David Hogg on Beating Your Critics

EP 042 Camelia Elias on Clear Sight and Clean Cuts

Camelia Elias holds a PhD and DPhil and spent the last twenty years as a professor of literature, most recently at Roskilde University in Denmark. Recently, she escaped academia to start an online school, Aradia Academy, where she teaches cartomancy (card reading); that is, how to read—yourself, someone else, books, pictures, films, the situation, the problem, or anything else—without belief, emotion, preconceptions or other obscurations getting in the way.

She recently said, "Why is reading cards fascinating? Because their visual language allows us to bypass everything we know or think we know."

Boiling our conversation down to the keywords, we talk about

interesting—curiosity—dullness—belief—vastness—strategy—one cut—the present circumstances—"and yet"—concrete—psychomagic—Jodorowsky—Freud—Boom!

(L to R) Dr. Camelia Elias, Freya

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Show Notes and Links

Camelia Elias's website
Her courses
Her Patheos blog

Help fund Alejandro Jodorowsky's film Psychomagic.

Startup Geometry EP 025 Robert Pool on Peak Performance

Robert Pool is a mathematician, science writer, and, together with Anders Ericsson, the author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Today, we talk about the use of deliberate practice to improve physical and mental performance, why the 10,000 hour rule isn't what you think it is, the relationship between talent and success (it's less important than you think, what good mental representations will do for you, and why taste is essential to the development of expert skills.

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Dustin Lance Black's Creative Process

He has a very deep way of working with the index cards at the post-note pre-first-draft phase. It's worth thinking about all the annotation and grouping methods that you could use in your own work to deliver this level of richness at the stack-of-cards level. Two useful questions that sit behind everything in this clip: "Why the film...?" and "How the film...?"

Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Rice Commencement Speech

Joss Whedon's Wesleyan Commencement Speech

Erased Advice for College Grads

This month, hundreds of thousands of new college graduates will be swamped with advice, from "plastics" to "follow your dreams", as well as some very nice engraved pens. Much of the advice is, as Garrison Keillor called it, "self-erasing", particularly that delivered by well-meaning relatives and commencement speakers. I've given and received my share of this advice, but there's one thing I forgot to say: right now, you're in the process of dumping not only the self-erasing platitudes, but also a lot of the knowledge and skills you've built up to this point. Instead, you should be thinking about how to store them more effectively. Somewhere in the confusion of starting in a real job, moving to a new city, getting a first real apartment, we regularly discard or ignore some big skills we've built up to this point. We lose the musical instruments we've played, the foreign language, the sport we lettered in.

I know a lot of thirty and forty year olds who used to play the piano, used to speak French fluently, used to be nationally ranked swimmers. Then, one day, the last recital, final exam, or swim meet happened, and they never used the skill again, only to miss it ten years later. It takes a lot of effort to recover at that point; the better course is to continue to do somewhat less practice of the skill, rather than none at all. Somewhat less doesn't seem like a particularly attractive option at first, but it's the option that keeps the skill alive and on backup without taking up huge amounts of time. It's also a good deal more fun to spend twenty minutes in the water than it is to have a full-on two hour practice with a coach, or twenty minutes playing pop songs rather than hours practicing scales. So, do somewhat less of the things you've been doing, because it's somewhat more than what you'll do if you try to keep going full bore on everything despite the pressures of life.

The second thing is, look over all the notes for all of your classes, and condense the greatest hits from them. If you've just finished college, the temptation is to pitch everything from your memory and from your dorm room so you don't have to ship it home. The smarter thing to do is to sort out the most useful things, dump them in some kind of word processor file or single notebook, and keep them organized for when they might be useful. Remember, you probably won't need all of this, but something is going to come in handy some time in the future. Write it up with one of those fancy pens they gave you, if it makes you happy.

Amanda Palmer: The Art of Asking

Or, how Amanda Palmer became Queen of TED.

Charlie Munger on Human Judgment

Charlie Munger, the other great investor behind Berkshire Hathaway, gave a speech on misjudgment in 1995 at Harvard. Here it is.

(via boingboing)

Quote of the Day

The best way to complain is to make things.

-James Murphy

Links for Later 6-11-12

1. First objects in the universe spotted, not identified
2. Prometheus from an archeological perspective (funny)
3. Advice for foreign tourists in America (be on time, tip 20%, use utensils sometimes but not always)
4. The final final
5. Laura Jane Grace rocking harder than ever
6. Courage: LGBT Pride events in Iran
7. Peter Thiel's startup class: startup founders are extreme people (the U-shaped distribution)
8. Bowe Bergdahl is still a POW
9. Busted via Twitter
10. Heinz Kohut's final days
11. Death among the Buddhist yogis
12. Death among the snake-handling Christians
13. More snake-handlers
14. Military-grade face transplants
15. There is no best place to advertise; try things and track results

Make Good Art

Neil Gaiman delivered some excellent advice in his commencement address to the graduates of Philadelphia's University of the Arts, including some useful Freelancer Secret Knowledge:

You get work however you get work.

