poised at the precipice

tannerherriott.com - blog: Roadtrip Nation Interview with Ira Glass

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:00:02 -0700

tannerherriott.com - blog: Roadtrip Nation Interview with Ira Glass:

Here’s to making peace.

“Different people have different personalities and some people feel happy and confident when they wake up in the morning every day. And some people are going to feel doubt and worry when they wake up everyday. It’s good to acknowledge early which one you are and make your peace with it. I know no matter what I’m doing, I’m going to wake up worried every single day.”

"Another principle I discuss is check your reference points. This principle involves carefully..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:42:41 -0700

“Another principle I discuss is check your reference points. This principle involves carefully considering the motives that are driving our decisions, and examine whether they are driven by the bitter feelings resulting from where we stand in comparisons to others. It is a principle that helps us counteract another force that often sidetracks us: social comparisons. On a wide range of dimensions, from how trustworthy we are to how good looking others find us to be, we often compare ourselves to our peers to evaluate where we stand. These types of social comparisons can lead to irrational behaviors. For instance, we may accept a job offer paying a lower salary than another that pays more but where other people like us make more money than we would. Or we may vote against hiring a new colleague who excels on dimensions we feel we also excel at (such as leadership) because we find him or her threatening.”

- Francesca Gino talks about how comparing ourselves to others can actually make us make bad decisions. I’ve been having this conversation with a few of my loved ones very recently. (via vasta)

Considering Radical Translucency

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:32:43 -0700

I have a “real” blog — one I host on my own domain, where I blog about work. I briefly blogged about personal things on it but I received a comment about it one time that made me reconsider the wisdom of doing so. People wanted to read what I had to offer on conversations about technology policy, not my struggles with mood or self-esteem. Despite having interacted with and being aware of many people who tackle those topics in the public eye with their blogs, I’ve always been aware of the tension and ambivalence between two positions on this topic: that the work and personal online presences ought to be, or can be, one and the same; or, that they ought to remain separate but also ought to be public.

It’s taken me a while but I’m realizing that my inability to properly engage with this line of thought is actually a part of the pattern of thinking I’m seeking to overcome at the moment. The mere recognition of this fact is making me feel… a little less constrained, because there is an awful lot I’d like to be able to talk about, publicly and without fear.

One day, perhaps, I’ll put my name to it and not worry about the repercussions to my work life.

"Depression will lie to you. Depression will try to tell you what others are thinking. That you are..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:29:51 -0700

“Depression will lie to you. Depression will try to tell you what others are thinking. That you are unloved and unworthy, that others think little of you or don’t care – or even wish you harm. You are not a psychic. Keep repeating that. “I am not a psychic”. Repeat. The only way to know what another person is thinking is to up and ask them.”

- The DIY Couturier: 21 Tips to Keep Your Shit Together When You’re Depressed.

Reblogging for future reference. annfriedman: In my ongoing...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:53:00 -0700

Reblogging for future reference.

annfriedman:

In my ongoing quest for the perfect framework for understanding haters, I created The Disapproval Matrix**. (With a deep bow to its inspiration.) This is one way to separate haterade from productive feedback. Here’s how the quadrants break down:

Critics: These are smart people who know something about your field. They are taking a hard look at your work and are not loving it. You’ll probably want to listen to what they have to say, and make some adjustments to your work based on their thoughtful comments.

Lovers: These people are invested in you and are also giving you negative but rational feedback because they want you to improve. Listen to them, too.

Frenemies: Ooooh, this quadrant is tricky. These people really know how to hurt you, because they know you personally or know your work pretty well. But at the end of the day, their criticism is not actually about your work—it’s about you personally. And they aren’t actually interested in a productive conversation that will result in you becoming better at what you do. They just wanna undermine you. Dishonorable mention goes to The Hater Within, aka the irrational voice inside you that says you suck, which usually falls into this quadrant. Tell all of these fools to sit down and shut up.

Haters: This is your garden-variety, often anonymous troll who wants to tear down everything about you for no rational reason. Folks in this quadrant are easy to write off because they’re counterproductive and you don’t even know them. Ignore! Engaging won’t make you any better at what you do. And then rest easy, because having haters is proof your work is finding a wide audience and is sparking conversation. Own it.

The general rule of thumb? When you receive negative feedback that falls into one of the top two quadrants—from experts or people who care about you who are engaging with and rationally critiquing your work—you should probably take their comments to heart. When you receive negative feedback that falls into the bottom two quadrants, you should just let it roll off your back and just keep doin’ you. If you need to amp yourself up about it, may I suggest this #BYEHATER playlist on Spotify? You’re welcome.

** I presented The Disapproval Matrix to the fine folks at MoxieCon in Chicago yesterday, and they seemed to find it useful, so I figured I’d share with the class. It was originally inspired by a question my friend Channing Kennedy submitted to my #Realtalk column at the Columbia Journalism Review.

