Zephyr Dear

Profiting from death underpins capitalism, but it’s not usually so gross as to make a five-page book comprised entirely of a recently-deceased man’s work and charge $3.97 for it.

Sometimes people dive into new projects because they really want to make some money or to “get something going.” They put pressure on themselves to start a project mainly for the sake of trying to create some forward momentum.

While forward momentum can be a beautiful thing, I would actually recommend against this approach. Usually when I see people try to motivate themselves like this, their projects fizzle out within a matter of months, if they can complete them at all. A couple years later, they have little or nothing to show for their efforts. The “I’ve gotta get something going” approach is the dabbler’s strategy. It’s too amateurish to work well most of the time.

The main issue is that these types of projects are selected largely at random. They don’t fit into any greater strategy. They’re just ideas, but they aren’t really inspired ideas, so even a small amount of resistance can kill them off.

I’d suggest thinking instead about a long-term journey you feel you could commit to for at least 5 years — some combo of lifestyle + income streams + fulfilling work that makes for a nice package deal. Then think about projects that align with your vision. This way you’ll be more likely to follow through on those projects; you’ll have more important reasons for seeing those projects succeed.

In 2004 I started on the path of building a personal development business, and I began with two different skill paths: blogging and speaking. On the lifestyle side, I wanted to explore personal growth very deeply, to conduct my own growth experiments, and to share what I learned along the way. It was the overall lifestyle that appealed to me most of all. I loved the idea of centering my life around personal growth for many years. That was an inspired idea that I could really commit to.

In order to make that a reality, I needed a flexible business model. That’s why I picked blogging and speaking for my work outlets — they’re both flexible and travel-friendly, and I enjoy doing them. But most of all, these outlets can support my desired lifestyle.

I knew that both of these skill paths could also be used to create a variety of income streams. I could write books, create info products, do paid speaking, do public workshops, etc. I like variety, so this seemed like a good overall strategy. If I stuck with these skill paths, I knew I’d eventually be able to monetize my work one way or another and make it financially sustainable. That was just a matter of time. But the real motivation was to support the lifestyle of being able to work on personal growth and to share what I learned with people.

As I went down this path, I tried to pick projects that aligned with it. Which projects would help me achieve my big picture lifestyle desires?

Some of those projects fizzled. Some succeeded. I tried a lot of different things to figure out what I liked doing most, what generated reliable income, and what provided value to people. Those projects were chosen because they fit the bigger framework — my long-term commitment to living a certain lifestyle centered around personal growth explorations and learning. You could say that these projects were stepping stones, but I didn’t always know which stones to step on and in which order. So in retrospect some of them may look like stepping stones, but when I originally picked those projects, it was usually because they looked like reasonable ideas that could support my lifestyle journey. I didn’t always know in advance how I might build upon them.

Here’s a quote from Steve Jobs that fits nicely here:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I think you can also trust in some basic intelligence. If you take the time to get clear about the core of your desired lifestyle path, and then you choose skill paths that can support it, I think you’ll have an easier time picking good projects and not seeing them fizzle so often. Otherwise there’s a high risk of choosing projects that are very disjointed and incongruent.

If your main motivation for selecting a project is money, but you aren’t yet clear about what type of lifestyle that money is supposed to support, then your motivation will likely be unstable and inconsistent. Minor distractions will knock you off course.

You may also be trying to force your project forward, such as by pressuring yourself for financial reasons, but that approach probably won’t create the most inspired work. So even if you complete your project, you may have a hard time selling it. Much to your chagrin, you may discover that no one feels inspired to buy your project that was forced across the finish line just so you could make money from it.

When I started studying public speaking in 2004, it was part of my big picture lifestyle vision. I knew that if I got good at speaking, I could use it to share personal growth ideas, to meet wonderful people, and to generate income. So for the first few years, I picked speaking projects to enhance my skills, to experiment with different styles, to discover my most authentic ways of speaking, and to get really comfortable in front of an audience. I didn’t get into speaking just to make money or to “get something going.” I chose it because it was a good skill set for my desired lifestyle path. This gave me a lot more motivation to stick with it.

