Images

Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

To be mature you have to realize what you value most.

It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family.

Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.”

Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry. – Catcher in the Rye

When Viktor Frankl was finally liberated from the camps, he founded the branch of psychotherapy known as logotherapy. The core doctrine is that finding meaning is a driving force in every life. “We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways,” Frankl wrote: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

”Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.” – Anthony Trollope

He would know. According to some reports, he paid a servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up at 5:30 am every morning and get him a cup of coffee. Trollope would then work on a novel for three hours. The first half hour was spent reading over what he had already written, and after that he wrote at a pace of 250 words per 15 minutes. So, over three hours, he would write approximately 2,500 words.

on the subject of metaphors:

[embed-google-photos-album "https://photos.app.goo.gl/5QKPWe4ijzEnYjE5A"

it might be useful to pause and examine the norms and incentive structures still in place from those exuberant days of heedless problem-solving. These structures now lock the organization in place with paralyzing might. Solving problems is still the currency of the organization, but that currency dries up when there’s an implicit “without creating new ones” requirement added.

We need a shift in perspective. What if, instead of looking at individual problems, we visualize the set of related problems, both solved and created, as a problem space? This problem space shrinks and grows depending on the actions of those who work within it. If the problem space shrinks, the team is doing good work. If the problem space grows, the team is struggling.