Me
Interesting
CJ Chilvers believes you are more interesting than you think. He longs for the “generalist” era of blogging and yearns to bring it back.
The trust was always about the person behind the index.html file, not the information itself. We gave that up in the years since. We put our trust in algorithms. Look how they’ve paid us back.
It’s time to bring trust in individuals back.
Our role? Keep building up that trust by being real and providing value consistently. Post about whatever your generalist heart desires.
Will that go viral? Hell no.
That’s not where the value is. The value is in the daily practice that makes you a better creator and a trusted resource.
Smart post.
Writing Essays
Here’s a good quote I found that I wanted to keep:
The best way to write an essay is to sit with a blank piece of paper and a pencil. Then set a timer for 30 minutes and start writing. Don’t stop until the timer goes off.
A Lesser Minimalism
CJ Chilvers writes about a lesser minimalism. Mainly focused on the “why” behind our clutter and dealing with it before it’s too late.
Our attachment to information can be profitable, distracting, emotional, or fleeting. The cognitive weight of words is not equal page-to-page.I simply don’t practice this enough.The process is the equalizer.
It’s been my experience that every minimalist dreams of passing down a thumb drive or password, giving their families access to 90%+ of their multi-generational trash and treasure. Then, they want their remains cremated and scattered to the wind, as to leave no trace.
It’s a laudable goal to enable as much as possible to be carried away on a cloud. Both kinds. But that requires a daily process — a practice. And it’s anything but minimal.
The Other Kind of Dead Time
Via Niklas Göke:
Robert Greene once told Ryan Holiday that there are two kinds of time: Alive time and dead time.I’ve neve heard of this before and it’s kind of brilliant. Read the whole thing.Dead time is when you wait for life to happen to you instead of for you. It’s when nothing seems to change for the better, yet when you take an honest look at the last six months, you realize all you’ve done is complain.
Alive time is when you’re making it count. It is when you do your best every day, no matter how hopeless or unfortunate your current situation may seem. You focus on what you control and try your best to learn and get better.
The idea behind this distinction, of course, is that whether you spend your time being “alive” or “dead” is up to you…
Maximum Clarity
Shawn Blanc on focus and decision making.
One definition of Focus is “Maximum Clarity”. But, in life, having maximum clarity doesn’t always mean having absolute, perfect clarity. Focus can be a graduating scale.
Sometimes, having maximum clarity right now, may still seem a bit vague… maybe you are only 80% confident and clear. But that’s the best you’ve got right now so you make the best decision you can at the time with the values, motivation, and information available to you right now.
Thus you must make a decision with the most amount of clarity you have right now. Knowing that, as you move forward, things will come more into view and you can make adjustments.
I’ve never thought of focus being on a graduating scale before.
Thinking About Friendships
Patrick Rhone has a few thoughts about friendship. This bit got me.
Even worse, messaging a friend to get together for no reason at all often doesn’t even occur to us as an option. We have some open time in our self-important schedules and in the myriad of things we could choose to do, we don’t even think about spending it with a friend. Friendships, and the time they require for nourishment, never seem to enter the equation. They don’t even make it on our to-do lists.
I’m so happy I’m seeing one of my best friends at the end of the month.
Memories of Things Nobody Cares About
Will Leitch, in his newsletter, spent most of it focused on his favorite movie of last year, The Worst Person in the World. The movie is about Aksel, a 43-year-old man who is dying of pancreatic cancer and reflects on his life. I have not seen the movie, but Leitch says the movie’s protagonist makes a realization that the things he cared about were meaningless.
Leitch quotes an Aksel monologue from the movie that feels revelatory in my own life.
I’d given up long before I got sick. Really. I just watch my favorite old movies over and over. Lynch, “The Godfather Part II”… How many times can you watch “Dog Day Afternoon”? Sometimes I listen to music I haven’t heard before. But it’s old as well. Music I didn’t know about, but from when I grew up. It felt as though I’d already given up. I grew up in an age without Internet and mobile phones. I sound like an old fart. But I think about it a lot.
The world that I knew has disappeared. For me it was all about going to stores. Record stores. I’d take the tram to Voices in Grünerløkka. Leaf through used comics at Pretty Price. I can close my eyes and see the aisles at Video Nova in Majorstua. I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects. They were interesting, because we could live among them. We could pick them up. Hold them in our hands. Compare them. Like books. That’s all I have. I spent my life doing that. Collecting all that stuff, comics, books. And I just continued, even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my early 20s. I continued anyway. And now it’s all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.
Leitch chimes in with his own reflection on “memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.”
Aksel is dying, so his memories have an extra urgency and sadness. But it can feel like dying sometimes, to know that everything you valued your entire adult life, and thought would last as profoundly important, has gone away. And nobody really noticed, or cared.
I remember when the mysteries of Lost were what everyone was talking about. I remember the transition from the musical domination of Sunset Strip bands to the Seattle sound and understanding a shift was taking place. I remember a time when I didn’t want an iPhone. These were fundamentally important things in my life at that time. Today? Not so much.
And then Leitch drops this killer paragraph:
Part of getting older is recognizing that the things you care about are not the things everybody else cares about, and being comfortable with that. Deep down, I don’t really care whether or not anyone thinks being a Wilco fan makes me “washed,” or if you think the third greatest rom-com of all time is freaking You’ve Got Mail (????!!!!!), or you don’t like watching college basketball, or if you get bored reading. I love Wilco, I love college basketball, I love reading, those things provide me pleasure, and if they don’t do that for you, I can’t do anything about that … and it doesn’t take anything away from my pleasure. There was a time that I would have obsessed over persuading you that you were wrong, that these things are fantastic and that you should come be a part of them with me, all the powerful emotions I felt in my early 20s. But it’s fine now. I like too much salt on my french fries, I like Rhone running shirts and Tracksmith running shorts, I like to sit in the third row at movie theaters, I like my car seat pushed farther back than the length of my leg necessarily requires. I like things the way I like them, and I’m comfortable with that. I don’t need you to be. And you shouldn’t need me to be comfortable with whatever you like.
It’s good to like what you like from “back in the day,” but time inches ever more into the future. Maybe I’m just getting old and set in my ways just like Leitch.
I like my own personal remembrances, and what I care about others might not, but I guess one can get lost in the way it used to be and forget to focus on the here and now and the future.
That’s the trick, isn’t it? I like to strike a balance between enjoying what I like and embracing something new. It’s hard but worth it. Because I don’t want to leave this world with just “memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.”
Start From Quiet
I loved this post from Niklas Göke.
How often do you sit in a quiet room, by yourself, before you take the next step? It could be any step: buying bread, heading to the office, opening your laptop to send an email, powering up your gaming console, reading a book, making dinner, taking a nap, calling a friend, writing a blog post, or submitting your vacation plans to your boss.
That step can begin one of two ways: from quiet or from noise. Nowadays, our default is to start from noise. There’s a TV playing in the background or a constant murmur of co-working small talk. We inject music, TED talks, and podcasts right into our ears. Open spaces have turned up the volume on office buzz. How often do we choose our own beginnings? When do we get to set the terms of the next stage without some stream of interference drilling into our consciousness? Whenever we pick quiet.
You can make quiet, you know? Find it. Go for a walk. Sit in an empty room. Close the door. Take off your headphones. Escape the chatter. It is remarkable what two minutes of quiet do for the brain, and how different a new beginning feels when you decide to make it from nothing rather than something — because that’s what you’re doing, you know? All day, you turn nothing into something, but if the intention isn’t clear, it’ll fall right back to ashes.
Protect your moments of setting intentions. Create the space to choose them deliberately. Take off from quiet, and you’ll find a much stronger wind beneath your wings.
I try to do this and fail all the time.
If We’re Back to ‘Normal,’ Why Am I Still So Exhausted All the Time?
Dan Sinker, writing for Esquire, wonders what is normal after two years of the pandemic.
Going back to normal is the wrong direction anyway. We need to move forward, to build new lives, better lives. Lives that address the inequalities laid bare in the pandemic, that pay people doing work we deemed “essential” two years ago wages that reflect it; lives that offer healthcare that doesn’t just address the current emergency but the fact that all of us live on a razor’s edge all the time; lives that give parents the support they desperately need; lives that lift up black and brown people who bore the brunt of the pandemic’s harshest outcomes; lives that feel like they’re worth living, for everyone. It’s possible. I have to believe it’s possible.
I love the idea of moving forward. We probably aren’t going back to the way it was in February 2020 ever again. It all changed when March Madness was canceled, and Tom Hanks got COVID. Maybe the turning point was when celebrities started dying like John Prine, Adam Schlesinger, Terrence McNally, Nick Cordero, and Herman Cain.
In any case, we must learn from our mistakes and go on. It’s the only way to do better. Everyone should learn from this experience, dismiss the old ways’ familiarity, and start thinking about the new.
New is the new normal.
