Personal – Budget Dust

“I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing — their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights — then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.”

Source: Why I Adore the Night

“Deconstruct the cool things you see.

If you’d like to become a better musician and you see an amazing performance, start paying attention to how they do it. How did they promote the event? What happens in the first ten seconds of each song? How frequently are they engaging directly with the audience? Is there a progression of energy throughout the show?

When something fascinates you, pay attention to the details. The person who thinks, “That was cool” is a consumer. The person who thinks, “How did they make something that cool?” is on the path to being a creator.

Don’t just taste the recipe, look for the ingredients.”

“The hard way is the fast way.

Do it right the first time and you won’t have to do it over the next time.”

Treat every experience as though it is the last time you will have it

“There will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time. Harris’s point is that we should therefore try to treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.”

David Brooks makes the distinction between “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”

Resume virtues are things like income, job title, and the size of your house. Eulogy virtues are things like being helpful, being loved, being honest, and being remembered.

An irony is that many people aspire for the latter, but put all their effort into the former. (Link)

I had a professor in college who used to work for Adobe. He said the engineers who built Photoshop had no clue how users would use every filter and tool in the software. They just tried to develop every imaginable way to manipulate an image and had faith that artists and designers would discover a creative use for it.

A lot of things work like that – their value to the world isn’t entirely known, or predicted, by their creator.

Visa founder Dee Hock said, “A book is far more than what the author wrote; it is everything you can imagine and read into it as well.”

Author James Patterson said, “One of the best things about reading is that you’ll always have something to think about when you’re not reading.”

Mark Twain, as he does, put it best when he said: “Wagoner’s music is better than it sounds.”

Investor Howard Marks once told the story of an investor whose performance was never in the top half of his peers in any given year. But, cumulatively, over a 14-year period, he ranked in the top 4% of his peers.

Bond giant PIMCO has an idea called “strategic mediocrity”: You’re never the best in the short run, but you stick around long enough to outlive the competition and come out on top.

My thoughts: I think this is what made Tiger Woods so prolific. He rarely shot a 63, but also rarely shot a 73. That’s not to imply he was mediocre. He just knew that 3 or 4 under for four days was going to win a lot of tournaments.

Henry Ford had a rule for his factories: No one could keep a record of the experiments that were tried and failed.

Ford wrote in his book My Life and Work:

I am not particularly anxious for the men to remember what someone else has tried to do in the past, for then we might quickly accumulate far too many things that could not be done.

That is one of the troubles with extensive records. If you keep on recording all of your failures you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to try – whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a certain method that another man will not succeed.

That was Ford’s experience. “We get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” He wrote: “Hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere in machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is called “the best shop practice.”

The important thing is that when something that previously didn’t work suddenly does, it doesn’t necessarily mean the people who tried it first were wrong. It usually means other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical.

Novelist Paulo Coelho on taking action:

“One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.”

Growth and comfort cannot coexist

When you run a knowledge business. You manage hearts; not parts

From start to finish, I put my thumbprint on this process in my own unique way. It’s a twist on what’s expected and executed in my own language. The deeper you look, the more you find.

My shop neighbor here in Fortuna works on old custom cars. Just beautiful stuff. He said to me once when we were talking shop on a Friday looking at one of his cars, “If you see this drive by, it needs to look like a Mustang. It has to be instantly recognizable. But when I park it, and you really can take a moment, every single line on this car is different. No piece of this is what it used to be. It’s still a Mustang, but it doesn’t share a single curve, sweep, part or component of what it came in here with. I’ve left my mark on every single part of this car I’ve touched. The people who truly appreciate what it is, and truly understand, those are the people that I make this car for.”

For me, that car is the putters I am creating. And the car gear heads who really appreciate the difference? Well, that’s the No. 1 golfer in the world. LINK

Favorite Ideas

If you find something that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important. The more fields it shows up in, the more likely it is to be a fundamental and recurring driver of how the world works. …

John Muir once said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Fields are studied individually, but there are so many common denominators across topics. The more fields a lesson applies to, and the more disparate those fields are, the more powerful and important the lesson becomes. @morganhousel

Leibniz’s Worlds (philosophy): There are infinite possible worlds; we just happen to live in this one. Some ideas hold true in all possible worlds, while others would only work in this specific iteration. Naval put it this way: “In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky, so we want to factor luck out of it … I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times.”

Liebig’s law of the minimum (agriculture): A plant’s growth is limited by the single scarcest nutrient, not total nutrients – if you have everything except nitrogen, a plant goes nowhere. Liebig wrote, “The availability of the most abundant nutrient in the soil is only as good as the availability of the least abundant nutrient in the soil.” Most complex systems are the same, which makes them more fragile than we assume. One bad bank, one stuck container ship, or one broken supply line can ruin an entire system’s trajectory.

gslmotorlearningguidev2 Download

Challengepointandgolf Download

Backyard Putting Green Plans

ProPutt Systems Forum Post – guy did a really nice job
Birdieball Outdoor Putting Mat
DIY Putting Green on the cheap

Richie Hunt Articles

2011 Pro Golf Synopsis
- Game planning
Golf Digest 21 Take Aways
All Rich Hunt GolfWRX articles
- How power helps your golf game (and it’s not how you think)
- Statistics on how short hitters can conquer Par-5’s
  - Hit driver off the tee, but focus on good contact and finding the fairway instead of swinging harder in hopes of hitting it farther.
  - Three wood performance is not as critical to par-5 performance as one may think. However, it’s still important to try and get the ball as close as you can to the hole when feasible rather than playing for your “money yardage.”
  - Short Game performance is fairly important, but it’s more about long-range short game shots (20-30 yards) than shorter range Short Game shots (<15 yards).
  - Par-5 performance is more about the first two shots than it is about performance with the putter.
- Are PGA Tour players too conservative when they lay up?
  - At the very least, these studies should make golfers question just how much loss aversion plays a role in their performance. For example, we have always heard the old adage of “take an extra club on approach shots because you are more likely to miss short of the hole than long of the hole.” Perhaps that is another instance of loss aversion affecting a golfer’s performance.
  - I also have to wonder if McIlroy and Spieth have a different view of golf than most everybody else. Perhaps they are thinking more about accumulating good golf shots in a round instead of focusing on avoiding bad golf shots. And maybe the golf world has to change its outlook on golf, choosing an offensive instead of defensive mindset in order to break the barriers Spieth and McIlroy have in recent years.
- The importance of the wedge game is vastly overrated by golfers
  - I feel that the average golfer can take note of this and use it to improve their game. Realize that the area where you most frequently hit shots may not be the most important part to lowering your handicap. Often times, the area where a golfer most frequently hits shots is the result of hitting poor shots from a more important area. If an amateur chunks 160-yard approach shots repeatedly, they may be left with more 40-yard shots into the green. They could improve their scores more rapidly by learning to hit the 160-yard shots better, instead of focusing on the leftover 40-yard shots.
  - Analyzing these statistics can also serve as a way to determine a golfer’s best bag setup. Perhaps golfers may want to leave that gap wedge at home in order to carry that extra long iron or hybrid so they are properly gapped on their long approach shots. And it can help the golfer understand what exact length putts are more important in lowering their scores, too.