The first in a new occasional series.
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Vixen screaming.
Category Archives: quotes
Changing Your Mind is not Indecisiveness
Sorting through some old work papers the other day I came across an item which was obviously originally posted on a forum somewhere. Sadly I hadn’t noted the source or the author. However reading it struck a chord so here is a (slightly edited) version, with apologies to whoever the original author was!
There is an interesting corollary to the “fog of war” which I [the original author] came across in Robert Cialdini’s Influence.
In a chapter on “Commitment and Consistency” he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson:
A foolish consistency is the Hobgoblin of little minds.
Usually we think consistency is a good thing, but the foolish rigid variety is not. Now, automatic consistency is really useful most of the time, since we often need to be able to behave in appropriate ways without thinking. A dilemma. And the only way out is to know when such consistency is likely to lead to poor choice. Cialdini says there are two separate signals to help tip us off.The first occurs in the pit of our stomach when we realize we are trapped in to complying with something we know we didn’t want to do. It’s probably happened to you a hundred times. Cialdini recounts his experience with a young woman carrying a clipboard who knocked on his front door. She tells him she’s conducting a survey. And he, wanting to make a favourable impression on the young woman, stretched the truth in his answers to her “survey” questions. Then using his answers against him, she tells him that she “can save him up to 1200 dollars” if he joins the club membership she is selling. “Surely someone as socially vigorous as yourself would want to take advantage of the tremendous savings our company can offer on all the things you’ve already told me you do!” she says. And he, feeling trapped, feels his stomach tighten. He actually complied with her request although he defends himself saying that it was before he started his study of influence.
The second is not so clear. It’s in your “heart of hearts” and can be heard in answering the tricky question: “Knowing what I know now, if I could go back in time, would I have made the same choice?” Sometimes circumstances change, and with those changes, is your original decision still valid? Changing your mind or acting inconsistently with your previous actions is not indecisiveness. If the answer to the knowing-what-I-know-now question is “No” then reversing or changing your position is the responsible thing to do. This strategy can help tremendously when re-evaluating those sunk cost decisions. Especially for revisiting decisions to continue with projects that may no longer be viable.
I try not to tie my ego to my original position, and remember that it’s okay to change my mind.
Moral: know when to change your mind!
Where Am I?
Here, I guess …
There’s a trick to the ‘graceful exit’. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over and let it go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out.
[Ellen Goodman]
Outlook for 2010
Jilly over at jillysheep has prompted me to think about what I might want to achieve in 2010. This is not something I normally do, as I have always been content to drift with the tide and see what washes up.
But in 2010 I would like to:
- Win the lottery jackpot (minimum £2m)
- Lose 50 kilos (I keep telling you I’m hugely overweight)
- Do all the cooking (like I used to)
- Get the bathroom rebuilt (probably requires #1 as a prerequisite)
- Get the house rewired (also requires #1 as a prerequisite)
- Get the whole house tidy, uncluttered and clean – and keep it that way
- Get the two-thirds of the house which badly needs it redecorated (another that requires #1 as a prerequisite)
- Go on at least three 2-week holidays, one railway-based, one to Europe and one naturist in the sun
- Travel from Thurso to Penzance by train.
- Have a good sunny summer and be able to walk skyclad all summer around my garden
That list was a joke! Yes, I would like to do all those things but the chances of achieving them are at best 1 in 14 million (ie. the chance of winning the lottery at any one attempt. If I win the lottery (odds over the year probably 300 in 14 million) all except #2, #3 and #10 become relatively easy.
OK, so let’s be realistic. What do I stand some chance of achieving?
- Lose 15 kilos
- Get out to the shops (even the dreaded supermarket) at least once a week (ought to be easy now I’m retired)
- Cook 3 meals a week
- Go out to take photographs at least once a week (also should be easy)
- Write 2 weblog posts a week
- Get the heating fixed (like Jilly, we have an annoying intermittent and unsolved problem)
- Grow a year’s supply of chillies – on the study windowsill (given that we use a lot of chillies and said windowsill space is limited this will need a very prolific variety)
- Get my Anthony Powell Society work up to date, and keep it that way
- Get the sitting room and dining rooms properly tidy and inhabitable
- Rejuvenate my fish tanks
- Go away on holiday for 2 weeks
- Make some major progress on my family history (yes that’s vague; first I have to take stock of what I’ve got)
And if I actually manage to achieve half of that lot I should be satisfied.
