The Kairos Newsletter

"You'd be surprised how far you can get in three years."

What's fascinating about physical knots, like a knot in a piece of string, is how easily they form.

This Saturday, I woke up after a full night's sleep to a beautiful late summer's morning. And to a weight of depression and anxiety.

When I began work with a now long-term client, I asked him about a life's goal.

Sunday night. Once again I had more ambition than I had weekend.

The one job of our brain is to protect itself.

A good and enthusiastic person wants me to sustain a project we need to shut down.

A solid, no, keeps me moving in the right direction. And it keeps me from investing time, attention, and energy in a low-probability outcome.

Maybe you've done this. Close one eye and, keeping it closed, walk through the space you're in, reach for a doorknob, pour a glass of water from a pitcher.

From the olden days, I have a small collection of vintage mechanical timers, sand timers, egg timers, wind-up timers from my lifelong engagement with getting to things, as the saying goes, on time.

I can keep turning the pages, and my eyes are seeing word after word, but the information is being indifferently uploaded

what if we learned not to respond to incoming information with fear leading to anger, but ..

"A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” Proverbs 15:1

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions..

We don't only experience these stages in dying. We experience grief when our cognition -- in particular, our context, experience, rules and processes -- is not offering us a ready path.

We stand on the same planet at the same time, in the same place, and have a different experience of our surroundings.

As I was racking my bike outside the pool where I mostly get a daily swim, a fellow member congratulated me on my green commute.

8pm on a Saturday night isn't considered a propitious time to be initiating a big think like this post. Yet, here I am.

An interview with K. Barry Sharpless showed up in my newsfeed last week

I'm not judging this characterization that takes place with adults.

One of the important traits of psychological maturity is the ability to hold opposites.

"I wish there was something we could do, but our personality assessment says we're incompatible for this job."

His personality assessment identified him as an introvert..

Sweet, smart, strange. They're identity words. They don't..

"Do you know the pride of the beggar?," my friend asked me. "I don't know," I responded. 

Accept that others have powerfully different experiences of reality

At one point, I realized this wasn't going to end and I gave him a look

These adorable quirks can morph into conflicts, but they don't have to

Aphrodite was completing her task, a drowning man appeared in the river begging her for help.

He was sure it was a sign of carelessness, or maybe disrespect

The man drove away and out of my life leaving me wanting to be a better person.

To sell skin science, they used cognitive science.

She launched into a tirade about me not listening or something..

The gloves came off. I decided to focus on my backlog instead of my backstroke.

my favorite way of being is to engage my living self with another live person

I was described as a dreamer, a fantasist, even as the village idiot. I didn't care.

My 2024 calendar is in front of me right now. My last task of 2023 is to write this post.

I keep an index card with three to five tasks on it.

No coffee in the hotel room. I had to go downstairs to the common area.

At this point in the 21st century, we have a reasonably durable understanding that there are two dominant ways of processing knowledge

This morning, I'm trying to embrace the entropy I'm creating for myself.

Has anyone ever asked you a question that knocked you back, and you thought, maybe even said, "What a great question."?

Anticipation, Activation, Reflection.

Did you hear that?

I live off the kindness of strangers.

I love science and scientists because my work is all about uncertainty.

I didn't have time to write this. Now I'm going for a walk.

A week ago, I got my first Christmas catalog of 2023.

Working with other people is tough.

“All true attention is prayer.” Simone Weill

Kairos Cognition is about the energy that gets released for you when you understand the deep drivers of your attention and energy.

I recognize some days, the higher powers have put me in their rat-maze for reasons beyond my understanding.

When our knowledge and experience is unsound it results in prejudice. And sometimes sound knowledge and experience changes.

I grew up with people in the building trades. I live in an old house largely for the opportunity to keep it from falling down.

Specifically, Dark Sky, It gives highly local, near term, weather forecasts. If I'm going to be outdoors for the next few hours, This is all I need.

Awareness and persistence to be useful, must be guided by discernment.

I was wrong. This post is to hold me accountable not to do that again. I need to hold my attention on this injustice.

Below is our correspondence captured in the form of a Socratic dialogue.

By as soon as eight weeks, they may single our faces as objects meriting a higher degree of attention.

Instead of asking it questions and getting answers, it would ask them questions.

Folks, truth is, we can't even neurohack a worm. Hope is not lost though.We don't understand how it works, but we can observe worms' learning.

