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One of my dissertation committee members is a ferociously smart guy who is a leader in his field. But part of the reason he's been able to be so successful is the cultivation of an attitude/persona that is somewhat stand-offish - giving off the "I'm smart and I know it and this had better be a good use of my time." I can understand why a person would want to do such a thing; time is precious and if you don't treat it that way, you can lose a lot of it to stupid things.
All that said and done, on the occasions when he has tuned in and given me feedback, it has been tremendously useful. And something he once said has really stuck with me. I can't remember the original context, but it may have been during a meeting when I participated in the Research and Training Initiatives committee. As we talked about ideas for some project or another, he commented that a certain thing was unlikely to get done unless someone started doing it immediately.
It's easy to develop a huge pile of projects. What's harder is sorting through them and finishing them. Sometimes, you have to make the painful decision to let go of some of them.
This is my long-winded way of telling myself that I'm not going to get to those boxes full of old copies of Food and Wine, so I need to load them up with the other recyclables to get them out of the house. Further reduction in stuff-clutter.
This also goes along with a recent brief article I read, Stop Buying Useless Crap, and Other Tenets of Militant Minimalism. I know I've been on this schtick for quite a while, but just about the only way to become an instant minimalist is to set one's house on fire, and I'm not willing to go that far. So instead, I must sort through projects, prioritize, and continue to simplify.
Really, my goal is to get to a point where I can come home and I'm not faced with 14 different projects in various states of completion. I know I'm like a small child sometimes, wanting to make new stuff and start new things, so I'm really just hoping to channel these energies more effectively.
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Edited to add:
Well, I couldn't get myself to do it. I made the mistake of opening up one of the copies of Food and Wine to look at the list of recipes. So, now I've reorganized them by month, with the goal of going through a stack each month and ripping out any recipes I might want to add to my collection. Yeah. We'll see how long this lasts.
All that said and done, on the occasions when he has tuned in and given me feedback, it has been tremendously useful. And something he once said has really stuck with me. I can't remember the original context, but it may have been during a meeting when I participated in the Research and Training Initiatives committee. As we talked about ideas for some project or another, he commented that a certain thing was unlikely to get done unless someone started doing it immediately.
It's easy to develop a huge pile of projects. What's harder is sorting through them and finishing them. Sometimes, you have to make the painful decision to let go of some of them.
This is my long-winded way of telling myself that I'm not going to get to those boxes full of old copies of Food and Wine, so I need to load them up with the other recyclables to get them out of the house. Further reduction in stuff-clutter.
This also goes along with a recent brief article I read, Stop Buying Useless Crap, and Other Tenets of Militant Minimalism. I know I've been on this schtick for quite a while, but just about the only way to become an instant minimalist is to set one's house on fire, and I'm not willing to go that far. So instead, I must sort through projects, prioritize, and continue to simplify.
Really, my goal is to get to a point where I can come home and I'm not faced with 14 different projects in various states of completion. I know I'm like a small child sometimes, wanting to make new stuff and start new things, so I'm really just hoping to channel these energies more effectively.
-
Edited to add:
Well, I couldn't get myself to do it. I made the mistake of opening up one of the copies of Food and Wine to look at the list of recipes. So, now I've reorganized them by month, with the goal of going through a stack each month and ripping out any recipes I might want to add to my collection. Yeah. We'll see how long this lasts.
