You’ve probably experienced flow: that sense of effortless engagement in what you’re doing. Maybe you get it when you’re coding or designing or writing or painting. Time and self disappears, channeled into the world making itself real.
Flow guru Csikszentmihalyi suggests you are likely to get into flow when:
You are engaged actively with the world. Surfing […]
What is mindfulness? Living in the present moment, keeping an open awareness, and maintaining a nonjudging stance. The more mindful you are, the less reactive and stressed you will be. The more mindful you are, the more you can experience the little and big joys your everyday life offers you.
David Allen’s GTD seeks mind like […]
An outbreak of A-list blogger ennui has struck Silicon Valley. Arrington and Scoble have caught it. Could be they’re just envious. But pro-blogging is tiring work. It can make you feel dull.
What if you’re suffering some malaise and it’s not just envy? Maybe you’ve been hit with the curse of expert ennui… you’ve seen it […]
I’m starting to think that I was a better technology blogger before anyone knew of me. I’m not saying I’m all that well-known now, although someone did once call me a “minor Internet celebrity”–a title I have milked to death with my husband–but I’m known enough to get pitches by email. And I’m starting to […]
What happens when you embrace chaos, welcoming it eagerly into your life? Here’s the inspiring Tara Hunt version (from her archives, scroll down to read it):
1. It will prepare you for anything….
2. It will prevent you from making assumptions….
3. It will reduce your stress levels….
4. It will open new doors….
5. It will allow you to […]
Do you want to be an expert at something? Expertise is important, but don’t spend too much time thinking about it. Focusing on getting better and better and constantly evaluating your work against some external standards, or worse, taking other people’s evaluations as objective truth, can slow or stop the creative process entirely. Some activities […]
From Ellen Langer’s On Becoming an Artist:
Mistakes, like all evaluations, are context-dependent. In one context a mistake is an error, while in another it can be a surprise advantage. Others have spoken to the dual nature of mistakes but typically in reference to grander events. We all have heard that “there is opportunity in chaos.” […]
I read Michael Goldhaber’s draft chapter on how attention works for his book on the economics of attention this morning. I have many thoughts after reading it, but no firm conclusions, so this post is of the thinking out loud type.
What’s the context? That clearly we need a post-industrial economics, something other than an economics […]
The power of blogging is not that it allows us to broadcast our voice and ideas to many people, but that it supports human scale interactions, dialogues between and among people that wouldn’t otherwise happen. This is what Jeneane Sessum has called M2Y, me to you, and it’s what ProBlogger Darren Rowse wrote about today […]
In planning the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam, I learn as much from detractors as I do from supporters. I’ve heard a few different arguments against the project. The one that I want to address here is the claim that the podcast jam creates an alternative, lesser conference.
Alternative: yes. Lesser: not necessarily. I think of it […]
