dropping balms

did I ask you to read this? did you come here because someone sent you?

I don’t pretend to understand

except when I do

there’s not an ounce of joy in these fingers

the stiffness sticks, waiting for movement moment

one thumb down, one thumb up

die

live

context-consciousness creating self-consciousness, as the soul waffles between speaking an utterance that will float away on the breeze and be lost to clouds… and articulating new Canon for The Book

if I write a book, it may out-live me

if I write a book, it may kill me a little

not the hours spent writing it, though they will surely be gone

but the artifact itself, static in a changing world

tens of thousands of copies—hundreds of thousands if I’m lucky

—of words attributable to me, uneditable

they’d better be good!

but, unless I go mad, they can’t be as good as my new understandings months or years or decades hence

and yet I saw a book get a new edition with so many additions its lost its life too

director’s cuts that preview to laughs

the author is dead

the work is alive

the work is not in the words, it’s in the dance

it’s in the remixes, not just the mashups that show up cited but in the tickling of axons and dendrites in each person who reads it

you know what I mean?

who cares if you know what I mean? why do they care?

I ask because I care: it seems to me that in the absence of some specific caring, we can’t even begin to answer the question of whether you know what I mean

the faucet, having sputtered at first, has begun to flow

and so I depart

Needles you can’t move with your hand

What do you want? Great, go get it. Tomorrow, maybe.

This is better advice for some things than others. To use a trivial example, say you’re part of a business that involves selling directly to clients. And your goal is to grow sales by X% this year. Well, you can’t reach out and directly move the dial on how much product the company has sold. What you can do is make more sales calls. Just remember: what ultimately matters isn’t the number of calls but the annual sales.

Lead & Lag measures

The 4 Disciplines of Execution (great pdf summary here) calls this distinction “lead measures” vs “lag measures”. Lead measures are the ones that you can influence directly, in the short term. They tend to be relatively “instrumental“—not things you want intrinsically, so much as things you want because they help you get things you do want intrinstically. The lead measures that you choose for a given situation represent a belief you have about the best way to influence the lag measure. For the most part, you’d happily choose a different lead measure if you thought that’s what could get you closer to the goal.

Briefly, some examples that follow this pattern:

    • # of pushups done is a lead measure… max # of pushups you can do is a lag measure
    • caloric intake or other dietary numbers are lead measures… your weight / health is usually relatively laggy
    • hours studied is a lead measure… grades are a lag measure
    • number of people messaged on okcupid is a lead measure… actually getting dates or a relationship is a lag measure

» read the rest of this entry »

Eating Frogs or Playing Vicious Rock-Paper-Scissors

My blog post titles have been getting weirder and weirder. This one’ll make sense by the end, I swear.

At recommendation by Kenzi at the Center for Applied Rationality, I’ve been reading the book Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy right now, which is based around the following premises:

“You will never be caught up.”
“There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.”

However, this only works if you actually have the focusing ability to turn [intending to do the most important thing] into not just doing it but finishing it. And you need to be able to trust yourself to do that. This post explores a particular kind of failure mode that occurs if you don’t have that kind of trust.

The titular frogs refer to » read the rest of this entry »

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