Things I Learned In 2013

With the close of the year, here is a not nearly complete list of the things I learned this past year:

• If you decide to do something, you can do anything. All you need is to get past that comma.

• The first part of your life is spent finding out who you want to be. The second part of your life is spent finding out who you really are.

• You do not discover the future. You create it with the actions you take today.

• The fanciness of your process only reveals your resistance to the dirtiness of the work.

• If you find yourself unusually productive in one area of life, ask yourself what tasks you are avoiding in the others.

• "Work, without love, is slavery." — Mother Teresa

• The secret to making kids that travel well is to start them traveling young and keep them doing so.

• Schlag is a Viennese term for homemade whipped cream that is seeing a certain renaissance as of late (in order to differentiate it from the canned stuff).

• We don’t buy things, we buy into things.

• One should strive to use all things until their usefulness is no more.

• I’m not sure I will ever be as emotionally fulfilled by digital technology as I am by a good pen and a nice blank page of paper. Nor will it hold, for me, the same feeling of possibility.

• Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem like a solution to a particular problem but cause so many new problems it is effectively useless.

• So much of modern tech is beginning to feel like Chindōgu to me.

• Sometimes, you have to come up with the completely crazy idea that could never work to get to the slightly less crazy one that will.

• It’s worse than we could ever imagine.

• One of the most dangerous ideas in a free society is one in which we believe that rights are granted, not guaranteed.

• Fight fear, with facts.

• “Fear is just excitement without breath.” –Fritz Perls

• Most of what we call truth is merely consensus.

• Unlike other trees whose roots are deep and thick, California Coastal Redwoods, some of the tallest of trees, are thin and wide. They stand tall by binding their roots with others near and far.

• The first approximation of others is ourselves.

• How much better “how to” posts/sites would be if they led with “what for”.

• "Why?" would be good as well.

• The GORUCK Challenge taught me more about myself in 13 hours than I learned this entire year. Especially the first item in this post.