Month: April 2011

Steve Jobs on how to trust life will turn out fine

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Chances are you’ve seen this Stanford address by Steve Jobs. It’s attracted over 3 million views. I was just alerted to a bit in it where he talks about a philosophy he has for life turning out. For how his life turned out.

photo: Nike
Photo via Nike

Jobs dropped out of uni after six months, but hung around campus, bummed about, ate Hare Krishna food. But he’d listen in on a calligraphy class…because it looked beautiful and interesting. Which, I think, is classic scanner (as per yesterday’s post) behaviour. He learned about the different fonts – serif and san serif (as per yesterday’s post, I, too, am obsessed by typography, among other things).

And so,

“If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, “ Jobs explained, “the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionately spaced ones. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

And this is his philosophy,

“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Which could be seen as cheap spiritual-speak. But it’s not. It’s how it works. I often get asked how I got to be editor of Cosmo or host of MasterChef of whatever. I can trace back and connect dots. But at the time, I didn’t see the dots.

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possibly the most reassuring advice I’ve been given (sunday life)

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This week I realise I’m a scanner. Which is to say, I realise my chaotic, excited way of being, and all the dreams I juggle, makes sense!

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On Tuesday I got great news. All these years I’ve regarded the crazy array of careers I’ve dabbled in (restaurant reviewer, political speechwriter, TV dollybird, magazine editor and so on with no discernible theme), the disparate topics of interests displayed on my bookshelf (evolutionary biology to typography), and the endless hobbies I engage with, as signs of a weak, unfocused character. I’m a spray gun! A jack of too many trades and master of jack shit! A dilettante!

But Tuesday I was told I’m none of those things.

No, I’m a “scanner”.

New York-based author Barbara Sher, who coined the term, reckons I’m a classic case. A scanner, she tells me, is genetically wired to be fanatically interested in multiple things at once. “You love everything, right!” Well, yes. “But you get bored and go off on tangents! And you think it’s bad that you keep quitting things and moving on!” Yes, yes, I do! “Don’t! Have some fun with it instead!”

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can you capture what you stand for?

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I have to come up with a mission statement, a raison d’etre for something I’m working on (actually, it’s my blog). I’ve struggled to get clear. I keep trying to get “on top” of what I think my blog is about, to get a definitive bird’s eye view. My view. Your view (as a reader). My critics’ views.

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I’ve mentioned before that with starting a blog – and when doing many things these days – it’s nigh impossible to get a definitive perspective on things. Everything moves so damn fast. Blogging doesn’t know where it’s heading…so enter the fray and just be part of it. Join the current, and learn to swim as you go, was my advice (I grew my entire career this way!). All of life is like this. Frazzled. Slippery.

But there’s another element to this resulting fugginess.

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“I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel!”

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Hmmmm, I wonder how much I love this angle: bikes free chicks! My favourite (dead-set) tweeter Maria Popova alerted me to National Geographic‘s new book Wheels of Change: How The Bicycle Empowered Women.

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The advent of the bike “radically redefined the normative conventions of femininity”. For a start it got women straddling something, and not side-saddle. Then it got them moving. And active.

“From allowing young people to socialize without the chaperoning of clergymen and other merchants of morality to finally liberating women from the constraints of corsets and giant skirts (the “rational dress” pioneered by bike-riding women cut the weight of their undergarments to a “mere” 7 pounds), the velocipede made possible previously unthinkable actions and interactions that we now for granted to the point of forgetting the turbulence they once incited.”

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how little acts of non-conformity make life better (Sunday life)

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This week I do things at the wrong time

lee-pricePhoto by Lee Price

I take disproportionate delight from eating non-breakfast food at breakfast. This morning I ate mashed pumpkin with garlic. Sometimes I eat grilled sardines on lentils. Once I ate lamb chops.

In the comfortable, middle-class world I inhabit, such deviations feel like perverse acts of rebellion.  My grandmother, for 65 years, used to put out two Weet-bix in a bowl every night ready for breakfast in the morning. Bless Grandmother’s gentle soul, but my non-breakfasts say booyah to that!

Doing things at the right – or conventional – time can make sense. Turning up to weddings at the time specified by the bride and groom is always good. And getting your bikini line waxed is best done mid-afternoon, a week after your period, when the skin is least sensitive.

But this week I played with the idea that doing stuff when you’re not meant to is a tidy way to inject joy into life. At a purely pragmatic level doing things out of step with the masses is efficient. In the book Buy Ketchup In May And Fly At Noon, Marc Di Vincenzo makes the case for eating out at restaurants on Tuesdays

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achieving with excitement

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Ages ago I remember reading something by Leo Babauta about he’d given up goals. Instead he was achieving things with excitement.

when your hair stands on end...YOU'RE EXCITED
when your hair stands on end...YOU'RE EXCITED

I’ve never really made goals. As in, “by 2013 I’ll be married with three kids”. Or, “in six months I will have the corner office”. In part because I’m never that certain about what I want to achieve. But also I’m not motivated that way. Goals seem so rigid and external and require different coloured textas and butcher’s paper and….

