Creative Work is Food
To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life.
The money is the gravy.
–Bette Davis
Develop Your Character
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.
Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Leadership Matters in Business
The business ability of the man at the head of any business concern, big or little, is usually the factor which fixes the gulf between striking success and hopeless failure.
–Theodore Roosevelt
Annual Message to Congress
December 31, 1901
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
From 1840:
In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on: he plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing: he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession, and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere.
If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days’ vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days, to shake off his happiness.
Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which is forever on the wing.—Democracy in America, Volume 2 by
Alexis de Tocqueville
Chapter XIII: Causes Of
The Restless Spirit Of Americans
In The Midst Of Their Prosperity
Practice Makes Us
The form of [Buddhism] I study is not really a matter of beliefs. I don’t believe; I just try to practice. And I’m no better than that practice, which is in the present moment. You’re either here or you’re not, either in contact or you’re not.
The Sun Magazine Interview
Not On Any Map
Jack Turner On Our Lost
Intimacy With The Natural World
by Leath Tonino
See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.
“Time may change me; But I can’t trace time …”
Some of the most concise and useful personal productivity advice I have seen comes not from David Bowie, but from Peter Drucker. I have often rejected time management with the observation that time seems immune to my influence, incentives, or encouragement much less any attempts at controlling or directing it. Time just is. We pass. On the other hand, personal management is work, but it works.
Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units.
–Peter F. Drucker
From The Effective Executive
Reminds me of the “Handle the big rocks first” metaphor in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Return to the Core
The tempo of modern civilization has a centrifugal force that carries us outward from the core of life toward ever-expanding peripheries. One should return frequently to the core, and to the basic values of the individual, to natural surroundings, to simplicity and contemplation. Long ago, I resolved to so arrange my life that I could move back and forth between periphery and core.
–Charles A. Lindbergh
See also Tony Mayo’s review of the book here.
See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.
You Don’t Need to be Crazy to be an Entrepreneur…
…but being hypomanic seems to help, according to John D. Gartner, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and author of The Hypomanic Edge
In his article for The American Enterprise Institute, America’s Manic Entrepreneurs Dr. Gartner writes,
“Successful entrepreneurs are … are highly creative people who quickly generate a tremendous number of ideas—some clever, others ridiculous. Their “flight of ideas,” jumping from topic to topic in a rapid energized way, is a sign of hypomania. … It is a temperament characterized by an elevated mood state that feels “highly intoxicating, powerful, productive, and desirable” to the hypomanic, according to Frederick Goodwin and Kay Jamison, authors of the definitive book Manic-Depressive Illness. “–John D. Gartner, Ph.D.
American Enterprise
Jul2005, Vol. 16 Issue 5, p18
I highly recommend the article to anyone who is or works with high-energy business leaders.
Newspapers: Why bother?
I have often remarked on this myself; now I learn it has an “official” name.
Why Speculate?
A talk
by Michael Crichton
International Leadership Forum
La Jolla
April 26, 2002
…the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
My theory on why we still read ’em
- To learn what other people are reading; be part of the culture
- Being conceited enough to think we can separate the wheat from the chaff
Help with Eating Healthy
Here’s a useful site, paid for by the foundation established by the founder of Health Valley Foods. The World’s Healthiest Foods List at: http://www.whfoods.com/foodstoc.php
I was glad to have more reasons for eating basil,
Research studies on basil have shown unique health-protecting effects in two basic areas: basil’s flavonoids and volatile oils.
and eggplant,In addition to featuring a host of vitamins and minerals, eggplant also contains important phytonutrients, many which have antioxidant activity. Phytonutrients contained in eggplant include phenolic compounds, such caffeic and chlorogenic acid, and flavonoids, such as nasunin.
Plus, of course, fiber. Gotta keep things moving!
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