People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.

Adam Swartzbaugh at Kenyon

Adam Swartzbaugh of the Genesis Network (and the US Army) stopped by Kenyon (and OSU) to talk about social entrepreneurship. He was a big hit with the students, in part because he talked about how his failures and setbacks motivated him to succeed, and in part because he put the responsibility for taking action on the audience.

Elsewhere: interviews with Adam in the Collegian before and after his visit.

The Polymath's Path

Noah Davis interviews Paul Hoffman, who ran Discover when he was 30, and who has had a number of interesting careers since then. His college roommate "had already discovered a sub-atomic particle in high school," which put him off a career as a physicist, and his father was a speed-reading English professor who "read three novels a day" and "had a photographic memory," so fiction was out as well. A fascinating career followed.

What would you tell a 22-year-old kid?

First of all, I would say, don't sweat it. It's really easy to say that in retrospect, but I really do mean that. You can make mistakes. You can take a job and six months later you can decide that it's hell. "It's not for me. I'm not interested in this." That's totally okay. In fact, that's easier now because the paths are not so well defined. People that present their careers as entirely successful from the age of 15 and on, most of it's fiction. Okay, maybe that's true in a couple people, but that's a couple people. There are several billion people on the planet who have managed to make their careers in other ways. You can't be afraid of failure. Even if you look at these incredible successes—people who were multimillionaires by the age of 30—often they did something that wasn't a success at first. Passion is so important. You have plenty of opportunities to bounce back if something doesn't work. If you see something out there that you really want to do, just go for it.

George Saunders' Writing Aphorisms

“The moment when things get complicated, that’s what we try to move towards.”

“A father and son in a bedroom doesn’t mean that something sexual has to happen.”

“Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey,”

“Aunts and uncles are best construed as the heliological equivalent of small-scale weather systems,”

“The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.”

-George Saunders
in Bomblog

The greatness that is xkcd

Zombie Marie Curie

The Three Classes

According to Robert Grudin:

1. Upper Class (income > expenditures)
2. Lower Class (income <>Anxious Class (income ≅ expenditures)

It's a good rule from this excerpt on refurbishing a second hand table. Worth clicking through.

10 Rules for Writing

Writers respond to Elmore Leonard's "Ten Rules of Writing" with ten or so of their own. Not a bad piece of advice in the bunch.

Margaret Atwood:

9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

Part I, Part II.

Fixing the Schedule

Cal Newport describes the benefits of the fixed schedule approach to time management, so you too can get everything done in 40 hours a week, if you're gritty enough.

Scrawled on a whiteboard in the conference room of Collins’ Boulder, Colorado office is a simple formula:

Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%

Collins decided years ago that a “big goal” in his life was to spend half of his working time on creative work — thinking, researching, and writing — a third of his time on teaching, and then cram everything else into the last 20%. The numbers on the whiteboard are a snapshot of his current distribution.

A Hero for Marriage Equality

"What do you think I fought for in Omaha Beach?"

Good morning, Committee. My name is Phillip Spooner and I live at 5 Graham Street in Biddeford. I am 86 years old and a lifetime Republican and an active VFW chaplain. I still serve three hospitals and two nursing homes and I also serve Meals on Wheels for 28 years. My wife of 54 years, Jenny, died in 1997. Together we had four children, including the one gay son. All four of our boys were in the service. I was born on a potato farm north of Caribou and Perham, where I was raised to believe that all men are created equal and I've never forgotten that. I served in the U.S. Army, 1942-1945, in the First Army, as a medic and an ambulance driver. I worked with every outfit over there, including Patton's Third Army. I saw action in all five major battles in Europe, and including the Battle of the Bulge. My unit was awarded Presidential Citations for transporting more patients with fewer accidents than any other [inaudible] I was in the liberation of Paris. After the war I carried POW's back from Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, and also hauled hundreds of injured Germans back to Germany.

I am here today because of a conversation I had last June when I was voting. A woman at my polling place asked me, "Do you believe in equal, equality for gay and lesbian people?" I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, "What do you think our boys fought for at Omaha Beach?" I haven't seen much, so much blood and guts, so much suffering, much sacrifice. For what? For freedom and equality. These are the values that give America a great nation, one worth dying for.

I give talks to eighth grade teachers about World War II, and I don't tell them about the horror. Maybe [inaudible] ovens of Buchenwald and Dachau. I've seen with my own eyes the consequences of caste systems and it make some people less than others, or second class. Never again. We must have equal rights for everyone. It's what this country was started for. It takes all kinds of people to make a world war. It does make no sense that some people who love each other can marry and others can't just because of who they are. This is what we fought for in World War II. That idea that we can be different and still be equal.

My wife and I did not raise four sons with the idea that three of them would have a certain set of rights, but our gay child would be left out. We raised them all to be hard-working, proud, and loyal Americans and they all did good. I think it's too bad [inaudible] want to get married, they should be able to. Everybody's supposed to be equal in equality in this country. Let gay people have the right to marry. Thank you.

Transcript via DailyKos