Hawk(ing) eyes
World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away last week. He left us with several gems worth pondering:
This seems like a fitting song for Professor Hawking…
Get Smart about what you pay attention to
- Good news: we have unfettered access to all sorts of knowledge via the Interwebs.
- Bad news: we have unfettered access to all sorts of bile via the Interwebs.
Seth Godin knows that the best way to deal with the latter is to not deal with it at all. Here’s a recent blog post of his:
Your kitchen table
You open the door and the vacuum cleaner salesperson comes in, and dumps a bag of trash in your living room.
Or a neighbor sneaks in the back door and uses a knife to put gouges on the kitchen table.
Or, through the window, someone starts spraying acid all over your bookshelf…
Why are you letting these folks into your house?
Your laptop and your phone work the same way. The reviews and the comments and the breaking news and the texts that you read are all coming directly into the place you live. If they’re not making things better, why let them in?
No need to do it to yourself, no need to let others do it either.
Be Smart.
Don’t give in to the chaos (or the KAOS).
Take Control!
Create your own Cone of Silence.
I gave up whine for Lent
Thank you for reading.
Enjoy some meaty links for your Saturday breakfast
Don’t worry, I’m still a tree-hugging vegetarian. The “meaty links” that we’re serving up at the dubbatrubba café are longer reads/listens that are worth chewing on.
I recently posted about South African singer/songwriter/amazing human being Johnny Clegg. Here’s a great 50-minute interview and performance from a recent World Café:
Bill Janovitz is the lead singer of Buffalo Tom. He’s also a father. The latter is more important. He wrote a blog post back in December of 2012, about the Newtown school shooting. Sadly, it remains just as relevant today, in the wake of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (and dozens of other mass killings that have come since Newtown). Please read the entire post here… but if you don’t have time, please ponder these excerpts:
We may not be expected to stop every insane bomb-making McVeigh-like terrorist, nor will we stop every future mass shooting. But no one can deny that we need to start to take logical steps to regulating guns to make it more difficult for the most damaged among us to gain access to machines that slaughter the most innocent among us…
Each day that goes by without substantive corrective measures should bring each and all of us collective shame. As long as we are unwilling to take advantage our self-evident truths of individual liberty, enshrined in our nation’s most sacred documents, to speak out loudly and demand action, days like Friday should make us all feel ashamed to be Americans — ashamed to have done so little with the responsibility that comes with such advantages…
We have already failed these 20 first-grade children, as we have dozens, if not hundreds of others. What are we going to do to stop the next obscenity?
So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it’s hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.
OK, let’s try to brighten things up a bit. Or not. Check out a Wired article about how social media is eroding our love/pursuit of knowledge. Here’s a quick excerpt:
Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television’s values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals—‘like’ buttons—over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciously performing. (It’s telling that, while Google began life as a PhD thesis, Facebook started as a tool to judge classmates’ appearances.) It reduces our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences. Enlightenment’s motto of ‘Dare to know’ has become ‘Dare not to care to know.’
Along those same lines, here’s a long, cleverly illustrated, irreverent article well worth checking out, about how our Social Survival Mammoth can block our Authentic Voice… and how we can overcome that.
Anyone who disapproves of who you’re being or what you’re doing isn’t even in the same room with you 99.7% of the time. It’s a classic mammoth mistake to fabricate a vision of future social consequences that is way worse than what actually ends up happening—which is usually nothing at all.
Let’s end on a brighter, sunnier note, shall we? Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin and Hobbes, one of the greatest comic strips ever) gave a fantastic commencement speech at Kenyon College back in 1990. It’s well worth reading nearly 30 years later.
I tell you all this because it’s worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It’s a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you’ll probably take a few…
…having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
Killing us softly with their tweets
Please spend a few minutes reading this story about how Russian trolls and bots are sowing seeds of discord in the U.S.
Data collected by the site over the past few months suggests that Russian social media accounts are now regularly seizing on divisive or tragic news to rile up segments of American society.
It’s nefarious, yet ingenious. Who needs tanks when you can just use tweets? Why develop nuclear weapons when all you need is a keyboard?
“Frankly, the United States is under attack,” Coats told the Senate intelligence committee. Adversaries “seek to sow division in the United States and weaken U.S. leadership.”
The intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, also out Tuesday, warns that Russia in particular will use social media “to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States.” The report predicts those attacks are likely to target the upcoming 2018 midterm elections.
Now do me a favor. Start a Lenten “fast” and avoid counting on Twitter and Facebook for your news.
Because you’re being played, comrade.
I will dare
The other day, I was talking to my buddy Jason, a co-worker of mine. He’s a fellow Xavier grad and we both have season tickets for men’s basketball, so usually our conversations are about rankings and seeds and opponents. But he got deep on me, and mentioned a conversation he had just had with his wife Charlene, where he said “you’re really only yourself up until about age 4, and then again at age 74.” Meaning kids are too young to know better, and seniors are too old to care, about what others think. But in the decades between, we give up our true selves, and worry too much about fitting in and playing by the rules. We let the weight of other’s expectations and societal cues bring us down. We let fear, judgement and shame take over.
Meanwhile, in a moment of true synchronicity, I happened to be reading the book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown.
This book covers the same territory. Here’s a great quote from it:
“When we spend our lives waiting until we’re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make,” says Brown. “Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don’t exist in the human experience.”
Brown also talks a lot about “scarcity” in American society. We’re conditioned to crave more… a better job, a nicer house, a cooler car, a fatter bank account, more “likes” on social media… in a zero-sum game where we’re constantly comparing/competing with others. She mentions that the opposite of scarcity isn’t abundance, it’s “enough”… as in “I have enough. I AM enough.”
“Worrying about scarcity is our culture’s version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when you’ve been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability), we’re angry and scared and at each other’s throats.”
Man, does that quote ring true in 2018! The solution, which seems counterintuitive at first blush, is to be more vulnerable.
“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”
“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
“The willingness to show up changes us, It makes us a little braver each time.”
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
Vulnerability is the best way to connect with others.
“Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The power that connection holds in our lives was confirmed when the main concern about connection emerged as the fear of disconnection; the fear that something we have done or failed to do, something about who we are or where we come from, has made us unlovable and unworthy of connection.”
The title of the book comes from a Teddy Roosevelt speech in 1910:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
Here’s Brené Brown’s TED talk about vulnerability.
The book is well worth checking out. Dare to make it a great weekend!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJcCzWcgPsY
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