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Fractured Lands - How the Arab World Came Apart

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On a more philosophical level, this journey has served to remind me again of how terribly delicate is the fabric of civilization, of the vigilance required to protect it and of the slow and painstaking work of mending it once it has been torn. This is hardly an original thought; it is a lesson we were supposed to have learned after Nazi Germany, after Bosnia and Rwanda. Perhaps it is a lesson we need to constantly relearn.

Incredible work by Scott Anderson at the New York Times. Take a day or two and read the entire thing. For those of us living in peace and prosperity, where the biggest problem we have to face is paying an extra dollar for a cappuccino, we need to remember that evil is always waiting at the gates. There are always those who would throw the world into chaos. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The Unbelievable, Amazing, Astonishing American Dominance at the Olympics - The New Yorker

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And yet, the Americans were . . . wow. They were amazing. What else could you say? Part of the pleasure was appreciating the team’s depth. Yes, Simone Biles is the greatest gymnast in history—she was even before she won her first Olympic gold last night—but she has astonishingly talented teammates. Laurie Hernandez doesn’t just look like she was drawn by a cartoonist; every leap seemed accompanied by a thought bubble filled with exclamation points. Aly Raisman tumbled with a regal quality that was absent even four years ago, when she won gold in the floor exercise. She seemed to stick her landings by fiat.

Dominating.

The Swimmer Who Fled Syria - The New Yorker

She’s focussing on the two-hundred-metre freestyle to qualify for the Olympics, but she admitted a soft spot for the butterfly. “It’s really hard,” she said. “This is why I love it.”

An amazing and inspirational story. It is far too easy to forget the human stories of the refugee crisis stemming from the Syrian civil war. These are real people with lives and dreams that were thrown into disarray when their country was torn apart.

My message to the world.
#YusraMardini 

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OmniFocus Video Field Guide Update Coming Sunday — MacSparky

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I’ve been working the last few months on an update to the OmniFocus Video Field Guide. I’ve updated it for several new features and gone deep on the iOS Automation and URL linking. I’m making final edits and additions over the next few days and intend to publish it sometime Sunday (probably late).

OmniFocus is where my stress goes to die. It’s where I regain control of my life. My system for making sure that things that need done aren’t forgotten. Bills are paid, calls are made, and projects move forward. It’s also where ideas go for evaluation. If I have an idea for a new project I’ll drop it in OmniFocus and let it sit there for a while. I might file it away in it’s own project folder, put a “Defer Until” date on it for the weekend, and let the idea sit and stew for a bit.

If the idea has merit, if I keep coming back to it and deferring it more than once or twice, then I focus more on it and start to eck out next actions to start making it a reality. I know there are a lot of task management apps out there, and even a few analog systems like the Bullet Journal, but I’m so invested, and so used to how OmniFocus works that I have zero motivation to move to anything else. By this point, OmniFocus works the way my brain works, it is my trusted system.

That’s all thanks to David Spark’s OmniFocus guides. I adopted his system years ago, modified it slightly and made it my own. I’m looking forward to seeing where he’s taking the guides next.

The Motivation Toolkit

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One key to mastery is what Florida State University psychology professor Anders Ericsson calls deliberate practice – a ‘lifelong period of… effort to improve performance in a specific domain.’ Deliberate practice isn’t running a few miles each day or banging on the piano for twenty minutes each morning. It’s much more purposeful, focused, and, yes painful. Follow these steps – over and over again for a decade – and you just might become a master:

Focus and mastery of your chosen craft are topics that I’m deeply interested in, so this article checked all the right boxes for me. In the age of distraction that we live in, where any hint of boredom can be quickly and easily erased by Twitter or Buzzfeed, I believe that the ability to focus, and focus intently for extended periods of time is only going to become more valuable for people who work primarily with their minds.

Each day is an opportunity to either sharpen your saw, or let it rust. Taking action to ensure that you are focusing on the right things at the right time gives you an advantage.

I’d be remiss not to mention Shawn Blanc’s “The Power of a Focused Life” course. I’ve not taken the course yet, it’s a bit pricey, but I’ve followed his work for long enough that I understand where he’s coming from. To do your best work consistently, and to always be pressing the boundaries of your capability, to always be making yourself just a little bit better every day, these are the traits of a master craftsman.

Master Plan, Part Deux - Tesla Motors

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However, the main reason was to explain how our actions fit into a larger picture, so that they would seem less random. The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That’s what “sustainable” means. It’s not some silly, hippy thing – it matters for everyone.

By definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better.

Here is what we plan to do to make that day come sooner:

Tesla is the most interesting company in America today.