Yes, I'm aware that the article says 5 thinking tools, but I only wanted to focus on just one — the “Five Whys” technique.
The “Five Whys” is a technique you can use to find an answer or a root cause, to a problem, a question, a desire or a perceived need.
^ Note that this is not how Anne-Laure Le Cunff described it in her post, but this is my own take on how and when to use it.
Has there been something you really wanted or wanted to do, but could not explain why you wanted it? If your answer is yes, then this is the thinking tool for you.
Tuned in to learn more about the Wisephone, but stayed for the parenting advice and philosophical/theological discussions. Excellent podcast. Well worth the 2 hours run time.
If you are a parent of young kids and you are concerned about how distracted you are around them, then you will find a lot to relate to in this podcast.
Personal Publishing Principles — this is a great read for someone interested in creating/maintaining a personal website or a personal blog.
One good tip that was shared in that post is that a personal website/blog is the perfect place for you to experiment with your own ideas. Not everything will work out of course, but keep trying and some will.
This also tells me that if your personal website won't allow you to do that, then you probably have a professional website as opposed to a personal one.
One thing that is often mentioned in the book Hardwiring Happiness, is that we don’t linger on positive moments long enough to build neutral structures in our brains for it.
Something positive happens, we feel happy, then we move on. The moment, the feeling is gone in less than 10 seconds. We move past it just like that, almost like it never happened. Kind of a similar experience to scrolling the feed on Instagram, don't you think? You see a photo, you hit like, you move on.
Anyway, this got me thinking, if lingering on the moment can help with making ourselves happier overall, can journaling help with that?
Maybe one way for us to linger longer on that feeling of happiness, is to write it down on our journal. Every time something positive happens, we write it down on our journal. And since writing something down with pen and paper takes time, maybe that time is all we need to linger on the positive moment and let it positively affect our brains.
A good friend of mine once said, the mark of a good rock band, is being able to perform their songs in acoustic format and still sound good. Well, here are two bands with some great acoustic renditions of their rock songs.
First up is Shinedown with an acoustic version of “Atlas Falls”:
This was supposed to be a part of a bigger journal entry, but I found that I had more things to say on this topic, so it gets its own dedicated entry.
Blog Posts vs Notes on a Digital Garden
An interesting observation I've made is that I bookmark blog posts, but I do not bookmark notes from digital gardens.
Does this mean that blog posts provide more valuable information? Not necessarily, but they have their advantages from a reader's perspective.
I think it's just easier to settle on a blog post I want to read, than to pick notes to read from a huge digital garden. It kinda relates to the article I read about Overchoice. It is hard to make a choice, when there's too many choices to make. And that's usually the situation with notes on a digital garden. The chronological or reverse chronological order of blog posts, which is looked at as a bad thing nowadays, is what makes it easier for me to pick something to read.
To achieve a goal, you have to give up something in return. In most cases, this means giving up time allocated to doing something you like, and using that time to work towards your goal.
It was Blaise Pascal, back in the 17th century, who said “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Fast forward to today and I can't help but feel that this quote is applicable to online discussions nowadays.
I think one thing that contributes to toxic discussions and debates online, is that people cannot accept a difference in opinion anymore. It's like everyone has this need to correct someone else online, to tell them that they're wrong and that their beliefs are stupid. The better reaction is to take a deep breath, understand that you don't agree with what you've just read and just let it go.
There's so much more to life, than spending your precious time trying to tell someone else online that they're wrong. Every once in awhile, you have to be able to just let it go.
Would you look at that. I managed to crank out a second journal entry in less than a year. With how things were going, I was certain I would only be able to write one per year. It actually took me months to write this single post. I spent maybe 10 minutes every week or so, adding stuff to this post as I go about processing my daily notes. Every little bit adds up. Similar to how reading for only fifteen minutes a day helped me finish books, working on this bit by bit every month, while really slow, was still enough to get another entry done. Anyway, here goes.
“We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
Here we go again with an example of the same problem — distraction — but just in a different form back then.
There will always be distractions in life, especially when you’re working on something important. The question is, do you let yourself get distracted or do you get your work done?
Today I decided to prune the items on my to-read list. It was getting unwieldy. I hoped to reduce the number of items in there every week. Instead, it kept on growing and growing and growing.
Prior to the purge that happened today, I had over 140 items in that list. I was like, “Enough is enough.” There's no way I could have read through all those links, plus read my books, while I kept adding more items every week or so. I needed a better way to manage the items going into my to-read list. I also needed a better way to determine if an item deserved to stay in my to-read list.
So today, I decided to come up with some criteria to determine when to add items to my to-read list, as well as when to remove items off my to-read list. The criteria are based off this excellent read from Nat Eliason — most of which I've already extracted and listed in here. These then are the questions I came up with, that would serve as filters for my to-read list going forward:
Does this fall into a category I'm interested in?
Does this answer a question that's already been answered?
Does this answer a question I have right now?
Is this going to help with something I'm working on now or in the near future?
Does this help grow my philosophical knowledge or does it entertain me?