Regarding True Strength
March 4th, 2013
A lot of notable people have made very public statements about how having great failures is a necessary part of learning: whether it's in business, or the creative arts, or whatever else, they all frame it as a noble rite of passage. What they often fail to mention or if they do, explain to any degree, is that it is often very, very painful. Painful emotionally, and spiritually, and sometimes economically, and very often even physically.
Failure is a necessary rite of passage to any kind of extraordinary success. Period. And I think it is as important to talk about failures as learning experiences as it is to talk about successes which can serve as examples of the Possible.
A great deal of the stress and pain and[...]
What is Signal?
March 1st, 2013
In a recent interview I was asked what I mean when I say "Everything Is Signal." I replied that for the last few years, I had begun each New Year on January One with the maxim, "Less Noise, More Signal," by which I meant that I wanted more of what I communicated to others, and more of what I drew in of what others tried to convey to me to be more and more meaningful. I wanted more of my life to be Signal, and less of it to be mere Noise.
Our lives, and the time of which they are comprised, is precious, and many of us spend a great deal of that time engaged in fairly meaningless things. That isn't a terrible thing — sometimes you need those breaks of comfort food that's bad for you and really awful television that mi[...]
Regarding Reverse Competition
February 27th, 2013
Lately in queries and interviews, and particularly within a small group of responses to Drawing Out The Dragons, I've been seeing a great deal of Reverse Competition invoked. Everyone knows about the parables of the lobsters in the bucket, clawing to pull each other down, or the tall poppies in the field being cut down when they grow taller than the rest of the field as examples of how some people will try to pull people down because they worry that others may outshine them. Reverse Competition is the opposite: it's trying to prevent people from being motivated to try for excellence not because they think those people will achieve it, but precisely because they don't.
I wrote a variation on this theme a couple of we[...]
