Thinks I find along the way
I think this is one of the greatest music videos [simple, impactful] of one of the greatest love songs ever [from two of my favorite artists, as well]. That’s a lot of greatest!
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Chances are, if you’ve been tuned in to the stations already playing Christmas music, you’ve heard at least one song about the plight of people in Africa, but SAIH, and organization of students and academics from the country wanted to make a point with this surprising satire on a sensitive subject:
“Imagine if every person in Africa saw the ‘Africa for Norway’ video and this was the only information they ever got about Norway. What would they think about Norway?,” said a statement from the group. “If we say Africa, what do you think about? Hunger, poverty, crime or AIDS? No wonder, because in fundraising campaigns and media that’s mainly what you hear about.”
It is an intriguing approach, that’s for sure, so sit back and watch as the tragedy befalling Norway unfolds:
via Africa to Norway: Paying back the favor in satire – Holy Kaw!.
I’m not a big Mary J. Blige fan, but this song is a good reminder that you don’t have to play a role in other people’s dramas if you don’t want to…
As a bonus, here’s the other music video of hers [along with U2] that I really like…
I frequently curate ‘pattern interrupts’ like the one above from Karen Salmansohn at notsalmon.com and I love her mind and her images. Did you know she is also a beautiful thinker? Here’s proof…
You can get there by making small changes daily. After all, it’s easier to be a saint for 15 minutes, than to be a saint for 2 hours. Right? Of course! I’m personally a big fan of small daily changes – which means I’m a big fan of “Kaizen” – which is a Japanese word which pithily summed up means: “doing small changes over time which create huge life changes.”
With all this in mind, I want you to do a Kaizen Experiment. For the next month commit to devoting a tiny 15 minutes a day to a new improved habit- and tweak your way to a happier life. The good news: You can always find an extra 15 minutes in your day!
More good news: Brain researchers Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang believe if you can train yourself to stay disciplined for a mere 15 minutes a day doing a specific task – eventually – over time – you will become a more disciplined person in general – and be able to do a habit for far longer than 15 minutes!
The Brain Research Cliff Notes: Aamodt and Wang have discovered that a human brain‘s overall willpower capacity increases like a muscle every time a human practices even a little bit of willpower — for even 15 minutes — because the human is literally strengthening their brain‘s neural pathways.
Meaning? If you want a toosh of steel, exercise your toosh muscles a little daily! If you want a discipline of steel, exercise your discipline muscles a little daily. On an amusing note: Aamodt and Wang mention in their report how increasing “a human’s overall willpower muscle” can begin with something as simple as disciplining yourself to brush your teeth for two weeks with your non-dominant hand.
Well, instead of having you brush your teeth differently, I want you to brush up on doing “that thing” you know you need to brush up on! For example: Yoga stretches. Jumping rope. Organizing closets. Meditating. Gratitude journaling. Staying in closer loving touch with friends/family. Reading that NYTimes Best Selling book. Reading that cute picture book to your child at bedtime. Writing that book you want to write. Writing that business plan. Looking into a family vacation. Creating a vision board (then happily staring at your vision board) etc…
Basically, sometimes the idea of doing something new to change your life can feel so overwhelming – that you wind up choosing not to do anything at all. However, if you commit to doing a tiny 15 minute habit a day – moving one tiny 15 minute step forward a day – you will happily discover changing your life is not as overwhelming as you‘d thought.Start today. Right now. Start to do “that thing” you know you gotta do – for just a mere 15 minutes of doing. No excuses. You can find 15 minutes. I promise you that if you can do this 15 minute habit tweak daily for the month, over time you’ll want to do this habit more and more – and over time you’ll find yourself smiling more and more – because both your discipline and your happiness will increase substantially.
By the way, I believe thereʼs a secondary reason why discipline for changing your life increases when doing small 15 minute habit changes over time. Youʼre creating what I call “identity shifting.” Basically, when you start doing a new disciplined live-improving 15 minute action, your identity begins to shift to see yourself as a disciplined life-improving person.
