#013 Friday's Findings

Small acts of kindness, someone is doing something right now and more.

Photo: Unsplash

Hello everyone!

Here are some things that resonated with me throughout the week.

Enjoy the weekend!

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Suggested readings

“Think about the last time someone showed you a small token of appreciation. Perhaps a stranger gave you a compliment, or maybe you got a check-in text from a friend, or received a particularly heartfelt thank-you note from a mentee. Chances are, that tiny act brightened your day. After all, there’s a delight in knowing you were on someone’s mind for even a brief moment. When the roles are reversed, though, you might often psych yourself out of performing these simple bids, convincing yourself you must initiate a follow-up after that initial text or that stranger will rebuff your kind remark…” (Small acts of kindness matter more than you think)

“We know that life is the self-correcting mechanism for error — as much in its evolutionary history as in its existential reality. And yet we are living our lives under the tyranny of perfection, as if all the right answers await us at the end of some vector we must follow infallibly until we arrive at the ultimate ideal. But the truth is that we simply don’t know — we don’t know where life ultimately leads, we don’t know what we want or what to want, and we don’t really know ourselves. It is by erring again and again that we find the shape of the path, by tripping again and again that we learn to walk it. Along the way, the answers emerge not before us but in us…” (The Value of Being Wrong: Lewis Thomas on Generative Mistakes)

“In one of his famous letters, John Keats wrote, “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body.” In another letter, he coined the term negative capability: “when [a hu]man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats’s idea was that a poet should be a kind of negative force—that only by emptying herself of herself could she make enough room to be fully inhabited by whatever it is she’s contemplating. Whenever I’m feeling uninspired, I think: Somewhere, somebody is doing something right now…” (Somewhere Somebody Is Doing Something Right Now)

“What are the main threats to the continued survival of humanity? What catastrophes lie ahead? These may seem like uniquely modern questions posed by contemporary thinkers in the growing field of existential risk. Yet, millennia ago, ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were already formulating and debating such questions. While these thinkers had radically different ways of looking at the world and one’s place in it, they all agreed that some form of apocalyptic catastrophe awaited humans in the future. How can we explain this interest?…” (How the ancient philosophers imagined the end of the world)

“I don’t love reading. I like it fine, the way you might like green tea, but I don’t love it, I don’t crave it, and I never have. I read very slowly, and I often have to re-read a paragraph after my mind has wandered. My extended family has some lore about the mild dyslexia in all our genes, but I’ve never been diagnosed and who knows if that’s a factor. Whatever the cause, it’s pretty rare that I think, “man, what I most want to do is curl up with a book and read.” Most often, the act of reading is accompanied by an uncomfortable sense that I should be processing the books faster than I am. Reading feels laborious, and I feel inexpert and slow. If you ever listen to an interview with a talented writer, or if you talk to anyone who knows anything about becoming good at writing, you will almost invariably hear one theme: ‘good writers are good readers.’ It doesn’t matter the genre or the age, this message seems to be wholly accepted as truth…” (I don't love reading)

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A quote I’m contemplating: “How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering? You will suffer soon enough, when it arrives.” — Seneca

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Tools and Proposals

Today I bring even more extremely helpful Chromium tools.

Web Developer (Chrome) — I suggest you try this web dev tool! It will make it easy to spot errors in your site.

WhatRuns (Chrome) — I recommend you check out this tool for web hosting. It is similar to Wappalyzer, but simpler. It shows what a website uses.

Stylus (Chrome) — I encourage you to try this extension. It will allow you to store personal styling on a website.

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Sounds

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Until next time,

Magnus