Overcoming Fear

From the incredible Steph Davis, climber, BASE jumper, wingsuit flyer, blogger and writer:

The best way to dull fear is to practice repetition. The more times you are in an environment or situation you find scary, the less it will intimidate you.

Every time you put yourself in an intimidating situation, even if you don’t actually do much (i.e., you take a 4 inch lead fall onto a giant bolt on purpose after alerting your belayer, instead of…taking soaring, monster whippers onto a blue TCU as you nearly get through the crux of your project), you are STILL making progress, and you should be happy, and keep at it.

The first time I started trying to free El Cap, I was terrified! Actually, when I started working on the Salathe headwall, I was also terrified. But I gradually got used to all the exposure, and was able to relax (somewhat) up there. Just keep at it.

Things in excess become their opposite

Tim Ferriss – The Four Hour Work Week:

It is possible to have too much of a good thing, in excess most endeavors and possessions take on the characteristics of their opposite. Thus, pacifists become militants, freedom fighters become tyrants, blessings become curses, help becomes hindrance, more becomes less. Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want. This is true of possessions and even time.

Choosing your path

A great little quote I found:

A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.

In case you’re wondering, I’m pretty damn happy with mine right now.

Dust dirt off your shoulders

To step up. The origin of this term comes from a story in which a donkey falls into a well and cannot get out. The farmer tries to get the donkey out by rope, unsuccessful in his attempt. He decides, instead, to just give up and bury the donkey in the well. As the farmer begins filling the hole with dirt, the donkey becomes depressed, realizing that all of the dirt on his shoulders and back were going to eventually bury him. He then thought of an idea: I can just shake it off and step up. Therefore, he could just die by doing nothing and getting buried, or shake the dirt off his shoulders and step up to the occasion. So when you have a problem, will you shake it off and step up or be buried?

A Simpler Future

In high school I thought that the future of computing would be networked machines constantly and transparently interchanging not only data but also computation. The world’s idle PC would help your computer when it ran out of processing power, working together as one big Distributed Operating System. You could start writing an email and then leave your computer and access it from any other device. I was right on that last part, everything else was slow, complicated, and unnecessary. The real future is a lot simpler: Webapps and Sharing Data via simple protocols.

Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients.

(From the excellent Daring Fireball iPad Review.)

We still have a long way to go to really make this perfect (sharing files is still hard), but computing is starting to get to the point where the device fades away and finally lets you focus on what you want to do.

A Journey Through Asia

Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam in particular. Absolutely beautiful. Via Andrew Sullivan.