Colin Wright's Blog, page 20
July 24, 2018
Transcendence
Everyone’s looking for some kind of transcendence. For some people religion fulfills that purpose. For others, it’s a less-defined sense of spirituality, or other non-organized, faith-based practice. For still others, the exploration of the physical universe scratches this itch—science, math, learning about human neurology and physiology and sociology. Transcendence is about being uplifted, pulled out […]
June 23, 2018
Creative Triggers
It feels wonderful to publish something. It’s an experience I first had way back in high school, when the web was still young and when, despite having access to basic computer production software, my journalism class still taught the not-yet-phased-out craft of physically laying out a page—every line of text on every page of the […]
June 21, 2018
Liminality
A liminal moment is one in which you are in flux, in limbo. You’re in the process of moving from one state of being to another, and although you’ve already left your previous state behind, you haven’t yet arrived in the new one. The word “liminal” was originally reserved for rites of passage. The time […]
May 25, 2018
First Principles Lifestyle
In philosophy, “first principles” refer to something like foundational truths. They are assumptions we can safely make about the way of things, with all of the secondary suppositions and postulations stripped away. The term is similar when applied to the world of formal logic. There are a lot of arguments you could make that rely […]
May 19, 2018
Tiny Luxuries
With rare exceptions, I prepare every meal I eat. I’ve done this for almost two years, now. Being able to take the time, not just to learn to cook, but to prepare myself something nice, to acquire the right ingredients, to spend a half-hour or more on preparation, to sit with my food and enjoy […]
May 1, 2018
Envisioned
With as much detail and precision as possible, describe your ideal lifestyle. This is what I asked myself to do back in 2009, when I first allowed myself to think about a world beyond my business, beyond LA, beyond the goals I’d been chasing my entire adult life. And this was a necessary ask, because […]
April 20, 2018
Eudaemonia
Most decisions we make can be traced back to our desire to be happy. But happiness is a fuzzy term, and is often—incorrectly, I would argue—conflated with a collection of other terms: fulfillment, pleasure, contentment, and satisfaction, among them. Homing in on this difference is important, though, as it allows us to better refine our […]
April 17, 2018
A Year of Growth
Today is my 33rd birthday, and to celebrate I’d like to take a moment to present some thoughts and heuristics that have served me well this most recent year of my life. One thought that’s been immensely useful to me over the past year, especially considering everything that’s been happening in the world of politics, […]
March 25, 2018
Big, Vague Goals
I like to set sprawling, ill-defined goals for myself, and then figure out how best to accomplish them along the way. This is a counter-intuitive approach to goal-setting, I know, but it tends to assuage some of the downsides of extremely formalized, front-loaded goal-setting. For one, there are many unknowns involved in any pursuit, and […]
March 17, 2018
Sewing Buttons
It was thrilling for me, the first time I sewed a button onto a shirt. I was sitting in a conference room, waiting for a meeting to start, and one of the buttons on my favorite polo—a shirt I’d owned for probably a decade—had popped off earlier that day. I stopped by a grocery store […]
