Category: Life

Feed That Wolf

The One You Feed is a show I often listen to on my hikes or while doing chores around the house.  It starts with the parable of the two wolves. You know the one. They have great guests and it’s always an interesting conversation. the best website to buy viagra and cialis

The guest this week is our friend Kristin Neff, who my wife and I met because of our work at Square Peg Foundation — especially with Autism. buy cialis

Joell knows Kristin better than I because of her many trips out to Kristin’s place near Austin, Texas to work with Kristin’s husband at Horseboy Foundation, but I follow Kristin’s work with interest.

Kristin Neff, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and her pioneering post-doctoral research on Self-Compassion is the basis for her book, Self Compassion: The proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, and The Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, which she started with  Dr. Christopher Germer of Harvard Medical School. These ideas are also well aligned with our Square Peg Foundation work and my consulting in technology and business.

This interview with Kristin is a great introduction to her research and the core ideas behind mindfulness and self-compassion. Enjoy!

The One You Feed #106: Kristin Neff

New to Podcasts?

I recommend Overcast for iOS. I’ve heard great things about Pocket Casts for Android (and also for iOS) cialis generic online

You are not your depression

Conversations on depression have been flowing around the tech community for the last few months. It’s important, and many people have written about their experiences. There is some wonderful, helpful, and deeply personal insights out there.  cialis tablets

This morning I found one that really hit me. Mike Monteiro is a Designer and runs Mule Design Studio in San Francisco. He’s one of those insightful voices that I always enjoy reading or hearing, whether on his blog or in conference talks. His books Design is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client are must-reads for anyone involved in creating a product. We’ve never met, but by all accounts he’s a great guy.  cialis generico milano

He has also struggled with depression.  generic cialis is it safe

His essay is by his own admission not a comprehensive view of depression. But he says one of the most important things that people need to know: 

I am still me. Better yet, I think I am finally me. I’m not living with some shit demon in my head all the time.
…
You don’t have to be your depression. Go be you.
From <https://medium.com/@monteiro/this-is-about-the-time-i-chose-not-to-die-3c2cc97cf769>

 

You can’t read much about depression and mental health without hearing the message that people have a hard time, for lots of reasons, taking the step to get help. Mike’s personal story steps beyond the cliché to touch that deep fear of loss — that fear that your depression somehow makes you who you are.  cost of cialis

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    • To Make a Great Product, Be Present and Self-Aware

    A key principle when thinking about a product is to understand, deeply, the needs of the user of the product. What job are they hiring it to do? Why – What are they trying to accomplish?

    But this is difficult – and not just because it takes long hours and many cycles of iterative improvement. It’s not just that the things people tell us about what they want are wrong, or at best incomplete. It’s not just that it’s difficult to simultaneously have deep belief in your insight and also question every assumption.

    It’s difficult because we get in our own way. 

    We have difficulty sorting out our own motivations, dealing with our own emotional responses, and knowing our own mind. So how can we really understand someone else? At the same time, we also tend to attribute motivations and meaning to the actions of other people —as if we know what they are thinking. 

    Look at your personal life. Have you ever been accused of some transgression that all turned out to be a misunderstanding? Now, be honest, have you ever made that sort of assumption about someone else, later to find out that you were wrong? 

    These emotional examples just highlight a more pervasive problem. Our minds tend to make a leap of meaning, a shortcut of sorts, to help us understand the world around us.  We tell ourselves stories about things that happen around us that build our concept of how things work. This skill is useful. But we also tend to stick to stories that reinforce our ideas about the world. We resist, and explain away, anything new or different —especially if it challenges our core ideas. 

    “If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies behind it: the contrarian truth.”

    – Peter Thiel, Zero to One

    We can never perfectly understand the motivations, aspirations, emotions and thoughts of other people. We can probably never perfectly understand our own. But by working at it, we can grow and become better at it. We can see our own thoughts as just thoughts. We can turn them over, examine them, think about alternatives, and decide what to think. 

    This is the beginning. It’s not about having a formula for success, but rather a skill of being present and self-aware so that we can make better use of any idea, method, formula, or framework. It’s not about being perfect. Just notice that you are making assumptions or assigning motivation, and come back to self-awareness. 

    Be Present. Be Self-Aware. Innovate. 

    Square Peg Ranch On TV

    For the next few months, our work at Square Peg Ranch is featured on America’s Best Racing and Fox Sports. The first short video in the series was shown today during the horse racing coverage of the United Nations Stakes at Monmouth Park, NJ. Joell and I watched at a local pizza place with some of our families. 

    You can watch an extended version of this first video on the America’s Best Racing Website. 

    In the video you’ll see several of our kids featured, plus Davis Finch, our Grantwriter who also keeps our horse and lesson records — tracking everything that goes on with the horses, including all training, exercise, injuries, medications and preventive care. (For more information about Square Peg Foundation and our work at Square Peg Ranch, check out our website, SquarePegFoundation.org or reach out directly to me.)

    The team at Fox Sports and America’s Best Racing have done a really beautiful job on this video. They were a joy to work with and we’re eagerly looking forward to seeing the rest of the series!

    A Quiet Sunday Morning

    I was up early today. When the hounds wanted out at 5am, I decided I would get some coffee, write and think. It’s the beginning of a quiet and reflective Sunday morning that Joell and I have been planning for a few days.

    The last week has been difficult. It started close to our hearts, but trivial: the loss of our dear little pygmy goat, Chocolate, who had been a part of our Square Peg family for a decade. Then, when we were still a bit sad over our silly little goat, a young man killed 9 people after sitting in church with them for over an hour. It’s been reported that he’s confessed that he almost didn’t go through with it because they were so kind to him. That’s the kind of people he killed, people who showed nothing but kindness to a stranger.

    Nothing is going to instantly fix this hole in my heart, calm the rage I feel, purge my disgust for the racists who fly that flag, but this morning we will take another step toward healing and spend the morning in celebration at Glide.

    Back to the Hack

    I took a break this afternoon while my old friend Cliff was here with his kids. Cliff and I fiddled with the repair project on my old turntable (more about that later) while the kids played my piano and guitar and took some photos of the horses.

    Now I’m back into the WordPress hacking to get all my IndieWeb stuff set up just-so. This post is a test of my POSSE to Twitter and Facebook.