I know a little about alot and alot about a lil!

1/3 of women have an abortion by age 45. @Stupak-Pitts

Zen Habits blog

Zen HabitsSimple Productivity The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Something

Find your passion, and then pour yourself into it. “Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.” - Albert Einstein

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter. Very often you’ll see blog posts or books teaching you to “master” a skill in only 10 days, or 3 days … in fact, it used to be 30 days but the time frame to master something seems to be shrinking rapidly.

I’ve even seen tutorials claiming to teach a skill in just a few hours. Pretty soon we’ll be demanding to know how to do something in seconds.

Instant mastery of skills and knowledge! Hey presto!

Unfortunately, the reality is something a little less magical. Or maybe that’s a fortunate thing.

There’s only one way to become good at something:

1. First, you must learn it by reading or listening to others who know how to do it, but most especially by doing.
2. Then do some more. At this point, you’ll start to understand it, but you’ll suck. This stage could take months.
3. Do some more. After a couple of years, you’ll get good at it.
4. Do some more. If you learn from mistakes, and aren’t afraid to make mistakes in the first place, you’ll go from good to great.

It takes anywhere from 6-10 years to get great at something, depending on how often and how much you do it. Some estimate that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but I think it varies from person to person and depends on the skill and other factors.

Want to be a great writer? It’s possible to be great within a few years, if you have the God-given talent of Fitzgerald or Shakespeare, but most of us toil for over a decade and are still trying to get better. We’re still learning, to this day, and if we look back on our first few years of writing — of any kind — we’ll tell you we sucked (for the most part) back then.

Want to be a great blogger? Same deal. I’ve been doing it for almost three years, and I’m still only competent. Gruber’s been doing it for, like, 7 years and he’s still only … well, he’s pretty great by now. You have to do it, make mistakes, learn, really begin to understand it, and someday, if you stick with it, you’ll be great.

There’s no one who is great at his profession who hasn’t been doing it for at least 6 years — no designer, no programmer, no carpenter, no architect, no surgeon, no teacher, no musician, no artist … you get the point. I dare you to name one. Most have been doing it for over a decade, and are still looking to improve.

It takes desire, it takes drive, it takes lots and lots of doing.

So here’s the thing: don’t get discouraged if you’re just starting out. Have fun, like we all did in the beginning. If you have fun, you’ll learn to love it, and THAT’S when it clicks. When you love something, you’ll want to do it all the time, sometimes late at night and often, you’ll jump out of bed and want to do it before you move your morning bowels.

THAT’S how you get great. By loving it so much your morning bowel movement takes second seat.

“Everybody has talent, it’s just a matter of moving around until you’ve discovered what it is.” - George Lucas

Find that desire. Do it, don’t just read about it. Don’t buy a single product or book or magazine that claims to teach you something in minutes, hours, days. They’re lying to your face, with a hand in your pocket at the same time.

Do it, keep doing it, then keep doing it some more. It’s the only way to get great, but the good news: anyone can do it. It just takes some time and some doing. Hey presto.

When the world says, “Give up,” Hope whispers, “Try it one more time.” ~Author Unknown

—

On mnmlist: The sweet science of less mail & Simplicity is the path, not just the destination

Wiki goin down?

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. That popular aphorism never seemed truer than today when reading The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of Wikipedia’s declining volunteer base. Despite countless articles extolling the virtues and seeming omnipotence of “community” over the past several years, the technology industry seems to be settling back into old habits: Command and control. It’s not that the “wisdom of crowds” idea hasn’t influenced the way technology is developed, or how news and information are gathered and distributed. It has. It’s just that the promised sea change has proved to be far less disruptive than we expected. Take Wikipedia. As the Journal calls out, volunteerism has declined as the ease of contribution has waned. The easy topics are taken. Rules for upping the quality have proliferated. Wikipedia is becoming…corporate. Nick Carr has been pointing this out for years, but it’s only now becoming self-evident. Wikipedia has grown up and, in so doing, is looking more and more like the encyclopedic world it sought to displace. Nor is it alone. Open-source business models increasingly look like proprietary software models, as the Software Freedom Law Center’s Bradley Kuhn suggests. Even uber successful open-source communities like Joomla have discovered that reliance on volunteers falls short of what a few good paid developers can do. That’s a positive discovery by Joomla. A more worrisome discovery is that Mozilla remains far too dependent on Google to fund development of Firefox. Mozilla has lots of community, right? Yes. As Mozilla CEO John Lilly has said, 40 percent of Firefox’s code comes from developers not employed by the foundation. But that still leaves 60 percent, and virtually all of the core development work, that relies on “company,” not “community,” which is how much of the world’s best open-source software is developed: funded by IBM and other “community” members. For those who think “community” is a euphemism for “everyone else doing my work for me,” think again. It just doesn’t work that way. Of course, companies can go to the opposite extreme, too. Apple, for one, gets beat up for a heavy-handed approach to its App Store approval process. Apple, in other words, doesn’t seem to care one iota what “the community” thinks. But then, this is the same App Store with more than 100,000 applications and 2 billion downloads to date. No wonder Apple isn’t apologizing: it’s clearly benefiting most people most of the time, or the application developers would take their complaints to a different platform. But they haven’t, and this calls out the problem with deifying “community.” It’s accepted wisdom that one shouldn’t “anger the community,” as if it’s some unknown god that demands the occasional virgin to be thrown into the volcano. But the truth is, “community” is not really much different from the “customers” and “partners” the industry has sought to satisfy for decades. So, yes, by all means seek to work with your community of users and partners, but don’t expect “the community” to do your work for you. Guess what? “The community” already has a day job, and can’t afford to work full-time for you unless you pay it. All of which leaves us largely where we started. The most successful software companies don’t rely on some vague “community” to build their products. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Google (Android, anyone?), and even, increasingly, Red Hat (JBoss, KVM, etc.) build great software based on their own, internal plans and expertise and “the community” buys it (or resells/embeds/etc. it). The big shift, however, has been in the transparency of the feedback loop, which has been a welcome change in the industry. So, to the extent that “community” simply implies a more open way of developing and distributing software, then, yes, it has been significant.-cnet