Photo

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:25:53 -0700

"Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:54:44 -0700

“Write it. Shoot it. Publish it. Crochet it, sauté it, whatever. MAKE.”

- Joss Whedon (via whedonesqued)

"Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all..."

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:07:54 -0800

“Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all of us love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour, unceasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”

- Henry Nouwen, The Only Necessary Thing

"Don’t worry about what other people think. And work harder. You might not believe it right now, but..."

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:35:08 -0800

“Don’t worry about what other people think. And work harder. You might not believe it right now, but persistence almost always trumps talent.”

- Daniel Pink on Copyblogger, answering the question, “Can you offer any advice to writers and content producers that you might offer yourself, if you could go back in time and ‘do it all over?’”

"It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere."

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:53:10 -0800

“It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.”

- Agnes Repplier, The Treasure Chest

Living for myself; living for imagined others

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:13:42 -0800

“One day,” I often find myself saying to myself, “I’ll come out and write about the crazy things I am going through right now, to connect with others who might be caught in the same place.”

In my heart, I kind of know that one day is actually now.

It’s a particular academic flavour of depression, perfectionism, procrastination and the effect of social networks I’m facing; but truth be told, I can only really write meaningfully about it when I have something to say about it.

All I’ve got right now, is that it hurts like hell and is mostly terrifying most of the time. But someday soon, I hope, I’ll have more to say.

Borrowing: immunity to change

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:40:03 -0800

The Immunity to Change™ approach helps people accomplish sought-after behavioral goals by making visible to them previously unrecognized “parallel goals” (“counter commitments”) which are producing precisely the behaviors that undermine their aspirations.

[…] The failure to enact visible goals is often due to the “success” of enacting unseen ones. […] While [one’s inability to perform the basic task] is a kind of failure, with respect to his sincere and visible goal, we can now see that it also a kind of “success” with respect to his unseen one. He knows he has “one foot on the gas” (the visible goal […]); he doesn’t know “the other foot is on the brakes.”

Saying yes to everything or everyone is a death by a thousand cuts way of leaving absolutely nothing...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:13:53 -0800

Saying yes to everything or everyone is a death by a thousand cuts way of leaving absolutely nothing for myself.

"[A]uthenticity is not only a lucid recognition that the situation into which we find ourselves..."

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:41:01 -0800

“[A]uthenticity is not only a lucid recognition that the situation into which we find ourselves thrown is contingent, absurd, irreal… but an acceptance and affirmation of that situation. The authenticity-seeking ironist-artist knows that authenticity is not out there somewhere. It needs to be created. Authenticity is always a point of departure, never a destination.”

- Fake Authenticity | HiLobrow

"Fear is big. But it is not bigger than me. I don’t know how to convince myself of this without..."

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:52:49 -0800

“Fear is big. But it is not bigger than me. I don’t know how to convince myself of this without bringing other people — what they’ve said, what they’ve done, what they’ve made me feel, what they expect and the horrible systems of reciprocity that constitute sociality — into it.”

- Me — today, trying.

"A little while back I observed that many people are put off writing because they fear committing one..."

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:07:37 -0800

“

A little while back I observed that many people are put off writing because they fear committing one or more of the innumerable errors that seem to lie in wait for them at every step of composition. But if one understands that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships and that the number of relationships involved is finite, one understands too that there is only one error to worry about, the error of being illogical and only one rule to follow: make sure that every component of your sentences is related to the other components in a way that is clear and unambiguous.

And how do you do that? Not by learning rules, but by coming to know the limited number of relationships your words, phrases and clauses can enter into, and becoming alert to those times when the relationships are not established or are unclear.

”

- Stanley Fish, “How to write a sentence (and how to read one)”

"The perfectionism involved in procrastination is a good example of an end we hold inconsistent with..."

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:00:24 -0800

“

The perfectionism involved in procrastination is a good example of an end we hold inconsistent with other ends and only semiconsciously. If we know we hold perfectionist aims for ourselves, we might not realize how stultifying they are. And in either case, we are unlikely to realize how much of our perfectionism is a desire to please or impress others. The Stoics and the Epicureans are clear on how a focus on others’ expectations is a disaster for us, morally speaking. Perfectionism in our physical achievements is a mistake to hold up as a value. It is part of an inaccurate self-conception; it is false. Your accomplishments through work are not what define you.

To put this in the form of an example, take someone’s statement, off-handed but revealing nonetheless, that he “lives for his job.” This person might agree with any of these simultaneously: my value is as a good performer at work; I am valuable despite failing at work; devotion to work does not completely satisfy me. These are the sorts of norms we have internalized that come into conflict, according to the Stoics and the Epicureans. According to each take, the prime source of all our immorality is to take limited pursuits — success at work, a good reputation — and give them the wrong sort of priority. Put in the right context, these things do not matter compared with virtue, and they are not satisfying without virtue.

