Cross-Pollination - Vol. 3

Making seemingly random connections across disciplines...
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*Hyperlinks contained within. Please make sure you jump into these rabbit holes!

Norman Doidge

"But if it’s uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don’t reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning.

​And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged."

The Gains of Drudgery

A nice little piece from the Art of Manliness:

"Suppose a man gives up his youth to the struggle for some coveted degree, some honour or award of the scholarly life. It is very possible that when he obtains that for which he has struggled, he may find that the joy of possession is not so great as the joy of the strife. It is part of the discipline of life that we should be educated by disillusion; we press onward to some shining summit, only to find that it is but a bastion thrown out by a greater mountain, which we did not see, and that the real summit lies far beyond us still... 

Thus though such a man may not gain the prize he sought, he has gained a command over his chance desires, a discipline of thought, a power of patient application, a steadiness of will and purpose, which will stand him in good stead throughout whatever toils his life may know in the hidden years which lie before it...

So true is this, that Lessing, who was among the wisest of thinkers, said, that if he had to choose between the attainment of truth and the search for truth, he would prefer the latter. The true gain is always in the struggle, not the prize." 

The Currency of Likes

Funny thought came to mind. In general, it is human nature to hold likes with high currency. This is hard to deny given the state of society we live in. However, when giving them out ourselves, they seem to hold low currency and value. We are very liberal and generous. What message are we sending? Maybe we should hold them a little closer? 
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Anton Chekohv

​"Man will only become better when you can make him see what he is like."
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Emotion, Professionalism and Boundaries

In many professions, strict - or should I say thick - boundaries are strongly recommended if not required. Doctor - Patient, Teacher - Student, Employer - Employee to name a few. These are important, without question, though often with transactional relationships as a side effect. Joe Ehrmann in "Inside Out Coaching" speaks of the importance of transformational over transactional relationships, yet discourses lacking emotion promote the latter rather than the former. Here's a piece from David Brooks on putting relationship quality at the center of education.
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Curiosity in Schools...Or a Lack Thereof

More on schools...

"Schools are missing what really matters about learning: The desire to learn in the first place." - Susan Engel 
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The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene and 12 Rules for Life: An antidote to chaos by Jordan B. Peterson

These two are my most recent reads. Here are some of the most vivid excerpts that stood out to me.

The Laws of Human Nature

• ​It is ironic that the word narcissism has come to mean self-love, when it is in fact the case that the worst narcissists have no cohesive self to love, which is the source of their problem.
• Whenever you feel unusually certain and excited about a plan or idea, you must step back and gauge whether it is a viral group effect operating on you. Never relinquish your ability to doubt, reflect, and consider other options - your rationality as an individual is your only protection against the madness that can overcome a group.
• ​Tribalism has its roots in the deepest and most primitive parts of our nature, but it is now coupled with much greater technological prowess, which makes it all the more dangerous.
• Try to pay less attention to the applause as it grows louder.
• Reading a variety of books for entertainment, in rapid succession, leads to a diminishing sense of satisfaction with each book; our minds are overwhelmed and overstimulated; and we must reach for a new one right away. Reading one excellent book and absorbing ourselves in it has a relaxing and uplifting effect as we discover hidden riches within it.​
• The problem we face as social animals is not that we experience this (social) force, which occurs automatically, but that we are in denial of its existence. We become influenced by others without realizing it. Accustomed to unconsciously following what others say and do, we lose the ability to think for ourselves. When faced with critical decisions in life, we simply imitate what others have done or listen to people who parrot conventional wisdom.
• ​What drives much of our behaviour is to have control over circumstances.
• Fifty years ago, many arguments were rooted in psychoanalysis and sociology. Now, arguments revolve around genetics and the human brain…Sentences are shorter, designed to communicate information.

12 Rules for Life

• Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better.​
• Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal - an ambition, and a purpose - to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. But all such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to what might be considered a meta-goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves. The meta-goal could be ‘live in truth.’”
• When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in.
• ​An idea is more credible when it emerges as a consequence of investigations in different realms.
• Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering.
• ​You might consider judging your success across all the games you play. Imagine that you are very good at some, middling at others, and terrible at the remainder. Perhaps that’s how it should be. You might object; I should be winning at everything! But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing , and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?
• Violence, after all is no mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.
• ​To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.
• People can be so confused that their psyches will be ordered and their lives improved by the adoption of any reasonable orderly system or interpretation.
• ​Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself - and then there would be nothing worth living for.
• Assume ignorance before malevolence.
• What can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations.
• But if it is not thinking that can be relied upon in the direst of situations, what is left? Thought, after all, is the highest of human achievements, is it not? Perhaps not. Something supersedes thinking, despite its truly awesome power. When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations - in the depths - it’s noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.
• You must decide whether you want to be right or you want to have peace. You don’t get peace by being right. You just get to be right.
• Aim for Paradise, concentrate on today.
• Orient yourself properly. Then - and only then - concentrate on the day. Set your sights at the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and then focus pointedly and carefully on the concerns of each moment. Aim continually at Heaven while you work diligently on Earth. Attend fully to the future, in that manner, while attending fully to the present. Then you have the best chance of perfecting both.

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