Your subconscious starts to say: “The old me did not used to have discipline. But lo and behold, now this new me does! I be da boss of my cerebrum, baby!” Thereʼs even a famed psychological theory called “Cognitive Dissonance” which explains this identity shift. The Cliff Notes On “Cognitive Dissonance”: We humans donʼt like to have a disparity between our thoughts and our actions — so when we change our actions, we change our thoughts to match them.
For example: If Human A starts to do a loving action for Human B — through Cognitive Dissonance — Human Aʼs brain will start to tell them “Geez, I must surely like Human B if Iʼm now doing a loving action for them!” As a result, according to studies on cognitive dissonance, Human A will wind up liking Human B a wee bit more.
Likewise: If you force yourself to do positive, disciplined actions, then your brain — via the perks of Cognitive Dissonance — will start to tell you, “Geez, I must be a positive, disciplined person if I am doing positive, disciplined actions.” Eventually you will wind up being a wee bit more positive and disciplined!
Source: Want to see HUGE CHANGE in your life? – Karen Salmansohn
I hope Karen doesn’t mind that I shared her post in its entirety on my blog. You can find her site by following the link and she has books full of pattern interrupts and other great thinking available on Amazon.com:
If you like By the way, for those of you keeping score at home this is post number 5,000 on this blog…
Found this on Michael Hyatt’s blog:
When I’m riding, I have a habit of looking over my shoulder to see if anyone else is coming and also to take a second look at something I just passed. At one point yesterday, traveling twenty mph, I executed my habitual over-the-shoulder look to re-see a beautiful lilac bush.
Turning my gaze forward, I realized I was off balance, heading from the paved path and into the forest where certain death awaited! (Cue dramatic music). A quick correction and I was back on track and not in the hospital.” Full story at: How to Lead a More Balanced Life | Michael Hyatt.
If you love the blues like I do, then I think you’ll enjoy this article about BB King that popped up in Google Reader from an unlikely source: a Brit who traveled to Mississippi to see him play in his hometown:
The fat red sun settles itself against the horizon, throwing a last, honey-sweet light through humid evening and over a small crowd on the lawn beside a railroad track that cuts through the cotton fields beyond. A quarter-moon rises and a chorus of cicadas serenades imminent twilight, now conjoined by the sound of the band; the drummer catches the backbeat and the compere announces: “How about an Indianola hometown welcome for the one-and-only King of the Blues: BB KING!”
And on he comes, to applause from people who know him well and claim him as their own – the last of the blues masters a few weeks short of his 87th birthday. “Nice evening, isn’t it?” he says, and introduces his nephew on sax. Some of his 15 children (all by different mothers) and innumerable grandchildren are in the audience, though one of his daughters died recently of diabetes, as had BB’s mother – a poignant riptide beneath the occasion. “I guess you can look at me,” he says from the stage, “and tell I’m the old man. My name is BB King.” Full story at: BB King at 87: the last of the great bluesmen | Music | The Observer.
I’m so thankful I got to hear him live in Green Bay at the Oneida Casino back in May. Treat yourself to his top 10 songs on Spotify while you read the article…
Time for a music break…
I like Britney Spears music. Or at least ‘vintage’ BS — raw and uncut…
Guy Kawasaki has this right:
There are a few folks out there who are about to feel really old. Forty years ago today, back in the groovy era that was the seventies, John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” album was released, which pushed the folk singer into the Top 10 for the first time in his career.
Though he lacks the edge of the artists who are usually celebrated from the time, hipsters should appreciate the flannel shirt and puffy vest and Muppet fans can’t help but hold a special place in their hearts for such a good friend of Kermit.” via 40 years of getting’ high with John Denver – Holy Kaw!.
That means I was 14 years old when this album came out and I played it constantly. I had to go to Spotify and take a trip down John Denver lane. OMG! I may even have to tune my guitar!
Hmmm. Miss Piggy hasn’t changed a bit. I wonder what her secret is?
:-D
Here’s one of my favorite songs off that album; didn’t get a lot of airplay but…
Leo Babauta writes:
One of the hazards of our modern lifestyle is our tendency to become more and more addicted to staring at screens, and more and more sedentary.
We look at laptops and desktop computers, iPhones and Androids and iPads and iPods, TVs and movie screens, play video games, watch videos, surf the web, socialize online, work online. And we’re sitting the whole time.
