My dear family, guess what? Today I found out what my special purpose is for. Gosh, what a great time I had. I wish the whole family could’ve been here with me. Maybe some other time as I intend to do this a lot. Every chance I get. I think next week I’ll be able to send more money as I may have extra work. My friend Patty has promised me a blow job. Your loving son, Navin.
Steve Martin in “The Jerk”
I’ve been blogging here for a while. In that time the general idea has simply been to have a place to share things I think are interesting and to develop my ideas simply by the act of having to form them into complete sentences that someone else might read with some level of comprehension. Other than that, the topics and direction have been quite random: product reviews, IDPA competition videos, book reviews, social/political commentary and family news. There was a time before we started blogging at work that I did some work related stuff here, just to have an outlet.
I think I am going to get a little more focused. At least for the next few months…and perhaps years, I’m going to focus on making better decisions. Decisions are an outcome of our thinking, so I am going to focus on making myself a better thinker. Thinking is an result of creating space and time to think and having a good understanding about how (not what) to think, so I will focus on how I can do that. Good thinking is also a product of good inputs, both information and physical (food, chemicals, etc) inputs, so I will focus there. Lastly, good ideas without action are not worth having, so I will focus on how I have implemented whatever I determine is a good idea.
The decision we just made last Tuesday was the result of thousands of decisions that millions of people made in the months and years leading up to Nov 11 2016. In the next 1400+ days, I am going to try to learn how to make better decisions with the hope that some of you might be inspired to do the same, and as a result you all get to have better options to choose from in 2020. I say “you all” not only because I think the english language needs a plural second person pronoun but because I am a deliberate non-voter. I recognize that many of you will never share my position on voting as a form of violence, so I figure sharing this personal expidition into better thinking is the one thing I can do to make lemons into lemonade.
I am not doing this from a position of “I know better than you” or ” you need to learn to think like me.” I am simply doing this as a way of living out being the change I want to see. I don’t want to see everyone think like me. How simultaneously scary and boring that would be. I do want to see all of us learn to think better since the quality of the world we live in is the direct result of the quality of our ideas. And since the only one of us I can control is me, I’m going to focus my attention there and let you all know how it goes. I also don’t have any illusions that any more that the 10 to 20 people that normally read what I post will ever see any of this. But it’s enough for me that I get better and that just one you does as well to make it worth doing.
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