Category: Everything else

One of the hardest things to do when we’re asked to give advice is to pause and remind ourselves that the advice is for the person asking for it.

Not for ourselves.

“If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?
It will have to be you.
The authority you feel has a great deal to do with how you write and what you write,
With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your own thoughts
And the value of your own perceptions.

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself.
You do that by writing well, by constant discovery.
No one else can authorize you.
No one.
This doesn’t happen overnight.
It’s as gradual as the improvement in your writing.

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There are moments in “Several short sentences about writing” when I find myself pausing and giving Verlyn Klinkenborg a hat tip for articulating a complex idea so beautifully.

I don’t think of myself as a “writer.” But, I’ve been writing for over a decade on this blog. And, his notes on the gradual process of paying attention to what we notice, valuing our perceptions, and going through the act of perpetual self-authorization summarize the journey beautifully.

A lot of improvement feedback boils down to a version of –

1) Do the opposite of what you naturally end up overdoing.

2) Then, find the right balance depending on the context over time.

We have a big tree in front of our home.

As a result, we get less light than we would otherwise in our living room. And, it also means our living room and home is cooler than the temperature outside.

This was wonderful in the summer.

It won’t be as wonderful in the winter.

But, that’s how most things in life work. The best of things can be the worst of things in different situations.

We can’t have it both ways.

The Carbon Brief team had a nice summary of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2020. My favorite 3 nuggets:

(1) “For projects with low-cost financing that tap high-quality resources, solar PV is now the cheapest source of electricity in history.”

(2) India will build 86% less new coal power capacity than expected last year. Long seen as driving global coal growth, IEA now says India will add just 25GW by 2040.

The result? Global coal capacity will fall.

(3) This year’s version of the highly influential annual outlook offers four “pathways” to 2040, all of which see a major rise in renewables. The IEA’s main scenario has 43% more solar output by 2040 than it expected in 2018, partly due to detailed new analysis showing that solar power is 20-50% cheaper than thought.

Despite a more rapid rise for renewables and a “structural” decline for coal, the IEA says it is too soon to declare a peak in global oil use, unless there is stronger climate action. Similarly, it says demand for gas could rise 30% by 2040, unless the policy response to global warming steps up.

This means that, while global CO2 emissions have effectively peaked, they are “far from the immediate peak and decline” needed to stabilise the climate. The IEA says achieving net-zero emissions will require “unprecedented” efforts from every part of the global economy, not just the power sector.

For the first time, the IEA includes detailed modeling of a 1.5C pathway that reaches global net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. It says individual behaviour change, such as working from home “three days a week”, would play an “essential” role in reaching this new “net-zero emissions by 2050 case.

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It has been awesome to see the IEA continually revise up the solar forecasts. I predict continued revisions in the coming years. Solar adoption will continue to rise quickly because it will be the obvious economical decision.

And, that’s fantastic.

“There’s nothing wrong with well-made, strongly constructed, purposeful long sentences.
But long sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over their awkwardness.
They’re pasted together with false syntax
And rely on words like “with” and “as” to lengthen the sentence.

They’re short on verbs, weak in syntactic vigor,
Full of floating, unattached phrases, often out of position.
And worse – the end of the sentence commonly forgets its beginning,
As if the sentence were a long, weary road to the wrong place.

Writing short sentences restores clarity, the directness of subject and verb.
It forces you to discard the strong elements of long sentences,
Like relative pronouns and subordinate clauses,
And the weak ones as well:
Prepositional chains, passive constructions, and dependent phrases.

Writing short sentences will help you write strong, balanced sentences of any length.
Strong, lengthy sentences are really just strong, short sentences joined in various ways.” | Verilyn Klinkenborg in “Several short sentences about writing”

A beautiful reminder of the importance of starting from the basics.

Internet service providers focus our attention on download speed when they advertise their plans.

Download speed is important. If you’re attempting to stream or download a movie, for example, download speed will ensure it happens quickly.

But, if you’re using the internet for video calls as so many of us are, it helps to pay as much attention to the upload speed.

We felt the effects of this recently as we realized our upload speeds were resulting in blurry videos for our parents. And, it was a fascinating journey to figure out how to get to a plan with a higher upload speed as the Xfinity/Comcast page on internet plans had no information on download speed.

After a call to the customer service number, we learnt that their tiers are 100/5 MBPS (Download/Upload), 300/5, 600/15, and so on. As we were on the 100 MBPS plan, this means an upgrade to the 300 MBPS plan would have done nothing for us. The 600/15 plan was the solution as a result.

And, it has made a massive difference in video call quality.

Win. :-)

No matter how hard we try, we will make mistakes.

Little good comes from attempting to prevent mistakes. All we end up with is fear and inaction.

Instead, the way forward is to know that we will make mistakes and be prepared to respond in a manner that is constructive, corrective, and, where possible, creative.

This focus on action and thoughtful responses helps us internalize the lessons we take away from these mistakes. Those lessons, in turn, help us avoid making the same mistakes in the future and often help us do better preventing bigger mistakes.

And, that is as good an outcome as any we can hope for.

One of the things you learn assembling furniture that comes disassembled is that you rarely, if ever, need to use brute force.

Instead, all you need to do is be patient, pay attention to the details, and keep at it for as long as it takes. If you have good tools, you may shave off some time. But, there are few shortcuts available otherwise.

And, if you do find yourself resorting to brute force, it is a sign that you’ve made a mistake somewhere. Hammers are rarely useful in ensuring the right pieces fall in place.

When pieces fall into place, they do so because of accuracy and finesse.

There’s a life lesson in there somewhere.

I was on the California Parks website the other day and noticed different copy in the checkbox near the submit button.

Instead of some version of “I’d like to receive xx newsletter and yy marketing emails,” it said “It’s okay to contact me in the future.”

It made me smile.

It also changed my behavior – I left it checked for a change.

Good copy is powerful.