Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Tag: work

  • Theme:

    confidence, not trust

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    You must have confidence, not trust.

    The opposite of confidence is doubt, and if someone sees doubt in your eyes, you will never build a mutual horizontal relationship.

    Banks have relationships based on trust; they measure out exactly how much you can pay back. The association is transactional: doubt springs from analyzing the situation and finding risk.

    Your job in a friendship is to believe in the other person; their job is to reciprocate with their best effort. You do not bully them with guilt; you allow them to find their best effort and develop pride in themself because you did not undermine them. Instead, your confidence provided them an opportunity to achieve.

  • Theme:

    humans without frontiers

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Without a frontier to push into or against, self-discovery is not an exploration of the new but a redefining (retromodification) of the preceding.
    In mining the past (nostalgia) the unreality of exhumation offers only abstract context, leading to affectation.
    Is regenerating affect non-effectual work? If so, without new frontiers, we risk assuming the labor of dilatante style is indeed substance.

  • Theme:

    belief before reason

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    No argument makes sense until you are conditioned to believe it.

    If a secularist reads every holy text (Bible, Koran, Upanishads, etc.) and is convinced by one, this is not a valid decision. Because Christian reasoning works only if you already believe as a Christian. (Kierkegaard)

    Belief primes us to use rationality, which makes us reason toward irrationality.

  • Theme:

    Tactics vs Strategy

    , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Tackling one task after another feels productive, but the tasks will not end, and if you are effective, you will add more functions upon completion.
    This can fill your entire life, but tactics are not a strategy.
    This is to say; you can convert yourself into a drone and never win.

  • Theme:

    Micro goals into mighty effort

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Goalsetting is several small steps (micro goals) that are focal points on the longer path.

    As you near the completion of your goal, called the “goal gradient,” you push harder.

    Interestingly, a “sunk cost fallacy” drives us forward: the closer we get to success, the harder we try to achieve it, doubling and tripling our effort.

    The exponential effort can work unless your goal is constantly vanishing in front of you.

  • Theme:

    the enemy within

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    We often compete with and demonize our colleagues or family members.
    However, proximity and familiarity are tragic standards upon which to focus your destructive drives. Instead, you should consider the broader world in which you must ultimately succeed.

    To win over your family, classroom, or office is a small-minded and hollow victory. To work against your comrades is to sabotage your stability.

  • Theme:

    you don’t have to respond

    , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Just wait. Soften your edges, and stay open.
    Observe.Everything will likely work itself out without your intervention or opinion: just being present is enough.

  • Theme:

    burned out

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    “Burned-out” is a linguistic reference to rockets.

    Today burnout implies you have a weakness: a stressed gasket or aorta, an o-ring or an esophageal sphincter that can’t handle the pressure. Your psychological ‘deficiency’ manifests as physiological incapacity: you can no longer keep up.

    More accurately, burnout is from overuse: a system burns you as an expenditure to test limits.

    In this framing, you are a sacrifice on a pyre of productivity: a captive burned to appease monstrous gods.

  • Theme:

    Delevate yourself

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    People become things through elevation: as we separate ourselves from a laborer, he becomes a function, a means-to-an-end, and a tool. Objectification occurs through difference.
    You can work to flatten and disperse your relating.

  • Theme:

    Self-help is not a fix, but a focus

    , , ,

    °

    1–2 minutes

    Reading self-help or jumping into therapy doesn’t fix you; it focuses you.
    You will not remember or fulfill all the advice: we change slowly with vast effort over extended periods.
    Our biological imperative is to bypass the hard work of change in favor of novelty and laziness, and we must surround ourselves with persistent reminders.