Hopes / Fears

[alibunao]

“Unlike traditional fantasies, Miyazaki doesn’t portray morality as a simple binary. The dichotomy of good versus evil isn’t present in his films. Everything and everyone displays elements of tenderness as well as elements of savagery. Nothing in the world is simply one or the other — it’s an amalgamation of all the elements within the spectrum. Miyazaki proposes a theme of morality that’s complex. It’s not shown to repress the negative aspects of humanity because they exist all around us, as part of nature. Brutality and tenderness coexist without any contradictions in his world as they do in our own. This realism avoids pandering to an audience to give an unflinching view of our own existence. The stories are never about the protagonists winning. It’s about the protagonists adapting and growing to a world that isn’t built around their needs.”

[nevver]

Tommi Parrish

[maeganramirez]

In the past, racially offensive jokes, remarks about your female colleague’s breasts or cracks about ‘spastics’ were considered a reasonable element of daily banter both in and outside the workplace. Now they are not. We have abandoned them for the same reason we no longer burn witches at the stake or stick orphaned children in the poorhouse. We have moved on. Values change, societies develop and their language and behavior evolve with them. That’s not political correctness but social and political progress. It is not imposed by liberal diktat but established by civic consensus. Those who are unwilling or unable to move on are welcome to their words and views. But like anyone else who engages in antisocial behavior, once they act on these impulses they must live with the consequences. Those who struggle with this are not so much living in the past as struggling to accept the present. For what they are really arguing for is the right both to be insensitive and for that insensitivity to go unchallenged. The first is their right–but, like all rights, it comes with both responsibilities and ramifications. The same freedom of speech that allows you to disparage large groups of people also allows those people to mobilize public opinion and legislation against you if you do so.

Gary Younge, Who Are We - And Should It Matter in the Twenty-First Century? (via sociologistbridget)

[aliveandfullofjoy]

Well, I’m deeply frustrated all the time. All my plays usually follow a two-year-period of deep frustration and not-writing and there’s usually an aha moment that surfaces gurgling from the pit of despair I’ve fallen into and unlocks the play for me after I’ve convinced myself that I will never write a play again. But I had an aha moment, I guess in my late 20s, when I stopped thinking about What Kind of Play I Wanted to Write and What Kind of Writer I Wanted to Be. I just gave up. I accepted the fact that I’m a little stupid. That I don’t know exactly what I want to say. That I don’t know what kind of theatre I want to make. That I don’t know how to classify it. I stopped thinking strategically. I stopped trying to prove to people that I was smart through my writing. I stopped trying to write stuff that I thought other people would like. And all that followed a long period of bad writing and deep, deep frustration with the fact that my talent couldn’t live up to my taste. I mean, it still doesn’t.

Annie Baker (via aliveandfullofjoy)

[webcomicname]

[andyroid1]

Takedowns and clever quips are easy, but empathy and persuasion are better

[andyroid1]

Get good at transitioning

Once we make the shift, then doing the work itself, consistently and over time, will make us proficient at the work.

Which means that the skill we really need to develop — and it is a skill — is transitioning.

It’s often not more complicated — that’s just the story your mind tells you to encourage procrastination. The principle — and the solution — is the same: Get good at moving from comfort to discomfort.

Let’s apply this to that thing you’re having a hard time getting started on:

Identify something important to you that you want to move ahead with but have had a hard time getting traction on.

Identify the transition point to working on it. Examples of transition points are: Pick up the phone and dial (for a conversation); sit in a chair and write the first word (for any kind of writing); ask a question and then stop talking (for receiving feedback).

Make the decision — set a time and place where you will get started (transition).

Prime your emotional courage. Starting something hard will bring up feelings of discomfort and you will need to be prepared to feel things — what I call emotional courage — to move through it without stopping. Are you willing to stay in that feeling long enough to get to the other side? That’s a critical skill — and it is a developable skill — for getting traction on anything. Some of the things you may feel in the transition: discomfort, fear (will this ever end?), sabotage (I should probably check email), and insecurity (I can’t do this).

Follow through without questioning. You can’t control the noise your thinking makes, but you can keep moving through it to do what you need to do.

Repeat this every day.

[andyroid1]

Juan Pablo MACHADO - "Rapunzel"

[andyroid1]

[andyroid1]

Bookmarked

[andyroid1]

The shining trophies on our shelves can never win tomorrow’s game.

George Moriarty

[andyroid1]

People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.

Start with the assumption that everyone is innocently out of touch and you’ll be more likely to explore what’s going on through multiple points of view, instead of cramming what’s going on into the framework of your own experiences. It’s hard to do. It’s uncomfortable when you do. But it’s the only way to get closer to figuring out why people behave like they do.

[andyroid1]

Ideas That Changed My Life

You spend years trying to learn new stuff but then look back and realize that maybe like 10 big ideas truly changed how you think and drive most of what you believe.

Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking. There is little correlation between climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation. That’s an extreme example, but everyone has views persuaded by identity over pure analysis. There’s four parts to this:

Tribes are everywhere: Countries, states, parties, companies, industries, departments, investment styles, economic philosophies, religions, families, schools, majors, credentials, Twitter communities.

People are drawn to tribes because there’s comfort in knowing others understand your background and goals.

Tribes reduce the ability to challenge ideas or diversify your views because no one wants to lose support of the tribe.

Tribes are as self-interested as people, encouraging ideas and narratives that promote their survival. But they’re exponentially more influential than any single person. So tribes are very effective at promoting views that aren’t analytical or rational, and people loyal to their tribes are very poor at realizing it.

[andyroid1]

Social capital is important. It leads to more opportunities and enables a person to gain soft skills like teamwork and grit. Families in the upper classes have been able to buy themselves out of the decline of social capital.

Forgot Who

[explore-blog]

That which one has set oneself to do, one should not relinquish on the grounds of absence of mind or distraction.

Leo Tolstoy, born 190 years ago today, on personal growth. (via explore-blog)

[andyroid1]

Have I posted Graham Norton’s Good Guest Guide before?

[andyroid1]

The real general finding is that inequality, being a way of making people feel more distant from one another, stretches the social fabric, it frays the social fabric. It pulls us apart from one another, physically, experientially, and psychologically. — Paul Piff | Psychologist, University of California

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with inequality. People have unequal endowments of intelligence, and beauty, and who your parents are. Where I start to worry as a sociologist is when people accumulate dynastic wealth. Dynastic wealth means a lot of money that gets transferred down through generations. That starts to stabilize in systems of inequality across society, and that constricts the opportunities available to everybody else. — Brooke Harrington | Sociologist, Copenhagen Business School

“These are very clear elements of an artificial world for which only an abstract amount of money counts. But not the quality of life locally, among the people, in the markets, in society.” — Hans-Jürgen Jakobs | Business Journalist.

In the context of modern investor capitalism, there’s been this massive shift of power from labor to investment. It’s called financialization. Now you can get rich from being a rentier capitalist — that is not from your work, not from the sweat of your brow, as they say, but from putting your money at the right place, at the right time, in the right things. — Brooke Harrington | Sociologist, Copenhagen Business School

Q: Many people would say, here are six well-to-do people sitting at the table and all they’re trying to do is increase their wealth. For many you are an economic bloat. What would you say to that?

A: Frankly, nothing because nobody ever asks me that. I think it’s pretty cheeky!