Alexandersmap

    Category: Culture

    • Reach

      Momentum is about rate of iteration and persistence, not brilliance.

      Luck is a function of surface area.

      In the early days, effective people increase their luck by exposing themselves to more opportunities and more people.

      There’s a reason why successful people tend to be proactive: they’re expanding their reach.

      Reach is a serendipity engine.
      – @Julian

      Anyone who sells anything has stumbled upon the truth of what Julian Shapiro is saying here. It’s profoundly obvious that the more people you reach out to the more you’ll expose yourself to opportunities. The trick has always been finding the right people, and the right opportunities, at the right time. And until you’ve built a network up around yourself and located the 20% of people who will help you the most in life, the more you’ve got to just get out there and play the numbers game.

      Momentum through our rate of iteration and persistence applies to everything we do in life.

      Want to be fit? Do the work, push yourself to do more, be consistent. Repeat.

      Want to speak a different language? Learn the basics and then push your limits. Immerse yourself in a culture where you must stretch yourself to be understood.

      Want to be a great writer? Read more to know what great writing is. Live more to have something to say. Write more to get good at it. Publish more to gain a following. Connect with more people to find the 20% who will help you the most in your career.

      Do more. Expand your reach. Reach is a serendipity engine. Simple. And simply true.

      For people starting their careers, I’d point to these simple @Julian tweets as the core lesson. No need to buy the books, attend the success summits, or watch hours of video. Just do the work, intelligently and persistently, that moves you towards your goal.

      Reach involves a level of discomfort. The very act of reaching implies going beyond your current place. Going beyond your comfort zone. To places of uncertainty and rejection and the unfamiliar. We’ve all felt that when walking into a room where we don’t know anyone. What we forget is that most of the people in that room feel the same way.

      Reach leads to connection.

      So go out on a limb.

      When you continue reaching, the uncomfortable becomes comfortable. Opportunities come up. Friendships and alliances are formed. And you grow in new and unexpected directions.

      So by all means, reach.

    • The Glories of the Journey

      “We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.” – John Hope Franklin

      “On a personal level, [the pandemic is] reminding me that, “Boy, life is short.” Life is precious. And, if you’re dreaming about doing something, there’s no better time than right now, if you can pull it off.” – Rick Steves

      The world is slowly opening up, even as COVID is declaring it’s not quite done with us yet. So where do we go when the world and we are ready? In the United States, the National Parks are already almost fully booked. Everyone is thinking the same way; we must get out there! The next few years are going to be the flood of the masses making up for lost time. Knowing that, where do you find your quiet little corner of Paradise?

      Personally, my vote is the most remote and obscure of destinations. Places where the RV’s can’t reach. Places where exercise and inconvenience are a toll many refuse to pay. The glories of the journey aren’t found elbow to elbow at the railing of the South Rim. They’re found when you hike deep down into the canyon to the silent reverence. When you wake up early and watch the sunlight dance on the canyon walls.

      Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that there are folks jamming into National Parks in record numbers. The more people who see and experience the wonders of the world, the more people will care enough to protect it for future generations. Pack ’em in. Buy the magnets and stickers and t-shirts. When I visit those places I do it too. Just try to peel back the onion a layer or two deeper while you’re there. Find the secret places hiding just around the corner.

      The world has stories to tell us. It’s waiting for the change it will bring to you in that moment of connection between the ancient truth and your current state. Those moments that you’ll bring back to the rest of the world in stories of your own. For we travel out to reach within.

    • Picking Up the Pieces

      Sometimes it takes darkness and the
      sweet
      confinement of your aloneness
      to learn
      anything and anyone
      that does not bring you alive

      is too small for you.
      – David Whyte, Sweet Darkness

      I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of Todd Rundgren’s Hello It’s Me and hearing it anew in my head. It’s always been a breakup song, that part is easy. But what I didn’t hear, not really hear, is the background singers rising chorus of “think of me” as Rundgren stops singing and the band reaches a crescendo accompanying the singing. At the end all that’s left is the band abruptly stopping, and all that’s left is a quiet, uncertain “think of me“.

      And then I understood grief and loss a bit better than I had before.

      It’s always been there, lingering behind the brave front and the moving on and the figuring things out. The feeling of abandonment in breaking up with someone, or losing someone who had a gravitational pull that compelled you to orbit them for what seemed a blissful forever. That person literally brought you alive and changed you forever. Until the spell was broken in loss. Until your identity was shattered in a moment.

