This is a short, punch-to-the-gut Seth post. So I am just stealing it wholesale, for you and me. (mostly for me :)) When you bought your first smartphone, did you know you would spend more than 1,000 hours a year looking at it? Months later, can you remember how you spent those hours? When you upgraded to a new smartphone, so you could spend more hours on it, did you think about how you had spent so much of your ‘free’ time the year before? ...
I found this image on Austin Kleon’s blog a few days ago, and it set me to thinking about these newsletters of mine. I would love to think of them, the same way. They are free, but definitely not cheap :) Not to toot my own horn, but for all their recent brevity, it still is a process that involves a lot of reading, and thinking and curating and writing. (and a whole lot of slogging) ...
image courtesy, Suzy Hazelwood Austin Kleon, quoting Octavia Butler on reading more than a book at a time. I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another. ...
click to embiggen I have lost my illusions, I have drowned in your words I have left my confusion to a cynical world I am throwing myself at things I don’t understand Discover enlightenment holding your hand You are … So beautiful!
The fastest way to raise your level of performance: Cut your number of commitments in half. — via James Clear’s latest 3–2–1 missive Jack Butcher puts it even more eloquently … Do! P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.
This post was first sent to my newsletter on December 14th, 2020. You really ought to subscribe :) When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. ...