thinkfetti

The quote, “insanity : doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” has been attributed to Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin, among others, but it was probably written by Rita Mae Brown (Sudden Death, Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68). [1, 2]

But let’s say you’re sending out resumes, hoping to get a job. If each resume had a 1% chance of succeeding (a 1-in-100 chance), and if you managed to send out 100 resumes, you’d have about a 63% chance of landing a job. (The percentage chance of success in this idealized case is (1 - (0.99^100))*100 for reasons I won’t go into here…)

That’s a better than even chance, after doing the same, crummy thing over and over.

Or…

You decide you want to learn to draw. You sit down for an hour, try to draw a realistic picture of something on the desk in front of you, and it doesn’t come out.

(more…)

I have many dangerous thoughts. Furious, critical, deeply questioning. But I haven’t been posting them here.

Insofar as time exists, or seems to, beyond a fundamental Buddhist idea of the all-pervading present, there is no such thing as “going back.” And regardless of which version of time I am holding, it’s healthy and stress reducing to think that even if I return to a place I have been before, it must be a “going forward.”

Anxiety comes and is hard. It is a comfort, though soft-spoken, that all movement is forward, that there is change.