“Don’t think. You already know what you have to do, and you know how to do it. What’s stopping you?”

– Tim S. Grover, Relentless

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“I recall Bruce telling me that after learning different styles or techniques, all the techniques that you learned would remain in the back of your head, so when you face the opponent, do not think, or anticipate what the opponent is going to do. You cannot think since you do not know what your opponent is going to do. You must empty your mind and adapt to the situation. With this, one must decrease what one has learned (hacking away the nonessentials), keeping only what is useful and mastering it… So, the key is you do not move first… but if the opponent does attack, you automatically counter it without thinking about which counter to use. It hits all by itself.”

Peter Chin, The Last Disciple: My Memoirs With Bruce Lee

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If you’ve prepared enough you don’t need to worry.

Just need to call ‘Action!’ and then you begin.

Thinking too much can result in inertia

There is intelligence in movement

I am moving on from this post…

See you tomorrow.

Don’t it always seem to go 
That you don’t know what you’ve got 
Till it’s gone 
They paved paradise 
And put up a parking lot

– Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

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“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Herbert Simon, ‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’ in Martin Greenberger (ed.) Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (1971)

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Our minds are paved with the designs of others:

Social media

Influencers

Podcasters

Politicians

Intellectuals

Algorithms

How do we know what we think anymore?

Our minds are the parking lots of other people’s information.

Let’s protect the paradise of our minds.

Be a conservationist of the wilderness of our thoughts.

“I do much of my taxes myself and … writing a book like my memoirs, I would do let’s say 3 hours working on my tax returns and then write 3 hours and it comes with ease, because it’s my life that I’ve carried in me and with me all the time of my life, so I write let’s say 15 pages in one go.”

– Werner Herzog on The Adam Buxton Podcast, ep. 218

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“It’s my life, it’s now or never
I ain’t gonna live forever
I just want to live while I’m alive”

– Bon Jovi, It’s My Life

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I’ve wanted to write for as long as I can remember.

Uncertainty and fear kept me back.

Now I write every day.

I love writing.

I am new to it.

I am of course in the honeymoon period.

But I feel like Werner.

I have been carrying around my ideas all my life.

I have been writing and erasing in my mind.

My mind was an Etch A Sketch.

Shake and it goes blank.

Nothing saved.

Now I have a great thirst to record my mind.

To make permanent here the passing thoughts.

It’s now or never.

I saw the planet
I met the Stones

If you’re invited, stupid not to go

– Dinosaur Jr, I Met the Stones

__________

“I say “yes” to most opportunities or new ideas. I toss them in and see what happens.”

– Dan John, Can You Go?

__________

I struggle with this one

Saying yes is harder than it seems

Saying yes is like asking for help

Yes, I want to learn more

Yes, can you teach me

Yes, I need and want connection.

Yes, that would make me happy

No is so much easier

No means sticking to the familiar

Avoiding the risk of a new challenge

By avoiding the yes, you automatically say no.

So have I been saying no all my life?

I need help so I will say yes.

Any invitations?

“Everyone knows more than you, but only you know what you want.”

– Ed Zwick, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions

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“To find out what one really wants, and what it costs, and how to pay what it costs, is an important part of everyone’s life work. But it is not easy to find out what we like or want, when all our lives other people have been hard at work trying not just to make us do what they want, but to make us think that we want to do it.”

– John Holt, Never Too Late

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It’s easy to live by other’s wants

But what do I want? That’s the hardest question.

It’s a lifelong quest.

There is no holy grail.

What we want can change all the time.

It’s often elusive.

It’s the combination of millions of things:

Life experience

Books

Friends

Family

Work

Play

Failures

Successes

Unsnaswered questions

It can feel intimidating saying “I want this”.

I feel confident enough right now to say:

I want to write on this blog.

I want my writing to find an audience.

Beyond that I don’t really know what I want to do with my life.

As long as I don’t stop asking myself the question, I’ll be OK.

“I would come in armed only with curiosity and my own natural ignorance. I was learning the value of bringing my ignorance to the surface… Ignorance was my ally as long as it was backed up by curiosity. Ignorance without curiosity is not so good, but with curiosity it was the clear water through which I could see the coins at the bottom of the fountain.”

– Alan Alda, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating

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“Ignorance coupled with curiosity is where all new knowledge starts. Ignorance, used properly, is our secret weapon.”

– Dave Trott, The Power of Ignorance

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We don’t know mostly everything.

