Work ethic. The value in labor is not that it’s hard. The combination of our minds and our might, our values and our ideals, is what raises labor from simply effort expended, to purposes transcendent.

What people don’t realize is that if you’re buried in your email inbox instead of doing your most important work, you are just as distracted as if you went on Facebook or Instagram or whatever. Anything that is not what you planned to do is by definition a distraction.

~ Seliria from, https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/stop-trying-to-make-hard-work-easy

Distraction and business are available everywhere and at all times. Fortunately, there are always other choices too.

Curiosity

If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. […] Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure.

~ Nick Cave

Just listening

It’s easy to get lost in the moment when another is speaking. So many things can spring to mind as our thoughts race to keep up with, and perhaps even to get ahead of, the speaker’s thinking. It seems so clearly truly that in order to have any chance to affect this other person, we have to get to the part where I get to start talking… But truly, step one is always to first be able to listen.

There is good reason to believe that high-quality listening can constructively influence a person’s attitudes about controversial issues. My previous work on listening suggests that when speakers experience high-quality listening, their attitudes often become less extreme and less prejudiced. Attitudes can also become more complex.

~ Guy Itzchakov from, https://psyche.co/ideas/why-listening-well-can-make-disagreements-less-damaging

Simply listening—good, active listening—can have a real effect on the speaker.

Mind

Mind unemployed is mind unenjoyed.

~ Bovee

If you can hold them

A while back I found this large essay about questions. I’ve been reading it repeatedly and found a number of interesting points (which will go on to become seeds for posts to Open + Curious.)

And questions are a tool you can use for that, as long as you’re able to hold them without immediately asking them (which shifts your focus onto answers). Leave the question in your mind as a thing to be figured out by your mind’s further interactions with the world.

~ Malcolm Ocean from, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/10/questions-are-not-just-for-asking/

It struck me that the sense of wonder that I sometimes experience in a conversation may actually be exactly the same sense of wonder from childhood. Everything is possibility. Everywhere there is opportunity for learning. Everyone brings perspectives. All of which invites further interactions.

Wanting

The minute you stop wanting something you get it.

~ Andy Warhol

Incredible

The linked post is an Apple-specific, nerdy deep dive related to technical details in recording. In the specifics it’s about people ripping on Apple for certain claims about something being “shot on iPhone.”

I much prefer the other way of looking at this same rig, which is that it is incredible that this entire professional workflow is being funneled through a tiny sensor on basically the same telephone I have in my pocket right now.

~ Nick Heer from, https://pxlnv.com/linklog/let-loose-lenses/

Heer is so spot-on here. Hear! Hear! I love this sentiment. When I take a moment to mentally zoom out, I’m knocked out by the incomprehensibly-advanced super-computers which are now everywhere. If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

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