the power of the mind

The year was 1978. It seemed like an innocent late November day – thirty-one degrees and misting – and the unthinkable happened to my family. Our car skidded off an overpass and tumbled down a steep embankment. As a thirteen year-old boy, I opened my eyes three and a half days later to the news that my father and sister were dead and I was permanently paralyzed for the chest down.

After waking from the coma, then twelve months of hospitals and rehab, I left my childhood behind and began a new life. The doctors led me to ignore my lower body, to focus only on what was left. I would become a powerful upper torso and willfully drag my paralyzed body through life. For twelve years, I did this. I graduated from high school, from college, and even from graduate school – but something was missing. It was my body. I was a fun-loving, athletic little boy who loved hanging up-side down and climbing trees. Being a floating upper torso wasn’t enough. I needed to find my body again; I needed to reconnect with that thirteen year-old boy. I started yoga at age twenty-five and I have been practicing ever since. Not only have I found more of my body than I ever dreamed possible, I am now in a position to help countless others heal in unexpected ways. I have had a hard life – the car accident was only the beginning…but everyone has a hard life, everyone has losses.

In the thirty years since, I have become an author, yoga teacher, and founder of a non-profit. I wrote Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence (Rodale: 2006) not to tell a story of overcoming disability, but rather to bring the reader intimately inside the importance of the mind-body relationship. I want readers to connect with that innocent thirteen year-old boy. I want them to connect with their own innocence and begin their own journey of transformation.

Through a page-turning story, Waking helps people realize the vital importance that their mind-body relationship plays in their lives. Everyone is leaving his or her body – everyone is aging. The lifelong journey of that thirteen-year-old boy to find new life within his paralysis becomes an archetype for everyone’s journey. Through yoga he wakes to subtler levels of sensation within his mind-body relationship. He realizes that the sensation of his paralysis is not an obstacle to overcome, but a teacher of what it means to experience the hum of life without direct control over it. He wakes to a new kind of freedom, a different kind of hope.

My work with yoga, paralysis and disability has led to practical insights about how to live in our bodies. I believe that mind-body integration is not just a personal health strategy. I believe it is a movement of consciousness that can change the world. I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without also becoming more compassionate. When we fully inhabit our bodies, we are more intimately connected to the world around us. We treat it differently, more gently, and with greater wonder and awe. We all have an inner capacity for survival, grace, acceptance and healing. Believe me; healing is possible, even when curing is not.

We are creatures who love stories. We have been trading stories around the campfire for millions of years. It is stories that shift consciousness, that inspire us to action. This is how it has always been. This is how it will always be. I offer my personal story of waking because we need stories of transformation – now more than ever. My hope is to inspire readers to explore their own stories, their own lives, and thereby help transform the world.(http://www.dailygood.org)

Right on!

the Hipster- the bane of my existence

I’m sipping a scummy pint of cloudy beer in the back of a trendy dive bar turned nightclub in the heart of the city’s heroin district. In front of me stand a gang of hippiesh grunge-punk types, who crowd around each other and collectively scoff at the smoking laws by sneaking puffs of “fuck-you,” reveling in their perceived rebellion as the haggard, staggering staff look on without the slightest concern.

The “DJ” is keystroking a selection of MP3s off his MacBook, making a mix that sounds like he took a hatchet to a collection of yesteryear billboard hits, from DMX to Dolly Parton, but mashed up with a jittery techno backbeat.

“So… this is a hipster party?” I ask the girl sitting next to me. She’s wearing big dangling earrings, an American Apparel V-neck tee, non-prescription eyeglasses and an inappropriately warm wool coat.

“Yeah, just look around you, 99 percent of the people here are total hipsters!”

“Are you a hipster?”

“Fuck no,” she says, laughing back the last of her glass before she hops off to the dance floor.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

—somehow I came accross this article twice in like 3 months, weird

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html