Many of the speaking projects I picked in those early years, such as doing a one-day workshop on blogging or speaking at Hay House’s I Can Do It! conference a couple times, were chosen because they aligned with my big picture lifestyle vision. I turned down a lot of other potential projects along the way because they didn’t align with my lifestyle path. I could have gotten into corporate speaking, but I didn’t go that route because speaking at corporate events doesn’t mesh with my lifestyle well enough. Public workshops, however, mesh beautifully with my lifestyle since I get to connect with people who are very enthusiastic about personal growth, and designing a workshop is a great way to delve deeply into a subject that interests me.

I think you’ll find that if you get clear about your desired lifestyle path — clear enough that you can make at least a 5-year commitment to it — you’ll be smarter about picking good short-term projects that align with your lifestyle and your desired skill paths. And you’ll be able to escape the dabbler’s fate of doing random projects that always fizzle.

I understand that it can be hard to take a step back and think about your big picture lifestyle vision, especially when you’re feeling a lot of pressure to get something going. But the get-something-going approach usually just punts the problem a few months forward. When you complete your project (or give up on it because it fizzled), you’ll be facing that same kind of pressure yet again. You’ll still be telling yourself that you need to get something going.

Looking back, haven’t you already been doing this to yourself for some number of years already? If so, then isn’t it fairly predictable that you’ll still be doing this to yourself a year from now… five years from now… ten years from now? Of course you will, unless you choose a different path now.

The people I know who are happiest in life almost invariably put lifestyle first. Yes, they do work they love too, but a big reason for their chosen work is that it supports their desired lifestyle journey.

I really enjoy writing and speaking, but I especially love that these skills support my lifestyle. It’s more accurate to say that I love writing and speaking about personal growth. If these skills didn’t support my lifestyle, my interest in writing and speaking would fizzle — I just don’t care to write and speak about other topics as much. The same goes for other creative projects. It’s the “about personal growth” aspect of those projects that makes them fulfilling and that motivates me to eventually complete them.

What’s your version of the “about personal growth” qualifier that suits your desired lifestyle journey? I think that once you identify it, you’ll find it easier to know which projects fit your qualifier (and your lifestyle) and which aren’t worth your time.

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Clearly the best of all possible back covers


Sorry Chris, this isn't going to work out.


Welcome to ALL of our new recurring nightmares


Clearly the best page in the book

So I got an advance copy of Randy’s What If (due to ~~FRIENDSHIP~~) and over on Twitter I was sharing some of my favourite pages.  The book is out for reals on Sept 2nd!

That back cover tho

by Bill McKibben

A reader writes to complain that fossil fuel divestment is a pointless waste of time:

What divestment does do is make people feel good. That they’re “doing something”, without having to do the thing that they actually need to do: use much less fossil fuel. It’s like a room full of chain smokers advocating tobacco divestment.

This is a reasonable complaint, or at least it would be if having individual people decide to use less fossil fuel could actually cure global warming in the time that physics allows us. But it can’t, because the problem is structural: given that the fossil fuel industry is allowed to pour carbon into the atmosphere for free, they have a huge incentive to keep us on the current path. And since they’re the richest industry on earth, they have the means as well as the motive. (Chevron, for instance, offered the largest corporate campaign contribution post-Citizens United two weeks before the last federal election). If we’re going to do anything about carbon, we’re going to have to break the power of the fossil fuel industry first, which is why divestment from high-profile places is so important (just as it was in the South Africa fight). Nelson Mandela journeyed to the University of California shortly after his release to thank students and faculty there, and by extension at 155 other campuses, for pressing the case so effectively.

Here’s an example from the days news of why oil companies are rogues. You’ll recall that on Monday a leaked draft of a new report from the world’s climate scientists stated that

companies and governments had identified reserves of these fuels at least four times larger than could safely be burned if global warming is to be kept to a tolerable level. That means if society wants to limit the risks to future generations, it must find the discipline to leave the vast majority of these valuable fuels in the ground, the report said.

