Hello there and welcome!
I’m Alan Dauphin and I’m an advisor helping people think slowly and big picture about their finances, businesses and life. After a more than a decade of advising people to think slowly, the methodology has spilled over into other parts of my life. This has resulted in the so called wood shavings, the scrap and byproducts made from my main work, I’ve found, have value. My wood shavings are these slow thoughts.
I started this blog because it is something that I want to to read and couldn’t find. Being a curious learner, I find most of today’s digital writing is skin deep, if that. So, I decided to create a place to share what I’ve learned and where readers can slow down to ponder and help them live a better life.
What is a slow thought?
It is exploring something down to its essence and then see how it reacts in the real world. Evaluating it from all sides and under different conditions. Questioning its assumptions, looking at alternatives. This is the opposite of the instant agreement and click bait thinking.
I’ve come to appreciate taking to think and learn by dissecting books and share that knowledge as well. Reading widely has formed and refined most of my slow thoughts and applying them and real life helped to complete the lesson.
Slow thoughts take time. Since I am a father of four, and along with running my advising companies, I post when the thoughts are written and ready. The best way to follow them is to get them directly in your inbox. Those that sign up can reply and connect with me to discuss them or other work.
Photography
Creating pictures is a passion of mine too. In today’s smart phone studios, the art of depth of field, composition and technique have gone by the wayside. My favorite pictures have been those that required slow thoughts about the elements of the image before capturing it. Most of the pictures on this site are my work. Starting with film and traditional black and white, forced me to focus on the elements of the image. Developing film and enlarging photographs from the negative is time consuming and expensive. Slowly thinking about each shot saved hours in the darkroom. This carried to digital. I edit with simple tasks like crop, straighten, flip to black & white, and adjust exposures. And I think any more than that, one becomes a graphic designer and no longer a photographer.
Enjoy!