I learned the concept from David Allen. Someday; maybe is for aspirational doing.

Procrastination focuses on all the things you're not doing: in short, the infinite. Doing, therefore, is optimized by choosing the best you've got available to you right now.

One of the great things about physical labor is I always knew when I was working.

Among his breathtaking range of accomplishments, Dwight was chosen to be one of America's first astronauts.

Any organization bigger than one person, think a marriage for starters, has friction and inefficiency.

getting to simple often requires significant mental lifting. Simple often must be dug out from under the Mountains of Distraction.

A lot of our human cooperation is the result of occult cues we pick up from one another, which guide us into alignment. 

I have an unusually short attention span for reading. That’s strange because I love to read, was an early reader, and, by contrast...

Ha! Gift giving. If it's not the hardest negotiation we have as humans, I don't know what's harder.

Charles Dickens modeled the pattern I thought I'd so cleverly assembled...

In a dynamic world, we need to always steer toward opportunities and away from threats

in what better time than this Thanksgiving weekend to step away from the crowds, to write long letters, to think long thoughts, and to pray long prayers?

It's actually hard to hold our attention on one thing. In some contexts this is powerfully useful.

In our current condition, it’s glib to think virtual presence replaces physical presence. For some it does, Does it for you?

john a. powell, Black Lives Matter, Muriel Bowser, Stacey Abrams, Larry Wilmore, Gil Scott Heron

Seemingly instantly, the walls at the front slid; the forward guy was buried up to his chin, the second up to his waist

For several weeks, I've lived in a cave; albeit as he notes, one that is ". . . safer, air-conditioned, and equipped with electricity and wifi."

“Maybe the best way to describe it is as people who only care about themselves in one group, and people who believe in the greater good in the other group.”

Creating spaces -- either physically, or psychically through selective attention -- to defend us somewhat from the bombardment of information coming to us from our surroundings is important work for us.

Even if you and I, right now, stood in the same place at the same time and looked together in the same direction, we’d have a different experience.

We have two dominant ways we think about things. Aristotle called them dike and gnomos;

For those of us following the Gregorian calendar, it is the month named in honor of the Roman divinity, Janus.

Eastern Colorado. Dropped down from Denver, put on cruise control, and set the tiller for the Delaware Water Gap.

If you’re in my social circle and acquired a child, I’m likely to have given you The Scientist in the Crib.

Comparing the essential quality: how well does the thing do what it’s supposed to do, both of them will do.

Most of what happens in the world is ultimately predictable; Colds and flu, taxes, flight cancellations.

We often complain about our attention drifting, but the fact that we don’t hold our attention in an unrelenting way turns out to have an advantage when it comes to managing our cravings.

Francis Sopper

For physicists, an event horizon is that boundary beyond which events can’t affect the observer.

St. Valentine. Patron saint of beekeepers. Blessing those who navigate between the honey and the sting.

Embrace the oscillation displayed in this latest wisdom of the crowd. Step away from the screen. Jump in some cold water.

Our mind appears to work as hard at forgetting as it does at remembering. We’re exposed to too much information to hold it all.

Accident responders and your insurance company describe the rubbernecker accident. It goes down like this.

So far as I can determine, the first person history records as having read silently was Ambrose of Rome in the fourth century.

Bad actors in crime dramas, after they discover, “You can’t prove that,” doesn’t apply to Dick Wolf, invariably claim, “I had no choice.”

If you look closely at the image of Boston’s Quincy Market, built in 1825, you’ll note a fire hydrant in the foreground.

Getting a few no’s tells use we’re engaging in the right amount of risk.

What stirs us up so we make the magic happen is the mystical element of curiosity.

“I want you to flunk your next test,” I said to my daughter. She was in her first year at high school.

Hard to do, but vitally important as a leader is to hold opposites, and to mentor others to do the same.

Essential to our best is rest and recovery. Roosevelt offers a formidable example of how strength is nurtured and refreshed.

Some things are best accomplished over extended periods of time. We need time to just be.

“Let me take this opportunity to tell you about our earthquake-preparedness program.”

Fill in the first column at random. Don’t worry, the best choice will win all the contests on the way to the finish.

This hot list gives these tasks momentum. (You’re reading this. It got finished. Quod erat demonstrandum.)

To stay focused on one thing long enough to complete it, create a defendable space.

For many of us our auditory processing system defaults to a deep resting state

The art of exploring another’s view is sharply different from argument, persuasion, and interrogation.