Shanti’s Dispatches

Just came across Launchy, which seems like it might be the QuickSilver of windows.

I’m subscribed to an email newsletter from Nightingale Conant. A really great article from them just dropped into my inbox. Since I’m not sure if it’s reprinted on the web anywhere, I’ll quote it liberally here. It’s by Denis Waitley:

Setbacks and failures mean little or nothing in themselves. The whole meaning of any setback - or any success, for that matter - is in how we take it and what we make of it.

It has been said that failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

It may motivate you more toward your own goals to know that some of the most famous and well-known people in modern times had to overcome obstacles as difficult as anyone’s before they finally reached the top. It takes persistence and total commitment to your goals, but it’s possible.

Edison: probably the king of all failure

Thomas Edison’s father called him a “dunce.” His headmaster in school told Edison he would never make a success of anything.

Henry Ford barely made it through high school.

…

Joe Paterno, head coach of the Penn State University football team, was asked by the media how he felt when his team lost a game. He rapidly replied that losing was probably good for the team, since that was how the players learned what they were doing wrong.

Setbacks and failures mean little or nothing in themselves. The whole meaning of any setback - or any success, for that matter - is in how we take it and what we make of it.

We often look at high achievers and assume they had a string of lucky breaks or made it without much effort. Usually the opposite is true, and the socalled superstar or “overnight success” had an incredibly rough time before he or she attained any lasting success.

I love hearing these kinds of stories. Famous writers almost always have an “almost didn’t make it but instead became a huge success” story:

You may not know the background of a certain laundry worker who earned $60 a week at his job but had the burning desire to be a writer. His wife worked nights, and he spent nights and weekends typing manuscripts to send to publishers and agents. Each one was rejected with a form letter that gave him no assurance that his manuscript had even been read. I’ve received a few of those special valentines myself through the years, and I can tell you firsthand that they’re not the greatest self-esteem builders.

But finally, a warm, more personal rejection letter came in the mail to the laundry worker, stating that, although his work was not good enough at this point to warrant publishing, he had promise as a writer and he should keep writing.

He forwarded two more manuscripts to the same friendly-yet-rejecting publisher over the next 18 months, and as before, he struck out with both of them. Finances got so tight for the young couple that they had to disconnect their telephone to pay for medicine for their baby.

Feeling totally discouraged, he threw his latest manuscript into the garbage. His wife, totally committed to his life goals and believing in his talent, took the manuscript out of the trash and sent it to Doubleday, the publisher who had sent the friendly rejections. The book, titled Carrie, sold over 5 million copies and, as a movie, became one of the top-grossing films in 1976. The laundry worker, of course, was Stephen King.

I’m really bad at this.

I used to check email constantly throughout the day. It would just never seem to stop piling up!

But being a GTD-freak (a lot more so lately), I’m really trying to keep that inbox within the 1-page (visible) range, of mostly actionable / pending items.

So today I didn’t check / respond to email at all! Yes, not exactly earth-shattering news.

But I got an incredible amount done, including ripping apart my Ruby / Rails / Postgres installation on OS X and basically starting from scratch. (We’re using Ruby 1.8.4 over at Sprout and edge Rails, baby! Umm yeah, we like to live dangerously.)

… and, now here at 5AM, relaxing in bed with my lappy, I’m finally wading through all the email from the day. Sorry for all the “late” replies!

Update: I can’t in good faith recommend Colibri at this time, after a more thorough review. It’s not quite useful enough yet (no indexing of folders like ‘My Documents’, etc) and I seem to activate it too often for no reason and always ended up disabling it anyway.

For those of us tethered to Windows operating systems (some or all of the time), a few prayers have just been answered with the release of Colibri.

I can see the more cynical blogger set complaining about Colibri’s similarity to QuickSilver. Of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and QS is pretty darn close to perfect.

QuickSilver: The Original

One of the first applications I installed on my new mac mini was QuickSilver. The only real feature I use is the Application / File Launcher.

If you’d like to read about all the other neat things it can do, peruse the 43Folders QuickSilver archives.

With QuickSilver, you just hit ctrl-spacebar, type a few words, and QuickSilver guesses which application or file you’d like to launch. Keep typing if it hasn’t figured out which app/file you’d like to launch, and it should eventually find it. (as long as its in the QuickSilver index, which you can modify to include directories it isn’t indexing yet)

Or — as I like to say (quoting some Zen dudes) — Eat when hungry, sleep when tired.

Several months ago, there was a huge linkfest on the lifehack/43folders blogs about Polyphasic sleep.

While I had never really heard of this term before, it sounded an awful lot like a sleep pattern I found myself drifting into when I was doing my own thing for about 6 months, back a year++ ago. (No regular 9-5 gig or any set work schedule to speak of.)

The Edisonian Sleep Schedule

Basically, I found myself drifting into a very Edisonian sleep schedule consisting of lots of little naps combined with a longer rest every 30 hours or so.

Some people’s biological clocks, I believe, are just not hard-wired for the 24-hour daily cycle that your typical 9-5 work environment demands. (I’ve written about this before but just wanted to revisit upon it… since running “virtual companies” via telecommuting & more flexible schedules is a topic I feel passionately about.)

People who do seem to be hard-wired for a set 9-5 schedule, or have possibly just conditioned themselves for this environment, cannot seem to understand the fact that maybe other people only need 4-5 hours of sleep at night, but might require some downtime naps (like Edison) of 20-30 min. throughout the day.

Out of Whack

The problem for Zen/Polyphasic sleepers occurs when you get out of whack with everyone else… and are waking up from your longer rest at 2am. Well, even if you try and get a nap in before the 9-5 rush… you’re still going to be dragging when 5pm rolls around. Especially if the possibility of a quick mental defrag by laying down to rest is not an option.

If you’re in NYC or Tokyo, you might be able to rent a sleep pod.

Of course, that’s not exactly the same as walking fifteen feet into the other room and crashing, but I guess it could do in a pinch.

Steve Pavlina’s Polyphasic Experiment

Steve Pavlina has reported back on his Polyphasic sleep experiment after 60 days. He seems like an incredibly disciplined guy, so I had no doubt, if it was working out for him, that’d he’d be able to pull it off. (unlike many others who reported that they tried and “failed”)

Like Steve, I’ve found that once you get used to this schedule, It’s tough to go back. In the future I’ll have to try his suggestions of cutting down on the meat & caffeine. The biggest problem I’ve found is having the discipline and ability to time your schedule so that you can workout / attend classes if that’s a goal of yours.

Sure, you can go for a jog 24 hours a day in many neighborhoods, but you’ll have to be up at the right time to hit that Yoga class.

Postscript

While googling for the funny T-Shirt slogan, Alarm Clocks Kill Dreams to end this post with, I discovered that the once funny catch-phrase has been co-opted by the humorless Work Less Party.

It’s not about the work, silly rabbit, it’s about pursuing the kind of work you love … in the way that you love to work.

[+] My review of Peopleware on All Consuming