I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions – that’s just setting oneself up to fail, because they are always so unrealistic – so I’m not going to start this year and I’m not even going to commit to trying to achieve any of the above. They are what I would like to achieve. It’s a “wants list”, not a “must achieve or else list”. One reason I took early retirement was to get away from the incessant round of unachievable “must achieve or else” objectives. That way come madness and depression. 2010 is about relaxing and finding a life again.
Happy New Year to everyone!
Please don’t go out celebrating and get frostbite. 🙂
Today's Quote
When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
[Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Spanish playwright and novelist, 1901-1952]
By courtesy of quoteland.com.
Welcome Yule!
Today, 21 December, is Yule, the Germanic peoples’ mid-winter festival held on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year – and doesn’t it feel like it this year with snow falling, as I type, across much of the UK. Wikipedia has a reasonable summary of the origins of Yule – there are others here and here – so I won’t repeat them except to say that like most pre-Christian festivals it was a time of feasting – indeed in many traditions it was the major feast of the year. And like many such events it was also a health and fertility rite which has descended to us in the form of Wassail, only on this occasion it is predicated around rebirth – the rebirth of the sun from it’s winter retreat and thus hope for the year to come.
Most religions have their mid-winter festival of rebirth and or light. Light to lighten the darkness of winter and celebrate the rebirth of the sun, the giver of life. Hence the bonfire traditions, the burning of the Yule log (yes, originally a big log, not a chocolate cake!), the Scandinavian feast of St Lucia, etc. So the old pre-Christian Yule has become assimilated by the Christian church, along with the Roman Saturnalia, St Lucia and New Year to make their feast of Christmas.
So in concelebration with our wise, pagan forebears I wish you all
God Jul and wæs hæil
Find …
Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot,
who calls you back when you hang up on him,
who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat,
or will stay awake just to watch you sleep …
wait for the boy who kisses your forehead,
who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats,
who holds your hand in front of his friends,
who thinks you’re just as pretty without makeup on.
One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares
and how lucky his is to have you …
The one who turns to his friends and says, ‘that’s her.’[Author unknown]
The Zen of Taxonomy
These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into
(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed ones,
(c) those that are trained,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) mermaids,
(f) fabulous ones,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) those that are included in this classification,
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones,
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush,
(l) et cetera,
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase,
(n) those that resemble flies from a distance.[Jorge Luis Borges in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”. Quoted in Finding Moonshine by Marcus du Sautoy]
Where we are now …
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
[HL Mencken]
Somehow this has a worry ring of veracity in these trying times.
H/T Julian Allason
ABC Meme
ABC Meme, originally uploaded by kcm76.
This week’s Flickr meme was an alphabet meme … a word for each letter of the alphabet (but we were allowed to drop one letter to make a 5×5 square. Of course yours truly has to do it all — and put a different (I hope) slant on it by doing the English comic alphabet as first produced by the variety duo Clapham and Dwyer in the 1930s. So I give you the not entirely original …
A for ‘Orses
B for Mutton
C for Yourself
D for Dumb
E for Brick
F for Vescent
G for Police
H for a Beer
I for Novello
J for Oranges
K for Restaurant
L for Leather
M for Sis’
N for Lope
O for a Pee
P for Relief
Q for a Bus
R for Askey
S for Teeda
T for Two
U for Me
V for La France
W for a Bob
X for Breakfast
Y for Husband
Z for Breezes
The two centre images are the first and last Greek letters, Alpha and Omega, so beloved of Christian symbolism.
As always the photographs are not mine so please click on individual links below to see each artist/photostream. This mosaic is for a group called My Meme, where each week there is a different theme and normally 12 questions to send you out on a hunt to discover photos to fit your meme. It gives you a chance to see and admire other great photographers’ work out there on Flickr.
1. Horse Eating Hay, 2. Assorted Beef & Mutton satay, 3. The day the little rocket hit a tiny little planet, 4. Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, 5. Heaved bricks, Glencoe between Reading Way and Kings Way, 6. Sweet and Bubbly, 7. Chief of POlice, 8. Felix having a beer., 9. Ivor Novello Plaque, 10. Jaffa Oranges, 11. Caff, 12. Gerald Tobin Hells Angel Funeral , 13. Tiny? Bite me! (101/365), 14. A (alpha), 15. Omega, 16. embroidery envelope 1, 17. Mannekin Pis, Brussels, Belgium, 18. Cafe Achteck (Pissoir) am Chamissoplatz, 19. Bus Queue, 20. British Film Icons, 21. Ferula asa-foetida, 22. ~Tea for two~, 23. 365 day one hundred & fourty-nine: will you for me, 24. vive la france, 25. 100708_Shilling_1955, 26. Egg for breakfast on pain complet in France., 27. husband and wife, 28. zephyr
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys