The Antidote

 Books  No Responses »
Jan 252014
 

If you’ve ever browsed through, or read, one of those self-help books that prom­ises life will be per­fect if only you think good thoughts, or that suc­cess in a busi­ness comes from set­ting goals and striv­ing to meet them, you may have had the nig­gling thought that there might be some­thing miss­ing in the rosy pic­tures these books paint. If so, The Anti­dote: Hap­pi­ness for People Who Can­’t Stand Pos­it­ive Think­ing might be the right book for you. I haven’t reviewed many of the books I’ve read recently, but this struck me as import­ant enough to do so.

The book talks about how always try­ing to be happy, think­ing only pos­it­ive thoughts, and try­ing to pre­tend bad things nev­er hap­pen to people does­n’t work to make us happy; there is real value in con­front­ing our fears and wor­ries and work­ing through the worst-case scen­ari­os as well as the best-case dreams. The author points out that fear of fail­ure makes busi­nesses blind to the real­ity that set­ting goals and doing things in the same way as a suc­cess­ful com­pany does­n’t bring suc­cess in and of itself.

The chapter called ‘Goal Crazy’ got me adding book­marks: it’s about how goals often don’t work, and it’s not just because com­pan­ies and people set the wrong ones, but because set­ting goals at all often means neg­lect­ing oth­er import­ant aspects. Examples include people determ­ined to suc­ceed in busi­ness who end up divorced and with health prob­lems, or com­pan­ies who focus on sales and starve the research depart­ment of neces­sary funds. Inter­est­ing stuff indeed, and lots to think about.

The author dis­cusses vari­ous philo­sophies and meth­ods to accept life without the ‘think pos­it­ive at all times’ man­tra, includ­ing stoicism, med­it­a­tion, Eck­hart Tolle’s teach­ings, and the Mex­ic­an tra­di­tion of memento mori, and teases out the sim­il­ar­it­ies between these. In the final chapter, entitled ‘Neg­at­ive Cap­ab­il­ity’, he comes to the con­clu­sion that hap­pi­ness includes neg­at­ive thoughts and emo­tions as well as pos­it­ive ones. This is a groun­ded hap­pi­ness, rather than some­thing fleet­ing that depends on one’s mood. This, to me, sounds like some­thing worth­while (and achievable).

No password issues

 Identity and Privacy, Technology  2 Responses »
Jan 212014
 

In prin­ciple I’m in favour of the ‘log in with X’ way of doing things (mod­ulo user exper­i­ence issues such as try­ing to remem­ber which ser­vice you picked to sign up with in the first place). There is, how­ever, more to it than that in some cases. Example: using the online repos­it­ory ser­vice bit­buck­et.

Sign­ing up in the first place with one of my Google accounts worked as expec­ted. The next step, of adding a git repos­it­ory and push­ing files to it, was a little more com­plic­ated. You need to use a reg­u­lar pass­word for git push and, of course, bit­buck­et does­n’t have the pass­word for my Google account. And I did­n’t have a reg­u­lar pass­word for the account, hav­ing set it up using my Google account, so I had to go through the pass­word-reset dance to cre­ate a new pass­word that bit­buck­et is allowed to know.

In oth­er words, for these sorts of ser­vices I need a pass­word that the ser­vice is allowed to know; log­ging in with oth­er ser­vices is an add-on but not a replace­ment. This isn’t hard to under­stand when you stop and think about what’s going on (in the browser the ser­vice relies on a lot of browser redir­ects which aren’t avail­able in the com­mand line), but it did take me a minute or two to fig­ure out that I would have to reset my here­to­fore blank pass­word to get one that I could use. (Bit­buck­et also sup­ports SSH iden­tit­ies and I’ll prob­ably set that up instead of the password.)

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