Carolina Pz

When you pause, and eventually discard, the narrative you craft of what the world, people, or circumstances have done to you or what they mean about you, there is a beautiful, glorious silence. A pause before the breath of the new voice begins to speak: the voice that tells what you bring for the world and that you are of the world.

The Future of Infographics →

“Just as the popularity of a new musical genre does not affect its legitimacy (right, hipsters?), the prevalence of infographics does not limit the opportunity to use the medium to create something of incredible quality and utility. The data boom and growing need to display complex concepts simply ensure that these opportunities for graphic visualizations will be plentiful in the years to come.” - “The Future of Infographics” on Fastcodesign.com by Ross Crooks

Content Curation as Self Curation

My history studies fueled my fascination (some might say obsession) with information. Reading it, recording it, sharing it, loving it. I’m convinced that I chose 20th century American history as my specialization because of the sheer amount of primary sources with which I could interact - speeches, books, photographs, film. Ancient Greece? Tougher.

We can all now create and preserve the primary sources not just on ourselves - but the ideas which influence us. For me, that’s the seemingly vast swathe of pages I glance at each night online - only a drop in the data deluge. Tabs? I’ve got them.

After I sent my best friend a metro map visualization of wine regions in France, she asks me half-amused, half-curious: How do you find such cool things?

I readily answer with the channels I look at- social media, publications, et al. In a typing tangent, I uncover a nagging back end to this question. I’m not worried about finding cool things. I’m worried about sharing, saving, and remembering them.

“I’ve been obsessing lately about content curation and finding and saving inspirational, enlightening, & informative things that I come across. I’ve wondered about what the best way is to curate and archive everything in a way that’s searchable and meaningful - and maybe even beautiful? There are so many amazing information & articles, things that you know would be of use to someone else at some point in time or might even change your life at another…and it’s so easy to lose track and forget about it.”

I visualize moments of inspiration as little sparks. Whenever an article or quotation lights up my imagination I’m determined to keep the spark burning as long as possible. Bookmarks helped first. Then Facebook and Twitter. Tumblr is the best bellow I’ve found so far. I’m hoping to find or even create an amazing space for these sparks: scattered sparkling data pieces and glowing bytes. For now, I’m grateful to at least collect the ashes of these sparks right here rather than letting them blow away.

Indeed, absorbing information, even if it doesn’t have any adaptive value, is a pleasurable experience. Of course, we prefer information when it is useful, when we can learn from it. And yet, Linden demonstrates how are brains are hardwired to activate pleasure from knowledge-for-knowledge’s sake.

The Pleasure of the Tweet at Bigthink.com

If you’re going to count on the competition to bring out your best work, you’ve surrendered control over your most important asset. Real achievement comes from racing ahead when no one else sees a path—and holding back when the rush isn’t going where you want to go.

Run Your Own Race by Seth Godin

Why wait?

Who cares when it’s due?

If you’re on the critical path, if someone is waiting for your contribution, ship now.
Too often, we find ourselves using the deadline as the lever to overcome our fear. If you’re relying on drop dead dates to push yourself, the project is paying a price.

Why Wait? by Seth Godin

Embody, don’t demand

Pursuit is fun. We all pursue opportunities, places, and people. But sometimes we’re too quick to chase.

I’ve played around with this idea for a while, around the time I read this article on Marry Him! in The Atlantic. It conjured up images of friends sitting together writing out lists of the qualities their dream man would have. Spontaneous, kind, funny, ambitious, etc. You’ll notice this exercise of projecting qualities extends to just about everything - career (stimulating), vacation (relaxing), friends (loyal).

For someone who plans and thinks too often, this exercise exhausted me. Why think about, wish for, and list these qualities? Why demand this of other people or experiences? Why not bethem?

Internal resistance to this notion flares up quickly. The qualities we list that we need from something else in our lives? These rarely apply to ourselves - or we rarely think to describe ourselves in this way. It’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable to think we can embody these traits.

You want your partner to be more spontaneous? Plan something new or take a walk outside. Do you want more excitement in your job? Make your own development thrilling and challenging. Do you wish your friends were more interesting? Start reading and start new conversations.

The next times I’ve found myself considering what I would like from someone or something else, I realize that I’m capable of bringing these same facets into my own life. Which in turn leaves me more open to the gifts that other experiences and people can give us. Try embodying instead of demanding. Shift your discontent with others and your life circumstances into contentedness with your power.

We perceive events as story lines. We continually (though often unconsciously) tell ourselves tales about life, and since no story can include every tiny event, we edit and spin the facts into the stories we prefer. Many of our stories are pure fabrication, and all of them are biased, dominated by our flair for the dramatic, our theories about life, and our fears.

Why Are People Mean? by Martha Beck - a fabulous explanation beyond meanness and into the narratives we craft about our lives and others

In searching for their aptitudes, people should act like treasure hunters passing over the ground with metal detectors, listening out for beeps of joy. A woman might get her first intimation that her real interest lies in poetry not by hearing a holy voice as she pages through a book of verse but from the thrill she feels as she stands in a parking lot on the edge of town overlooking a misty valley. Or a politician, long before she belongs to any party or has any profound understanding of statecraft, might register a telling signal when successfully healing a rift between two members of her family.

Find Your True Calling, O Magazine

Ridiculously excited

Heading off tomorrow to General Assembly in Flatiron for the first time for an NYC Tech Cocktail Mixer! Looking forward to seeing the space, which incidentally happens to be next door to my last internship - a nonprofit which supports high impact entrepreneurship.

Open floorplan, tech talk, new people - what’s not to love?

Passion is rare. It’s something we are all attracted to, but it’s something few people can muster. That’s why most people are bad in bed, and it’s why most people are bad bloggers. Unleashing passion is scary. You don’t know where it will go. So instead, most people try to sort of keep themselves under control. This is boring. You instinctively know it’s boring, because you remember who was fun in bed.

Penelope Trunk, How to Write a Blog Post People Love

It’s amazing what happens when you just say what you want.

12 Ways To Be More Search Savvy →

gjmueller:

We all use google. A lot. But here are some good simple tools on how you can use it more effectively to get closer to what you need.

It’s our responsibility to teach kids how to find and research information, how to judge its veracity, and when it’s time to ask for a grownup’s help. I spoke to Daniel Russell, Google’s “search anthropologist” in charge of Search Quality and User Happiness (yes, really), who brought to light some important tips you may not have known.

Ctrl-F

Keep it simple

Define operator

One more search

Fine the source

Confirm content

Link operator

Don’t use the + sign

Pay attention to “google instant”

Switch ON safety mode

Functions galore (calculations, translations, measurements)

Left-hand side tools