I’m a victim of this as much as anyone else. My family and I are drifting toward this lifestyle, and while I’m no Luddite, I do believe that we should live less as victims and more consciously.
Too much screen time means less active time, less personal socializing, less focus on the present, less time for cooking healthy food, less time reading novels, painting, making music, making time for the ones you love. And too much sitting means fewer years on your life.
So what’s a better way?
Limits.
Limit how much screen time you have each day. Limit your sitting to short periods with breaks in between.
I realize that many people have jobs that require them to have a minimum amount of computer time, and probably mostly sitting. So I don’t recommend a certain number, only that you figure out a limit and work with that.
What I’ve Been Doing
Though I’ve set limits for myself in the past, I’ll admit that they’ve eroded in recent months, so that my screen time has grown over time. And not just for me — for my wife and kids. So recently Eva and I set limits for ourselves, and we’ve been working with them.
We find them to be great. I find daily limits to be a better balance than going on week-long or month-long digital sabbaticals, which aren’t realistic for many people.
Here’s an example:
- We set a limit of either 4 or 5 hours of total screen time a day. (We haven’t figured out what’s best yet, still experimenting.)
- That total is broken into 30-minute chunks. So if it’s 5 hours total, that’s 10 chunks of 30 minutes.
- At the start of a 30-minute chunk, I set a computer timer and put a tally mark on a text document, so I know how many chunks I’ve used today. When the bell rings, I close my laptop.
- After the 30-minute chunk, I take a break of at least 30 minutes. I try to get up and move, stretch, play with the kids, get outside. I also often read a novel. The moving is good for my body, and helps me to think.
- If I have things I want to look up online, or write online, I’ll just make a note of it and do it when I start my next 30-minute chunk.
This isn’t the only way to do it — you’ll have to find the limit that works for you, and the chunk size that works for you. But the idea is to set limits, and to break the total up into pieces so you’ll take breaks and do other things.
Benefits of the Limits
We’ve loved it: we’re reading more books, spending more personal time with each other and the kids, getting more chores done, exercising more, playing outside more.
It also means that because we have a limit, we have to figure out the best way to use that time. We have to make choices — what’s worthy of our limited time, and what isn’t? This means more conscious use of our time.
We haven’t instituted the limits with the kids yet, though we have been talking to them about it and getting them thinking about what would work best for them. And we do tell them to take breaks from devices throughout the day, so they’ll do other things.
For the kids, this has meant they have more unstructured, imaginative play, more reading, more art and music, more activity. Kids get addicted to screens just as much as adults do, and it’s not a healthy thing for them. We’re trying to teach them ways to live a healthy lifestyle, which is a lesson with lifelong benefits.
We’ve found this lifestyle to be healthier, better for relationships, better for our peace of mind. And to me, that means it’s something work keeping.
More reading:
Abe&Tell ‘s music video created by Orrin Hastings was shot with over 500 girls holding an iPad displaying one frame clip of the film. It’s pretty awesome.
For me? Sorry, ‘mano, but it would be Latinos who would be in charge of the music! What about you? Cartoon of the night. For more: http://nyr.kr/LLmyi3 via Cartoon of the night. For more: http://nyr.kr/LLmyi3.
The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts via Remembering Andy Griffith: ‘America’s favorite sheriff’.
If you ever feel like losing a little faith in your fellow humans, then take a swing through the comment section of pretty much any video on YouTube.
Barely Political takes a crack at the culture of YouTube in a video that imagines what a day staffing the complaint department desk might look like.
A little fun with YouTube. via The YouTube complaints department .
I was born in Calw in the Black Forest on July 2, 1877. My father, a Baltic German, came from Estonia; my mother was the daughter of a Swabian and a French Swiss. My father’s father was a doctor, my mother’s father a missionary and Indologist. My father, too, had been a missionary in India for a short while, and my mother had spent several years of her youth in India and had done missionary work there.My childhood in Calw was interrupted by several years of living in Basle (1880-86). My family had been composed of different nationalities; to this was now added the experience of growing up among two different peoples, in two countries with their different dialects.