Pressure
I don’t know about you, but I have a general feeling of helplessness right now, and I don’t like it. I imagine we are all experiencing that same depression and inability to fix [waves hands around randomly] everything. The pressure keeps building.
Flashpoints are happening in a dozen different places, and I feel apprehensive. I know part of me wants to return to some sense of normalcy, and another part knows that’s never happening. My world of pre-March 2020 is never coming back. I want what’s been taken away from me, and it feels, lately, that it’s just out of reach. Probably permanently.
Additionally, I’ve been working on my mental health. The pandemic was not a horrific turn of events in my world like it was for so many others. I was lucky. Still, it took its toll on me. My communication was poor. I was having trouble just talking with my wife. We are still working on it.
Now, as we navigate the post-pandemic world, the feeling of pressure keeps building.
How will you handle it? How will I handle it?
I don’t know.
January 1
December 31 means a great deal to me.
It’s the last day of the year, of course. However, it’s also my mother’s birthday and the day I lost my right eye in a freak accident.
My accident isn’t something I think about daily. I was only eight years old. When I do think about it, I only think of fleeting things like getting the wind knocked out of me, being carried to my back door, the stitches, and staying in a hospital for a bit.
I don’t think about blindness, mostly because I can see just fine out of my left.
It was a football accident, so my chance of ever playing football in high school was pretty much over. Because I lost depth perception, playing baseball was out of the question, especially when they started throwing curveballs. I found other interests and other sports.
Blindness in my right eye probably restricted my life in a few minor ways, but it wasn’t that big of a deal in reality. I certainly never allowed it to define my life. On the other hand, my mother certainly shaped me for the better.
She was of the stay-at-home variety, and I saw my Mom every day after school. She grew up as a latch-key kid, but I did not. She never wanted that for her children and didn’t go into the workforce until both of her kids were essentially out of the house.
When she married my father, she could hardly boil water. We would nearly always come down to eat at the dinner table as a family. Dinner time was family time. Over the decades, cooking became a passion, and she still loves to experiment and try new recipes.
I learned most from my mother that family is the most important thing. Your family is the one to rely on when you need help. When confronted with obstacles or realized successes, my family was there.
As I reflect on the lessons taught by accidents and mothers, my goal for 2022 is to keep these ideas alive in me, not as some resolution, but as a steadfast core belief in myself.
Hello, January 1, 2022, and goodbye to 2021. Goodbye to a year of doubt and fear. Goodbye to the need to be like others or worry about how others view me. Just be me. I may be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what I want to accomplish, but I can’t be paralyzed by it. I can’t be fearful.
It’s hello to a restored sense of family. I will embrace what I have right in front of me and worry less about what I think I want or desire. This is the year I find my voice and quit letting the successes of others drive me or attempt to mimic their unique achievements. I’m the star of my own life, and I need to start acting like it.
The best motivator for me is me. Do better than before. Get better. Find the next level and keep at it, in my writing, with my family, and in how I approach this precious thing called life.
The adventure is just beginning.
Don’t Look Back
Boston’s second album is called Don’t Look Back. The title track’s lyrics are inspirational — A new day is breakin’/It’s been too long since I felt this way/I don’t mind where I get taken/The road is callin’/Today is the day
While the song is probably more about the band on the road than embracing the new, the song seems pertinent to my creativity. It’s a bright horizon, and I’m awake now/Oh, I see myself in a brand new way.
I used to have a tremendous amount of regret. I’d obsess over paths taken and if I made the right choice. Today, I realize that was unhealthy. It would help if you never had any regrets in life. Look at the here and now. Be present. Look to the future.
And don’t look back.
I was trapped by past creative work. My writing output was ten times what it is now. I’m not writing every day. Life simply got in the way, or I got tired and turned to some other creative exercise. My creative writing became stagnant. The enthusiasm waned. Where did the passion go? I want to ignite it again. Start writing. Rewrite. Publish.
And don’t look back.
The best advice I ever got was to treat every day as a new opportunity to do good in the world. So, I’m going to try and be good, and along the way, I might try something new, do something different, and in the process, re-invent myself. Starting now.
Gene Simmons of KISS has said, “Every day above ground is a good day.” Each new dawn is a gift. It’s a blank slate.
Don’t look back.
The past can hold you back. I’m letting it go. The only thing that exists is the present, one breath into the future.
I’m not good at living each day like it’s my last, but it could be. So, I should be as creative as possible for as long as I can. I’m proud of my past, but I can’t let it define or cage me.
