Category: Productivity & Work

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Life & Philosophy Productivity & Work

More time is better than more money

Time is the most valuable asset we have, yet we often fritter away the minutes using money.

Instead of walking up the mountain, we pay to take the lift. Instead of using the local train, we hop in a more expensive cab ride. Such convenience circumvents the lived experience.

The most memorable experiences are the ones that stem the pace and allow us to notice the minutiae: the smells, the way people move, communicate, and dress. Ceasing the fight with time, life generates novelty.

Travel, while requiring the funds to do so, is nonetheless a priceless activity. Writes Kevin Kelly in his piece More time is better than more money, living in the present opens a secret vault.

“Here is what I learned from 40 years of traveling: Of the two modes, it is far better to have more time than money.

When you have abundant time you can get closer to core of a place. You can hang around and see what really happens. You can meet a wider variety of people. You can slow down until the hour that the secret vault is opened. You have enough time to learn some new words, to understand what the real prices are, to wait out the weather, to get to that place that takes a week in a jeep.”

Kevin Kelly

No one is doubting that money makes one’s life easier. But we can either like and enviable Instagram photo or try to live it.

Money cheats time by replacing experiences with immediate gratification. The challenges along the way are the richest experiences in disguise. “So if you have a choice,” Kelley writes, “travel with more time than money. You’ll be richer.”

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Creativity Productivity & Work

Keep them guessing

They say write to be understood. But what’s the point in spelling it all out?

Said author William Faulkner in an interview with the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?

FAULKNER

Read it four times.

Write to be misunderstood?

It doesn’t hurt to make an arcane reference here and there to keep the reader guessing. Obscurity is luminosity.

Said author Jonathan Franzen in lunch with the Financial Times:

“I think you have to have a few things that you have to kind of chew on to get.”

When you first listen to a new Radiohead song, something about it sounds off. But after a few listens, the sounds in between appear and ameliorate Thom Yorke‘s mystical voice. Nothing makes sense, but the emotional tug works, the same way laughter doesn’t need thought.

It shouldn’t be the author or musician’s goal to demystify everything. The maker is often still figuring it out himself, recasting their own interpretation.

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Arts Life & Philosophy Productivity & Work Tech

Brian Eno: ‘Try not to get a job’

What would the world look like if everyone was guaranteed a basic income?

For musician Brian Eno, that society would put a lot more emphasis on time well spent.

“Try not to get a job. Try to leave yourself in a position where you do the things you want to do with your time and where you take maximum advantage of wherever your possibilities are.”

Brian Eno

Of course, not everyone can afford to remain jobless; the harsh reality is that work pays the bills and keeps us alive. But as more jobs get outsourced to robots and artificial intelligence, humans will need new ways to think about their responsibility.

What will we do when there’s no work to be done?

Work defines who we are. It forms the nucleus of our identity. However, a jobless world may encourage more innovative thinking about ourselves and our role in a secular, globalized world.  Perhaps it’ll compel some people to pursue more passionate work, the type of vocations that choose them instead of the other way around.

In such a world, we’ll be makers instead of cogs, thinkers instead of algorithmic lemmings. Writes Oliver Burkeman in The Antidote: “There is a positive correlation between the fear of death and the sense of unlived life.”

To work on something we actually enjoy is to live.

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Books Productivity & Work

Henry Miller on why we create

“I reached out for something to attach myself to—and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for—myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself. I realized that I had never had the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live.”

Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
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Books Productivity & Work Writing

Steve Hely: ‘Writing a novel is a pain in the ass’

Writing a novel — actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs — is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

Steve Hely, How I Became a Famous Novelist
Categories
Life & Philosophy Productivity & Work

The plasticity of consciousness

Knowledge helps one toggle the symbiosis of order and disorder.

Free to fool around, the mind treads confidently in its concrete plan. But the soul refuses to pay the price for rigidity — the head and the heart remain adaptable.

Never too invested to quit, pledged to keep pushing in one direction, we proceed with a tranquil approach to progress.