Events | Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer

How to Survive Long Plane Rides

Whenever my mother or some other evolved being tells me “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” I have to stop myself from shaking them by the shoulders and saying,

“OK fine! You sit next to a screaming child on a plane. And you’re right, my journey is going to begin with one big fat single step – noise canceling headphones!”

Goodbye San Jose

For all of you who flew in to the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in San Jose and flew home finding yourself in the unfortunate position of being seated next to a very loud little person, I hope you spent the two bucks for a headset and pumped up the volume.

Here are some other travel tips:

Print out your boarding pass ahead of time
Always ask for an aisle seat close to the front if you can – if you have long legs like me, you will appreciate stretching out and standing up when you need to without unearthing other people. Go ahead, drink as much coffee as you want!
Travel light – believe me, you don’t need all that stuff
Wear flip flops – now that we are in the era of inelegant air travel where we are subjected to all kinds of indignities like being herded through metal detectors, removing our shoes and traveling with less than 3 ounces of liquids which inevitably brings on immediate dry skin and swollen feet. Do yourself a favor – pre moisturize, slip off your flip flops and wiggle your toes
Bring earphones – listen up, you don’t want to be between loud people and screaming babies without these
Say hello to the flight staff – always good to know someone if you want to change your seat, or another bag of those cool blue potato chips
Volunteer to sit in the emergency exit seat area – people with babies don’t like to sit here

Graham and me

Thank you Graham, for asking me to be a conference blogger.

I hope everyone’s trip back home was pleasant. I look forward to seeing you all again at next year’s conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

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November 23rd, 2010 hoongyee No comments

Categories: blogging, Events, The Naked Nonprofit Tags: americans for the arts, artful living, nonprofit, wow

Style Note: Simply Focused and Fabulous

photo by ronit.b

Why is it so hard to do one thing?

Does this happen to you? You are doing something and within minutes your mind starts wandering. To make yourself feel less guilty you start checking your email, voice messages, thinking about bills to pay, people to call and before you know it you have completely forgotten what you were doing in the first place. So you’ve done all of these other things which you didn’t really plan on doing and you still count them as Things That Have Been Done. But later on, you feel a vague dissatisfaction about your day and you say, “I’m always so busy but I never feel like I’ve accomplished anything.”

I hate when that happens.

New York Times article about distraction

Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness,psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.

What psychologists call “flow” — immersing your mind fully in activity — has long been advocated by nonpsychologists. “Life is not long,” Samuel Johnson said, “and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.” Henry Ford was more blunt: “Idleness warps the mind.” The iPhone results jibe nicely with one of the favorite sayings of William F. Buckley Jr.: “Industry is the enemy of melancholy.”

Over the several months of the iPhone study, though, the more frequent mind-wanderers remained less happy than the rest, and the moral — at least for the short-term — seems to be: you stray, you pay. So if you’ve been able to stay focused to the end of this column, perhaps you’re happier than when you daydreamed at the beginning. If not, you can go back to daydreaming starting…now.

Or you could try focusing on something else that is now, at long last, scientifically guaranteed to improve your mood. Just make sure you turn the phone off.

Leo Babauta is the founder of ZenHabits and Write to Done, and the author of The Power of Less. He just came out with a terrific new book, Focus: A Simplicity Manifesto in the Age of Distraction. My favorite topic and a book I highly recommend.

You can only be excellent at one thing at a time. This is just the way it is so why fight it?

Focus.