”

- Procrastination As Vice, Jennifer A. Baker, “The Thief of Time”

Jam Tomorrow, Jam Yesterday

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:06:00 -0700

At one point in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen offers its hero a position as a domestic servant. And when Alice asks about her compensation package, she is surprised to find that, in addition to a weekly salary, it consists of jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today. Alice objects that it must sometimes come to jam today and declares herself confused to hear that it does not. Call this the jam-yesterday-jam-tomorrow structure of a good[…].

I love my job, enough so that it is hard to imagine being willing to trade it in for almost any other. But when you look at any particular moment of it, you are likely to find me desperately trying to figure out what I am going to say to tomorrow’s class, or sitting in an airport waiting for my airplane, or grading student work, or writing yet another letter of recommendation, or fretfully pacing up and down my living room as I try to make sense of some philosophical point. Once again, the good that can be located in each of these moments does not add up to the explanation of the great value that academic work has for me. And I think that these examples can do duty for a great many more. When you look at important human goods, the good in them is jam yesterday, jam tomorrow — but very rarely indeed, jam today.

[…] The strategy, then, is to exploit an already present disposition to take steps toward temporally locatable ends, but overlaying a jam-yesterday-jam-tomorrow good with means-end structure, structure through which an agent may progress to an artifical and often only trivially valuable goal. Let me acknowledge that such devices are not magic bullets; giving [a] hike an objective does not, for instance, do much to prevent one from postponing the entire outing to some later occasion. And an agent who was a principled procrastinator […] would be unimproved by a regiment of dummy goals: such an agent would systematically procrastinate when it came to taking steps to a prosthetic end. Nonetheless, that a device is not an infallible solution to all of one’s problems is not a reason to throw it out; what device is?

You would not want the device to be so powerful that the means-end structure hijacked the activity. […] The student who is just trying to graduate will not get much of an education; and, as we remarked, the hiker who arranges his hike to reach the view most efficiently will not see much of the mountain.

[…] Because we are probably all prone to be insufficiently motivated by jam-yesterday-jam-tomorrow goods, we are probably all procrastinators. A perfectly virtuous role model would not need to rely on devices of the sort we have describing, but would take his outdoor walks and his education straight, without the pretense of instrumentally organized progress to a goal. But if we are going to be as virtuous as we can be, we should not be trying to imitate that sort of role model. Virtue for us consists, among other things, in adopting dummy goals of this sort, and in suppressing the thought that the view at the end of the trail is not any more important than the equally wonderful views we are seeing along the way. If we are virtuous (as virtuous as we can be), we will work at identifying jam-today-jam-tomorrow goods, and at developing instrumental structure of this sort to impose on them.

[…] An instrumental reason is one that adduces the end to be attained: the point of taking the step the reason recommends is, precisely, to get you to the end. So, in instrumental or calculative reasoning, the end is what both the reasoning and the activity are for. If all calculatively structured activities were being performed for the sake of their respective ends, perhaps it would be hard to avoid being impressed by the importance of ends, and thus of instrumental reasoning. But we have just that at least some calculatively structured activities are not performed for the sake of their ends: they exhibit stepwise progress toward an end, to be sure, but that end is a dummy goal, installed as a way of managing procrastination in the face of jam-yesterday-jam-tomorrow goods. Reaching the objective with the view is not the point of the hike, and graduating is not the point of going to college.

— Elijah Mullgram, Virtue for Procrastinators, from The Thief of Time

I don’t have anywhere near a complete grip on the argument being made, but it’s a compelling concept nonetheless — that we have to fake ourselves out. And that my problem with procrastination, perhaps, is that I am struggling to deceive myself for the purposes of movement as I was before.

Resistance is Futile

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 07:52:33 -0700

Pema Chödrön writes (in Comfortable with Uncertainty), “There are three habitual methods that human beings use to troubling habits such as laziness, anger or self-pity. I call these the three futile strategies — the strategies of attacking, indulging and ignoring.” But these are not the only options available to us, Chödrön suggests. “The mind-training practices of the warrior present a fourth alternative, the alternative of an enlightened strategy.” She goes on: »Try fully experiencing whatever you’ve been resisting—without existing in your habitual ways. Become inquisitive about your habits. Practice touching in with the fundamental tenderness and groundlessness of your being before it hardens into habit.

What’s the bigger purpose of doing this? She answers, “[So that] your ego-clinging diminish and that your wisdom and compassion increase.”

Addicted to love — nay, suffering

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 17:49:54 -0700

”[…] we look for happiness in all the wrong places. The buddha called this habit “mistaking suffering for happiness.” We become habituated to reaching for something to ease the edginess of the moment. Thus we become less and less able to reside with even the most fleeting uneasiness or discomfort. What begins as a slight shift of energy — a minor tigtening of our stomach, a vague indefinable feeling that something bad is about to happen — escalates into addiction. Because we mistake what always results in suffering to be what will bring us happiness we remain stuck in the reptitious habit of escalating our dissatisfaction.” — Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chödrön (p. 54)