Dear Lovely Simplerista,

Back from a trip to Denmark. My dad turned 80, and I'd written him a song ("Song for my Father") which I performed on the very guitar he got for his 18th birthday. He and many others were very moved. It was a great experience.

Lest week we talked about your zone of genius. Today I promised I'd talk about reality.

We all have the capacity to be dreamy, head in the clouds, envision things that don't yet exist, dream of futures we wish to create. We also have the capacity to delude ourselves, to try to convince ourselves that things are great when they're not (or that they suck when they're actually great).

That's why I really like Reality. I like those moments when we just see things for the way they are, right here, right now. And sometimes that's painful. It can be a situation that we don't like that we can see we created ourselves. It can be looking at finances. It can be looking honestly at how you appear to others, online or in person. It can be seeing that your entire victim story is a lie.

Whatever it is, I find that the pain of facing the truth tends to be the same. It's a sinking feeling in the stomach, it's an uneasy vibration around the heart, and it's like a force pulling backward on my arms, around to my back.

And while it can feel unpleasant, when you open up to it, it's actually quite nice. It feels alive and grounding and like you've just been awakened a little bit more.

I want you to make friends with that feeling, however it manifests for you. Encourage it. Welcome it. Seek out opportunities to face reality. Because only when we're seeing reality clearly can we go about creating the results we want in life. If you're not in reality, then it's like you're running in mid-air. You can run all you want, nothing's going to move but your feet.

That's why I love Reality.

New Features in Simplero

I've made a lot of progress on support for multiple currencies. Still no promises about when it'll be done-done, but I'm sure a lot of you are going to be really happy with this one.

The new server infrastructure is holding up incredibly well. I'm really happy we made that move.

Random Links from around the Interwebs

Los Angeles schools suffered from a Denial of Service attack. As we move into this next phase of civilization, the ability to learn how to deal with our feelings, how to face reality, and how to be more conscious and effective is going to critical to our thriving as a species. This is why I'm so excited about the work that we all do together.

Solar energy in the sky. Really awesome concept. And I love how they got around the problems with costly batteries by storing hydrogen in the balloon as an energy storage.

Dropbox is a good example of a company with a great product and great execution that is in trouble simply because it was valued too highly and got too much funding. Had it been a bootstrapped, profit-seeking company, it could have been a fantastic money maker, and everybody would be happy.

Have an awesome week. We'll connect again next Wednesday, on the 23rd, or "little christmas eve", as we call it in Danish.

Cheers,
–Calvin