Beliefs 🍀

My personal beliefs, to share, and work on. Some adopted, all inspired.

Offered simply to protect, and encourage, the value of sharing.

Quote me, if you wish. Credit your god, if you prefer.

Communications

Successful communication is the responsibility of the sender.
Attention-spans are subjective, learned, and can be trained.
Be kind, assume nothing. You don’t know what else another person has going on, unless they are safe to share, too.
Objections are the response to inadequate confidence in information.
You don’t need to know everything, if you know someone who does and will share.
Not communicating, still communicates something.
Being offended is a choice.
What you say about someone, says as more about you than it does them.
You can tell more from the questions people ask, than the answers they give.
Speak to create opportunities to listen.
If it’s not entirely true, don’t say it.
Nuance is the difference between what’s happening or intended, and what someone wants to believe is happening or intended.
Perception is anchored to anticipated reward.
If reward isn’t assured, risk-aversion consumes comprehension.
Facts, without primary-source evidence, are hearsay.
Knowledge, without testing, is opinion.
Brand is the sum of every interaction.
Emailing from noreply@ should be outlawed, and is a lost opportunity for all.
Experience beats opinion.
The sender may choose the message, but the receiver should always remain free to choose the time, place, and medium.
Long-form writing and reading is self-care.
People will know when you’re unprepared.
To be mistaken is unfortunate, to be surprised is unforgivable.
Speak with your loved-ones when you can, while you can.

Technology

Most technologies are never final, finished, or infallible.
Some technologies are essential, if only to replace the loss of skill they displace.
Choose technologies last, after all other options are reviewed, and decisions made.
If you think technology will solve your problems — you might not understand technology, or your problems.
Technology that saves time, and amplifies results, is worth learning.
The smarter the technology, the less capable the user becomes without them.
Always have a backup, beyond the control of the original.
Always have an alternative. Technology often fails without notice.
You’re only not technical in an area because you haven’t needed to be. If you might need a technology, give yourself time to learn — you’ll either learn it, or save yourself from needing it.
The cloud is just a digital landlord’s computer.
Open-source is a social responsibility. Sharing is caring.
Be kind to yourself in learning new things, you don’t yet know what you’ll find easy, and can improve your life, until you try.
Faster internet and computers pay dividends.
A good camera, computer, chair, desk, monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk mat, and lighting are all an investment.
Desk work is physical work. Get a standing desk. Move around and away from the desk often.
Humans with technology, beat just humans, or just technology.
Radio is a lifeline.
Shazam is magic.

People

Everyone is unique, without exception.
Everyone can be exceptional at something.
You’re not working too much, other’s just aren’t thinking as big.
The happiness paradox: You can’t “want to be happy” AND “be happy” at the same time.
Being extraordinary means, by definition, not being ordinary. If you want to be extraordinary, doing ordinary things won’t get you there.
Avoid “they”, “people”, “government”, “companies” dogmas, be specific, or risk losing faith in your self-determination.
Need and want are not the same. Be mindful of those that say “need” but mean “want”, or minimise “want” to avoid “need” — distinguishing between this is the key to making sustainable progress with finite resources.
Being right, can annoy those that still have their emotions attached to not being wrong. Enjoying being wrong, to learn and adapt quickly, is the key to enabling continuous and compounding improvement.
The most value a person (or brand) can generate is from their uniqueness. Find that, share it, and you’re on your way to fulfilling your potential.
Be grateful every day for your abilities, respectful of others that may not have some of them, and exchange them whenever you can.
Be grateful for your pains — that others could only wish for.
Don’t be shy of being photographed or videoed, someone will always be glad you were, often your future self.
Being lazy is a sign of having standards for the value of effort.
Motivation can only ever be self-generated, or identified in others. Externally, without the offer of commensurate value, it’s coercion.
Good manners cost nothing. Being a nuisance costs everyone.
If you met a difficult person in the morning, you met a difficult person. If you meet difficult people all the time? You’re difficult.
Don’t be or tolerate nuisance.
Learn to say nothing to those that talk more than listen.
Walk away from fabricated drama and disrespect.
Walk towards those in need.
Feedback is a form of payment — and the least you can do for anyone offering you something for free or without obligation.
The greatest gift you can give, is a genuine, supported, value-increasing opportunity. The more benefitting, the merrier.

