Becoming a better writer and Homo sapien.
Something I picked up to add to my daily journaling from the Tim Ferriss book Tools of the Titans: Starting off with some daily questions and affirmations. Asking myself to write down things I’m grateful for, ways to make today a good day, and then answering the prompt “I am ______.”
Today’s response felt like one worth sharing:
It ties in a little to a recent thought I shared on Twitter:
Thinking about the difference between Actual Biological Age and self-perceived age when in professional situations.
— 𝙲𝚑𝚛𝚒𝚜 𝙲𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚝 🥐 (@ccsont) May 27, 2021
Experience Based Age or Career Based Age feels like a function of time and degree of Imposter Syndrome.
Wait. Is this a blog post and not a tweet?
I feel like if you only work to be great, you’ll miss opportunities or miss the mark. If you try to always be good, occasionally you’ll stumble on to something greater.
Kind of like not getting so caught up thinking about the grade that you miss the lesson of the assignment.
In ridding ourselves of the courthouse and marketplace we do not rid ourselves of the principal worries of our life. Ambition, covetousness, indecisiveness, fear, and desires hardly abandon us just because we change address. They pursue us into the monasteries and schools of philosophy themselves. Neither deserts nor caves nor hair shirts nor penance can extricate us from them. That is why it is not enough to remove oneself from people, not enough to go somewhere else. We have to remove ourselves from the habits of the populace that are within us. We have to isolate our own self and return it to our possession. We carry our chains within us. We are not entirely free. We keep returning our gaze to the things we left behind.
Stephen Batchelor reading Michel de Montaigne for the Tricycle podcast
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transferred or transformed from one form to another.
The first law of thermodynamics
Sometimes I’ll delete Instagram from my phone for a while. Or set up blockers to keep me from looking at the web version of Twitter (since Tweetbot does a pretty good job of keeping me from falling down rabbit holes).
The other day I put Instagram back on my phone for a moment to check a message someone had sent me there, and within a few taps I inadvertently opened a video with spoilers for the new season of The Owl House.
At which point my brain kicked over to “In for a penny, in for a pound” and I fell down a rabbit hole with the app for several minutes.
The little lifehacks and quick fixes don’t work for me. There are plenty of others who feel the same:
Because bad habits provide some type of benefit in your life, it’s very difficult to simply eliminate them. (This is why simplistic advice like “just stop doing it” rarely works.)
James Clear
Instead, you need to replace a bad habit with a new habit that provides a similar benefit.
I haven’t found the right replacement for some of the habits that don’t actually bring me any real joy (even if they bring me dopamine). Maybe that’s because I haven’t adequately figured out what need they’re trying to fulfill.
An app or a social network isn’t designed for an individual, but for a broad sense of what humans need and desire. When I let idle moments default to distraction, I lose definition.
I’m no longer here, in this space, doing and thinking and being. Instead I’m riding a current of other people’s decisions and thoughts. Surrendering to it.
And it’s not enough to try to run and hide from it.
Sprout’s soccer season is over. We made it!
She was playing on an Under-8 team: 4-on-4 with no goalies. It was her first team of any kind, and the first time I ever coached a sport.
My qualifications? Glad you asked:
So I did some homework on drills and strategy. Asked other parents for advice. Quickly watched Ted Lasso. Bought some colorful cones for practices.
Then we lost every game.
Don’t act surprised.
After those first few losses, I felt like I was doing them a disservice. The other teams were punishing. And some of the coaches encouraged their kids to rub it in our faces.
I wasn’t about to go down that road and try to respond in kind. The world has too many toxic sports parents already, thanks.
I stopped attaching my sense of success from the win-loss record, and it got easier to focus on what could help them.
If I only pushed them to win, it would’ve meant the only way to have fun would be to win.
There was no Gordon Bombay moment coming. I stopped looking for it.
Instead, I motivated them to get back up when they fell. To line back up as fast as they can if the other team scores a goal. To care more about the next point than the final score.
Here’s how we ended the season:
So no, I’m not going to get any offers from the Premier League. I played the game that made sense to me, and it turned out pretty well.
The last few days I’ve worked on revisions in Google Docs and Highland 2 for different projects.
You get an expected word salad on your screen when collaborating on a virtual document that tracks changes. It takes a few extra moments to parse what you’ve actually written. Small changes can have outsized influence, interfering with the legibility of a sentence or paragraph. But I can get past that pretty quickly.
Even when the markup is more subtle, like the revision mode in Highland, there’s a false sense of security that comes from looking at something that shows you what you’ve changed.
“Oh, I already revised there. It’s probably solid enough.”
When I used to print drafts out and mark them up in pencil before heading back to the keyboard, the friction of looking between two separate documents made me re-evaluate every change. I always found more tweaks and changes I wanted to make.
I’m not about to call for abolishing digital revision tracking — It makes remote collaboration possible.
Still, additional friction helps me slow down and make sure I haven’t missed an opportunity to put my best work forward. I appreciate that.
This Builds Character
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