Stop Stealing Dreams is Seth Godin’s description of why Home School-ing requires going through a GodinDip, but he doesn’t want to do it. So instead of being a linchpin for homeschooing, Seth will be a naysayer. Seth is advocating the Status Quo: Lame-duck parent activists who delude themselves that their activism is meaningful. And people advocating for large-scale School Reform without any blueprint whatsoever for how to educate such a wide range of students on such a large scale. This discussion is parental escapism. No parent, not even Seth, will solve the school problem before their kids are out of school. Seth has kids. This book is his justification for not homeschooling his own kids… Un Schooled (Un Schooling) kids — who follow no curriculum — do better on the SAT than the majority of schooled kids. The SAT does not test what you’ve learned. Which means you don’t need to have curriculum based education to get into a good college. I could list stuff like this for ten pages. The point I want to drive home is that the education reform movement is so far past school reform that it’s ridiculous to waste our time talking about this topic.
Venkatesh Rao warns against various Logical Fallacy-s that detour you from Authentic Happiness. So clearly, expecting nothing to change when you undergo a major transformation is as silly as expecting everything to be perfect. So what can you reasonably expect? You can expect to become either a more complex person or a more confused person… The arrival fallacy is a fallacy because it predicts the exact opposite of what actually happens: that life will get simpler… To operate with the expectation that things will get more complex with every transformation is to live life. To operate with the expectation that things will get simpler with every transformation is to live a series of unsatisfying projects. Unless you are one of the lucky minority… American culture strongly conflates success and SimplicIty on the one hand, and FailUre and ComplexIty on the other. A life that gets progressively more complex takes a good deal more philosophy and reflection to navigate. Success and failure become matters of perspective and interpretation rather than simple arrival. You may even find that the categories become less relevant to you with each arrival. If I had to boil all this down to a bumper sticker, it would be the title of the post: live life, not ProJects.
LIFE NEED ONLY TWO THINGS:
1. STAY ALIVE
2. WIN
STOP DOING EVERYTHING ELSE.
We are naturally detecting which games matter and which don’t– and we are figuring out that most of our life is the fundamental equivalent of gold farming. It’s pointless and it’s fucking sad.
Do less. But do the very small number of things you do very well.
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Cal Newport: “The Ambitious Minimalist: Musings on Impact, Simplicity, and the Good Life”
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Living without Goals
Leo Babauta: So what does a life without goals look like? In practice, it’s very different than one with goals.
You don’t set a goal for the year, nor for the month, nor for the week or day. You don’t obsess about tracking, or actionable steps. You don’t even need a to-do list, though it doesn’t hurt to write down reminders if you like.
What do you do, then? Lay around on the couch all day, sleeping and watching TV and eating Ho-Hos? No, you simply do. You find something you’re passionate about, and do it. Just because you don’t have goals doesn’t mean you do nothing — you can create, you can produce, you can follow your passion.
And in practice, this is a wonderful thing: you wake up and do what you’re passionate about.
(Often, any action is better than doing nothing.)
If a task has been on your to-do list for an extended period of time and it hasn’t gotten done and nobody has fired you, condemned your house, or put your dog down, it’s quite probable that the task wasn’t important to begin with and it’s certainly not getting more urgent. (by Jason Fitzpatrick)
