Colin Wright's Blog, page 18

Perspective Triggers

There’s a sinking feeling in my stomach, my thinking becomes cloudy, my mood slumps, my energy levels deplete.

For some reason or no reason I’m sad, I’m forlorn, I’m unable to focus or lift my spirits. Everything seems to suck, and whether I can connect this feeling to something that happened or not, it doesn’t improve my disposition. Caused or cause-less, this is how I feel.

When I notice I’m experiencing such a slump, I stop what I’m doing, close my eyes, take a few slow, deep breaths, and...

Heterodoxy

Some of the satisfaction we derive from new knowledge stems from that information’s adherence to what we already knew.

The world seems to be a particular way, a new piece of information seems to support that assertion, and we receive a burst of dopamine from the parts of our brain that look for patterns and attempt to understand the world around us.

When new information seems to conflict with what we thought we knew about the world, it’s not uncommon to experience cognitive dissonance: a feel...

Communication Methods

Successful communication is a multi-person effort.

That’s true in the sense that it requires both (or all) people to be engaged, to be interested in the act of communication.

But it’s also true in the sense that we, as individuals, need to be aware of the other people involved and keep their interests, priorities, and perspectives in mind, just as we do for our own.

In practice, this may mean pointing at something uncomfortable, something previously unaddressed, something difficult or cumbers...

Status Quo

I’ve taken the last few months off, in the sense that I’ve set aside most of the work that I typically do on a day-to-day basis so I can focus, instead, on recalibrating my lifestyle.

In practice, that’s meant decompressing after my recent speaking tour by spending time with my parents in Missouri, then leaving for London, where I’m spending the rest of the year with my girlfriend.

There’s still work of the conventional kind to be done, of course, despite this shift.

When I started up my podc...

Tiny Advantages

There was a time when I made a significant portion of my income by designing and building websites for clients.

That collection of skills was once vital to my financial well-being, but today it’s more of a tiny advantage: nice to have, but not fundamental to my ability to pay the bills and buy groceries.

Which isn’t to say it’s worthless; far from it.

Such tiny advantages add up, and take many shapes. Over time, in fact, I would argue that these tiny advantages can make a person more capable...

No Need

What would you do if there was no need for you to do anything?

This isn’t a simple question to answer. It’s also a question that’s increasingly relevant, not because we’ll all be able to stop working any time soon, but because it can help us determine how to spend our time, now, within our current systems and circumstances.

For many people, the answer to the question of how to spend one’s time when one needn’t work is predicated on current, everyday realities. We imagine that we’d do all the...

Reflections

Our lives are reflections of our values.

Said another way: the way we live demonstrates our priorities and beliefs.

That’s the optimal situation, at least. In a lot of cases, for a lot of reasons, this isn’t entirely true. It’s not uncommon to make slapdash decisions in moments of panic or stress. It’s not uncommon to build lives that more accurately reflect those who raised us than us, or that are predicated on our prior beliefs, rather than on beliefs we hold dear, today.

I’ve been reflecti...

Whatever Happens Next

I’m often asked where I envision myself, my career, my life in five years. But I don’t have a good answer for this.

Looking back five years, I was in a very different place from where I am today. My lifestyle, my priorities, my hopes and dreams, my relationships and work: it’s all changed.

In small and dramatic ways, I’ve iterated, I’ve grown, and the idea of making decisions today, based on my wants and needs of back then, makes little sense.

Why would I prioritize the concerns and goals of...

Comparative Value

It’s not always easy to tell if the work you do, the way you spend your time, is a net value-add for the world. Part of the difficulty is that most types of potential value and anti-value are measured using non-comparable metrics. For instance, if you spend your work hours each weekday helping the homeless, […]

Things

We tend to use things to fill perceived gaps in ourselves and in our lives. Feeling unhappy? Buy a thing. Feeling incompetent? Buy a thing. Feeling incomplete in some currently unnamed way? This thing will complete you; buy one. We use new acquisitions, new things, to introduce change into our lives. I’m not feeling great […]