Sitting down to write “a list” of defined outcomes for down the track seems so dreary and admin-y.

Sitting down to reflect – or write – on what I want my life to feel like – that’s more like it!

Leo arrived at a similar point and said he gets things done by using excitement to lead him. Once excited, he takes action – he acts on the excitement immediately. Then he shares it (talks about it, tweets it). Then acts again. Keeps the excitement going. Acts a bit more and behold a “goal” is reached. Writing down goals, he says, can make you excited. But it’s only one way. And it’s not what gets you to the goal. Excitement does.

Let me tell you a story.

About six years ago I imagined up a scenario where I’m living in a place up high in trees overlooking the ocean. Hot, coastal, slightly tropical. I felt myself being there and felt myself working from there. Last week I took a look at where I’m living now, up here in the Byron hinterland in a little shed/cottage, and realised I’d landed myself in that scenario – trees, view, hot etc.

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why i’m sending my kids to public schools

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I’ve ranted about this issue before. I’m vocally against the principle of private schools. So is Justice Michael Kirby. Below are some of his thoughts from his interview with Fran Kelly on Radio National this week. But first…

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I know parents want to provide the best thing for their own kids. And they feel that private schools provide a better start in life.

But two issues.

1. I don’t know that fancy pools and excursions to Tuscany make for a better education. When I got to uni I was surrounded by private school kids…I was one of a few public school kids studying law at ANU (I don’t think this is to do with grades alone…more that I think law is pushed more as a career at private schools…which ain’t necessarily a good thing). I remember being astounded by how much hand-holding my peers required to keep up with the course load. This is a generalisation that might offend. So let’s put it this way – I reckon the “self-led” approach required to get ahead in public schools sets a kid up well for life beyond school. In all kinds of ways. Not least of all that it instills awareness of a fuller spectrum of the human experience.

2. The “my kid deserves the best” attitude perpetuates the growing divide in schooling quality between public and private. While ever good, engaged, smart parents send their kids to private schools, it drains resources from public schools.

My beliefs are these:

* The two hallmarks of a just society are the same (high) standard of education and health for all. What chance does a kid have if these things aren’t accessible to them? With a decent education a kid that comes from nowhere has choices.

* Good, engaged, smart parents have an obligation to all kids, not just their own.

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how to start a blog. actually, how to start anything.

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A while back Clare Lancaster of Women in Business asked readers to share “the tips you would give yourself if you were starting up your blog today”. I get asked the same a lot.

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It’s funny because just yesterday I was thinking about a feature I wrote on the early blog sensations. This was back in 2008 when I was in New York. I interviewed Julia Allison (the first online megac-celebtrity) and Emily Gould (started the whole “snark” movement at Gawker.com) and Choire, who was just starting up The AWL. I also chatted to Problogger (Darren Rowse). At the time he was one of less than 10 or so bloggers in Australia who were making some money from blogging. Frontier stuff!

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https://www.sarahwilson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/goodweekend-dragged-2.jpggoodweekend (dragged) 3

I’ve been blogging for a little over 18 months now.

My tip would be for anyone starting out. Or starting anything:

Enter the fray. Step in, get messy, work it out from there. Just enter.

With blogging NO ONE knows what they’re doing. Even now, several years after it all took off, there does not exist a “person” out there who can show you how to set it all up, design it, get the perfect mechanisms in place. Everyone is sucking and seeing. It’s BLOODY frustrating. Not a day goes by where I don’t scream to the gods, “WHERE IS THE ONLINE BUSINESS THAT COMES IN AND SHOWS HOW ALL THIS IS MEANT TO WORK!??!?”. (If you are that business, do get in touch!).  All we can do is share little tips along the way that gradually build things in the right direction.

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how to make easier decisions

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I love this article on why easy decisions are so hard by the ludicrously young and authentic Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and Proust was a Neuroscientist. I’ve mentioned it here on this blog a lot…that I struggle to make the simplest of decisions, like what toothpaste to buy. And other such”first-world problems”. (As an aside, for thyroid disease folk…indecision is a very AI trait).

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I loved, mostly, how Jonah confesses that he’s crap at making toothpaste decisions, too, despite being an expert on how we decide. He picks the research apart and finds that we stall with dumb decisions because we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking they’re important decisions simply because they’ve been made complicated (mostly by too many options):

“Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t.”

The analysis paralysis makes us think the decision is important…which intensifies the paralysis. And around and around we go. It’s a very real issue for more of us. We’re bombarded with more stupid options daily.

This is how I simplify decisions?