Mindset

I watched the movie Eclipse recently. I’m not a Twilight fan, but – well, we all have people in our lives, don’t we?

One moment in particular stood out to me. In the middle of the one of the most intense scenes, Jacob angrily says that if Edward had stayed away for six more months, Bella would have forgotten about him, falling completely in love with Jacob. Twilight fans would no doubt argue the accuracy of that prediction, but I think it makes sense. I’ve seen many people (like Bella) in the middle of obsessive and unhealthy relationships, and without space to breath, they are never able to get enough separation to get a glimpse of the reality around them. They stay stuck in a world and a relationship collapsing in on itself, cutting off more and more people and possibilities as time goes on.

For Lent, I'm going to give up trying.

I'm going to give up trying to force myself into some kind of confined idea about what a human is supposed to be.

I'm going to give up trying to prevent myself from enjoying things.

I'm going to give up trying to make futile efforts work.

I'm going to give up trying to abstain.

One of the biggest issues I have seen people have is a misunderstanding of the idea of sunk costs.

You've seen it - someone puts a massive amount of effort into something, and now they have to keep pursuing it, despite the fact that everyone around them sees how bad this thing is. They just keep thinking, "But I put so much effort into this! I can't throw it away now!"

You and I do the same thing on a daily basis. We pursue something that no longer makes sense, because we don't want to lose our investment. We all do it, and it's completely illogical.

Don Miller has been posting some insightful thoughts on creating lately. This one in particular struck me.

A Creator Doesn't Build On Emotion

I think it struck me because there is something very appealing about it, and something in it that I completely disagree with. A new friend of mine posted something similar on Twitter the other day:

In a computer, caches are everywhere. A cache helps speed things up by temporarily holding onto something you'd normally go out in the world to find.

For example, when you first visit a web page, your browser downloads all the images and text and fonts and colors that are on that page. But if the browser thinks that you might be coming back to that page soon, it caches some of those images, so that next time you go to the page, it doesn't have to re-download them. Instead, it can just pull them out of its cache, and save a lot of time.