So, demonstrating the exact opposite of that discipline, Shell yesterday filed for the right to become the first big driller in the Alaskan Arctic. It’s actually a followup to their first attempt a couple of years ago, which went tragicomically wrong when a drilling rig ran aground in a storm. But forget the myriad local dangers. The real story is, the world already has four times more hydrocarbons than they can use, but Shell (and its brethren) are busy searching for more. This is like nuclear overkill, except that they’re planning to sell every bit of the oil they find. It’s business as usual, and it’s insane–and anyone who invests in it, make no mistake, is profiting from the wrecking of the planet.

“These people are paid to play and not to watch,” said Fadel Gheit, a senior oil company analyst at Oppenheimer & Company. “After all the hiccups and bad luck, the company has decided that the upside potential is greater than the downside risk and its worth another shot.”

All a game, with the only planet we’ve got hanging in the balance. Oh, and Chevron, with its mighty campaign warchest? Check out this new piece from Rolling Stone if you’d like to see how they play. (Rough).

(Photo. A Greenpeace activist holds a banner during a protest on May 10, 2012. By Michal Cizek/AFP/Getty Images)

wearepioneerspress:

You guys are making his day! Every time he gets an order he wants to know person’s name, the “name of their momma,” what they’re going to do with the zine, and he gets REALLY excited. http://pioneerspress.com/catalog/zines/4531/

 

P.S. Here is a photo of me with my dog, Pippi.

Another fantastic Major to Minor by Chase Holfelder. Song becomes sort of funny and ironic!

Rey Garza approached a "suspicious" car while wearing plain clothes, gun drawn, and allegedly without identifying himself as a cop. What happened to the teen driver is depressingly predictable. Read the rest

"I get absolutely infuriated when people mill around the sidewalk, clogging it up and having conversations when there’s *clearly* a lot of people in a hurry — it’s inefficient, and I hate that more than anything else. So I have no compunction about pushing past them — maybe a little harder than I need to, as a lesson to them to stop blocking the sidewalk."

The Procrastination Doom Loop occurs because "(1) We're think we're in the wrong mood to complete a task, and (2) We assume that our mood will change in the near future, which will help us complete the task," but of course it doesn't.

Dogs (and Cats) Can Love:

We found that the dog had a 48 percent increase in oxytocin. This shows that the dog was quite attached to the goat. The moderate change in oxytocin suggests the dog viewed the goat as a “friend.”

More striking was the goat’s reaction to the dog: It had a 210 percent increase in oxytocin. At that level of increase, within the framework of oxytocin as the “love hormone,” we essentially found that the goat might have been in love with the dog.

also though i hate her, probably justine tunney is right, and we will all just end up in a world where the world government is essentially google, locked in a cold war with facebook, or whatever the fuck

by Dish Staff

Over-reliance on part-time workers isn’t good for anyone:

Since 2006, the retail and wholesale sector has cut more than a million full-time jobs and added half a million part-time positions.

A study of one large retail chain, conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that scheduling the optimal mix of temporary and part-time workers could increase the profitability of the average store by nearly one-third. But cheaper wasn’t always better. Part-time workers often are not as productive as full-timers, because they tend to be less skilled and less experienced. To maximize sales, the researchers found, the typical store should have four or five part-time employees for every ten full-time employees. “It is possible to have too much of a good thing,” they concluded.

We may already have passed that threshold. Last week, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reported that a slack job market continues to limit the paychecks of U.S. workers. An important factor, they said, is the number of part-time employees who would rather have full-time work.

The New York Times called Michael Brown "no angel." Here's how it described serial killers.:

fuck, dude

by Dish Staff

Crazy how the NYT is demonizing kid for burnin herb when a few weeks ago they were patting themselves on the back for endorsing legalization—
Lacking Iron-Man (@OrdinaryK) August 25, 2014

Yesterday, the NYT took heat for using those words to describe Michael Brown. Yglesias fired back by recalling an experience he had when he was around Brown’s age:

I suppose that, when an undercover officer came upon me and two friends smoking cigarettes and drinking beer on a park bench that night, he could have shot us dead and then the Times could have reported that we were no angels. We weren’t.

