Sunday Open Thread – July 1, 2007

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

Freeing People from Neediness: I’ve recently realized that, in my zeal to solve problems, to be useful to people, to be sociable, to be popular, to expand my communities and relationships, to say ‘yes, and…’, I have inadvertently encouraged some people’s neediness, which is not doing them or me a favour. I am spreading myself too thin as a result. I’m going to explore, out loud, what I might do about this.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignettes #4 and #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. I’ve recorded some practice podcasts, readings of my own works just to try out the new medium, but I’m not happy with them. I’m also unhappy with the quality of recent Skype calls — too many dropped calls, lost sentences and strange audio artifacts to make a pleasant listening experience. Need to find a better way.

Open Thread Question:

I’ve been thinking about ideas that have profoundly changed my way of thinking. For the most part, they met three criteria:

They could be captured reasonably succinctly (so they were memorable and infectious, fun to talk about),
They were waiting for me to discover, to be ready for them (until I was ready, they would just have bounced off, not registered with me at all), and
They were not obvious — except perhaps in retrospect (though they may have been cleverly worded and intuitively appealing, I only realized their real importance after thinking about them, sometimes for a long time.

Some of these ideas were 100% someone else’s e.g. “There’s no such thing as a dragon“, and just resonated with me, my worldview and where I was in my thinking. Some of them were ‘mine’ in the sense that they were syntheses of others’ ideas restated in some novel way by me, e.g. “We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun”. It’s strange that, to really change how we think, an idea has to be consistent with how we think, but just not thought of, or thought of inthat way, before we heard or coined it, and suddenly: Aha!

What idea(s) have changed your ways of thinking, and why?

3 Responses to Sunday Open Thread – July 1, 2007

Ed Diril says:

July 1, 2007 at 16:52

A book I’ve recently read (Extraordinary Knowing) talks about this. It specifically mentions “gestalt perception” which is how you see the various subsets of a whole. It says that you cannot see all of the subsets at once. You only see one subset at a time and while you are focused on that subset, all the others fade into the background. Moreover, if there is a subset within the whole which you’ve never seen before, it remains hidden from you until you figure out how to bring it to the foreground.I think this is what innovation is all about. Figuring out ways to see different subsets hidden within the whole. This is not a rational, logical, sequential process. Hence it is not something the conscious mind can handle. It is discontinuous and instantaneous. The rational mind can only go back and analyze “the jump”, produce a pattern and make it available to others so that they can make the same jump.
Jacob Haqq-Misra says:

July 2, 2007 at 11:56

One way I like to try and capture some of the profound ideas that have impacted me is to collect insightful and/or succinct quotations that touch on some of these ideas. Less is more, which is why I just have four quotations right now.Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science…the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved.
Andrew says:

July 2, 2007 at 13:03

In response to:2. They were waiting for me to discover, to be ready for them (until I was ready, they would just have bounced off, not registered with me at all), I recommend you go see if http://www.rc.org is a bouncer for you – of not, go for it as it is a tool of extraordinary sharpness for dealing with anger, rage, the general oppressions of mainstream cultures……and much more. I use rc all the time in order to have the courage to keep stepping up to my own world change agendas with grace, calm, effectiveness…… Best wishes