either are keeping your New Year’s Resolutions (yay!) or you have shelved them. If the latter, cheer up. You don’t need to wait a year to resolve to be better. And you don’t need to necessarily make a big commitment either. Maybe just a week of doing something for the better is enough to make an improvement in yourself. A week may be just the thing to kick start you and send you off in a better direction.

Sound good? Great. And if you are stuck for ideas, check out this:  C’mon, It’s Just 7 Days recipes and how-tos from Food52. 

It’s not just about food. If you are looking for a week of challenges to try out, read the articles there.

The articles are fun even if you aren’t looking to change. A lot can happen in a week.

10 Spectacular Roast Recipes That Aren’t Turkey

Many people

  1. want to make a roast turkey for Christmas
  2. do not want roast turkey

If that’s you, Chatelaine has your back with this:  10 Spectacular Roast Recipes That Aren’t Turkey | Chatelaine.

They truly are spectacular recipes, perfect not just for Christmas but any time of the year (ahem, winter) when a good roast is just what you need.

The Disaster of Richard Nixon, and thinking about US presidents

A good book on something that people needs to be reminded of:  The Disaster of Richard Nixon | by Robert G. Kaiser | The New York Review of Books.

No matter how bad the current president is, longing for bad former presidents is nostalgia at its worst. It’s good that works like this are frequently published to remind us and give us perspective.

How art can make us more confident


According to this, art can make us more confident by providing us with stories and representations of people with characteristics we share that overcome similar obstacles that we run up against. After all….

Confidence isn’t the belief that we won’t meet obstacles. It is the recognition that difficulties are an inescapable part of all worthwhile contributions. We need to ensure we have to hand plenty of narratives that normalise the role of pain, anxiety and disappointment in even the best and most successful lives.

I agree.

The image is an extended version of the work highlighted in the article. Like the Stations of the Cross and other works, they illustrate the difficulties of a way of life, and by making us aware of them, allow us to best prepare to meet them and overcome them.

What You Can Control

While this article, What You Can Control at The Simple Dollar, is financially oriented, it really contains wisdom you can use in general. While this wisdom is obvious once you read it, most of us lose sight of this from time to time. Go remind of yourself of it by reading the article.

While I recommend reading the whole article, but here are some points I pulled from it:

  • You can’t control the actions of others
  • You can control how you respond to the actions of others
  • You can’t control natural forces
  • You can control how you prepare for the possibility of natural forces
  • You can’t control big expenses, especially unexpected ones.
  • You can control how you prepare for those unexpected expenses

Also:

When it comes to things completely outside of your control, it’s not very beneficial to you to exert time, energy, emotion, or focus on those things.

Finally:

In general, actions based on emotion in response to something you can’t control are awful choices.