All my life, I’ve been plagued by an onslaught of great ideas. If you know me for any amount of time, you know that this is both a blessing and a curse. An idea falls in my lap, and I get started on the pursuit of that idea, and then while that’s underway, more ideas crop up and they’re interesting…more interesting than the actual execution of the current project. You could say that I subscribe to Shiny Object Syndrome, which is a hallmark of ADD1. One of my big goals has been to really rein in that crap, because it really does nothing but create a lot of frustration/regret/etc.
thinking
44 Orbits
When he crossed the Delaware River to attack Trenton, George Washington was 44 years old1. At the time, life expectancy for an adult male was 35 years old2. Due to the temporal disconnect we have with our history, it becomes pretty easy to compare your life to that of someone you’ll never know, whose lifestyle was completely different from your own.
Image Credits: pedromomx8/.
Scrivening
To paraphrase Harry Doyle, in case you haven’t noticed, and judging by my site traffic, you haven’t, there hasn’t been a lot of activity on the blog lately. I’ve been doing my scribblings elsewhere. Mostly for therapeutic reasons. These are screeds that get hammered out in a storm of emotions, and then deleted. And then revisited again and again as the mood strikes (usually as the aftermath of a particularly intense therapy session). What I’ve been writing there isn’t fit for public consumption — whether due to subject matter or the particularly poor quality of the writing.
Image Credits: Unsplash/.
I Disagree, Vehemently
What were the Obama campaigns? Flat-out optimism. Those worked quite nicely.
OTOH, different medium, different results? I think that there are things to be optimistic about, but optimism requires charisma and oratory skills, while pessism is more of an Eeyore game. Hollywood doesn’t have authentic charisma/voice to pull off optimism.
The Things I Think About Sometimes
I am 41 years old and still wear cargo shorts. Is this a life fail (Y/N)?
— Dan Bailey (@fontosaurus) June 16, 2014
Okay, so it’s not always as inane as the tweet above. Actually, I spend a lot of time thinking about the future (see also: my StandOut! results), and not in a daydream-y, fanboy kind of way, but in a more concrete, “what are the possibilities and how can I prepare for them?” kind of way.