I’m starting new projects, dropping old ones, and looking at the past and how it can shape my future, but not for too long. I have to keep moving forward.
Don’t look back.
Parents Are Not Okay
Dan Sinker, writing for The Atlantic, focuses on how everything about Covid-19, politics and the public school systems have broken parents all across the country.
Instead it was a year in limbo: school on stuttering Zoom, school in person and then back home again for quarantine, school all the time and none of the time. No part of it was good, for kids or parents, but most parts of it were safe, and somehow, impossibly, we made it through a full year. It was hell, but we did it. We did it.
Time collapsed and it was summer again, and, briefly, things looked better. We began to dream of normalcy, of trips and jobs and school. But 2021’s hot vax summer only truly delivered on the hot part, as vaccination rates slowed and the Delta variant cut through some states with the brutal efficiency of the wildfires that decimated others. It happened in a flash: It was good, then it was bad, then we were right back in the same nightmare we’d been living in for 18 months.
And suddenly now it’s back to school while cases are rising, back to school while masks are a battleground, back to school while everyone under 12 is still unvaccinated. Parents are living a repeat of the worst year of their lives-except this time, no matter what, kids are going back.
Even with college-age and older kids, my wife and I are struggling with trying to keep the kids (and family and friends) safe from Covid-19 while balancing the social and emotional wellbeing of everyone concerned. Plus, you know, navigating our jobs and figuring out dinner and whatnot.
We have help and resources. I can’t imagine what it is like for parents who don’t.
Most of 2020 and a large chunk of 2021 are going to be traumatizing for kids for decades.
Time Dilation
This post by Seth Godin is fascinating to me. I’m going to drop the whole thing here:
You can read this post in six minutes. It took me more than an hour to write.
That extra editing and polish is a benefit to the reader.
You can read this post instead of 100 others, because people highlighted or shared or ranked or otherwise filtered the other things you might be reading. That curation created value as well.
The math here is compelling indeed: 1,000 would-be authors pitch books but only 30 get published. Each book takes a year to write but just six hours to read. And you didn’t read all thirty of them, just the one that had the best reviews… 10,000 hours of work by authors and editors to deliver six hours to you.
The time dilation of polish and curation is possible because of asynchronicity and the one-to-many nature of publishing ideas.
Asynchronous because you’re not doing it live, reading it as I write it.
And one-to-many because the work of a creator is multiplied across many readers.
A friend recently sent me a note via voice mail. It was 14 minutes long. Because he didn’t spend another ten or fifteen minutes editing it into a three-minute long email, he wasted a ton of my time. But the nature of 1:1 interaction meant that it was either his time or mine, even steven.
And listening to someone live, at an open mic nite or at a concert, promises wonderful surprise, but it also means that there’s bound to be a lot of dead time. Because no one is curating, and you have no selection advantage.
One of the surprising unsung benefits of the worldwide web and the organized sharing of information is time dilation. A benefit we constantly waste by seeking the more human habit of mindlessly taking what comes, in real-time instead.
The idea of time dilation and curating input and the important idea of curating output to others is a concept I’ve never heard of before, but I understand completely.
The Innocence of Youth
When I was a kid, I watched my favorite shows just like any other kid my age. If you grew up in the 70s, you probably watched the same programs I did, give or take a few. I watched The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. I loved the original Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. WKRP was awesome.
Recently, I watched a few episodes of the 60s Batman with Adam West and Burt Ward. I had forgotten just how “tongue pressed firmly in cheek” the whole show was.
When I was still running around in Keds, I had no idea what camp was or that they were spoofing the whole genre. I didn’t know the pedigree of Caesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, or Frank Gorshin. I saw a live-action Batman, and that was all that mattered. Today, the show certainly holds up as the campy kitsch it was, but the wide-eyed wonder of the kid seeing comic books come to life is gone.
My eyes can no longer keep their innocent point of view.Back to back with Batman, The Monkees were also a daily afterschool ritual of my much younger self. I loved the combination of music and silly hijinks. I sort of looked like Mickey Dolenz in my youth — all crazy curly hair and mugging for the camera. The first record I ever owned was the Monkees Greatest Hits, and I remember proudly bringing it to school when I was in the third grade. I haven’t seen any of the old Monkees episodes lately, but I’m afraid I will be disappointed. I’ve since graduated to the Fab Four instead of the Pre-Fab Four. My daughter knows “Last Train to Clarksville,” but she’d rather listen to “Let It Be.” I’m much more interested in reading stories about how the show was created than watching episodes.
