Aaron Kee

And what of 2013? The first year since 1987 to have four different digits. Why that’s important, I don’t know – people try to find some divine meaning and significance in everything when, really, we should be building it ourselves. This year is going to be different, they say, before continuing to go about every task in exactly the same way. To that effect, New Year’s resolutions will most likely fail. But this year is going to be different. This is the year you should probably try doing something astronomical. What the heck. Move. Execute step one in your world domination plan. Create something unheard of. Just do it. And then this blog. Looks like it’s not going anywhere.

It is said that creativity is the basis of self-expression. Why are some people supposedly more creative than others, and why can’t others open themselves up enough to be able to express who they are? Creation is the birth of something, and something cannot come from nothing. When someone creates something: a painting, a poem, a photograph, the creativity comes from an idea, from a feeling, from emotion, or from a combination of ideas, feelings and emotions that are somehow ‘reborn’ from all our experiences and perspectives. Creativity is the desire to express ourselves. To formulate these expressions, we have to draw from our reservoir of experience, dreams, desires and experimentation and mix together what was, what is, and what could be… I don’t think you can learn it, it is rather something that evolves. Your perception of everything in your life fills up this reservoir.

Life is what it is. We live the life we choose, we are our own destiny. I know I may never escape this moodiness and loneliness, this hunger and restlessness in me. I still want to dream of places I like to visit. I want to stare at the sky and wonder what it’s doing.

Life is always in the way and life always has problems. There is no such thing as a perfect day or a peaceful day, there are just days. Every day new things excite, scare, oppress, confuse and change. Engage with them, fight, learn, grow, lose, win.

Life, as is the message at the heart of Feynman’s monologue, is to live the questions, to embrace the unfamiliar and to celebrate the beauty of the mysterious. It is a beautiful mantra on which to center the new year.

“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe…I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

“For me, a woman, who is absorbed in her work, who does not care about gaining one’s favour, strong yet subtle at the same time, is more seductive. The more she hides and abandons her femininity, the more it emerges from the very heart of her existence.”

“We’re hoping to succeed; we’re okay with failure. We just don’t want to land in between.” Lots of people say this, but few are willing to put themselves at risk, which destroys the likelihood of success and dramatically increases the chance of in between.

Sometimes, we can’t measure our success, so we invent a proxy, something that’s much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation.

TV advertisers, for example, could never tell which viewers would be impacted by an ad, so instead, they measured how many people saw it. Or a model might not be able to measure beauty, but a bathroom scale was a handy stand in. A businessman might choose cash in the bank as a measure of his success, and a book publisher, unable to easily figure out if the right people are engaging with a book, might rely instead on a rank on the New York Best Seller list. And the non-profit organisation that uses money raised as a proxy for the difference they make.

You’ve already guessed where I’m getting at and it’s call the false proxy trap. Once you find the simple proxy and decide to make it go up, there are lots of tactics that have nothing at all to do with improving the very thing you set out to achieve in the first place. When we depend on a proxy, we’ll likely spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead.

Offices should close at four, books should be two hundred pages long, CEOs should have an MBA, blogs should have comments, businessmen should be men, big deals should be done by lawyers, good food should be un-processed, doctors should never advertise, good employees should work at the same company for years… find your should and make it go away.

I was talking to someone the other day about the first time he broke his nose, he was playing rugby with some boys far better than he (not older, merely better) and they slammed him onto the ground. And he was twelve.

The second time was more recent. He had just finished breakfast with a friend and as he walked out of the restaurant, he was focused on the weather outside and completely ignored the plate glass door, slamming right into it at full speed.

The lesson he was trying to impart on me here is this: while it matters a lot that you have a goal, a vision and an arc to get there, it matters even more that you don’t skip the preliminary steps in your hurry to get to the future — miss even one and you might not get the chance to execute on the later ones.

Do the extra work not because you have to but because it’s a privilege.

Get in early.
Sweep the floor without being asked.
Not because you want credit or reward.
Because you can.

The system wants to suck everything out of you and doing extra work is a fool’s errand.
The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.

And the habit is priceless.

I never liked school. I went all the way through primary years thinking I will never be an achiever of anything then got to secondary school and realised that I was actually quite a mediocrity. English was not one of my strongest subjects. I struggled with my grammar and vocabulary. What I do know is this: to shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence as inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. “He helped his uncle Jack off the horse.” vis-a-vis “He helped his uncle jack off the horse.” So I have a disturbing weakness for the unconventional. To heck with the conventional I say. I might be inclined to gush out words to express how I feel.