Our individual knowledge is insignificant.

But what is not quantifiable is curiosity.

There’s no limit to the questions we can ask.

They don’t need to be levelled at anyone.

A question is not about what comes out of our mouths.

A question is what moves us inside.

What do we need to know?

What can’t we ignore?

If we stop and say “I know”, then we prevent ourselves from finding out.

Finding out what?

Everything that is not in our heads.

Which is to say, everything.

“Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing. When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.”

– Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

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“Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking or intuitive process. Because definitions are a product of rigid reasoning, quality can never be rigidly defined. But everyone knows what it is.”

– Robert Pirsig, On Quality: an Inquiry Into Excellence

__________

Art and quality are two words for the same thing that cannot be defined.

We could say the energy of creation.

Others may call it flow.

Aliveness?

Euphoria?

Giddiness?

Joy?

Satisfaction?

What is the word that resonates with you?

It doesn’t have to be the same as me, but we could perhaps agree on the same sensation.

We know it when we are doing it

“This one goes out to the one I love
This one goes out to the one I’ve left behind
A simple prop to occupy my time
This one goes out to the one I love”

– REM, The One I Love

_____________________________________________

“One love! One heart!
Let’s get together and feel alright”

– Bob Marley and the Wailers, One Love

———————————————————-

In the pursuit of other’s shoulds we can leave ourselves behind.

We should be writing for ourselves

If we are excited, that is most important.

This blog is a simple prop that occupies my time, but it is written with love.

Writing for myself but wanting to share.

To get together with readers to share ideas.

If we do not love what we have written, how can we expect anyone else to?

“What did I write the other morning: You have to pull out the plug of the TV forever and cut your telephone cords because it’s not proper that you should spend your life with your ears stuffed with merde, as they say.”

Jim Harrison, in Conversations with Jim Harrison, Revised and Updated, Robert DeMott

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“Oh, I see, I remember realizing, you write out of your own experience. You write in your own voice and don’t try to write literature per se. I don’t know why I needed to learn this, but I did. And if part of your childhood was spent watching Get Smart [on TV], it’s okay to mention that; don’t pretend you grew up in France.”

David Shields, Reality Hunger

_________________________________________________

I love Jim Harrison.

I love the major themes in his writing.

I love his voice.

I love his attitude.

But I didn’t grow up in the 1940s and 50s like he did.

I did not grow up on a farm.

I am a product of my times.

I grew up on Thundercats and Transworld Sport on Saturday morning TV.

I was unduly influenced by Reagan era commercial film and television.

I came late to the world of words and big ideas.

I love Jim Harrison.

I don’t pretend to be like him.

The only thing I can try to emulate is in his being himself.

This is evident in all his work.

I must remind myself to be myself at all times.

“During my last few years of school, I came to realize that my path to knowledge would not lead me to libraries, professors, universities, and studies. My path to knowledge was through living life and experiencing reality. I could learn plenty secondhand, but nothing was ever to surpass the experiences I had in the wilderness. All my knowledge of social, scientific, and religious issues has been acquired through personal experience.”

– Reinhold Messner, My Life at the Limits

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“Our friend Albert Bandura has a catchy name for the way these learning experiences compound– enactive mastery experiences… According to Bandura, an enactive mastery experience refers to the process of learning through doing. Learning through doing is one of the most powerful forces in human psychology. It’s the second key strategy if we’re to build our sense of power. Why? Because the more we do something, the greater our sense of control. We learn. We level up our skills. Our confidence grows. And we empower ourselves.”

– Ali Abdaal, Feel-Good Productivity

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If something is borrowed, you can’t put as much trust in it as something that you own.

You might borrow an identity.

For example, the identity of climber can be borrowed.

I might climb a mountain once a year, and so I borrow the title of a climber.

I can never be that confident in my skills because I haven’t tested them. They are just borrowed for the day, for the weekend, the length of the trip.

If we own something, we have true knowledge.

We know the nuances.

If I borrow a car, I don’t quite know how it will handle on corners, how good the brakes are, what speed makes the engine purr.

I’m tentative because the car is borrowed.

I can’t quite trust it to perform.

And it’s the same with any activity that we haven’t mastered.

We borrow the skills until we get familiar with it.

We only get familiar and confident with something we use all the time.

Never from something that we just pick up and borrow then put back down.

We accumulate confidence.

We are made owners through doing.