Derek's Blog

Is the difference between 0 and 1.  It's not some incremental improvement. It's crossing a chasm--going from nothing to something.  Over the past couple weeks I've brought this blog back online after unpublishing all of it several years ago. This entailed going through dozens of old posts.  I deleted all the haiku. Most of them were trash; all of them were a lazy way to fulfill my self-imposed one-post-a-day quota. Several longer posts were unproductive rants from a hurt, angry young man. These were deleted as well.  However, the majority of the non-haiku posts were (in my opinion) worthwhile, positive insights that I still believe today.  The problem? Aside from writing brief blog posts, I did nothing to execute on these valuable sentiments. There was a (shallow) understanding with no action.  Don't let 6 years go by (and it really does fly). Start doing things that are in accord with your highest values. Today .  The do more tomorrow. And the next da...

Last night I finished reading this book .  Daniel Pink's central argument in it, which I agree with, is that happy humans are not primarily motivated by profit. Rather, we're driven by these 3 internal, intangibles:  Autonomy "Without sovereignty over our time, it's nearly impossible to have autonomy over our lives."  Humans have an innate urge to control what they do, and especially how they do tasks.  None of us dream of being a compliant cog in someone else's machine.  Mastery One needs about 10,000 hours (about 10 years) of deliberate practice. This entails frequently being in a state of flow , a euphoric experience where the practitioner loses herself inside the activity.  According to Pink, mastery has 3 components: It requires a (growth) mindset, some pain, and is never wholly achievable.  Purpose Purpose gives our lives meaning. Contributing to something greater than ourselves--leaving a legacy--makes it all seem worth it.  What would be t...

Every day we get 24 hours. No more, no less. It's a rare universal, and equalizer. If you're lucky you have a great deal of autonomy over how you spend most or all of the 24. Even if you don't, chances are most days you control at least half this time. (And yes, sleep takes up about 1/3 of our day; it's the preparatory sharpening of the axe that makes everything run smoother.)  Regardless of how many hours you direct your actions, every single waking second you own how you approach the day. You have complete sovereignty over your attitude, responses, and thoughts--and nothing else.  Are you going to waste this 24 worried about the previous one? Or some 24 that happened hundreds--or even thousands --of days ago? Maybe you'll spend this precious time on worrying about a horrific imagined future?  I've done all of the above--far too often. Trust me: There's no profit in it. For you or anyone else. All we have is the Now. This 24 and how we approach everything t...