Paradoxes..................

 

Fast is efficient; but sometimes slow is effective…

What is productivity for you anyway…

-Nicholas Bate, who always asks good questions

a now familiar paradox..............

  In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

-Adam Gopnik, from this review

...........the way.

 You will complete your mission in life when you figure out what your mission in life is.  Your purpose is to discover your purpose.  This in not a paradox.  This is the way.

-Kevin Kelly

a paradox.................

 The popular adage "use it or lose it" doesn't go far enough.  If you don't use it, you might never gain it in the first place. 

. . . a light bulb went off for me.  Comfort in learning is a paradox.  You can't become truly comfortable with a skill until you've practiced it enough to master it.  But practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it.  Accelerated learning requires a second form of courage: being brave enough to use your knowledge as you acquire it.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

Life its ownself.......................

 Life is not a problem to be solved. It’s a paradox to experience. You can believe one thing and also believe its opposite.

-Derek Sivers, as culled from here

To ask the question is to answer it........

 Spinoza, according to all the seventeenth-century interpreters, rejected all the traditional ideas about God, he was indisputably a heretic.  Yet his manner of living was humble and apparently free of vice.  then, as now, the philosopher seemed like a living oxymoron: he was an ascetic sensualist, a spiritual materialist, a sociable hermit, a secular saint.  How could his life have been so good, the critics asked, when his philosophy was so bad?

Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

endless............................

 You can and should be interested in everything, the Stoics taught, because you can and should learn wisdom from everything.  The more you experience, the more you learn, and, paradoxically, the more humbled you are by the endless amounts of knowledge that remain in front of you.

-Ryan Holiday, Lives Of The Stoics:  The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Evasions.....................

 We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.

-attributed to Ayn Rand.

Undaunted........................

      If artists have the capacity to make work that defies time, it is because instead of trying to force-fit a predetermined idea of the future, they have learned to live productively with ambiguity, to see it as a rich source of discovery and exploration.  Instead of trying to reduce complexity, they mine it, undaunted by contradictions and paradoxes. . . . In this, artists have much to teach us about how we ourselves could address the future with imagination and independence.  In addition to thinking about what to do, the artist's method suggest that we should think about how to be.

-Margaret Heffernan,  Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

One can admire his writing.........................

...........................without having to agree with him:

      This is the paradox of historical knowledge.  Knowledge that does not change behavior is useless.  But knowledge that changes behavior quickly loses its relevance.  The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  Homo Deus:  A Brief History of Tomorrow

Checking in with..............................

............................................................................Ram Dass:

“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.” 

“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”

“It's only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.” 

“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”

“Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.” 

“The human mind is like that monkey, incessantly active by its own nature, then it becomes drunk with the wine of desire, thus increasing its turbulence. After desire takes possession comes the sting of the scorpion of jealousy at the success of others, and last of all the demon of pride enters the mind, making it think itself of all importance.” 

“I think the message is that you don’t need to go to anywhere else to find what you are seeking.”

The more things change..............

"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."

-Bertrand Russell,  Skeptical Essays  (1928)

Not to worry.............................

A paradox: Become too efficient and you become less effective


-Nicholas Bate

Twelve truths....................................

Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it’s impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It’s been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It’s so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we’re being punked. It’s filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I don’t think it’s an ideal system.


-Anne Lamott, by way of View From the Ledge

Hmmmm..................................

• A paradox: Boosting efficiency often reduces effectiveness.

-Nicholas Bate, from his wonderful new series

Because the learning never stops...........

Not remembering my Zeno's Paradoxes, the Oracle Google was consulted.  Now I remember, but I still don't understand.  Read it yourself.

"To fully solve any of the paradoxes, however, one needs to show what is wrong with the argument, not just the conclusions."

Really?   I think Diogenes the Cynic had the correct answer.

Mystery and paradoxes..................

“Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.” 

-attributed to Scott Peck

The paradox of tolerance....................

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

-Karl Popper, as excerpted from here

image via

On taking a break........................

9.  Take a break;  re-activate your higher brain where your best work is done

     Full on, sustained work is admirable.  However, the body being organic maintains this relentless pace by slowly switching to reptile brain.  Reptile brain is about survival.  It will get the job done until you literally drop.  But take a break and you keep higher brain in flow.  Higher brain is where the creative breakthroughs occur, so many of which are the amazing productivity breakthroughs.

-Nicholas Bate,  Paradoxical Productivity 35

Speaking of Paradoxes.............

12.  Make small, big.  And big, small.

These endless small things.  What's the context?
Where do they really fit in?  What are you actually trying to do?  Make the small, big.

Those big things.  The 'man on the moon stuff.'  How can you make it brain friendly?  And time friendly?  Break it down, break it down, break it down.  Make the big, small.

-Nicholas Bate,  Paradoxical Productivity 35