Get it Done

Posted on Aug 13, 2023 in Uncategorized

Photo by Alora Griffiths

The Need to Not Need Help

Hello TB Readers! Happy Sunday, I hope.

Today I am featuring Andrew Bosworth’s latest blog post on getting “it” done. He is a husband, uncle and father as well as a Harvard grad and CTO at Meta in California. Below is his refreshingly honest reason for blogging.

I started this blog with the goal of sharing a few of the lessons I’ve learned in my career. As I have been writing I’ve found myself fighting a desire to make myself look better. A big part of me wants to present myself as some kind of sage who has always been wise. But that isn’t true. I learned most of these lessons the hard way. Shame is a powerful force in our society and prevents us from sharing our lessons. We protect ourselves from criticism but also prevent people from connecting with us meaningfully. Shame begets more shame. Maybe by me talking about these things people will think less of me. But someone else will connect with it and maybe avoid the same mistake, or maybe even share their own.

Whoa… Right?

Bosworth’s comments apply to each of us personally as well as professionally. After you finish, ask yourself: “In the last couple of months: what could I have handled better, if I had read the following sooner?”


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One Beautiful Smile

Posted on Aug 6, 2023 in Uncategorized

Photo by Bruno Martins

A young man asked Nick Cave (whose son died prematurely a few years ago) how he could transcend his usual self-absorbed way of being to become a better son for his father, who had suffered a serious stroke and was unresponsive, but unexpectedly smiled when his son played Nick and the Bad Seeds’ recording “Dig Lazarus Dig” at his hospital bed.

I’ve said it before… there’s something about Nick’s ability to astutely answer his readers’ questions and then go beyond – to make a real difference in the questioners’ lives.  

Article  

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Whew!

Posted on Jul 29, 2023 in Uncategorized

Photo by krakenimages

Morgan Housel rocked my boat with his most recent column.

Would you consider actually writing down the answers to his questions? I intend to…it’s one way to stay clean of being an effete snob.

Here’s to not-conning ourselves!

Vicki


A Few Questions

by Morgan Housel

Whose life do I admire that is secretly miserable?

What do I believe is true only because believing it puts me in good standing with my tribe?

Which of my current values would be different if I were raised by different parents?

What do I believe the most with the least amount of evidence of it being true?

Who has the right answer but I ignore because they’re a bad communicator?

Who is full of it but I pay attention to because they’re a good communicator?

What do I think is ambition (a good trait) but is actually envy (a terrible one)?

What annoys me about other people that I sometimes do myself?

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Giving Away Our Power

Posted on Jul 22, 2023 in Uncategorized

Photo by Ethan Haddox
Giving away our power may have started as a survival tactic. In any case, humans are good at it. So good we are dumb to the fact that being a pleaser isn’t a pleasant way to live. 
 
Who would we be if we didn’t have to please at every turn?
 
Jocelyn Glei does a good job addressing the topic. Below is a short excerpt; you might want to read the entire article.
 
Love,
Vicki
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Conviction

Posted on Jul 16, 2023 in Uncategorized

Photo by Gilles Rolland-Monnet

Convictions Can Be as Dangerous as Lies

The School of Life post this week is on conviction. It is something we become “good” at as we age… i.e., we become certain when very little is certain.

Think about it and consider knocking off your sharp edges before life does it for you. That said, there is one conviction worth developing: you are stronger than you think–and you will tolerate more than you expect you can.

Toodles for now, Hug, Vicki


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If Only

Posted on Jul 9, 2023 in Uncategorized

Photo by Road Trip with Raj

Jeff Matlow/By Title Only had a great newsletter this week. It not only presents a perspective but gives you a few tools to use moving forward. Enjoy hunkering down for a few minutes to think about how you handle some of these issues. Hope your 4th was safe and you are wearing a hat in this summer sun. Be well. Summer Hug!

~Vicki


The Power of Personalized Perspective

by Jeff Matlow

A professor is standing in front of a classroom. He grabs a blank piece of paper and draws a dot in the middle.

He holds the paper up to the class and asks them what they see.

Some students talk about the position of the dot on the paper, others mention the size of the dot. But they all agree: they see a black dot.

After the responses, the professor speaks to them:

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Becoming Worthy of Old Age

Posted on Jul 1, 2023 in Uncategorized

Photo by Jonathan Cosens Photography

The following was a midweek revisit of an earlier Marginalian column (once called Brain Pickings). Enjoy! 

Love,

Vicki


How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing). 

“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty, located the triumph in remaining able to “fall in love again and again… forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.” Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older: “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”

Life is largely a matter of how we hold ourselves — our hearts, our fears, our forgivenesses — along the procession of the years. Hardly anyone has furnished a more elegant and robust banister for the holding than Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her 1970 book La vieillesse, published in England as Old Age and in America as the characteristically cottoned The Coming of Age.

Two years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are. De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a “semi-death.” With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:

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