But he didn’t shoot us. He wrote us citations for drinking alcohol in a New York City park. … We were teenagers. But since the officer who apprehended us managed to handle the situation without killing us, the NYPD and the New York Times never felt the need to air our dirty laundry in public. And, indeed, though I know plenty of white kids from fancy prep schools who did illegal stuff in high school — who even got caught doing it by the police — I don’t think I’ve ever heard a story where someone like me was killed and then proclaimed to the world to have been no angel. Angels, it turns out, are pretty rare. But if you look the right way, you don’t need to be one to survive into adulthood.

Ta-Nehisi Coates piled on:

[I]f Michael Brown was not angelic, I was practically demonic. I had my first drink when I was 11. I once brawled in the cafeteria after getting hit in the head with a steel trash can. In my junior year I failed five out of seven classes. By the time I graduated from high school, I had been arrested for assaulting a teacher and been kicked out of school (twice.) And yet no one who knew me thought I had the least bit of thug in me. That is because I also read a lot of books, loved my Commodore 64, and ghostwrote love notes for my friends. In other words, I was a human being. A large number of American teenagers live exactly like Michael Brown. Very few of them are shot in the head and left to bake on the pavement.

The NYT admitted that the choice of words was a mistake. But Alyssa Rosenberg was frustrated by another part of the piece, “the idea that dabbling in hip-hop represented something about Brown’s character”:

The Times could have published a different profile of Michael Brown, one that portrayed him as someone hopeful enough to imagine a career in hip-hop but practical enough to pursue technical courses that could give him more stable work. This could have been a story about a boy whose artistic interests were proof that his soul was sensitive, rather than coarse, whatever words rolled off his tongue. But an environment in which these were the associations that came easily to us would be one that saw Michael Brown very differently all along.

West Coast rap is coming back next summer with N.W.A. biopic "Straight Outta Compton." And the cast for the F. Gary Gray movie just keeps getting bigger. "Short Term 12" star Keith Stanfield (who showed off his rap skills in the indie flick) has joined the movie, taking on the role of hip hop titan Snoop Dogg. Those are some big shoes to fill. He joins a cast that includes O'Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Aldis Hodge and Neil Brown Jr. as N.W.A., with Paul Giamatti as their manager. The movie hits the streets on August 14, 2015. [The Wrap] Mary Elizabeth Winstead will face the end of the world in "The Cellar." She has joined the thriller...

Remember bullshit like this every time conservatives whine about the alleged “liberal media.” Shameful as all fucking shit.

“Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.”

– Thomas Berger

by Sue Halpern

Last night our twelve-year-old dog got into the trash. We came home from dinner out and the trash can had been tipped over and a week’s detritus was strewn across the kitchen. Pransky, the offender in question, had her tail firmly between her legs and was looking nervous and, possibly, guilty. If I had taken a picture, she now might be featured on the wonderfully inculpatory Dog Shaming blog. Instead, she is sleeping on the couch, all trespasses forgiven.

The question of whether dogs feel guilty, or just look guilty, has been long debated, and the jury remains out. Still, as Professor Marc Bekoff has written “there’s not reason why dogs cannot. And there’s solid, biological/evolutionary reasons to assume dogs can and do.” Of course, there are solid, biological/evolutionary reasons for dogs to raid the trash, too. So much of what we, humans, consider to be “bad” behavior in dogs, is behavior that comes with strong instinctive ties. The term “house breaking” offers a good clue to the power dynamic of domestication. Think about those collars that emit “ultrasonic sounds” to dogs that bark. Or the ones that zap them with a jolt of electricity if they jump. A barking dog! Can you imagine that?

There must be a better way.

