9 ways to worship: from nature to nurture to nerding out

I came across this excerpt recently and wanted to share it.

In his book Sacred Pathways, Gary identifies nine of the ways people draw near to God:
1. Naturalists are most inspired to love God out-of-doors, in natural settings.
2. Sensates love God with their senses and appreciate beautiful worship services that involve their sight, taste, smell, and touch, not just their ears.
3. Traditionalists draw closer to God through rituals, liturgies, symbols, and unchanging structures.
4. Ascetics prefer to love God in solitude and simplicity.
5. Activists love God through confronting evil, battling injustice, and working to make the world a better place.
6. Caregivers love God by loving others and meeting their needs.
7. Enthusiasts love God through celebration.
8. Contemplatives love God through adoration.
9. Intellectuals love God by studying with their minds.

This captures many of the thoughts I’ve had around what it means to be spiritual, what is religious versus what is not, what is faith.

Which of these nine do you identify with?

If made to choose one, I’d probably go with #9. But numbers 3, 4, and 5 stand out too.

Daily Habits Checklist (May 15th – June 11th): A painter, who became Picasso

Another good 4 weeks and the progress I believe is starting to show, at least in private. The big gap in late May was due to a family cruise which was a great time. And all that white space on Friday May 26th was the result of a delayed flight. I suppose I *could* meditate and do back stretches while waiting at the terminal, but am averse to public attention…

My music habits have been moved to their own category. These include practicing the piano and guitar, and writing song lyrics. Thus they aren’t here, on the main list. But maybe I’ll include them in future updates. My goal is to start publishing songs soon. They probably won’t sound very good :/

Some thoughts on the habits…

Waking early: Your partner’s sleep schedule has a big impact on yours. If your sleep and wake cycles aren’t in sync, then one of you (usually both of you) will suffer. If you can’t get in sync, consider sleeping in separate beds and ignore the social stigma…? :)

Pushups: Seeking ways to “exceed my level”, in the words of Bruce Lee. In this case, eg, decline pushups

Meditate: Still remains hard, after all these years. Why?

My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

Here’s why I track habits this way.

Thanks for reading!

A brief snippet of Paul Graham’s brief writing advice

His original essay is here.

A few favorites (all quoted):

  • Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can
  • Expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong
  • …just say the most important sentence first
  • Read your essays out loud to see…which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading)
  • Write for a reader who won’t read the essay as carefully as you do

A typical adult has…

…seen more lands than Marco Polo…

…read more philosophy than Confucius…

…heard more music than Mozart.

And so on and so on.

So how do we gain more of Confucius’s wisdom? Marco Polo’s curiosity?

We have already consumed so much. Taken in and absorbed and eaten more than kings and popes and most presidents.

But all of this quantity only gets us so far. Diminishing returns, that diminish quickly.

Understanding and using and mining what we already have is far harder. But it’s also far more valuable.

The easy thing to do is consume more: Read more books. Travel to more cities. Listen to more hit Billboard songs and watch popular TV shows. Go back to school to do homework and take exams. Always seeking more and new and novel.

But something tells me this is the easy part of the journey, the journey to where we want to go. It’s the part we’ve traveled many times over. Where we keep getting stuck on the same mountain pass, lost in the same valley.

But over that pass, through that valley, lies the beautiful destination. The place where Mozart composed his sonatas, where Marco Polo lived his stories, where Confucius discovered and shared his worldview.

I guess I’m just complaining that I don’t create enough. Input so much, and output so little. How do I – how do we – flip this equation? How do we make the most of the much that we already possess, of each little bit?

New additions to the Personal Bible: Warren Buffett, Robert Greene, and a Hacker News comment

I created a Personal Bible for myself so I could re-read and re-re-read my favorite essays, poems, and passages of text. Below are new additions including a snippet from a Warren Buffett shareholder letter, a raw and honest comment on Hacker News, and some small snippets from other writers that I like.

Here’s my latest version as a PDF. Hope one day you can create one for yourself!

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Warren Buffett’s 1989 letter to shareholders
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html

My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call ‘the institutional imperative.’ […] I thought that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.

For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

[…] After making some expensive mistakes because I ignored the power of the imperative, I have tried to organize and manage Berkshire in ways that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and I have attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear alert to the problem.

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I was the ambitious one, the one that strayed far from home, chasing the dream, getting caught up in the consumerism. I’m glad that by the age of 38 I have come to realize that I had everything that was important before I left. The remainder was a constant cycle of churn, want more, want bigger, want better, want newer, want more convenient. Except it’s hard when it’s being fed to you every day by every billboard, every sign, every menu, every advert, every press release, every news story, every TV show to differentiate between want and need. When you stop to analyze what you actually need – I mean really need: Clean air, clean water, shelter, nutrition, sanitation, family, community, companionship; how much of what you’re being sold every day is truly “needed” and how much of it is a want to fulfill some notion that has been sold to you by the media? – a Hacker News commenter

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David DeAngelo: Prove to yourself over and over that you can cope with rejection

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From Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power [Amazon]

Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness
When […] entering any kind of negotiation, go further than you planned. Ask for the moon and you will be surprised how often you get it.