Tag Archives: new year’s resolutions

New Year’s Resolution part deux

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I admire those who are quietly assertive and wish to learn their Jedi mind tricks. Luckily I have the following quote from Madeleine Albright and all I have to do is to apply it.

So I made up this term, active listening — you listen differently if you think you’re going to interrupt.

The trouble is I worry whether I’ve been overcompensating and become a rude interrupter. I grade myself on whether I’d been aggressive enough or too aggressive at the end of the day and I regret either way.

2017 is going to be the year of no regret.* It’s the year to be bold, to be undeservedly confident, to interrupt without fear, to rid oneself of the plight of feeling self-conscious, to grab life by the, ugh, whatever handy.

 

* I immediately regretted calling 2017 the year of no regret. tbh we all know it’s going to be the Year of Regrets on so many levels.

Make it up on volume with the island of misfit toys

New Year’s Resolution: Make it up on volume

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Make it up on volume with the island of misfit toys

Happy New Year! We couldn’t wait for 2016 to end even though 2017, let’s be honest, is not going to fare better.

To say that 2016 sucked is a gross understatement. My father passed away on April 10 while I was 7,447 miles away. I still haven’t processed this. I am working up to it while being slowly eaten empty by guilt and regret.

I am not one to make New Year’s resolutions. I mean, I am very good at making them, I am just horrible at keeping them. My best record I believe was one week for keeping a journal. Journals are in general a bad idea: the thing about secrets is that as soon as they leave your mind, they stop being secrets. I did make one resolution for 2017 however: Read more real books instead of trying to read every single article saved to Pocket.

I’ve reached a, what should I call it other than a cliche, crossroad in my professional (and personal, though I am in deep denial on this one) life. So for the first time, I picked up one of the 10,372,763 recommended “this year’s best business books to teach you how not to jump in front of a moving train on your commute home every evening”, called Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, chosen out of, yes, self-aggrandizement. Adam Grant made an interesting point on quantity vs. quality:

It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it—but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality… On average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality.

I’m taking this as a permission to crank out as many streams of consciousness as my mind can dictate.

“…the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.”

Make it up on volume. Sorry Internet. Blame it on Ira.