whetstone

Me: I’m going to blog my experiences of learning to live with ADHD.

Me 2 years later: Wait, what?

“It was frightening to think how quietly, how unobtrusively, those dreams, sometimes sweet, sometimes darkly unsettling, had slipped away – as if a large part of his imagination had died painlessly and unannounced.”

The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub

Extended hiatus due to health issues making writing experiments less fun.

The good news is, you can only get frozen shoulder once per side, and I have now run out of shoulders.

Maybe I should post selected videos and memes here. I’ve been thinking a lot about yin and yang in personal growth

I’m paying attention to when I’m silently yearning. My goal is to do less yearning for what I want, and more strategy, more *doing*, to create what matters to me. 

The yearning thing is a pattern I see in myself, and in some of my clients. 

The thing I want may or may not be fulfilling, may or may not be good for me. But if it is – if I’ve done the work of reflecting on my values and goals and what I really do want in my life and in my year – then idle fantasy is likely to leave me unsatisfied. 

An obvious example of this is desire for a relationship or for sex. Fantasy can be fun, but when that’s all there is, it can be kind of empty. To actually satisfy that need in real life takes action – doing things to meet people, doing things to go on dates, and doing things to make oneself into more the kind of person that one’s preferred partner would want to be with.

Easier said that done. Noticing the pattern is a start. Then, connecting that intrinsic motivation to the thing I want. Also, having a strategy, not trying to plan out every step, but knowing enough to take my next step. . 

This is where I do quick notes about things that I eventually want to write about on Procrastination Paramedic. 

I have a new one-on-one coaching client doing post graduate studies, with exams coming up, so I introduced them to spaced repetition. Copying my message here:

Spaced repetition involves testing yourself on the material you want to learn, and when you get it correct, leave it about twice as long before you again test your recall of that knowledge. It’s a very powerful way of moving knowledge from working memory to long term memory.

For example, you might review something by testing yourself 1 hour after first trying to memorise at it. Then once you get it right after a 1 hour gap, leave it another 2 hours, then 4, then 8, then 16 hours or 1 day, then 2 days and so on.

The exact spacing is flexible, but doubling it is the general guide. (The theoretical ideal is to leave it almost long enough to forget, but not quite. So if you know it will be easy to remember next time, you can make the gap longer.)

The other important thing is to keep the memorisation tasks chunked down, not making them more complex than they have to be.

And you don’t have to remember exact wording unless that exact wording is important for the subject.

As for how to test yourself, there are many ways. I have used strips of paper with vocabulary on them, when learning a language (writing the day of next testing at the top). There is also a great app for spaced repetition, Anki, but I don’t recommend installing and learning a new app now. Better to focus on your material, and use whatever methods you can for the spaced repetition.

It’s important to distinguish

  “We connect so well and understand each  other deeply and we’re obviously meant to be together!”

from

  “She laughs  at my jokes.”

The confidence with which assertions are offered is poorly correlated with their accuracy or value.

“Done is better than perfect.”

A helpful mantra if your perfectionistic concern is telling you “you have to do it right, if you start now you won’t do it right because you don’t know how to do it exactly right so let’s just do it at an unspecified time in the future when we’ll somehow already know everything we need to know and everything that’s stopping let know us fixed and lined up perfectly, oh good phew let’s check Facebook.”

austinkleon:

Here’s “The Camel” from Return To The City of White Donkeys:

Here’s his Paris Review interview: 

you can just walk by somebody downtown and overhear one phrase and it’s a cliché and suddenly you go, Wow, actually that’s very beautiful when it’s taken out of its normal meaning. It’s very stimulating and it gives you a lot to think about. 

And here’s a little writing tip:

“Another good thing that happens [when you allow yourself to stop writing in the middle and pick up the next day] is that the next day you’re another person… and so you may have come up against a brick wall the day before but the next day you go there and you look at that and you go, no, no, no, I want to go this direction. And you start taking in it a slightly different direction than you thought you were going. And that frees you up quite often and gets you into a new territory… You’ve had experiences, you’ve had dreams, you’ve had idle thoughts, you know. So that’s what I meant by being a new person. You look at the fifteen lines you wrote the day before and you have a different idea. Whereas when you quit the day before you thought you were out of ideas.”

If you don’t know his work, click around here or better yet, just grab his Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

New favourite poet.

Reblogged from: austinkleon