in fine whack

So, "in fine whack" is the opposite of "out of whack." Just not by much.

[briansweis]

I decided 2020 is a good time to shut down extraneous activities and online services. This Tumblr page was focused on my life as a technical writer. And, as of February of 2019, I was no longer employed as such. Also, I rarely took the time to interact over here. I’ll be focusing more on my other social media accounts. You can find my interfaith ministry postings on Twitter (@yourmythiclife), Instagram (@yourmythiclife), and Facebook (facebook.com/YourMythicLife), And, I’ll occasionally post about comics and 80s music over at Bookended by Cats.

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Can 10 Minutes of Meditation Make You More Creative?

Google, Goldman Sachs, and Medtronic have all introduced mindfulness practices.

Post includes links to resources and research on meditation.

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Mindfulness is crucial to your well-being *and* your success. And you can use this author's tips regardless of your specific vocation or (non)spirituality: “How lawyers can be more mindful and embrace their spirituality“ by James Gray Robinson  (Image credit: Shutterstock.com)

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Blair Singer defines four leader levels based on how they motivate other people. If I'm honest with myself, I'm at 2 working toward 3. Where are you in this scale from 1 to 4? (Image credit: LoveTheWind | Getty Images)

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John Rampton advises: "Don’t Fall Into the Urgency Trap: How to Prioritize Your Work."

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Amédée Guillemin (7/5/1826–1/2/1893) understood that he needed elegant and tangible ways to help people grasp the abstract mathematics of the fundamental laws of nature. He did so by finding artists whose renderings were captivating for the eye and stimulating for the brain. And, my oh my, did he succeed in making physics beautiful in his 1868 textbook.

This is an amazing achievement in science communication (and a fine example of technical communication as well). 

Read more at Brain Pickings: https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/08/20/amedee-guillemin-le-monde-physique/

Image: Light distribution on soap bubble from Le monde physique. Available as a print.

[briansweis]

"Not asking for help" definitely deserves to be first in this list of biggest time wasters. 

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The anti-CEO's playbook, according to Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya's Ted Talk:

1) The principle goal of large businesses should not be to maximize shareholder value. Ulukaya instead seeks to maximize employee value, and distributed shares of the company to all 2000 of his employees.

2) Collaborate with communities and seek to help them. Don't seek incentives and tax breaks from local governments.

3) The CEO reports to the consumer, and the consumer is the ultimate boss. In fact, Ulukaya's personal number was on every cup of Chobani for the first several years of the brand's life.

Read the whole piece, and get a link to Ulukaya's TED Talk, at Inc.

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‘There’s probably not one age at which you’re peak on most things, much less all of them.’ —Neuroscientist Joshua Hartshorne 

WSJ Saturday Essay: It’s Never Too Late to Start a Brilliant Career

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If "thorough preparation makes its own luck," maybe that preparation starts with your state of mind.  

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Dr Helen Klus explains Why Society Needs Science Fiction. “[W]e’ll be better prepared to deal with [time travel, teleportation, genetic engineering of humans, meeting aliens, intelligent robots, etc.] and other potential dilemmas, if we have already thought about them."

Image credit: Albert Robida/Public domain.

[briansweis]

Adam Grant breaks down Time Management vs Attention Management. (Spoiler: Time Management loses).

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/smarter-living/productivity-isnt-about-time-management-its-about-attention-management.html

[briansweis]

"You can be anything you’re good at — as long as they’re hiring.” ~Chris Rock

As I recently remarked that I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up, I found this article by organizational psychologist Adam Grant rather interesting. (And the Chris Rock quote was a bonus).

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Here is Medium's collection of interviews with writers about how they paid the bills while they wrote.

I got the link from NYT's Thursday Briefing email in which Concepción de León, a staff writer for the NYT Books section, recommends this collection, saying: “Reading about the jobs these writers worked — librarian, paramedic, apartment building superintendent — lifts the veil on the labor that made possible our favorite stories, aside from the labor of writing them.”

https://medium.com/s/day-job?te=1&nl=morning-briefing&emc=edit_NN_p_20190404§ion=whatElse

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Cool tech: Engineers have built an asteroid exploring spacecraft that uses steam as propulsion, and mines ice to fuel itself! https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/steampunk-rocket-engineers-design-a-steam-powered-asteroid-spacecraft

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The Psychological Trap of Freelancing

The time-is-money mind-set is hard to escape.

My employment experience has been strictly in full-time corporate positions. So, if you’re a freelancer, how accurate is Charlotte Cowles' article in relation to your feelings about time and money?

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The cubicle: A requiem for inside-the-box thinking

“The predecessor to the cubicle is the carrel. If you’ve ever ground out the hours at a library, you’re part of a tradition of study in a tiny cube that goes back to the Benedictine monks of Westminster Abbey.“ ~Quartz Obsession