Day: January 25, 2008

Certainty kills

Disaster is not set up by inexperience but by experience.

When you *know* things and those things are untrue, they are far more dangerous than if you believe you don’t know. Certainty kills. There’s always hidden characteristics, newly input energy about which you are unaware. If you think you don’t know, you remain agile and open. You improvise your way through ground you believe familiar, but on your toes, ready for the unexpected. Knowing breeds inattention. So while large scale collapse is virtually certain, your involvement in that collapse is not. The butterfly effect tells us that small inputs can create powerful effects. One moments attention could be all it takes to remove you from a catastrophe.

Be Here Now

Seems like simple advice. It’s something I discussed with my wife just before the birth of Noah. The context was a discussion about whether to purchase a video camera. Our decision was based on my feeling that you can either concentrate on collecting excellent footage to be assembled into some masterpiece of cinema or enjoying the moment and not caring that it wasn’t preserved for an eternity, or until the disk crashed, format changed, etc. Other’s might be better at pulling this off, but I didn’t want to split my attention. I wanted my focus to be on the delight and wonder of watching my child grow, not on whether something was exposed correctly, in focus, enough disk space of tape etc. etc.

It also works for all relationships and work.

Simple but powerful. Be of the moment. Be here now.

The last interaction

The last interaction: Forever, my only memory of the job is going to be the mess. Forever, the only thing I’ll talk about is the mess. The last interaction, in my experience, is responsible for virtually all of the word of mouth you’re going to get, positive or negative. [Yet it doesn’t color my impression of how an interaction went. Interesting that it so greatly influences what we talk about.]
Source: Seth’s Blog