Q: What are you most looking forward to about the holidays?
Often, there are a lot of things to do around the holidays. What are the best things that happen from the holidays? What are the best things that could happen!? What are the best things that will happen this year?
:) … And you?
We live longer than our forefathers; but we suffer more from a thousand artificial anxieties and cares. They fatigued only the muscles, we exhaust the finer strength of the nerves.
~ Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it. ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick
There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
~ Calvin and Hobbes
The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it.
~ Anonymous
Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
~ Will Rogers
Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop. ~ Ovid
I’m a huge fan of interactive entertainment, i.e. fun with real activities. Here are two great places.
1) I’ve been here and love to take my friends here. This is TOMB, an interactive adventure. An interactive, who-done-it, move-through-three-chambers, and solve-puzzles adventure, done in groups of 10-15 people. Love it!
2) Ninja Restaurant in NY (haven’t been yet, but want to go): the waiters hide and surprise you and jump out at you and the food includes swords that you need to pull out. Here is a video about it, and I heard about it from this link about 10 unusual restaurants:
He sang to himself. In front of 10,000 people, he sang to himself.
Stage lights reddish-orange. Words muffled by his beard. My friend said, he is shy and doesn’t like to see the audience.
The sitar-like dobro alternately squeaked and bellowed
hallowed violin music.
Drums backed up his rhythm guitar strumming,
the guitar sitting high on his button-down shirt,
like a mantle on a statue of a musician
who might have been in performance for an audience.
But he was not. The audience is irrelevant.
A performer without performing, he speaks a Mantra.
He says, Gone Away. From Me.
There’s a great 1995 article by David Myers and Ed Diener: “Who Is Happy?“
“In study after study, four inner traits mark happy people: self-esteem, a sense of personal control, optimism, and extraversion.”
How are you doing on:
Each of these traits is actually acquirable and increasable, which is the most interesting part to me.
What is the question you can ask yourself to know whether you have self-esteem? After discussion with a positive psychology colleague of mine, here is his suggestion, which is fascinating to me. (I don’t usually write about bad-feeling situations or scenarios on my site, but this post is on that map of a sphere below the equator of happy and pleasant thought.) You can ask yourself:
What’s your answer? Pause a second … What do you think? What’s your answer?
Exactly. In a way, it’s such a manipulative question because the high self-esteem answer to it is, “No, forget it, I’m extremely loveable.” And the low self-esteem person will go looking for answers where there don’t need to be any.
Here is another question:
The high self-esteem person will sometimes doubt, and will just as often or more often be secure and comfortable with his own thoughts. Both questions lean the answer towards choosing the negative thoughts in your head - both questions are manipulative in that sense, which is why they seem to get to the question about self-esteem.
Here are Christine Kane’s 21 favorite ways to be more creative. I like many of them: the 20-minute walk, the go-see-a-gallery, go-hear-live-music. My favorite suggestion of hers is “read poetry aloud” (I found Christine’s blog through this post on the Life Coaches blog).
Q: What are your favorite ways to be creative?
…And your ways? Would love to hear what you think! Great weekend to you!
Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.
~ Harriet Braiker
Once you accept the fact that you’re not perfect, then you develop some confidence.
~ Rosalynn Carter
Sometimes… when you hold out for everything, you walk away with nothing.
~ Ally McBeal TV show
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in. ~ Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” lyrics
Posted on 12-15-06 for Thurs, 12-14-06.
I was reading Dave Seah’s story about Ulrick the Bee, and I like this second part of the story where Tiffany appears and she ask a lot of questions!
Once of the best lessons I ever received was, “Ask Early.” When I was working on Wall St., my mentor was a woman who was very accomplished in her department, and a wonderful, kind, great person. I met with her early in my career at the company, and she gave me a great piece of advice. She said:
Ask early. Ask about anything that you don’t know. Because if six months have gone by and then you ask about something that should be simple and clear and easy, then you will seem to be slow and lagging behind. Then the quesiton will be, “Oh, you don’t know that yet?” Ask early. There is great simplicity to that. If you don’t know, ask.
My father also told me many times, three of the most beautiful words in English are “I don’t know.” And then finding out is fascinating.
Posted on 12-15-06 for Wed, 12-13-06.
Not-perfect is real.
Imagine two stories: STORY 1: A girl lives on a farm with her Aunt Em and her Uncle. Everything is pretty outside. She goes to sleep. She wakes up. Her dog jumps into her arms. Everything is fine. Oh, yes, a little boring maybe. STORY 2: A girl lives on a farm with her Aunt Em and her Uncle. Everything is pretty outside. There is a tornado. She finds herself in another world and her house has killed the wicked witch of the west. She needs to get away, and there are bad guys, and crazy monkeys, and three adventurers who come with her. The man who is supposed to get them out of there is frightening. Everything seems lost, and then she finds the wizard of Oz, clicks her heels and comes home and wakes up.
A little more drama in story 2, eh? I want to make sure I keep drama in my blog posts. I want to make sure I show you in writing what I think the cool parts are and what the issues are. I don’t want to be too didactic. I don’t want to be too simple and obvious. I want to write a mystery, like Haidt in most chapters of The Happiness Hypothesis. I want to write a love story, like The Dot and the Line, and I want to write what’s fun!
But sometimes, I want to write and write and write and do more and more research before presenting it. This is the leftovers of junior high school perfectionism. Actually, everyone who knows me would say that I am not a perfectionist. I’m not. But in some things, I have the leanings of one.
And there are other bloggers out there who say similar things! That’s why I’m writing this down and why I made the repeated goal of writing daily! It’s about a hint of an idea. It’s not about a thesis! (…um, that’s an exclamation sign to me, not to you).
I have such a mini-struggle with blogs sometimes. There are so many fascinating ideas in the positive psychology literature, and I’d like you to see them all! Or, well, the really interesting ones anyway.
Here’s what Charlene Li of Forrester says about losing - and finding - one’s voice:
So I’ve vowed to follow Nike’s mantra and “just do it”, or in this case, to “just blog it”. Damn the idea of quality and depth of analysis — I’m better off getting something out there and getting your reactions to it. So here I am, writing a stream of consciousness and finding my voice again. … So hang on, I’ve got a lot of pent up ideas that I want to explore. I don’t promise well-formed ideas or deep insights in every post, but it’s the best that I’ll be able to do.
Christine Lane writes about the 17 things she knows about creativity. I like number 11 and 17:
And, of course, I am a fan of the dailyness of Fred at AVC, whom I first read about on Evelyn’s blog.
Cool, see you soon.
Posted on 12-15-06 for Mon, 12-11-06.