*Typing*

When opportunities feel scarce, we place an unhealthy expectation on each one that comes our way. This not only takes us out of the present moment. It actually pushes the opportunities away. The Buddhists call this grasping or clinging. They believe it's the root of all suffering. I prefer to call it white knuckling. Think of it like attempting to catch a butterfly. If you chase a butterfly, you will not catch it. You will frighten it away. However, if you sit still and be patient, the butterfly might just land on you. It's easy to be patient in a butterfly garden where there are dozens and dozens fluttering around you. It's harder when you look around and see just one. When there is just one, behave as if there are many. You can't white knuckle a butterfly.

No matter how unique your taste is, you're not alone. Your taste might be eccentric, sure, but it's not exclusive. There are communities who like stapling bread to trees, writing horror renditions of Garfield comic strips and carrying around sand in their pockets. Shared taste should be hugely liberating to a creative individual. Knowing others will like the things you like gives your the freedom to create the things you like. Your work might not garner an audience of millions. But, your work will find enough people to support its creation. So, instead of creating for the masses, focus your attention on creating for yourself.

Great martial artists achieve what is called 'munen muso'. It's the ability to act without thinking. Professional athletes might call it the 'zone'. Big wave surfers might call it 'flow'. Businessmen might call it 'momentum'. It's not so much the name that matters but the feeling. It's a state of mind where thinking is replaced with knowing; and deciding, doing. To achieve 'munen muso', we must meticulously master our craft until it is knitted into the fabrics of our beings. Our crafts must become as much a part of us as our hearts and souls.

Refuse intense ideology. Avoid black and white thinking. Believing blindly in any one extreme is not faith but ignorance. It muddies up the waters of your thinking. Instead, you should constantly challenge your own beliefs. You should treat your beliefs as questions rather than answers. You should be wary of your natural tendency to drift too far in any one direction for with extremism comes a sense of certainty. It is not certain to live without answers. And so extremism is choosing to live with a false sense of certainty. Furthermore, you should be wary of extremists as the mouse is wary of the grinning fox, for extremists are quite persuasive.

To the truffle pig, every problem is a truffle problem. This is satisfactory when hunting for truffles. But, it doesn't exactly make for a well-rounded animal. This is the inherent problem with specialization. When we specialize, we believe that everything can be solved through our specialization. And so we must develop generalized knowledge to mitigate specialized bias.