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Before you learn to write well, to trust yourself as a writer, you will have to learn to be patient in the presence of your own thoughts. You’ll learn that making sentences in your head will elicit thoughts you didn’t know you could have. Thinking patiently will yield far better sentences than you thought you could make.

Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

What can we do to avoid the clarity paradox and continue our upward momentum? Here are three suggestions:

First, use more extreme criteria. … If we ask, “Do I absolutely love this?” then we will be able to eliminate the clutter and have space for something better. We can do the same with our career choices.

Second, ask “What is essential?” and eliminate the rest. Everything changes when we give ourselves permission to eliminate the nonessentials.

Third, beware of the endowment effect. Also known as the divestiture aversion, the endowment effect refers to our tendency to value an item more once we own it.

If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less. Not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials. Not just once a year as part of a planning meeting, but constantly reducing, focusing and simplifying. Not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but being willing to cut out really terrific opportunities as well. Few appear to have the courage to live this principle, which may be why it differentiates successful people and organizations from the very successful ones.

Apple’s string of successes during the Jobs 2.0 era seems to exemplify this approach.

Though they seem like rather unlikely pairings, many great rock songs have been the result of a lyricist finding inspiration in the pages of a book. These are just the tip of the iceberg…

1. The Song: “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” Pink Floyd. *
   The Novel: Animal Farm, George Orwell. *

2. The Song: “My Antonia,” Emmylou Harris.
   The Novel: My Antonia, Willa Cather.

3. The Song: “Whip It,” Devo.
   The Novel: Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon.

4. The Song: “Wuthering Heights,” Kate Bush.
   The Novel: Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte.

5. The Song: “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Bruce Springsteen.
   The Novel: The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck.

6. The Song: “Sympathy for the Devil,” The Rolling Stones. *
   The Novel: The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov.

7. The Song: “Holden Caulfield,” Guns N’ Roses.
   The Novel: The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. *

8. The Song: “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” Cream.
   The Novel: The Odyssey, Homer.

9. The Song: “Breathe,” U2. *
   The Novel: Ulysses, James Joyce.

10. The Song: “Ramble On,” Led Zeppelin. *
    The Novel: Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.

11. The Song: “Scentless Apprentice,” Nirvana. *
    The Novel: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Süskind. *

I’ve marked the songs in my CD collection and the novels I’ve read with asterisks.  Visit the source link to read more about the songs and novels, plus additional contributions by commenters.

A humorous post, asking “what if?” at the intersection of programming and literature.

A pretty good overview of that abstract thing we call money.  Necessary reading for those who think currency still is (or should again be) backed by gold.  Also explains why the gold standard failed. 

This irrational fear is ultimately a legacy of the way money evolved: We cling to the belief that money needs to be backed by something “solid.” In that sense, we’re just like Marco Polo—still a bit amazed by the thought that you can base an entire economy on little pieces of paper.


…

There is, to be sure, something a bit eerie about all this, and periods like the recent housing bubble, when banks made an extraordinary number of bad loans, should remind us of the dangers of runaway credit. But it’s a mistake to yearn for a more “solid” foundation for the monetary system. Money is a social creation, just like language. It’s a tool that can be used well or poorly, and it’s preferable that we have more freedom to use that tool than less.


While the recent credit crises and various bubbles are to be deplored, going back to the gold standard (even if it were possible) would only cause more problems than it would purport to solve.  It wouldn’t prevent governments from “printing money” - the hyperinflation in Germany occurred in the 1920s, notwithstanding the gold standard. Instead, we need better government and market oversight to prevent the excesses of investment/merchant banks and other financial institutions.

For millennia, humans have sought to make sense of time, to visualize it, to ride its arrow, to hack it, to understand biological connection to it.“Time is the very foundation of conscious experience,” writes  Dan Falk in In Search of Time: The History, Physics, and Philosophy of Time (public library).“To be human is to be aware of the passage of time; no concept lies closer to the core of our consciousness.”

The rest of In Search of Time, a fine addition to these essential books on time, is just as fascinating an untangling of the basic fabric of our existence, exploring everything from the science of time travel to the persistence and mechanisms of memory to the inevitability of impermanence.