There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same: only love.
– From Don Juan de Marco
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Book review: The 7 habits of highly effective people
It’s a little difficult to say someting original about this book. The 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey has been around for a long time, and has infleunced many people’s thinking on leadership and personal and professional development.
And deservedly so. The book offers insights that make sense and can serve as the foundation for personal growth. What I found most encouraging is that I see signs that much of the thinking of the book is now commonly found in a business setting. It seems that the ideas have spread and have become accepted, especially the very foundation, namely that professional success can (or maybe even must) come from personal development. To become a better worker, become a better person is the message that’s been spread by many books, and most effectively by “7 habits”.
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Book review: No contest
Competition is bad. It is a determining factor shaping human interaction almost everywhere eg. in education, in the workplace in hobbies and even in our social lives, but the net result of competing is negative.
Life for us has become an endless succession of contests, From the moment the alarm clock rings until sleep overtakes us again, from the time we are toddlers until the day we die, we are busy strugglinh to outdo others. This is our posture at work and at school, on the playing field and back home. It is the common denominator of American life.
This is the central argument of Alfie Kohn’s excellent book No Contest, The Case Against Competition. In the book, he takes on many of the myths of competion, especially that competition is an unavoidable aspect of human nature (built into us at a biological/genetic level) and that it drives us to better performance.
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MS goes Google
Microsoft recently redesigned their search engine in the image of you-know-who. The NY Times has a cool comment on that:
Once you click Search, you’re in for a pleasant surprise: Microsoft has stopped trying to trick you into clicking on its advertisers’ links, which it used to scatter among the genuine search results…
Unfortunately, Microsoft calls the separation of advertising an experiment, not a permanent change in policy. It seems to be trying on honesty in the mirror to see if people will find it attractive, rather than realizing that running a principled business is the way to win customers’ trust.
I like the image of “trying on honesty” and I must say that it fits well with my impression of how business is conducted at Microsoft and many other large corporations. It’s refreshing to see companies like Google that exhibit a true commitment to their customers and who consequently put their interests first.
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Book review: The art of happiness
The Art of Happiness starts out by defining the role of happiness in our lives:
I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So I think the very motion of our life is towards happiness…Howard Cutler got the enviable assignment of sitting down for a series of meetings over a copule of years with the Dalai Lama, and the result is this book. The style is true east meets west as Cutler, a psychologist, seeks to combine his understanding of the mind with the spiritual practices of the tibetan buddhism practiced by the Dalai Lama.
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Toy store
I have a hankering to spend some money at the Trainer’s Warehouse.
I mean, who couldn’t use:
A whiteboard on a stick
Real gameshow buzzers
A Cat-a-pult game
A set of boom wackersMan, I could have some fun with some of that stuff :o)
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Book review: Rational Mysticism
John Horgans book Rational Mysticism breaks new ground because it is written by a man who is clearly a sceptic but who seems to want to believe in something beyond rationality – yet doesn’t want it so much that he forgets to ask the tough questions. And the strong side of this book is precisely the questions. What is mysticism? What are spiritual experiences, what causes them, why should we seek them and what do they signify? Are mystical experiences triggerede by hallucinogenic drugs as reald or “valid” as those triggered by meditation or prayer? All good questions to which the book offers no one set of answers but rather an examination of many different viewpoints.
Each chapter of the book describes Horgans encounter with one aspect of mysticism, eg. drug related experiences, meditations, prayer, etc. He’s talked to many of the prominent people in the field, such as Ken Wilber, Huston Smith, Stanislav Grof and Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD. He allows each of these people to present their viewpoints on mysticism while offering his own thinking also.
One of the main questions examined in the book is that of the perennial philosophy. Here’s a quote from the book:
The perennial philosophy holds that the world’s great spiritual traditions, in spite of their obvious differences, express the same fundamental truth about the nature of reality, a truth that can be directly apprehended during a mystical experience. Implicit in the perennial philosophy is the notion that mytical perceptions transcend time, place, culture, and individual identity. Just as a farmer in first-century China and a website designer in twenty-first-century New York City see the same moon when they look skyward, so will they glimpse the same truth in the depths of a mystical vision.Do we each see our own little world in our mystical experiences or do we look at the same world only differently. This difference is crucial because it seems to me, that mystical experiences would somehow be truer and more real, if they were not just individual “fantasies” but new ways of seeing our world.
The book is very well-written, highly entertaining and well researched and I recommend it to anyone interested in a view of mysticism that transcends the cool scepticism of the scientist types and the blind willingess to believe of the new-age generation.
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Quote
I want to make my music so that it doesn’t force the performers of it into a particular groove, but which gives them some space in which they can breathe and do their own work with a degree of originality. I like to make suggestions, and then see what happens, rather than setting down laws and forcing people to follow them.
– John CageVia Boingboing.
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Laugh of the day
Far be it from me to serve as a tool of some multinational corporations viral marketing campaign, but this little movie is extremely funny, and VERY well executed.
