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Articles on Being Good, on Being Great
Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player Strategy #4: Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness. “Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an […]
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Work Habits at Apple – Ole Begemann
Melton: Oh, Christ! Yeah, exactly, I couldn’t do that. I had to do something right away. I said in the article that I wrote for The Loop magazine, when Steve asked you a question you didn’t ramble and whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. And if you didn’t know, you said that […]
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Defensive Pessimism
I often describe myself as an optimistic pessimist; I guess it’s really defensive pessimism at work. But still, I like the ring of optimistic pessimist better. When you plan for the worst, things will almost never go that badly—there’s no shortage of potential upside. What better source for optimism? And if things do go south […]
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How To Think
most people won’t tell teenage girls especially the together, articulate ones that they are lazy and the quality of their work is unacceptable. And sometimes kids need to hear that, or they have no reason to step up. via How To Think.
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness
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The Great Discontent: Merlin Mann
The fact is that most of us are wandering around, scared shitless, wondering what the fuck’s going to happen next. That’s as true when you’re 11 as it is when you’re in your 40s. It’s one reason that people feel very discouraged or disinclined to try new things—they feel like it’s not for them. I […]
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The 40-Year Slump
What has vanished over the past 40 years isn’t just Americans’ rising incomes. It’s their sense of control over their lives. The young college graduates working in jobs requiring no more than a high-school degree, the middle-aged unemployed who have permanently opted out of a labor market that has no place for them, the 45- […]
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The magic of Madison County | Iowa Now – The University of Iowa
With its friendly people, rolling scenery, and covered bridges etched with history, I can’t help but recommend a day trip to Winterset and Madison County. Not because you can get away from it all and experience life like it used to be in a simpler time as a lot of the marketing might suggest, but […]
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Money, Happiness and the New Science of Smarter Spending | New Republic
Experiences can have a much bigger impact on people’s happiness than things, and a big part of that happiness lies in looking forward to the experience that you are going to have. via Money, Happiness and the New Science of Smarter Spending | New Republic.
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Unwelcome tasks and burdens
…Town notables, as town autonomy vanished, found they had become subordinate implements of the imperial bureaucracy, and the life went out of their public functions, which grew every decade more disagreeable, more profitless and more oppressive. They had to be driven to their unwelcome tasks and burdens, which brought no real honor and gratified no […]