I have warm memories of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends and the various incarnations of the Super Friends. However, I’m deathly afraid if I watch the shows today with my world-weary eyes, I’ll hate it. In fact, I know I’ll hate it. Some things hold up, and some things don’t. The Super Friends cartoon has been available on DVD for quite some time, but I don’t even want to watch it because I know from experience that, seen through adult eyes, it will suck.
I loved Ultraman when I was a kid. I have hazy memories of a giant space guy with incredible powers beating up the Godzilla rip-off of the week, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I bought the DVD set when it came out and attempted to watch the first two or three episodes. I couldn’t get past everything wrong with it — acting, costumes, the whole premise, for goodness sake. It sucked so bad I let Goodwill have the package. I’m sure someone was happy to buy it.
The sadness I feel at replacing wide-eyed innocence with jaded experience and knowledge is profound but understandable. My ten-year-old self watched The Godfather on TV with my Dad, and I didn’t get it. It was the sanitized television version of The Godfather Parts 1 and 2 recut to chronological order, and I thought it was the most boring thing imaginable. I needed the experience and knowledge to appreciate the work. By that same token, the work I loved as a kid doesn’t cut it anymore as an adult.
Back when my daughter was much younger, we watched the first collection of the Speed Racer cartoon, and it held her attention. We watched it straight through. Sure, the dialogue was borderline unlistenable in places, and Spritle and Chim Chim are still as annoying as, say, Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars prequels, but the stories were pretty good. Maybe early anime still has some holding power?
My eyes can no longer keep their innocent point of view. I mean, I still want to strangle George Lucas for subjecting me to the antics of Jar Jar Binks. My daughter laughed every time he was on screen.
Today I’m old, crusty, and tired, but what I’d give to be in middle school in the late 70s-early 80s again.
Anticipate and Adapt to Thrive
Brian Clark of Further has a few thoughts about change that spoke to me.
Change is unsettling, and plenty of people hate it. But odds are you’re not going to stop it from happening, and you’ll just become more miserable by fighting the inevitable.I need to embrace some of the opportunities coming my way.Why not spend your time anticipating change instead? Look at it clear-eyed and without wishful thinking, and give yourself the best shot of better dealing with changes as they come.
In other words, be prepared to adapt. From a biological standpoint, an adaptation is a change that helps you better survive in your environment. More than survive, adapting to change can also help you thrive.
You’ve heard over and over that change brings opportunity. And although change may also cause chaos, there’s a whole lot opportunity coming our way.
The Surreal Nostalgia of Arcade Longplays
Steve Rousseau, in Digg, writes about a unique thing to a certain age group: the nostalgia of playing arcade games. It’s amazing how the internet has not killed nostalgia but amped it up. I think I’m more than a touch older than the author, but I’m with him every step of the way.
What’s it like to watch someone play a video game of your childhood better than you could possibly imagine in 1080p at 60 frames per second? It’s absolutely enthralling. It’s the past, but perfected. It’s better than you remember because it’s not you playing, and it’s not being played on a big fuzzy CRT screen in a big loud arcade that’s desperately trying to suck quarters from you. It is the idealized childhood no one could ever possibly have. That’s the most intoxicating nostalgia when the past is better than you remember because it’s been upgraded and played by an infallible machine with infinite money.
The Expected Unexpected
Michael Wade on being prepared.
The day is planned. Time is blocked out. You finally have the chance to catch up on things and then, well, you know what happens.The expected unexpected arrives.
Fortunately, it was always in the back of your mind. You weren’t sure what form it would take but you knew that the odds of its non-appearance were small. That’s why you always book in some cushions. As the old line goes, it is better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them.
It also reminds me of a Old West saying about having a revolver: you didn’t often need one but when you did, you needed it real bad.
Big Slip
Stepping out this morning to walk the dog, I took one step onto what looked like a wet driveway and did a full cartoon slip, and landed straight on my back. I’m lucky I didn’t crack my head open. I managed to hold on to the leash as well, although Rocco was wondering what the heck I was doing.
In any case, be careful out there.
7 Things Successful People Ignore
I’m a sucker for listicles about what successful people do every day. Josh Spector has a good one.
Successful people share a common ability, but it’s not what you think.Read the rest.We hail them for their hard work, vision, and dedication, but overlook what truly sets them apart —an ability and willingness to ignore things.
No matter how talented or dedicated you are, your ultimate success hinges on your ability to overcome a gauntlet of powerful forces that can tempt, distract, and derail you.