Life

Music is the language of life.
When you share music, you’re never alone.
Rock ‘n’ roll was once labelled the devil’s music.
You can go anywhere, and be anything in your imagination. If you can do that enough, you might just make it happen for real.
A problem, shared, is still a problem.
Joy and compassion shared, multiplies.
Pets are family, too, and offer true unconditional love. Offer it back, and pay it forward.
Plants eat other plants.
Protein is life, and not infinite.
Regular grounding is cleansing and invigorating. If you’re not, find a way to. Grass, beaches, trees are friends for life.
Give your future self the gifts you appreciate, or wish for, from your past self.
We are the sum of all we, create, consume, and share. Nothing else is real.
The cat is the box, it’s just not within your reality until you open it.
Question if “have to” is really “want to”, or “can’t” is really “don’t want to”.
Friends don’t let friends lose.
Greater goods, don’t justify lesser evils.
Ask for permission. Forgive, but don’t forget.
Fun is a priority, and reward for endeavour. Purpose is a right. Question those that don’t allow for this.
We’re here for a good time, not a long time.
None of us are getting out of this alive.
If you can remember the way someone made you feel, they are still with you.

Work

Work is what you create and share.
Busywork is procrastination.
Procrastination is a manifestation of the fear of failure or the natural aversion to unrewarded or recognised effort. Sticks cause it, carrots solve it.
Every decision should always be compared to the likely outcome of just doing nothing.
Why do you have to do anything? Ask yourself this, when things are asked of you.
Always question your need to react, before reacting.
Training is doing, whilst commentating, with an audience.
Take a role for what you learn. Use what you know to justify what you earn. If that’s not respected, it’s time to gracefully move on.
Winners want to work with winners. Create your own wins, before asking to be a part of other’s.
If you’re not allowed to journal, blog or publish outside your work, your basic human rights and freedoms are not being respected.
Solve in pairs. Contribute alone.
Measure three times, cut once.
Iteration beats perfection.
You can always do something.
The things you choose not to do, define what you can do.
Thinking about work, is also work.
Problem-solving is relative to your self-control in keeping calm.
Confident calm is a prerequisite to attracting assistance.
Success is proportionate to focus, and finishing what you start.

Business

There’s no shortage of ideas, it’s the application of time and experience that creates tangible value; otherwise ideas are noise.
Pareto’s principle (80% of outcomes from 20% of actions) is eerily reliable.
The business is the accounts, the legal documents, and infrastructure. Everything else is the brand.
If it’s not in writing or witnessed, it wasn’t agreed.
People-like-us recruitment policies perpetuate problems-like-ours.
If you wouldn’t recommend it to your loved ones, you shouldn’t be doing it.
A mission, without a genuine benefit to the community, is an excuse.
A leader’s role is to understand, share, and enable everyone’s why.
Template everything possible. Every new project is a test of the completeness and value of the templates for the next.
Your colleagues are not your family, they are your team.
Earn your place, expect no less from those that may happen to be in a position of deciding.
Management without mentorship is overhead.
Calm beats force.
Enthusiasm is contagious.
Stories travel.
Advantage is vision.
Ideas without creation are worthless.
The world’s not short of ideas, it is short of reliability.
If a business cannot continue or thrive without key people, it’s a partnership, not a company. Share in successes accordingly.
Building a company is continually making chores redundant, and capabilities possible.
You enable profit when you buy, and actualise when you sell.
Risk is unrealised liability. Protect from liability, buy security.
Cashflow really is king. If your accounts can’t show you the best and worst-case scenarios over the next year, you’re not in control.
Subdivide teams of 7 or more.
Meetings without proposals are social events.
Training without testing is entertainment.