I spent most of my school years in boarding schools in Wuerttemberg and some time in the theological seminary of the monastery at Maulbronn. I was a good learner, good at Latin though only fair at Greek, but I was not a very manageable boy, and it was only with difficulty that I fitted into the framework of a pietist education that aimed at subduing and breaking the individual personality. From the age of twelve I wanted to be a poet, and since there was no normal or official road, I had a hard time deciding what to do after leaving school. I left the seminary and grammar school, became an apprentice to a mechanic, and at the age of nineteen I worked in book and antique shops in Tübingen and Basle. Late in 1899 a tiny volume of my poems appeared in print, followed by other small publications that remained equally unnoticed, until in 1904 the novel Peter Camenzind, written in Basle and set in Switzerland, had a quick success. I gave up selling books, married a woman from Basle, the mother of my sons, and moved to the country. At that time a rural life, far from the cities and civilization, was my aim. Since then I have always lived in the country, first, until 1912, in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, later near Bern, and finally in Montagnola near Lugano, where I am still living.
Soon after I settled in Switzerland in 1912, the First World War broke out, and each year brought me more and more into conflict with German nationalism; ever since my first shy protests against mass suggestion and violence I have been exposed to continuous attacks and floods of abusive letters from Germany. The hatred of the official Germany, culminating under Hitler, was compensated for by the following I won among the young generation that thought in international and pacifist terms, by the friendship of Romain Rolland, which lasted until his death, as well as by the sympathy of men who thought like me even in countries as remote as India and Japan. In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.
In 1923, I resigned German and acquired Swiss citizenship. After the dissolution of my first marriage I lived alone for many years, then I married again. Faithful friends have put a house in Montagnola at my disposal.
Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.
I survived the years of the Hitler regime and the Second World War through the eleven years of work that I spent on the Glasperlenspiel (1943) [Magister Ludi], a novel in two volumes. Since the completion of that long book, an eye disease and increasing sicknesses of old age have prevented me from engaging in larger projects.
Of the Western philosophers, I have been influenced most by Plato, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as well as the historian Jacob Burckhardt. But they did not influence me as much as Indian and, later, Chinese philosophy. I have always been on familiar and friendly terms with the fine arts, but my relationship to music has been more intimate and fruitful. It is found in most of my writings. My most characteristic books in my view are the poems (collected edition, Zürich, 1942), the stories Knulp (1915), Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Der Steppenwolf (1927) [Steppenwolf], Narziss und Goldmund. (1930), Die Morgenlandfahrt (1932) [The Journey to the East], and Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) [Magister Ludi]. The volume Gedenkblätter (1937, enlarged ed. 1962) [Reminiscences] contains a good many autobiographical things. My essays on political topics have recently been published in Zürich under the title Krieg und Frieden (1946) [War and Peace].
I ask you, gentlemen, to be contented with this very sketchy outline; the state of my health does not permit me to be more comprehensive.” via nobelprize.org
Happy birthday, Hermann! You made a profound impact on my life through your body of work…
And you thought the Port-a-John line at the music festival was long…
This mind-blowing shot was part of a blog post by Steve McCurry called “Simple Act of Waiting,” and shows what the Indian government estimated to be seventy million Hindus waiting to bathe in the Ganges at the Kumbh Mela Festival in 2001.
McCurry starts his piece with a quote we can all appreciate and which makes this photo all the more compelling:
“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.” Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns” via Waiting on an epic scale.
Chela Davison writes:
Sometimes you need to think positive…
…and sometimes you need to sit your ass down in a dark corner with melancholy music on and bawl your effing eyes out for like four days.
Sometimes you need to sort out what’s happening inside yourself before you speak or act…
…and sometimes you need to splay the mess out there, all risky like, and allow the next step, insight or direction to show itself through real relating.
Sometimes you need to push yourself to ship or launch…
…and sometimes you need to relax and surrender into just how terrified you feel and flounder about a little longer and maybe even have a chuckle about the absurdity of the human experience.
Sometimes you need to be gentle and loving with yourself and others…
…and sometimes everyone needs a good swift kick in the ass, because what are we all doing here if not evolving in some way?
Sometimes you need to solve incredibly complex problems that are limiting your growth…
…and sometimes you just need a good night sleep.” Get more here: Sometimes and Sometimes Not…Honouring Who You Are and What You Need.
There is a time to every purpose under heaven…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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