Personal Development with Gray Miller
There is one constant undercurrent to my journey learning to work within the visual thinking/graphic recording world. I’m so far behind. Reading the stories of other people who do this, there’s a recurring theme of I always drew things and I started working in design in High School and I started calligraphy when I was eleven and the …
Lately I’ve been in kind of a “maker frenzy”; for some reason, I’ll see something online like “Build your own screen printing press out of scraps” and the next thing you know I’m raiding my girlfriend’s basement for lumber and buying springs…and that leads down a rabbit hole of finding squeegees and ink and transparencies …
Long-term goals are wonderful things, and some of them are shiny enough to be enough, in and of themselves, to inspire a regular practice. Other times the goals are more nebulous, and the temptations of the GravyHose are far more present and close. So rather than pull up the word processor you pull up Facebook, …
It’s a pretty simple and common problem: practice means “more than once”, and that implies a repeated action. Life has it’s own gravity, though, and there are times when it really sucks (ha). One of the ways we try and make it less sucky is through comfort (think of it as inertia; a safe place …
You know what I’m talking about. It is the Achilles heel of those “chain” habits, where you get a streak of days doing That Thing that you want to make into a habit. “Don’t break the chain,” is what Jerry Seinfeld recommended. But what happens when it breaks anyway? Suddenly you feel like a failure. …
One of my friends and I challenge each other weekly to do something that we know is a good idea but that we are reluctant to tackle. It’s not big-picture stuff (Organize your home!) but rather one of the tiny steps towards the big picture stuff (Make your desktop look inviting). I spontaneously named these …
As I write this, I’m growing a tree. Not literally, of course. There’s this nifty little app called “Forest” that has a pretty fun twist on the whole “focus time” method. It’s kind of a productivity Tamagotchi, in that you set an amount of time – say, 25 minutes – and you hit “start”. A …
“Come on, you sons of b****es! You wanna live forever?” – Daniel Daly, Motivational Speaker I have a guilty pleasure, which I can cheerfully lay at my Dad’s feet. I enjoy some pretty violent movies. I was raised on spaghetti westerns, weaned on Dirty Harry and cut my eyeteeth on Arnold and Sylvester. I’m not …
The Maze or the Cheese? I enjoyed relaxing yesterday morning with a TED Talk by Dan Ariely about the motivation for work. Much as Daniel Pink talked about in his book Drive, it turns out the old Skinnerian behavior models don’t work so well in the knowledge economy. People don’t seem to want to work just for pay, …
with thanks to Miss Amy Red for pointing me to the article that inspired this post It’s a very simple formula: Desire –> Wish –> Will but it’s got some tricky bits. It’s also, to keep on with our theme of the Quantified Self this week, rather difficult to measure accurately. Here’s a few of …