Yet feelings and words can be so different. Sometimes it is so difficult to try to express how you feel, and you end up stringing words that may not fully express your thoughts and feelings.

Feelings can stay with you, they may fade but they will never vanish completely. No matter how much you try or you may think you have erase the past, there will always be traces of evidence reminding you of it. You think you have forgotten the person, the moments, but when reflecting on the past or you chance upon something that reminded you and the echoes of the feelings resurface.

It is said that people lie to themselves constantly. They lie to themselves about their real motives, beliefs, and desires; they lie to themselves about what other people think of them. Even though out civilization, and life itself, involves compromise and suppression. Being civilized is just a constant stream of lies about the things people want to excuse, the things people don’t want to admit they desire, and the things they’d rather not deal with or acknowledge. Being civilized often means suppressing your real self, and lying to yourself, telling yourself that the mask you present to the world is who you are.

Here’s a question that we should clip out and tape to our bathroom mirror. It might save us some angst five years from now. The question is: what did you do back then? What will you have to say for yourself? Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around. Hopefully, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice. Maybe you already have a clipping on your mirror that asks you what you did four years back. What’s your biggest regret about that? Do you wish that you had started, joined, invested in, built or changed something? Are you left wishing that you’d at least had the courage to try? Why? Because it’s always possible to find a reason to stay put, to skip an opportunity. And yet, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember why we said no and easy to wish that we had said yes.

I’m a serial creature of habit, my day to day activities, likes and dislikes, have not changed much since way back when. Most mornings, I’ll be reading news and articles and clicking onto my must-go-to sites.Repeated actions tend to perpetuate itself, so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been accustomed to think, feel, or do, under similar circumstances, without any consciously formed purpose or anticipation of results.

However, some would argue that habit is society’s most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within our boundaries, the fact that for most people, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

It is said that there is no more miserable human being than one whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed, are subjects of conscious deliberation. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless of automation, the more our higher power of mind will be set free.

For this we must guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantages to us. If we could realise how soon we will become walking bundles of habits, we would give more heed to our conduct. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest act of virtue or vice leaves it’s never so small scar. Nothing we ever do..wiped out.

Whatever you love, you do it, as if everything is on the line. When the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you know you’ve commited to whatever it is you’re doing. Patience, awareness and skill matter, and you are best at this if you are prepared to fail without dying.

You need to have focus and passion every time. Your lofty life goals are fabulous. Be proud for having them. But it’s possible that those goals are designed to distract you from the thing that’s really frightening you–the shift in daily habits that would mean a re-invention of how you see yourself. Habits are where our lives are made.

An open heart and an open mind, you won’t get far without it. Skepticism doesn’t help you. Don’t bother going to that seminar or reading that book unless you can momentarily assume the message comes from a place of goodwill and genuinity.

Slogans don’t change anything. They don’t mean anything. They don’t grow market share or increase blog traffic or win you an election. Underneath the slogan, do you have a story? A slogan might be evidence that you have a story, but it isn’t the story. The slogan should be a symptom of that story, a symbol of what you truly stand for. A story is something you live and connect with and come back to again and again and again.

If the story of your struggles, your beliefs and your principles are consistent, if it resonate with your audience and if you can defend it, then you’re likely to succeed. So sure, start with a slogan. But don’t bother wasting any on it if you’re merely going for catchy one liners.

It seems like the only thing you can be is a figment of someone’s imagination. No, the falling tree in the empty forest makes no noise, and your ideas or your principles doesn’t exist except as a figment of your own imagination. The challenge, then, isn’t to worry so much about what’s happening in the real world, outside, but to work to be sure you exist in the figment world, inside. You need to believe in yourself.

You won’t benefit from anonymous criticism. There are plenty of ways to get useful and constructive feedback but forms, surveys, mass emails, tweets, none of this is going to do anything but depress you, confuse you or paralyse you. Don’t ask for it and don’t look for it.

So, go do your stuff and make a difference. Most people don’t care enough to make a difference. Most people are afraid to take action. Most people are too self-involved to do the generous work. Most people think they can’t afford it. Most people won’t talk about it. Most people aren’t going to read what you wrote. Fortunately, you’re not most people.