Privacy

Privacy is healthy, and respectful.
Privacy is not secrecy.
Private data may have value to others, and cost to oneself.
Personas can help in protecting privacy.
Privacy is a right, and a public good.
Encryption is a right, and a public good.
Privacy should be self-determined and is self-determination.
Privacy is not a crime — secrecy can be.
Standards for privacy are mutually beneficial.

Health

Walking in nature is the best gym. Park, beach, woods, hills.
Everyone who doesn’t have a physical job, should have and use a set of dumbbells at home. Use it or lose it.
The only exercise equipment you need is a yoga mat and appropriate resistance bands. Everything else is a luxury.
Stretching is as important for mobility and strength as lifting.
Nutrition enables. Malnutrition disables.
Food is primary care medicine.
Exercise stimulates self-generated medicines.
Medicines, without long-term double-blind trials, are experimental.
All drugs originate from biological discovery, synthesised.
Not all protein is equal. Life cannot exist without protein.
Hormones are created from natural fats.
The brain operates on carbohydrates.
You are the sum of all you think, or allow yourself to. Choose your thoughts and inspirations, wisely, for you will become them.
Ignore the numbers on the front of the label, look at the ones, in small print, on the back: fibre, protein, nutrients.
Over-stimulation through information, is akin to the desires and consequences of over-eating.
News, without the ability to act upon it, is entertainment.
The most useful news is the weather.

Stress

The definition of stress is having to do something, without the controls or resources to do it with. Find the controls and resources, or relinquish the thing.
The mind is a reflection of the experience of the body.
The body is a reflection of the choices of the mind.
What hurts doesn’t break you, makes you stronger.
Everyone has of morbid fascinations of some kind.
Thoughts are not reality, but they can replace it.
Mindfulness works, and can be done anywhere, at any time.
Conscious breathing controls consciousness.
Stress creates strength.
Nature absorbs stress.
The only thing you can control, is yourself. Everything else is offering sufficient reason for others to self-control for everyone’s benefit.
If you don’t know what to do, then breath, stretch, and move, until you do.
Give stresses a number, from one to ten. One being mild, ten being an emergency. Pause for thought on this can balance responses and reactions to match.
Change the word “stressed” for “excited”, it’s just your mind telling the body what it wants to solve.

Education

Learning without purpose is entertainment.
Be careful of the information you consume, as if it were food for your mind.
Does it matter if you know everything about some new thing, if you know nothing about those you care for?
Proof is not in certification, it’s in demonstration and results.
Knowing what can be done, has no impact without doing it.

Personal presentation

One smart item of clothing, improves all casuals.
You can have untidy hair, or beard, or clothes, but not all at once.
Have one fitted-suit for summer and one winter. Everything else is a bonus.
Keep shoes clean, watches loose, and belts tight.
Notice others’ efforts.
Posture and gait can say more than words.

Writing

Be shareable.
Be succinct.
Be humble in opinions, open to alternatives, and to having your mind change being a positive result of an improved understanding.
Write the headline, outline your headings’ hierarchy, fill in the blanks.
Link to primary sources for claims of fact. Otherwise, identify as opinion.
Illustrate with imagery.
If you can’t read it out loud, the structure isn’t finished.
The shorter the paragraphs, the longer attention it can maintain.
Write to add more value to the time spent reading than any other option at that moment.
You’re not writing too much, you’re qualifying too little.

Money

The price of housing is constant or falling, when measured in materials and construction hours. Your house insurance policy has a better estimation for that. It is the value of money and location that changes, relatively.
Investment, without a direct ability to improve the vehicle, is gambling.
Investment, without diversification and hedging, is gambling.
Lifetime cost, and opportunity costs, are more important than price.
Buying expenses is easier than selling expenses.
Buying income, discounted, is leverage.
You value things higher when selling than when buying. Everyone else does, too. Price this into your valuation.
Unearned income doesn’t teach how to generate value.
Give enough to do something, but not enough to do nothing.
The most valuable investment is in buying yourself the time and space to learn and create the things that an audience will share their time to receive.
Measure in percentages of net worth.
If you can’t pay for it twice, you can’t afford it.
Cutting time-overheads enables value-creation.
Quality doesn’t advertise the brand label. You are not a billboard.

