Because DreamingRight is not a big enough umbrella, I am starting a new blog, where eclectic bits of digital detritus will swim happily alongside poesy about chickens and photos of same.
Please help me name her.
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I have a graphic designer friend who was toying around with a logo for Dreaming Right. In the process of giving him feed back about his beautiful logo design, I realized something about my mission for this project:
I want readers to get clear, warm, and simple information about how to live better. I want them to feel that it is a friend…a kind of goofy, kind of nerdy, flawed but authentic friend is passing them advice that they can take or leave.
The nerdy part refers to my desire to be “literary”, to explain my reasoning, rather than to post links or lists. I guess you could say that I am a writing nerd. A fan-boy of the essay.
But another part of me is feeling frustration that all the tidbits of good information that flow over me are not being passed on. I take too much time tweaking my little essays, and with my current job, it seems like I only have the time, energy and attention span for one post a week.
Maybe I should write short posts. Maybe I should just post short synopses and links to useful life advice like Bruce Barber @ The Real-Life Survival Guide.
I want to share, but not indiscriminately.
I have been avoiding the short post and link-heavy content because of my literary pretensions, but also because I feel like the bite-sized chunks of information might be doing something detrimental to us. The internet may be changing our brains.
As Nicholas Carr says in an article in last summer’s The Atlantic:
…the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
His essay, which took all of my concentration to read even though it was totally interesting and well written, was about how our brains might be losing something that those of us who once read deeply and patiently recognize as valuable.
Nevertheless, short posts are more efficient…and more likely to be read.
Below is a video of a guy who is, by no means, a waggish shag-eared malignancy.
My mom told me about this article in January’s Wired. It would make me jealous if I didn’t have love in my heart for talented people.
Mr. Hardwick is not a haughty dog-hearted clot pole who stole my idea. Instead, he is a talented, and if his article is accurate, chaotically productive, gentleman. He had no idea that his combination of subject matter and humor was exactly what I aiming for when brainstorming this blog. How would he know that one of the original subtitles of Dreaming Right was “Misadventures withThe 4-hour Workweek?
I am not at all upset that the title of his article, “Diary of a Self-Help Dropout: Flirting with the 4-hour Workweek” combines erudition with a dash of self-depreciation, even though I write that way as well.
His joke about “mini-retirement” being eerily similar to a “vacation” does not at all suck. Nor does it make me less enthusiastic about finishing my article about Timothy Ferriss’s book, even if much of it, including the “hook,” is about his made-up terminology and now the idea seems a little flat and used.
Kudos to a freedom-loving humorist who is not anything like a thieving eye-offending canker-blossom.
And thank you, Mom, for referring me to this article, which in no way contributes to my feelings of inadequacy as a writer and creator of original ideas.
everybody loves GTD, the creative process, what it's like to be me
Dream: build a website that is content rich, elegant, helpful, and filled with good writing on topics that I am passionate about.
I got into mind maps a couple years ago. I started out by reading The Mind Map Book by Tony Buzan, the slightly annoying man who attempted to trademark the word “Mind Map” and is often given credit as being the inventor. Despite being annoyed by the constant capitalization (of the letters and on the idea) of Mind Map, I found the book to be incredibly useful. I followed advice which suggested that I adhere to a particular set of “Mind Map Laws” until I had made 100 maps. I’ve drawn about 300 or so, written an article about them and given several workshops on the topic.
“Mind map” can mean a lot of things, Read more…
honoring distraction, information dieting, mind maps, the creative process, useful technology, what it's like to be me
Note: this post, and any other post in the “30 day nephalist” category, has been moved from from an earlier blog that documented an important experiment – not drinking for 30 days.
It’s been a while since my last post.
The exact measurement of a “while” – 11 days.
What has happened? A whole hell of a lot. Or should I say, a whole “helloween” of a lot.
Because Halloween happened. It was an amazing time and I didn’t think about drinking for more than a few seconds. There were two dance parties happening in my house, and I was a clown. I’ve been talking about what a great party it was to anyone who will listen.
Costumes are amazing things. When I think back to the first time I felt like I was my own person, with my own identity, it is tied up with what I wore (plaids and army boots). When I decided to go to my first college, I chose Bard College because I liked the way the people there dressed. Read more…
30 day nephalist, overcoming addictions, what it's like to be me
