Getting Unstuck
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 21, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, March 21st, 2011We don’t have the answer, but we do have the question. What are you afraid of?
Do you ever get stuck? I mean, stuck in a big way, not just solving a problem, but really STUCK? Well, what I’m about to say may not help. I’m kind of stuck right now myself, and in the process of figuring out how to get unstuck. But maybe you can learn something from my bumbling. My first piece of advice? Don’t search “how to get unstuck” on Google. There are thousands of web pages out there, eager for your traffic, most of which serve up a shallow article about how to get unstuck. But odds are, you will end up feeling more stuck as you find yourself overwhelmed with all those thought-provoking ideas about being stuck. I just spent about twenty minutes doing that, and then remembered that I have most of the knowledge and tools right inside me to figure this out. Which means you probably do too, because – although I like to think I am – I’m really not that unique. So let’s start with basics. Although one of the likely causes of “feeling stuck” is some form of depression, that is the extent to which we’re going to touch on it. If you think this is a possibility, by all means examine the possibility with a qualified professional, it’s a common problem, and nothing to be ashamed about. So as we dig in, a little warning: rather than laying claim to answers, we’re going to ask questions. The first is: are you stuck doing something, or not doing something? I have ingeniously created a situation that involves both. I say “ingeniously”, because being stuck in a dead-end job can be an unfortunate side-effect of “living responsibly”, but I’m self-employed! It’s all my own doing! I’m involved in several projects right now, and with a couple of them, I feel like I’m swimming through concrete, and others, I’ve been completely stalled. But this is an important question. Are you stuck in the sense of immobilized creatively? Are you stuck in a negative relationship? Stuck in a dead end job or stalled project? Are you just plain bored with your existence? The solutions to the first and last items mentioned can be fairly easy to fix. If you’re stuck creatively, the worst thing you can do in most cases is ponder the fact that you’re stuck creatively. That brings all your focus to the “left brain”, a guaranteed brick wall for creativity. My worst experience with this recently was sitting down with a group of business people that were trying to name a new venture. They decided to meet at one person’s house, and “brainstorm”. After two hours, this group of people – not really “creative types” in the first place – had nothing but a large collective headache to show for their efforts. And a few really dumb names. The surest way to kill creativity is say “Okay! Now let’s be creative!” and then not hand out some fingerpaints or something. You’re putting the rational brain to work on an irrational problem. Even if you have to use weird tools like Roger Von Oech’s Creative Whack Pack
10 Essential Items To Survive The Coming Apocalypse
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on March 15, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, March 15th, 2011With the end of days clearly upon us, we thought it was time to finally assemble that survival kit. And since we’re afraid to leave the house, we thought we’d see if we could order it all on Amazon
  Amazon doesn’t sell REAL machine guns, but you can at least ANNOY THE HELL out of enemy invaders with this realistic BB gun replica . |
These are strange and troubling times. Global economic collapse, which was only prevented (or just delayed) by the nationalization of banks and industry. Border skirmishes in Korea. Continued war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Riots and revolution in the Mideast, massive civilian protests in Wisconsin. Earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan, where tsunamis and nuclear reactor meltdowns were added for extra apocalyptic horror. And in the most telling sign of all, America elects a black man as president. Who could ignore these obvious signs of the coming Armageddon? Well, not us; we started talking about preparations for the econopocalypse back in 2008 and have revisited the theme regularly since then. But with the official end of the world less than 650 days away, we thought maybe it’s time to take a more serious look at finally assembling those essential tools for surviving the apocalypse. We’re so frightened by recent events ourselves that we’re afraid to leave the office, so we decided to see if a person could secure all the supplies they need on Amazon. Aside from automatic weapons, water tanker, and razor wire, we think we did pretty well. See below.
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Assimilated By Facebook – Is Resistance Futile?
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on February 24, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Thursday, February 24th, 2011I would have never discovered the disturbing similarities between Facebook and the Borg if I hadn’t tried to escape “the collective”.
