What others say

If you or I agreed with everything Peter Rollins says, then probably we hadn’t been listening long or closely enough. Yet he’s a man who often says things that resonate, they may actually shatter glass in some quarters. I love this short interview and wouldn’t mind having a transcript to underline and reference.

Normally, I would quote a teaser or two. I just don’t know where to begin. There’s the story about Hitler serving milk and  cookies (okay, something like that), or the part about how he would be a liar if he claimed to believe in Jesus Christ.  His message is disturbing for anyone inside the box of traditional Christianity, but it’s a breath of fresh air for those who are ditching the box or at least thinking about it.

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I skim quite a few blogs using Google Reader, but I can count on one hand those that I read carefully. Seth Godin’s blog is on my shortlist (and I know I’m not alone). He consistently has insights that cut through my senses and call me to attention. Today he struck twice.

First, in typical Godin style, he reminds me to dare. One large “success” outweighs dozens of failures. I use quote marks, because we all have different ideas of success. Still, the principle holds. As Godin writes,

If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you’ll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that’s easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you’re after.

Simple, right? Well, I need reminders like this almost every day. That’s about how often I find myself tempted toward doing things I can’t fail at.

But it gets better. His next post speaks directly to something I’ve long believed. The best choices in life are not always the rational ones. Love, faith, art…such things don’t require rational explanations. In fact, something vital is lost when forcing such realities into rationality. We can celebrate the irrationality of something without sacrificing its truth.

Godin asks, “Are you rational?”

Yeah, sometimes, but I’m probably less overtly rational than the average person. Yet I’m pretty intense about why I do things and about what is true (even if I don’t see truth clearly but from a distance).

What I appreciated was Godin’s closing thought:

There’s room for both rational and irrational decision making, and I think we do best when we choose our path in advance instead of pretending to do one when we’re actually doing the other. The worst thing we can do is force one when we actually need the other.

This is both reasonable and encouraging for someone like me. There are times for both rational and irrational decision making, and it’s best to discern and acknowledge which mode I’m in and have the tenacity and/or courage to follow through.

Fortunately, failure is not the worst case scenario. If it was,  I suppose the world would be led by rational decision makers alone, and it would be quite a bit less interesting.

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Are you acting in compassion on behalf of the poor? Imagine if the roles were reversed? What is so ridiculous about what you see in this video? What could this teach us about authentic acts of compassion?

Hat tip to Aid Thoughts via Chris Blattman (via IPA).

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I’ve been living abroad for years, and now I naturally simplify my spoken English to accomodate whoever may be listening. I filter out complex grammatical structures and choose simple words. Sometimes when I want to say something too complicated to express in simplified language, I stop as if lacking the language. Or I switch to Japanese. The same thing  happens in writing if I know the audience are not native English speakers. The difference is more pronounced in Cambodia. The language of Cambodia, Khmer, doesn’t have verb tenses. When speaking to shopkeepers and tuk-tuk drivers, they understand better if I keep all verbs in the present tense. This naturally spills out in more and more conversations in Cambodia.

On my last trip, I discovered it took a conscious effort to speak like a native English speaker. Rather, simplified English is becoming my default.

Now I have a word for what I do: globish (global English). Do you speak it?

Globish is a “decaffeinated English” that is increasingly becoming a widely used international language. (h/t Kottke)

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My blog has a new look. If you’re using Google Reader, you’ll have to come here to see it. Be one of the first to see the short movie I’ve posted on the front page.

Are you a victim of the lizard?

Recently, I added Seth Grodin to my Google Reader feed. He has an amazing ability to churn out useful insights almost every day. Today he writes about the inner resistance that holds people back:

The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

I’ve been wanting to start exercising for months, and I want to write for publication. But the lizard is strong in me.

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