Enter, pigs. Or, more accurately, the pig pheromone androstenone, which is secreted by male pigs when female pigs are in heat. Apparently, what turns on female pigs, turns off dogs of either sex. By chance, Texas Tech professor John McGlone happened to have some in his house, a house that also happened to be home to a yappy Cairn Terrier. And then, magic!

So, he gave one little spritz to his dog, Toto, and immediately the dog stopped barking. Right on the spot. ‘It was completely serendipitous,” said McGlone, who works in the Animal and Food Sciences department of the College of Agriculture and Natural Sciences. “One of the most difficult problems is that dogs bark a lot, and it’s one of the top reasons they are given back to shelters or pounds.”

Suddenly, an idea was born. After extensive testing and publishing of the results, and with funding help from Sergeant’s pet care products, Stop That was developed and hit store shelves under the Sentry pet products name about a year ago. It has been met with tremendous success by pet owners who were on their last legs in trying to curtail bad behavior in dogs.

“My dogs were instantly focused and silenced with one spritz,” said one product reviewer on Amazon.com. “It’s changed my life.”

With that, a new term was coined, interone, which McGlone and his colleagues define as a product that is a “pheromone in one species and has a behavioral effect in another species, but we do not know if it is a pheromone (naturally produced) in the other species.”

And what if that other species is…us? According to The Long Term Ecological Network website, humans are also susceptible to the charms of androstenone, which in the UK has been marketed as a porcine aphrodisiac called Boar Mate since 1972.

At Guy’s Hospital in London scientists sprayed chairs in the visiting room randomly with Boar Mate, and when women arrived for treatment they chose those chairs over others. The active ingredient in the pig perfume is androstenone, and other British tests show that men with high levels of this chemical (measured in urine samples) tend to be married, father more children and occupy positions of power in industry. (Aggressive young criminals also have an excess of androstenone.)

Bad dogs to bad boys, and it gives new meaning to “male chauvinist pig,” too.

(Photo of a wild boar from Getty)

Shannon Kepler's family is standing resolutely behind him after he allegedly shot and killed Jeremey Lake, the black 19 year old who daughter Lisa Kepler met at a homeless shelter after the Kepler's kicked her out of their home. Kepler, an off-duty cop, tracked the couple down outside Lake's home and confronted his daughter. He shot and killed Lake as he was trying to introduce himself. "There was no argument," said Lisa Kepler. "I walked away and Jeremey introduced himself and my dad shot him."

Kepler's attorney seems to mix victim-blaming and unreconstructed racism in his defense of his client.

In a statement, Richard O'Carroll, said there was no basis for the charge since there was "not one credible eyewitness to this event" and claimed Kepler was trying "to protect his daughter, who preferred to live in a high crime area than live in a home with rules prohibiting her from bringing men home at night, some of whom even broke into the Kepler home."

A judge today set Kepler's bond at $825,000.

"littlefoot, do you remember the way to the great uncanny valley?"


ducky is the background (post surgery)


reject neopets


I pity it


WHY JUST WHY I DONT EVEN HAVE A CAPTION WHAT IS THIS


everything in this picture is a reptile


is it petrie? is it a cockatrice? nobody knows


Bambiraptor cumbersnatch

zagreus-taking-time-apart:

this is a real existing movie that i actually watched

Samsung made a video purporting to show the Galaxy S5 taking the “ice bucket challenge”, not to raise awareness for ALS, but in order to mock competing phones (including the iPhone 5S) for their lack of water resistance.

But here’s the thing: Watch the time at the top right of the Galaxy’s status bar. Samsung lacks integrity even when doing something ostensibly for a charity. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

kateceratops posted this:

People are giving Wilson money to thank him for killing an unarmed black teenager. Please report this to GoFundMe, as it violates their Terms of Service and they get 5% of the tens of thousands of dollars being donated. Click to report.

This is my message, in case you want to copy and paste:

Your Terms of Service prohibit “items that promote… hate, racial intolerance, or the financial exploitation of a crime.” Take a look at the comments that come with the donations on this page and tell me that doesn’t violate your terms. “Support Officer Wilson” is a thin veil for people rewarding Wilson for killing a black kid.