Have you been assimilated yet? You may not have even noticed it happening. Do you have shadowy memories of a previous life in which you didn’t check Facebook every morning when you woke up? When you didn’t think in status posts, putting yourself in the second person to construct clever phrases like “John or Jane Doe is [insert comment-baiting one-liner]? When you didn’t feel vulnerable and afraid when the hive mind was not humming around you sharing their thoughts in a constant stream intermingled with your own? My little joking analogy here isn’t so far off base. We’ve asked before if the internet is actually a giant flesh-eating robot, but we think it may be worse. Facebook may actually be controlled by the Borg. If you’re a normal human, with your life firmly rooted in the real world, you will have no idea what I’m talking about. But if you’re a person who spends a fair amount of time on the web, you have almost certainly at some point found yourself – and perhaps still are – spending an awful lot of time interacting with Facebook. Early on, we would wonder to ourselves: “am I weird? Am I the only person who feels like some kind of Facebook addict? Personally, when I validated this feeling with my friends who pondered the same question, it only made me feel like they were weird too; it didn’t provide much comfort. But the results are in, so we can stop second-guessing ourselves. Yes, it’s a problem. We now know that a third of women 18-34 check Facebook when they first wake up, even before they go to the bathroom . We know that serious addiction sites label it a problem, as do PhD Psychologists. As far as I’m concerned, this is a moot point. What concerns me is the fact that Facebook bears such a disturbing resemblance to the Borg, and there may be NO WAY to escape the collective. Recently I thought I’d at least give Facebook a rest, but still found myself unconsciously logging on, to find that nothing new of interest awaited me – the same banal stream of commentary, the same pleas to support liberal or conservative causes from my friends. And nobody commenting on my crap. That’s the killer. When the little red number is low, and only indicates comments on other people’s stuff. How depressing. So why the hell was I reflexively logging in for more letdowns? Probably because I’m a Faceborg Drone, that’s why. I thought to myself “Wow, I think I’m going to have to actually de-activate my account for a few days, and go back when I feel more rational about the whole thing“. But no-OO-oo. Facebook tried to scare me with images of the fellow drones I’d be abandoning, and actually wouldn’t LET me de-activate unless I assigned another person (who is on Facebook) to manage a couple of apps or pages connected to my account. DIRTY TRICK, Facebook. But I expect nothing less from what I now know is an alien collective that intends to “add my biological and technological distinctiveness to its own“. Below are examples of how Facebook is like the Borg, and how hard they make it to escape the hive. More soon, I have to go share this piece on Facebook now. Read the rest of this entry »
A Perfectionist’s Guide To Enjoying Imperfection
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on January 23, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, January 23rd, 2011Trying to do things perfectly is easy. The hard part can be accepting that you won’t.
 No wonder he did so many sketches. He was in the perpetual planning stage that plagues perfectionists. |
Can you guess who said “I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have”? It was Leonardo da Vinci. Can you imagine? What a miserably unhappy fellow he must have been. And a perfect example of one of the pitfalls of being a perfectionist. We often think of a perfectionist as someone who meticulously demands that everything around them be “just so”, imposing their will on others. But I speak from firsthand experience when I say that more commonly, perfectionism manifests itself as a self-defeating, sometime paralyzing life approach that leads to procrastination, disappointment, and an ongoing, low-key dissatisfaction with life in general. I personally didn’t realize that I had this problem until a few years ago. It was brought to my attention in an unexpected way; I had quit drinking, because although I wasn’t having more obvious, “dramatic” problems with alcohol, I recognized that it was significantly diminishing my quality of life. It was a long-time struggling alcoholic that mentioned it. It was a simple, but shocking revelation for me. Prior to that point, I knew that I tended to be extremely organized, a little particular about fine points, and punctual. That sort of thing. But what had never occurred to me was how many things I hadn’t done in life, because unconsciously, I felt I wouldn’t excel at them. On the other hand, I’ve done very daring things in a mediocre way, like skydiving and hang gliding. With hindsight I realize that I secretly thought that things like this somehow made up for all the other things I hadn’t done. Because who can question