Time

Video the good times, and record your loved-one’s voices, while you can. You’ll miss them more than anything.
Money can be recreated. Time spent is forever.
If you don’t know what day it is, you’re doing OK.
Variety creates memories, and gives meaning to life.
Go to bed at a time when you don’t need an alarm to wake, at least every other day.
Sound travels at ~350 meters per second. Thunder takes around 5 seconds to travel 1 mile (1.61 km).
Light years are measured in Earth years. Our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4.2 light years away. At 99.999% the speed of light, it takes 3 weeks to get there, but 4.2 years pass on Earth.
Assumption travels faster than science.
Better to be late than to be unprepared.
Measure in percentages of available time remaining.

Politics

I vote Green. I see it as the highest potential return of effort for my local environment.
Unaccountable and unnamed deciders, are dictators. Be accountable, put your name to your decisions, everyone is better off with transparency in cause & affect.
Unchallenged observation and allowance of corruption, is appeasement, and also corruption.
We can always do better, and should never be forced to do worse.
The definition of corruption is the exchange of money for influence.
Creating jobs is not creating value or quality of life. Vandalism creates jobs. Creating equality of opportunity is the sole purpose and responsibility of anyone paid to be entrusted in civil service.
Government has no money, it has influence on the direction of a proportion of everyone else’s money.
Public accounts for who collected and spent what, from and to whom, is essential for trust in the responsibilities of this separation of money from influence being beyond corruption.
We are all “The Government”, if the designated functions are not being served fairly and adequately, we are all responsible to change it.
The law is a reflection of the past views of morality. It ceases to serve its purpose when it is implemented without regard to being presently informed and remaining morally influential of the future.
Vote in elections to show you are watching whoever wins.
Lower voter turnouts favour the status quo. Not voting is still a vote — for no change.
Be mindful of every single other vote you have in between — with your wallet, and now likes, follows, shares, and subscribes.

Religion

Having beliefs is to be aware, awake, and enjoy being human. It’s not a sign of weakness, but a confidence in purpose, and confirmation of being alive.
You don’t need to believe in invisible magnetism, or radio, or x-rays, or kindness to see their effects.
If you believe a person is more than their body, and that they have an effect on their world, then you believe in the spirit.
If you accept that not everything needs to be seen to be, and that a person is more than a body, it is not beyond the imagination to believe in a god as a person embodied in your surroundings.
Religion is not an excuse, or reason to identify others as wrong. It is a transcendence of personal experience to collective experience, from which we all benefit — regardless of contribution, but more-so from giving than taking.
To benefit from religion, you must believe, you must give without expectation of receiving, receive the benefits without costing more — and somehow then, from its existence, we all continue to receive more than we could ever hope to give.
If you have a god, look after them as they care for you — and be glad that other’s have a god that will look after them, too.
Do no harm, sins are self-harm.

Bias

Everything is biased to some degree.
Prejudice is natural, healthy, and efficient in making quick decisions with limited information.
Discrimination is self-protection in attempting to be constructive.
Prejudice and discrimination without consideration and compensation for bias is self-defeating.
Disadvantaging others, without regard to bias, is destructive — and often unlawful.
Questioning bias first improves rational in response.
Survivorship bias is when someone quotes you specific examples as evidence of likelihood.
Correlation bias is more common than causation.
Reporting bias is propaganda.
Censorship is selective bias.
Virtue-signalling is soliciting bias.
Social and parental conditioning is bias.
Sensationalism, outrage, and unfounded disbelief and dismissal betray bias.
Bias is understandable, when recognised, and dangerous when dismissed.
If in doubt, declare it. Respect is earned. Denial is circumspect.
All information consumption forms some kind of bias.

Beliefs change

I share all this only for the potential and hope of improvement to more, than the cost and risk in effort to share.

Happy to learn if any of my beliefs can be improved. Debate is only offered with consent, which remains reserved.

The liberty to believe otherwise is respected, and understood.

Put your name to your beliefs, most of them only exist because someone else did. Beliefs are what created and protects civilisation.

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