Life on Janusworx

Make Bad Things

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 10:54:10 +0530

Amanda says,

“Make bad things, instead of making nothing”

Something similar that’s been drummed into my head innumerable times over the years, by many mentors:

“If you cannot do it well, do it badly.” :)

If you love doing something, if you want to do something … do it.
Does not matter how poorly or badly its done.
You’re going to love it nonetheless.

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Ursula Vernon on Unrealistic Expectations and Eating Bread

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:50:35 +0530

If you’re ever feeling guilty about not cooking a fresh home-cooked meal, a reminder that people in cities historically either had cooks or ate at food stalls, going back to Ancient Greece. Ancient Egypt, too, although since everybody ate bread, beer, and onions, less of a thing.

It’s a weird quirk of our obsession with nuclear families that everybody is expected to have time, skill, and equipment to cook daily and that if you’re a woman, particularly, you are a lesser person if you aren’t casually able to cook every day with random fresh ingredients.

Don’t buy into that. People since forever have hired cooks, gone to inns, lived in extended families where it wasn’t always your turn to cook, or ate such simplified diets that it was less of an issue.

You haven’t failed at a normal human task,
you have been sold an unrealistic expectation and told it was a normal human task.
Go get takeout.
Or beer, bread, and onions.
Eat cheese and some dates.
Relax.

— Ursula Vernon via, Diane Duane

I stumbled across Ursula from her art.

Art courtesy, Ursula Vernon

And then I realised she is an accomplished children’s author

And she does not stop there, she writes Hugo award winning books for adults across genres; horror, fantasy and romance.¹

And talk about making art from pain, she fucked cancer right in the eye!

Read all about her long journey here!
And if it does not inspire you, and make you shed a tear, I’ll eat my hat.

I’d say she’s a female Neil Gaiman. But let’s face it. She’s far more talented and kicks ass. Gaiman is the male T Kingfisher! ↩︎

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:35:56 +0530

My old-style slow notetaking process.
Replaced now with Elipsa Annotations, which then move along with my thoughts into Org Roam Notes.
Click to see bigger

Cal Newport recently did a deep dive on his podcast, on a minimalist note taking system for various areas of your life.
Video’s on Youtube, if you want to watch. It’s called A Productivity System To Remember Everything You Learn.

It matches, what I’ve organically been doing all these years.
And I was really happy to see it structured and rendered so well.
So I wrote and paraphrased and jotted it all down below.
Note: These are my mangling of Cal’s words, not what he actually said. The audio/video above should give you exact specifics.

Why?
#

Minimal Friction
#

too much friction with other systems
friction in work that matters is ok, is good, is perfect. McPhee & Caro! But for most other things, not needed.
- Cal goes on to verbally list what McPhee does, but my notes are better.
- In a nutshell, friction slows him (McPhee) down in a way that’s beneficial, that lets him do his best work
Notetaking does not need such friction. When information is coming at you, your time to act + energy to think are limited
Friction stops you from taking action. That information could then be lost
- For e.g. a complicated note taking process when reading a book, might stop you from getting into the book or ever keep you from reading the book altogether.
Your system should therefore reduce friction, so that you can capture as much information as possible quickly, efficiently, painlessly

Outsource your brain? No!
#

When it comes to things that matter, stuff should live in your brain. So that stuff percolates into your value systems and mental models and you evolve!
Your brain needs to be part of this curation process. Your brain needs to build hooks. To remember the big things. For accuracy and precision, details can always be looked up.

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

If there’s somethng interesting on the page, mark the corner fo the page (dog ear with pen) and then …
- Mark up the thing that interest you! Simple marks in the margins. Put a box around text. Checkmarks next to a line. Curly braces next to a paragraph to remember
- Occasionally write a short note, to help you remember the context, or to tell yourself what it reminds you of, or is there any other place where you’d find this useful?
Barely slows you down. Does not get in your way. Does not prevent you from reading
Then when you go back to your book, and look at your dog marks and then look at stuff you marked on those pages? You will in a few minutes, reconstitute all the ideas from that book.
Bonus: One “shortcoming”? You need to remember! Oh that book? That was the one that had the interesting ideas about such and such
- That is not a problem. This is the one bit of friction that is useful. It allows you to use the gist of what you learned from the book in the schemas of knowledge that I am constructing and modifying and growing in my head. So that’s not really a bug, rather a feature. In English? It helps me build better Mental Models!
- You become a better reader

