April Journal Excerpts

• The ability to re-articulate the information that you have read, either by speaking or writing, is absolutely critical. Reading a lot of books is of little use if you can’t explain their ideas and concepts to others in a coherent way.
• If you spend all your time pulling out weeds and never water the plants in your garden, you will go hungry. Something similar will result if you spend all your time criticizing that which you disapprove of and never put any effort into supporting that which you feel is good and true.
• I’ve spoken with many people who have worked with the Amazonian hallucinogen ayahuasca. One man’s anecdote about his experience really stuck with me. It was quite simple. Shortly after drinking the ayahuasca, a voice in his mind kept repeating the same sentence, over and over: Focus on what’s happening in front of you.
• How will this stack up over time? If I spend ten minutes doing something every day for a year, how many hours will I have spent doing it once the year has elapsed? (10 minutes x 365 days / 60 = 60.8 hours)
• Life changes significantly when you start making your ideas and creations public. That’s when things get real.
• What scares you more: The possibility of your work might be panned when you show it to other people, or the possibility that you might get to the end of your life and wonder whether other people might have appreciated your work if you had showed it to them?
• How often do you put your ideas to the test? Are they backed up by any evidence? If not, they could very well be nothing more than fantasies.
• Other people are life’s great amplifies. Every person you interact with will amplify a unique aspect of yourself. This is one of the reasons why spending time with others is such a great way of learning who you are.
• You are like a song that is always changing. New notes are always being played, and old notes are fading into silence. The quality of your state of mind is a direct reflection of the amount of harmony or discord between the notes in the song of you. The quality of your relationships is a direct reflection of the amount of harmony or discord between the notes in your song and the notes in the songs of those you spend time with. Your thoughts are the notes.
• I disagree with anyone who is entirely against judging books by their covers. Same goes for websites. Aesthetics speak volumes. They are not the only factor a person can use as an indicator of quality, but they’re often a useful one.
• If you can design a more intuitive and or aesthetically pleasing user interface, you can destroy your competitors. Facebook is basically just an easier and prettier version of MySpace. You don’t hear many people talking about MySpace these days.
• Parroting ideas doesn’t take much skill. Linking many ideas into a coherent whole does.
• Are you bothered by uncertainty? If so, you are probably bothered pretty often.
• Small barriers can have big effects. If the information is hidden behind two clicks instead of one, you can bet that half the number of people will end up seeing it.
• I’ve come to feel that the thoughts I choose to think have a far more significant influence on my life than I once believed they did.
• Molecules and sentences have some interesting similarities. A string of atoms, such as a drug molecule, can change behavior if ingested. A string of words, which we call a sentence, can change behavior if heard and comprehended.
• Musical instruments can communicate truths that spoken language never will.
• One of my newest passions is archery. It can be frustrating when I’m not performing the way I’d like to, but I’ve developed a mantra that helps tremendously. Regardless of where my arrow lands, I try to tell myself this: Every shot teaches you something.
• Can you show up and create, even when you’d prefer to consume?
• What could you benefit from doing more of? What could you benefit from doing less of? If you want to get rid of a habit, replace it with different, more uplifting one. If you want to engrain a habit, make it easy enough that doing it several times per week feels like nothing. If you want to start going to the gym, begin by going fifteen minutes every other day; and only lift weights that are five times lighter than those you’d be capable of lifting.
• As our tools become more powerful, there is usually some sort of tradeoff. Once chainsaws started replacing axes, it became far easier to cut down a tree. And far easier to injure yourself while attempting to do so. Once the internet started replacing libraries as the place to go to find information, it became far easier to find what you are looking for. And far easier to become so distracted that you never find what you are looking for.

For so long

The solution is elusive

Then

Seemingly out of nowhere

It comes to mind fully formed.

There is so much to be said for learning the little things

How to tie a knot

How to juggle

How to cook a certain recipe

With each little thing you learn

You move one step closer to the ultimate truth.

So often, we get caught up in semantics arguments

Arguments about definitions

Arguments about what things are

Some say a stool is a chair

Other say it is not

Some people say life is a game

Some people say life is a journey

You can call these things what you will

Regardless of what you call them

They are what they are.

A Way It Could Be

The moment you “die” you begin developing once more in the womb of your new mother. Once you are born, you will be new in many ways. You’ll have a new body, unmarred by the physical injuries and ailments from your previous life. Some things will remain though. If you died from a fall in your previous life, you might have a fear of heights in your new one. If you practiced a sport in your previous life, it will come more naturally to you in your new one. If you liked a certain song in your previously life and hear it again in your new one, you’ll feel as though you’ve hear it before. You’ll find it tough to imagine a time in your life when it wasn’t with you. The same happens when you meet a friend from another lifetime.

The catch is that the truth of reincarnation cannot be figured out using empirical means. It can’t be figured out using reductionism. It can’t be figured out by looking through a microscope or telescope. If such means are employed in an attempt to answer the question of what comes after death, it will seem as though death must result in oblivion. That’s for the best though. If the truth of reincarnation was obvious or easily provable, it would ruin the game.

And so you continue on, lifetime after lifetime, learning all the while. Until one day when you finally realize it’s all a dream. Then you truly wake up, and move on to a higher level of reality.