Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Returning briefly to an old series of scans of my collection of bits of wisdom from fortune cookies; for some reason, this is the one that struck me today.

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Previously in the “Wisdom from the Cookie” series: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Patterns | Scarsdale, New York | Apr 2009

Me, Are you a creator or a consumer?

Usually creating requires a bit of consumption: aggregating, listening, analyzing, structuring, finding and linking connections, processing information, researching past learnings, understanding new ideas, thinking, tinkering, reconfiguring and playing. Every day we consume information and experiences: conversations with others, broadcasts from media (TV, magazines, the Internet, books, billboards, videos, etc.). Listening to the world is an important part of being able to create.

But it’s easy to consume too much.

Far too easy. The key is creating internal, trusted systems for consuming and creating that tell us when we’ve found the balance, when we’ve consumed enough to be able to create our own words, create our own vision, find our own voice.

Diana Kimball, The World of Writing:

Patterns aren’t for nothing. It takes a long time to know anything well enough to have something new to say. Even if those months of persistent research were caught up with avoidance, I know that if I’d started writing earlier, I would have been working from a very different picture. A much emptier one: so I’m grateful that it was full.

My worry: will our quest for information sublimate our ability to build (and recognize) wisdom?

Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker, Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.

Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus. The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.

The quest for productivity, specialization, routine and eliminating variability is valiant but misguided; my hope is that we don’t forget the value in long tables, long tails and long prose; the joy in the flash of brilliance, the recognition of a pattern, of finding a needle in a haystack, these are the joys of intellectual curiosity; even as I decry our splintered conversations and fractured context, I find joy in digging through the noise to find signals. So it goes…

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Yes, as an artist, I think like a businessman. As a businessman, I think like an artist. C’est la vie…

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

I love the idea. Life is an experiment, albeit an experiment where we are the subjects and directly bear the gains and consequences of our tests.

The only problem is the qualifier “too.” There is always a restraint, always a point that is too far, always a bit of timidity that is needed to keep us from going too far. Learning what is too far is the hardest part.

Sometimes you just have to burn your hands a couple times to figure out how hot is too hot.

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Previously in the “Wisdom from the Cookie” series: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Your way of doing what other people do their way is what makes you special.

I would like to believe that in this context “special” means good, but when I reflect a little bit about myself I’m not so sure that’s true.

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Previously in the “Wisdom from the Cookie” series: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4