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

Where do notes relevant to a project go?
Store notes relevant to a project in the location where you will one day work the project.
- I do this on a personal level too. Everything is where my mind says, I ought to look for them, not where they “ought to be.” Which is why my keys are next to my Minnie mouse plushie and my flash drives live in an old, soup bowl.
So when it comes time to do the work, everything that you’ve gather is all there for you to use.
Duplication is ok. (If there’s too much duplication, which happens rarely, I organically figure something out)
Bonus: Whenever you add something new to the pile, you always encounter your old stuff and it keeps refreshing a mental picture of the project in your mind and helps create new mental grooves

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life
#

Keep a fancy, awesome, cool, aspirational notebook!
A fancy pen you like
Basically whatever you used when you started your journey? You wrote notes, you made headlines, you had marginalia in your pages, you did everything by hand. Just use the classiest things you like and can afford, to give it heft and meaning.
Your life has few ideas, important as they are. Easy to keep track of them in a notebook
You want the form to matter.
Digital notebooks? They’re cool too, if you like them.
All you need is semi regular review and process
- A good lazy way to do it is when the notebook fills up
- Review and copy over the summaries of everything good and lasting and important
- See what sticks

You Can’t Have It All

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 09:25:59 +0530

Mountains in Ladakh. Click to embiggen

And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

— Barbara Ras, via Maria Popova

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On Things That Last

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 20:33:23 +0530

Just something that kept coming to mind today.

I met an old friend the other day. We’d fallen out of touch and gone our separate ways.
We were both gifted watches by another friend of ours at the time.
And they pointed out to me, I was still wearing the same watch.

I gently pointed out to them, that this watch was a different one, something the better half gifted me just after we got married. This is a white dial, see. The old one was blue. And then we moved on to other things.

What I didn’t tell them, was that I still have the old one.
It’s battered.
It’s scratched.
It works.
It keeps perfect time.
It’s beautiful.¹

I didn’t tell them, because I imagine, they probably wanted me to remember the times we were together, fondly. Because I imagine, they think I’d get all dewey eyed over friendships long lost.

And that’s not why I have it around at all.
It was my companion through the worst years of my life.
When I was lost, at sea and barely keeping my head above water.
When I was nursing my brutally broken heart, which then got broken again. And again.
When I had no money, and no friends.
When I was thinking of the futility of going through one more day.
That’s when I’d strap it on. And go live one more day.
I have it, because it reminds me of my resilience.
I have it, because it reminds, I decided to live.

Strange that a thing has lasted longer than my friendships.
Not so strange, when I realise that it’s no longer a gift.
It’s imbued with the echoes and memories of decades of my life. Those that I chose to live.
It’s not just mine. It’s me.

P.S. If the blue is for resilience, the white is for joy.

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in a very wabi-sabi-esque way ↩︎

This is Water

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 05:45:00 +0530

My idols have feet of clay, as usual. The book is one of those, do as I say, not as I do books. I learnt about his abusive behaviour about a month after reading the book. While I absolutely loved reading it, I cannot in good conscience suggest you buy it anymore. Hopefully the clip I linked to, should be enough, because what he did share in the talk, is worth emulating, even if he himself, didn’t.

At some point in my mid twenties, before I found Stoicism, I somehow managed to start looking at things in my life, from other points of view.
And I was wondering how I got to be so “adult”, at least in that sense, when I did the rest of my growing up and adulting in my mid thirties. It was not the Catholic faith that I was brought up in, nor had I found the Stoic sensibilities that I’d stumble across much later in life.
I found the answer today as I was cleaning out my book shelves.

It was David Foster Wallace’s talk, This is Water.
I remembered the message and forgot the source! Talk about internalising a book.
I listened to it over and over and over in the mid 2000s, and when the book was published in 2009, soon after his tragic death, I went and bought a copy and then read that to tatters too.
This little volume, was the bridge that took me, as I struggled from being laid off through five years of craziness until my mind and heart settled down.

The tiny book I have, is this small talk I’ve linked below, spread across a hundred easy breathing pages.

brainpicker · David Foster Wallace: "This Is Water" (part 1)

*[Part 1][scdfwtiw1]*

brainpicker · David Foster Wallace: "This Is Water" (part 2)

*[Part 2][scdfwtiw2]*

This is the part, that has always stuck with me,

“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
This, like many clichés, so lame and banal on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

And this is just one lesson.
Maria Popova lists a ton on her post about the talk.
Shane Parrish lists it in his books that have the most page–for–page wisdom.
And then goes further and transcribes it completely.

So listen and read ~~and go buy the book and destroy~~ it too.
The lessons are worth it.

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Life on Janusworx

Make Bad Things

Ursula Vernon on Unrealistic Expectations and Eating Bread

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

Why? #

Minimal Friction #

Outsource your brain? No! #

The System #

For Books (the Corner Marking Method) #

Projects (Professional and Personal) #

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life #