There is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
Most people think there are one or two methods for tying shoelaces. However:
Many are surprised to learn that there’s more than one method, let alone seventeen! This sheer variety is testament to the ingenuity of people throughout the ages in their quest to prevent shoelaces from coming undone.
Admittedly, I am sort of taken with allthemethods, and the feature comparisons. Perhaps it’s because I remember feeling a bit cheated when my younger brother and sister were “allowed to” wear Velcro. I never did.
Luke Fowler creates field recordings to posit questions on how to develop new dialogues between looking and listening. The artist responds to pivotal moments in the history of Western culture’s aim to classify noise, music and everyday sounds: John Cage’s 1953 composition 4’33’’, silence used in experimental films of the 1960s, and Peter Schaeffer’s ‘found sounds’ and the concept of ‘acousmatic’ (reduced listening) where sounds were stripped of instrumental and cultural contexts in order to develop a language of intonation.
Researchers set out to unpack rituals on the subway, and examined a common societal pattern: Why don’t people give up their seats to others they “should” give them up for?
It seems all they needed to do was ask, simply.
Students in [an] experimental social psychology class took to the underground to ask for seats, under a number of conditions (either with no justification, or offering a rationale like “I can’t read my book standing up”). People were surprisingly compliant — a total of 68 percent either got up or moved over in the “no justification” condition. The more justification that was offered, however, the less likely people were to stand up. Curiously, Blass notes, the most striking thing for many of the participants was just how difficult it was to ask for the seat (“I actually felt as if I were going to perish,” recalled Milgram). It’s not hard to imagine why; asking for help on a subway exposes one to both the risk of a certain stigma — and to the possibility of rejection.
The “no justification” condition is as true for the subway space as it is above ground. The next time you want something, try not giving a justification. I’ve found this particularly true in saying “no.” The more you justify why you’re saying no, the less a person accepts no. The less justification you give, the easier it is for the person on the other end to accept it.
I have started to make formal “park prescriptions.” The prescribing instructions are considerably more detailed than ones you might get with a medication; they include the location of a local green space, the name of a specific trail and, when possible, exact mileage.
It turns out I am not alone. I’ve begun hearing about doctors around the country who are medicating their patients with nature in order to prevent (or treat) health problems ranging from heart disease to attention deficit disorder.
The park system as an extension, or natural part, of the national health care system.
New York City startups are as likely to be focused on the arts and crafts as on the bits and bites, to be influenced by our unparalleled culture as by the latest browser features, and informed by the dynamic interaction of different social groups and classes that’s unavoidable in our city, but uncommon in Silicon Valley. Best of all, the support for these efforts can come from investors and supporters that are outside of the groupthink that many West Coast VC firms suffer from. When I lived in San Francisco, it was easy to spend days at a time only interacting with other web geeks; In New York, fortunately, that’s impossible.
When people absconded from New York City several years ago — many to the west coast — one such friend’s comment from that time has stuck with me all these years. In talking about how he felt about San Francisco versus New York City he said, “I don’t know people anymore.” He wasn’t talking about friendships.
He compared his car commute in San Francisco to his former subway commute in Manhattan. “Commuting by car, you can’t hear or smell anyone around you. You’re locked in a box alone,” he noticed, “How are you supposed to know what people are feeling?”
New York City startups may have equal focus on arts and crafts as its bits and bites because it’s impossible not to have equal, if not extreme, contact with all of it at once; process all of it at once; make sense of it all at once. Know people all at once.
We make things for people. And no matter where we are in New York City, we get the opportunity to observe, hear, befriend, smell, talk with, be proven wrong by, block out, be surprised by, take on, and just happen upon people who can change our perspective in unexpected ways. It’s friction. And it’s a good place to be.
If you’re getting advice from someone who has never steered you wrong, then you’re not asking this person enough questions. After a while, someone who has given you a lot of advice will falter. Because no one is perfect, and no one can do as well at running your life as you can. So if you find someone who is giving good advice, push harder, until you get to their limit. Everyone gives bad advice sometimes, even me.
In some respects, bad advice might be better than good advice. Because what you really want is advice that makes you think in new ways about possibilities for yourself.
At age five, Melissa Foley and I became friends because she violated my personal manifesto. I spotted her on the swingset in my yard without permission. I, the oldest child in the family, had already arranged a rigorous permission system for swingset use. And this strange four-year-old, with all the courage I didn’t have, unflappably swung. I approached her, furious, reciting the Manifesto of the Swingset. “You didn’t ask permission and must stop. And leave.” It was shortly after we were best kindergarten friends.
However you feel about manifestos, you have one. Even if you’re anti-manifesto, a respectable position, you have beliefs you find yourself repeating over and over.
There are at least a handful of personal manifestos I have. These aren’t design principles or teaching methods, rather they’re items I use to move forward. Like my thoughts on the thank you, if you’ve spent any time with me, you’ve heard:
Delete sorry.
See also: Steve Pavlina’s advice, Part 11 especially.
You’re busy, so you may start much communication with a variation of, “Apologies for the delay, I’ve been…” or “Sorry it’s taken me awhile, I’ve been…” This cathartic pardon may be good for you, but it only sets up an unbalanced structure for remaining communications. The receiver doesn’t want an apology; he or she wants a response. Sorry, but you must put a stop to it. First, get the apology out. You need to, as an email, for example, may have been sitting in your inbox for two months. Writing that apology sentence helps you write the rest of the email. But before you send, delete the sorry sentence. Don’t lead with apologies — get to the point faster and maintain the natural order of things.
Because you’re busy, you probably find yourself rushing. Running from desk to meeting, to a dinner, to a lecture, to a train. But rushing is unnecessary. Missing the allotted time is only “missed” if you define it that way. If you match your metric of success to what some other timeline dictates, you’ll never be leading your own way. Of course, respect for others is foremost, so be respectful above all. But enter every situation on your own terms, without running. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Black Swan, says something similar.
Perception is at least a twofold process: the first stage is an awareness; the second attends more directly to the particular stimulus. In staking out our place in the world, we begin by reforming the relevant order as a means of overlaying significance onto that terrain. Disturbance, whether by adding or subtracting from the landscape, is the first realization of environmental design.
Important because:
The power of absences is felt in varying contexts. We notice for the first time certain structures when they have been torn down for a parking lot or when the site is vacant, awaiting construction. Like the exaggerated sense of the missing tooth, one becomes more aware after it has been extracted. Departure from the normal order, whether it be construction in the natural setting or destruction in the urban environment, controls our attention. We can focus only on the void, at times forgetting the subject that has been removed.
In all instances of design, a void invites us to participate in a way that the solid cannot. The challenge is to discover the voids we pass through, staking claim to see both the voids and the solids, discovering both equally.
Miss Julie Eidesheim, of Alsatian extraction, and consequently a linguist, is a foster-mother of books. She delivers them, pins up their didies without comment on sex, numbers and picks out the solecisms from their sheets. Frequently and usually she proceeds further. She teaches her charges how to spell, she corrects their pronunciation with diacritical marks, she gives them courses in geography, history, botany, foreign languages, etc., etc., etc. — — and English — always and above all in English.
[Image: Editor at work. (c1939), NYPL Digital Collection]
