There’s many a 10 step programme. An infinite supply of advisors. And our parents.
Ultimately we all want happiness. A steady stream of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. Not too much all the time. Not too little ever.
How we get the right amount at the right rate is down to how we create our own rulebook. Get up. Make the bed. Shower. Eat healthy food. Be nice.
I once tried to write my life manifesto. And indeed still have a monthly “manifesto review” for the first Sunday of every month. In 2008 I read about 60 self-help books. And summarised the main points in each of them. From this I noticed that successful people have the following characteristics:
Passion
Belief
Strategy
Communication skills
Working hard
Being disciplined/creating good habits.
The other thing that came out of this was about belief in oneself: believe about yourself what you would like others to believe about you. The manifesto work was to make sure I was actively working on those 6 areas.
The other part was that there is a big gap between the knowledge or capacity and the acting on it. Be proactive.
In the next few posts I’ll dive into each of those areas.
Podcasts are my longform media. I consume lots of podcasts. They are my anti-television and an echo to the radio that would play back thoughtful BBC World service broadcasts from my father’s workshop in information-dark South Africa in the late 80s. Podcasts are the roughage in the titbit driven information diet.
Enough with the analogies, you are here to know what and how.
How to listen
Download Pocket Casts (iOS / Android). It’s about the price of a coffee. And when you consider that you get free upgrades year after year, great value. You could try all the others. The Doggcatcher, the built in Apple podcast (worst of them all) and BeyondPod. I’ve worked my way through them all and arrived at Pocket Casts.
Pocket Casts ensures you always have a supply of the podcasts you follow on your device. Freshly plucked from a WiFi access point near you so you aren’t using up valuable mobile data. Pocket Casts presents the podcasts beautifully, with nice show notes on an intuitive interface.
Other features I like:
The ability to play some podcasts faster (for example BBC podcasts can comfortably be played back at about 1.5x speed, and I’d play back a German podcast slightly slower.) Pocket Casts will also pitch adjust so your podcaster doesn’t sound like Mickey Mouse.
Pocket Casts will auto-delete podcasts you have listened to, or always keep the five latest episodes. You can star episodes you have liked and they will be saved. I use this feature for saving some DJ mixes to listen to again when running.
Subscription and listening position synchronisation: subscribe on your phone. Listen on your tablet. Finish off on their webpage. Everything is synchronised.
NB: This is not a paid promotion for Pocket Casts, simply me having tried all the other podcast tools and finding Pocket Casts to be significantly better.
Most of my podcast grazing comes from personal recommendation. Occasionally hackernews will include a “what podcasts is everyone listening to”? AskHN.
Pocket Casts also includes a helpful “ Discover” tab. This helps you search for podcasts by name without needing to know the subscription URL. However, the discover tab could benefit from a:
“based on your current subscriptions you might like ….” and,
“podcasts similar to this podcast” feature.
Specific favourite podcasts:
Storytelling: The Moth, where a bunch of storytellers get on stage and recount their lives: some sad, some humerous. All touching.
Today was a good day: I received a letter in the morning that was very touching. And then cycled north from Berlin, seventy-something kilometers to Vogelsang to look at the old Soviet machinery, buildings and climb a very tall chimney to get an amazing view over the forest.
The military history angle was interesting.
But really it was just lovely being out of the city and having nice company.
What makes a good ideology? Is it because it’s something that I also believe in? Like open source? Or don’t kill your enemies? Or believe in $DEITY? Or staying true to an idea?
Or other beliefs: Staying with a partner in a challenging relationship? Or working on something that isn’t working out in the hope of things turning around?
How long should we cling to an ideology before we let got and are freed to accept new beliefs? How long do we keep trying to make something work?
I’ve never been a huge fan of the MVP school of thought. My take on it is that it’s more of a “make something shitty and find a victim.” There’s no minimum viable iPhone or no minimum viable Pebble watch. Products need love and care to come to life. Throwing spaghetti against the wall will tell you if it’s cooked. It won’t tell you if it’s going to make a great meal.
So I’ve been working on different ideas pushing them along hoping that they will catch. I don’t have the answer. But I do know that ideologies can both support us (respect others), and be destructive (martyr yourself for a greater cause).
But there’s also a time when we need to let go of some idea to make space for new ones. There’s good letting go and there’s throwing away. To me a good letting go is more a case of… “so we’ve come this far, now let’s build on what we have but in a different direction”.
Today has been an interesting day of exploring something same-but-different. A pimp-your-ideology-into-something-better day. Time to jump back into the saddle and head off in a new direction.
I’ve usually relied on partners to prod my reticent self into taking a break with them. The freedom of working for your own company and choosing times usually results in my working until I burn-out, then taking a quick break that doesn’t really do much for recovery, and then jumping back on the horse.
I started this year in great form: a lovely trip to South Africa paddling down the Orange River through the Namibian desert with my cousin. It was a wonderful holiday. Work has been hard. Really hard. There was a work trip around Easter with a few days off, then a week’s stay-cation in Berlin. Not really a holiday. And too many other things going on to really relax. And so it is today: feeling close to being burned out and knowing that I must look after myself if I want to prevent full-burnout. It’s not a good situation to be in and I can only blame myself.
I love travelling. That feeling of taking off and leaving the day-to-day behind and the adventure of exploring a new place.
At the end of this year I’m meeting an old school friend in South Africa’s Hluleka Nature Reserve. It’s a wonderfully desolate part of the Wild Coast.
Until then, I need to plan a break but don’t see how to take it. And don’t see how to survive without taking it.
Yesterday I listened in on one of Wendy’s friend’s video workshops. It was about observing the ego and being aware of the need to distance ourselves from our feelings. Observing that you talk negatively to yourself as a means to improve the inner dialogue into something of a fanclub rather than the angry “you’re not perfect” coach.
I’ve also started the Monash university mindfulness course. I really liked week 1. Less woo-woo, more science of how our brains deal with interrupts and the professional value of being in the moment. Excited to see where the next 6 weeks take us.
And that was an almost perfectly late blog post. Goodnight.
Life is really easy. Instead of nobody handing you a life-manual there are thousands being stuffed down your throat. From old-school Bible-types with rather dubious advice to newer self-help gurus and their amazon hit sellers. Then there are the manuals of manuals: I enjoyed Tom Butler Bowden’s distillation of all the great self-help books into 50 Self-Help Classics and his 50 Success Classics. The chapters were short enough to get the gist of the the book and 50 was enough to see trends popping up between all the books. It’s a good read. But ultimately I think we need to write and rewrite our own self-help books. Write oneself, because we are all different. Rewrite, because we change.
Yesterday I was at the Mauerpark Bearpit Karaoke session and a singer was singing John Legend’s All of Me. The song includes the lines
“Love your curves and all your edges All your perfect imperfections”
Forcing myself to write something everyday and post it a good exercise in reducing perfectionism.
The idea is that I write something in a time-boxed fashion so that I’m forced to upload it, forced to not correct it, forced to just accept it as it is and get it out they get it online even if its imperfect.
Secondly, I’ve always enjoyed long form writing, but its a huge leap between daily life’s flow of events and the writing flow. The idea of setting a daily commitment is scary and exciting. Let’s see how long this can go for.
Should Anyone Ask 