A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
............. "fee for services" business for 9/10 of my professional life, this is a wonderful post.
In other words, a reasonable fee is poetry and prose, logic and magic. You can get too logical. Put down that calculator and consider feelings and status.
How do we learn the difference between willfulness and willingness, the distinction between magic and miracle? The answer will come as no surprise: in the practice and process of storylistening and storytelling. "Story," the novelist John Gardner observed, "details the gap between intentions and results." Story conveys the reality of human freedom, for although "real," our freedom is limited, and although "limited," our freedom is real. To live with an awareness of story is to recognize, with philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, that "We are never more than the co-authors of our own stories."
Every story details a mixture of what Niccolò Machiavelli named necessità, virtù, and fortuna: cause, choice, and chance. The very combination of the three reveals that we are neither completely controlled nor completely in control. We can will, in other words, but we must also be willing. This can be a difficult, even painful lesson to accept, for we tend to want "either-or," especially in matters of being "controlled" or "in control." Accepting the impossibility of this willful demand—becoming willing to accept the limited freedom that is ours—is one gift of story. Stories reveal a spirituality that views life not as a problem to be solved, but as a mystery to be lived. . . .
. . . We find miracle only when we stop looking for magic.
-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning
It doesn’t matter if you are trying to pick a new skill, or get fit. Discipline is the secret sauce. Do it long enough and it becomes a part of who you are. Then rewards compound. Every seed of talent, when watered with consistent input grows to bear multiple fruits.
-Tanmay Vora, from here
Watching someone with a crazy goal give it everything they've got and then succeed is so powerful. It's like magic, because it unlocks potential we didn't even know we had. It shows us what is possible if we put our mind to something and then back that up with effort.
-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water's surface. Pay attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shadows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what's real. It's a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
There are wonders here.
Things worth experiencing, worth knowing.
Magic hidden in plain sight.
Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all. These are some facts that are easy to overlook.
These are facts that saved my life.
Wall Street’s love affair with this hocus-pocus intensified as the 1960s rolled by. The Street’s denizens are always ready to suspend disbelief when dubious maneuvers are used to manufacture rising per-share earnings, particularly if these acrobatics produce mergers that generate huge fees for investment bankers. Auditors willingly sprinkled their holy water on the conglomerates’ accounting and sometimes even made suggestions as to how to further juice the numbers. For many, gushers of easy money washed away ethical sensitivities.
-Warren Buffett, from this recent letter
Regardless of what the marketers, click-bait headlines, and pseudoscience evangelists say, there are no magic lotions, potions, or pills when it comes to deep happiness, lasting well-being, and enduring performance.
. . . happiness, fulfillment, well-being, and sustainable performance arise when you concentrate on being present in the process of living instead of obsessing over outcomes, and above all when you're firmly grounded wherever you are.
-Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness
The shortcut turnpike is dark and filled with terrors.
-Tony Isola, from this post
We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.
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