We can only absorb and actively work with so much knowledge. Sometimes I seriously wonder about what choices people make about what knowledge to absorb.
Category: 99 entries
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Entry #12 – Deep
Welcome to Friday. Today happens to be an exciting Friday. It happens to be a day I took off work to engage in writing and do a little cleaning up around the house. During part of my morning, I spent some time thinking about the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport (2016). Getting time to focus in and really work deeply is increasingly challenging. The number of things that beep, alert, and draw attention are forever increasing despite our best efforts to reasonably silence and control the ones around us.
That made me think about my top 3 favorite business books at the moment. It was pretty easy to figure that one out and it only required a couple seconds to type them up on the screen here.
- Deep Work by Cal Newport (2016)
- Measure what Matters by John Doerr (2017)
- Executing Your Strategy: How to Break it Down and Get it Done by Mark Morgan, Raymond E. Levitt, and William Alexander Malek (2007)
To me the Executing Your Strategy book is full of timeless pearls of wisdom and should be read by every student before graduating college. Seriously, that advice might be offered for free, but that does not mean it is not valuable.
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I went down the guitar effects rabbit hole today on the web and YouTube.
- Orange OR15H 15-watt Tube Head
- Orange PPC212 V 120-watt 2×12″ Cabinet – Orange
- EarthQuaker Devices Palisades
- EarthQuaker Devices Sea Machine
- Walrus Audio Deep Six
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Entry #11 – Deciding
Today I organized my collection of Crane & Co. note sheets and note cards. Earlier this year I started to look for a nice stationary box. Currently, I am still using an old Sony VAIO neoprene laptop case to store all my stationary equipment. However, I have yet again managed to lose my address book. That small address book as been in my possession for over 10 years. It has been lost a number of times. This time it seems to be lost a little more than usual. It is probably sitting underneath something. That is typically what happens. I end up sitting it under something or it gets knocked behind something.
I’m going to need to engage in some deciding. Some direction has to be taken here shortly to drive all of my attention and energy to building and creating something. Instead of just switching from thing to thing it is time to begin to be devoted to something. That might sound rather simplistic and it should be a rather easy thing to commit to doing, but it turns out it is much harder than expected.
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Entry #10 – Hot Sauce
Today was an exciting day in terms of hot sauce management. My collection of hot sauce has gotten out of control recently. Earlier today, during a trip to Target, I purchased a new container for my hot sauce collection. Right now 18 bottles of hot sauce are being stored in the garage fridge. A few of the older ones had to leave my collection. I’m going to need to eat hot sauce at least 2x a week to be able to start to reduce the number of bottles in my collection. That is important to help create enough room for new hot sauce additions. A few of them are on my short list of things I would like to try to see if they can make the vaunted top five list.
I started to write a short story:
“Elson entered the parking lot from the northeast side. A few people were milling around the parking lot that morning. They were in various states of getting, having, or finishing breakfast. It was that time of day. Things happened slowly for some and in highly entrenched patterns for others. Today was a day where a bagel was going to be a part of breakfast. That was about to happen.”
My goal for today is to try to plug that little bit of a short story into the GPT-2 model to see how the AI would continue my efforts.
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Entry #9 – Purpose
Grappling with the idea of finding a purpose is a fight worth having. Everyday I wonder about the nature of having multiple purposes or trying to strive toward one overarching big thing. That is really the difference between purpose and duty.
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Entry #8 – Opportunity
Perhaps a view exists that future problems are not really problems they are just opportunities for action. This creates a scenario where the present is more about driving things along to create opportunity than allowing anything to be final. That view does not really sit well with me or how I tend to approach things. Everything that comes into my view receives a healthy dose of skepticism based on an analysis including form, function, structure, and assumptions.
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Entry #7 – Questions
Earlier today/yesterday, I started looking at a few different options for buying a single Callaway 7 iron golf club. The new club designs are so expensive that it seemed like a good idea to just test one out to see how things would go. This aside has nothing to do with my plan to keep writing. Getting a new golf club is without a doubt a distraction from the act of writing. Sure getting out on the golf course is calming and can help build up the foundation of things that might well lead to a breakthrough. That is probably not a direct exchange of one thing for the other. In reality, it is more of a tradeoff.
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Entry #6 – Wondering
I cannot totally control where my mind will take me. This is a statement of pure truth. These words should ring true to you if you know the joy of creating words. No edge of a hollow promise should be anywhere in the knowledge that thoughts wonder and that is both frustrating and amazing. Creating something from the blank page brings forward a different feeling. It really is some combination of satisfaction and delight. For me it is probably best described as joy with a little something extra. Maybe joy+ is the right way to think about it.
Today started out with me taking a few notes using Google Keep to record either audio or simply as a notepad to write down a few things. Over the years, I have learned it is far better to seize the moment and capture what has been created than to hope it can be retained for later. It always seems that later comes and the original joy has been lost and the idea falters or fades away. Sometimes that idea never even bubbles back up to the surface it was here and then gone forever without any real determination of how much value it might have had.
You are welcome to read my words if you want. They are generally published in an open fashion online for anybody to take a gander if they so desire. Some of that action of publishing is about my desire to be a public intellectual and some of it is just how my thoughts get rounded out. They arrive and are worked on from keystroke to keystroke.
A flurry of activity happened on an eBay auction for my old DSLR camera the other day. Things went swimmingly with the 10 day auction and a number of people bid on the camera. However, the payment never arrived and I ended up walking down the murky road of second chance offers. Really it is just an exercise in hope that somebody might pay before the item has to be relisted and the entire process has to be started over again.
The spell was broken and this writing session is coming to an end. Something else caught my attention and I switched out of writing mode and into something else.
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Entry #5 – Tradeoffs
Always tradeoffs. We make choices. Some of those choices involve a tradeoff. Some of them do not involve a tradeoff. Others are just bannal marches along the daily path forward a repeat of the day before. Earlier today I started to wonder a little bit about just how to best setup a writing plan for the day. I started looking at the ASUS 14″ C434TA 2-in-1 Chromebook – Intel Core m3 – 1080p on the Costco website. Maybe it is still my best option or maybe the Pixelbook 2 (codename Atlas) will be amazing. It does seem to be enough to keep me using this Chromebook that is missing about five keys. Fortunately, none of them really stop me from typing and pushing things forward.
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Entry #4 – Reflecting
This entry was almost called thinking, but it very quickly became the one about reflecting. Every day I’m sitting down and thinking about what I’m going to produce at the start of the day and reflecting on what happened the day before. This is not at all a writing Scrum session it is more reflective than action oriented. The actions are compelled from the value they provide not from some type of burn down chart toward a major accomplishment. Sure that has a place and a time and it was not what happened within the journal I was reading. That was more or less about the struggle to produce. The struggle to create. Making something from nothing based on ideas plucked out of thought and placed on the page.
One of the elements of writing fiction is standing up a fictional world that becomes so real you can almost touch or taste it. At the end of my 99 entries, which should end up taking about 99 days to produce, I’m going to have a collection of 100 words. That may very well end up being the title of my eventual treatise, “100 Words: Engaged daily writing for 100 days.” That is where my thoughts are at the moment. It is a moment full of hope and promise. Something about hope stands on its own fueled by promise and optimism.
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