I might get some heat for this, but I actually kind of regret using the term “singularity” in Hob. Not that I’ve lost interest in the subject or anything, but I don’t think the current real-life terminology (transhuman, h+, etc.) is appropriate for my comic. They have specific connotations and I prefer to leave things open to the imagination.

It’s partly why even cyborgs in Nephilopolis are called “mezzodes.” When you have your own terminology, you get get a little more freedom with their meaning and implications within your story. I’m not writing speculative fiction, after all. Everything from robots to cyborgs to giant floating cities are there for thematic purposes.

… persuade them to stop being rightwingers[1]

(This is a cross-post from my blog)

I have a piece in (Australian magazine) Inside Story arguing that the various efforts to “frame” the evidence on climate change, and the policy implications, in a way that will appeal to those on the political right are all doomed. Whether or not it was historically inevitable, anti-science denialism is now a core component of rightwing tribal identity in both Australia and the US. The only hope for sustained progress on climate policy is a combination of demography and defection that will create a pro-science majority.

With my characteristic optimism, I extract a bright side from all of this. This has three components
(a) The intellectual collapse of the right has already proved politically costly, and these costs will increase over time
(b) The cost of climate stabilization has turned out to be so low that even a delay of 5-10 years won’t render it unmanageable.
(c) The benefits in terms of the possibility of implementing progressive policies such as redistribution away from the 1 per cent will more than offset the extra costs of the delay in dealing with climate change.

I expect lots of commenters here will disagree with one or more of these, so feel free to have your say.

fn1. Or, in the case of young people, not to start.

by Dish Staff

Paul Cassell previews the trial of officer Darren Wilson:

[P]roving a crime in the Brown shooting will require close attention to the details, particularly details about the shooting officer’s state of mind. Even if the officer made a mistake in shooting, that will not be enough to support criminal charges so long as his mistake was reasonable — a determination in which the officer will receive some benefit of the doubt because of the split-second judgments that he had to make. And, of course, if it turns out that Michael Brown was in fact charging directly towards the officer (as recent reports have suggested), the officer’s actions will have been justified under state law and no charges should be filed. Trial lawyers know that one thing above all else decides criminal cases: the facts. And that is what we’re waiting for now.

Yishai Schwartz expects Wilson to get off because of Missouri law:

In other states, claims of self-defense need to be proven as more likely than not, or in legal speak, to a “preponderance of the evidence.” It’s still the state’s obligation to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the defendant actually killed the victim. But once that’s established, the prosecution doesn’t also have to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the killing wasn’t justified. That’s because justifications—like self-defense—require the accused to make an active case, called an “affirmative defense,” that the circumstances were exceptional. The logic here is simple: As a rule, homicide is a crime and justification is reserved for extraordinary cases. Once the state has proven that a defendant did in fact kill someone, it should be the accused’s obligation to prove his or her actions were justified.

Not in Missouri. Instead, as long as there is a modicum of evidence and reasonable plausibility in support of a self-defense claim, a court must accept the claim and acquit the accused. The prosecution must not only prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime, but also disprove a defendant’s claim of self-defense to the same high standard.

"I’d say I’m a rather rare ENTJ because I actually do care about people’s feelings, but it’s a calculated move. I understand that a happy worker makes an efficient worker. Unless they’re full of it, then it’s their fault if they get butt hurt, I tried."

"Minecraft is digital Lego," says Lego marketing director David Gram. "We only wish we had invented it." This is mentioned in about the same breath as the phrase "core brand beliefs," a concise reminder why they didn't.

Amnesty International says its delegation will remain in Missouri "until we have a clear picture of what is taking place on the ground, and we are able to work effectively with local activists on how to defend human rights at home." Read the rest

I don’t know, dogg, I think literally all of US history has told racists that killing a black kid and then using all the levers of power available to cover it up and violently silence any protest always works out for them.