your willingness to do things when you can inject that kind of experience into a conversation? If you’re not sure if you’re a perfectionist, maybe you you should take this test provided by Discovery Health. If, like me, you get annoyed with the obviousness of the test questions and quit after the first page, you probably have a problem with perfectionism. There are hundreds of articles on perfectionism out there, but one of the more concise summaries I found just now was this one on the University of Texas web site. It defines a lot of the key characteristics and the problems they create in a simple, summarized format. So assuming you’re deciding that maybe you have a problem with perfectionism, how do you fix it? My asking that question is kind of a joke; that’s probably one of the first things you have to get used to. Life is not a state, or a series of states, it’s a process. If you even pause and say “Damn, I think I have a problem with perfectionism”, you’ve begun to fix it. And you may never actually “fix” it. That’s the real secret. Part of dealing with self-defeating perfectionism is simple acceptance of who you are. And accepting that you’re not perfect, may never be, and probably you’re the only one who expects you to be. This piece on Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong.com takes a rather in-depth look at the problem, and offers a ton of ideas for working on it. But I have three simple suggestions below. You’ll be surprised that not only will you like you more when you learn to let go of some of your negative perfectionist traits, but other people will too. Life’s too short to mope about lamenting its imperfections. Learn to enjoy its consistently successful chaos. Read the rest of this entry »
Do Lottos Really Benefit Education?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 19, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, December 19th, 2010Or are they just a “tax on the stupid”, as they’re often cynically referred to?
 Having trouble picking your numbers? There’s an app for that. |
A couple of things got me thinking recently about the concept of legalized state lottos that operate with the public assumption that they fund education. The first was that I fell into a rather amusing obsessive-compulsive trap a little over a year ago. My mother – bless her soul, she passed away this year – suggested we pick a few lotto numbers and play them regularly. It was a little moment of fun once a week, checking to see if we were multimillionaires, and we even had a couple of $150.00 winners. But now I’m left with a sick compulsion – and I’ve talked to a few other people that do the same – to keep playing the numbers, because I’m DEAD POSITIVE that the day that I don’t play is the day that the numbers will be the multimillion dollar winners. I mean I’ve “invested” around three hundred dollars in that year and a half, so I’m at about break-even, right? No harm going on, correct? And so goes the thinking of a potential gambling addict. The other thing that got me pondering these state lottos was observing the demographic that seems to support the system. I’m doing work on location with a client who owns several lotto/liquor stores, and couldn’t help noticing that the vast majority of lotto customers seemed to be lower income, and non-white. This is obviously a local and anecdotal observation, and as you might imagine, there are very few large-scale scientific surveys to reference. However, surveys like this one from Georgia (2.6MB PDF) and this one from Texas (221KB PDF) make it clear that although the percentage of each racial demographic that has at some time played is almost the same, the high-frequency players who spend the largest percentage of their income are in fact black, in the lowest income bracket, and have the lowest “educational attainment”, in this case a high school degree or less. Well, perhaps the government knowingly supporting the gambling fixations of the hardworking poor is acceptable. In a free market economy, it’s “buyer beware”, right? Besides, it’s all for a good cause. We’re supporting education, remember? Well, not so much, as it turns out. This Illinois School Board brochure (180KB PDF) points out that lotto revenue provides less than .03% of total funding for schools in Illinois, and as this NBC News affiliate article points out, many states take money away from education to match the lotto revenue. And in the case of Michigan, which boasts in press releases about the efficiency of their lotto commission, the former governor shuffled $208 million of the school money into the general budget to reduce the state’s deficit figures this past fall. Well, at least once in awhile some poor cuss will win and live the good life right? Well, someone has to win, but one of the commonly used examples of how absurdly unlikely that it will be you is that if you spent a million dollars a year on tickets, it would be 146 years before you’d be sure to win. And when people do win, it often doesn’t turn out so well.
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