#7forsunday — Public Fediverse posts

Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

~ Harper Lee

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https://constantine.name/2023/11/25/courage-12/

#7ForSunday #Courage #HarperLee #Quotes

Acoustic ecology

I love a scenic overlook, but give me a few minutes and I’ll be sitting with my eyes closed listening to the scenic overlook. I once dove in the ocean at the edge of the continental shelf—it’s a long story—but the sense of lack of place when you gaze into the abyss is unsettling. Sitting and listening to a vast landscape is the closest I’ve ever come to that. (And without feeling like complete panic is right behind the veneer of my thoughts.)

The World Soundscape Project worked from the basis that any given soundscape (or sonic environment) is a representation of how that environment is perceived by listeners within it. Soundscapes are themselves influenced by human behaviours. As a combination of all sound within a particular location, soundscapes may therefore comprise natural sounds as well as those from social and technological sources. As these sounds change, so does the ecology of the soundscape.

~ Neil Clarke from, Acoustic ecology and the World Soundscape Project – earth.fm

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Soundscapes are amazing. I’ve always been fascinated by sound, and how our aural sense is a very old sense; it is connected to a much older part of our brain. Sound is very important to our sense of being. We hear in the womb, and at twilight our hearing recedes last to gracefully ring down the final curtain.

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The task of art

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

~ Marcel Proust

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Real change

Change—real change—comes from the inside out. It doesn’t come from hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior with quickfix personality ethic techniques. It comes from striking at the root—the fabric of our thought, the fundamental, essential paradigms, which give definition to our character and create the lens through which we see the world.

~ Stephen Covey

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Ridiculous

The moral? That there is no greater homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.

“To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: It does not constitute it.”

Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.

~ Alain de Botton

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Pale facsimilies

We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale facsimiles.

~ Marcel Proust

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Mediocrity

Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity. You’ll avoid the tough decisions, and you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted.

~ Colin Powell

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Our numbered days

Because we don’t exactly know how may days we’ll be alive, and because we try our hardest not to think about the fact that someday we’ll die, we’re pretty liberal with how freely we spend our time. We let people and obligations impose on that time, only rarely asking: What am I getting in return here?

~ Ryan Holiday

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Understanding hope and fear

It’s not about overcoming our fears but understanding that both hope and fear contain a dangerous amount of want and worry in them. And, sadly, the want is what causes the worry.

~ Ryan Holiday

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Environment matters

In the wrong environment, your creativity is compromised. At 30, I assumed my strengths would always be with me regardless of where I applied them. I was wrong. Truth is, your environment matters.

~ Scott Belsky

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The one thing that matters

From this experience I learned what legendary writers call ‘killing your darlings’—the plot points and characters that detract from a novel. Sometimes you need to stop doing things you love in order to nurture the one thing that matters most.

~ Scott Belsky

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Watching the light go on

This was Seth Godin’s second appearance on Brian Koppelman’s show The Moment and captures a slightly less polished version of some of his usual messaging. It’s easier to see his path to really polished books like This is Marketing and The Practice.

I think we talked last time about watching the light go on for people. That is my mission. That is what I’ve been doing since I was 18 years old, that when I’m doing my best work, what I’m doing is engaging with someone and helping them see the world differently and let them do work that they care about. And sometimes you can do that with a book. And the magic of books used to be that millions of people would go to a store waiting for a light to be turned on. So it’s scaled. And it was a combination of solitary endeavor, but a community one as well. I do it in person with people I care about. But that doesn’t scale. So the question is, is there a way in this post book world to be able to create environments where people change.

~ Seth Godin ~3:17 in the July 7, 2015 episode of The Moment with Brian Koppelman

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Depending on where you normally listen, this episode might be hard to find. It’s more than 300 episodes back (7 years) in Koppelman’s The Moment podcast. I couldn’t find it on the main web site for the show. (I originally found it because I have a way of manually, human-reading RSS feeds, beginning from the first entry in a “drip” system.)

The link below is to a service from Overcast (the podcast player app) which will let you play it in your favorite web browser.

https://overcast.fm/+HS-ViyTws

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Quite nice

[T]oday, let’s seek to be better than the things that disappoint or hurt us. Let’s try to be the example we’d like others to follow. It’s awful to be a cheat, to be selfish, to feel the need to inflict pain on our fellow human beings. Meanwhile, living morally and well is quite nice.

~ Ryan Holiday

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The danger of plans

It is essential to get lost and jam up your plans every now and then. It’s a source of creativity and perspective. The danger of maps, capable assistants, and planning is that you may end up living your life as planned. If you do, your potential cannot possibly exceed your expectations.

~ Scott Belsky

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