      I heard it in my mother’s voice and in my own anger when a repaired grandfather clock broke apart again, betraying us and our memories in its fragility. I saw it in my wife’s welling eyes when a song that reminds her of her sister comes up on the playlist. I’ve heard it in countless voices over the last year. I’ve seen it in eyes locked in on my own above masks that hide everything but the reality of what is missing. Now and forever.

      Son sometimes it may seem dark
      But the absence of the light is a necessary part
      Just know, that you’re never alone
      You can always come back home
      – Jason Mraz, 93 Million Miles

      I grieve for the grief of others while holding my own close to the vest, where it leaks out in unguarded moments. Forever moving on, without really getting away from the missing part. Now and then it catches you in a broken grandfather clock and you know you can’t pick up all the pieces. All you can do is try to put it together again as best you can.

      And know that you’re never alone.

    • Quicksand and Tasks of Consequence

      “Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.” Toby Litt

      “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” – Cyril Connolly

      The time we spend, these moments slipping through the hourglass, are either consequential or quicksand. And so the tasks filling those moments are loaded with questions – is this the right use of this brief moment in time or might there be a better place to spend the grains of sand? Is this a task of consequence, or is it a love poem to the self, mere folly?

      You know when you’ve stepped in quicksand. Maybe not immediately, but soon enough you recognize the stickiness of a habit and the sinking feeling that you’re not making any forward progress. Quicksand is tricky stuff. The one thing you don’t want to do when you’re in it is flail in place.

      Writing a blog every day might not be a masterpiece, but is it folly? The act of writing is pouring your grains of sand into a jumble of words and placing them just so. With a picture in your mind of what they might be if you could just get it right.

      The ultimate measure of tasks is whether you’re flailing in place or going somewhere consequential. What might you otherwise be doing with those grains of sand? The answer isn’t what are you doing now. Not really. It’s what are you becoming? That is what really matters. For what will your masterpiece be, in the end?

      Work towards that.

    • Whispers from a Dead Poet

      There is no dusk to be,
      There is no dawn that was,
      Only there’s now, and now,
      And the wind in the grass.

      Days I remember of
      Now in my heart, are now;
      Days that I dream will bloom
      White the peach bough.

      Dying shall never be
      Now in the windy grass;
      Now under shooken leaves
      Death never was.
      – Archibald MacLeish, An Eternity

      I confess to not really knowing much about Archibald MacLeish, who died in Boston exactly 39 years ago yesterday, the day I started thinking about Archibald MacLeish at all. It started the night before, watching Ken Burns’ Hemingway and latching on to his name as someone Hemingway hung out with in Spain, as someone I ought to look into. Much of his poetry is available online, and I waded through a strong dose of it. And then I read his biography:

      “His mother was a Hillard, a family that, as Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren reveals, MacLeish was fond of tracing back through its New England generations to Elder Brewster, the minister aboard the Mayflower.” – Poetry Foundation Biography of Archibald MacLeish

      It seems I’m a distant relative of Mr. MacLeish, both of us pointing to Elder Brewster as a connection to the Mayflower. I don’t dwell on the Mayflower connection – who cares if you were the first European to settle here or the millionth? What matters is how you behaved when you got here. I think on the whole Brewster settled his accounts well. And MacLeish lived a life of consequence himself. So how does one keep up with the relatives?

      What do you make of meeting a long dead relative through his work on the very day he passed 39 years before? Serendipity? Whispers? Or just history and happenstance capturing my imagination and carrying it away once again, as it’s done so many times before?

      It doesn’t matter so much, does it? We have the advantage of now, and now. Until we lose it. Until we are whispers ourselves, hardly heard in the swirling wind in the grass. Days we remember and dreams of the future matter little compared to the urgent matter of now. And what we might do with it.

    • A Visit to First Encounter Beach

      If Provincetown claims the first landing of the Pilgrims in North America, and Plymouth claims the place they settled, Eastham is the place where they first encountered the Native American population. And like the thousands of encounters between settlers and natives to follow, it wasn’t hugs and kisses.

      Today there’s a popular beach with a paved parking lot on the calm waters of Massachusetts Bay. The real estate runs in the millions now, with great sunsets and a chance to swim while the sharks stake a claim on their ancestral hunting grounds on the opposite coast of Cape Cod. Really, it’s all funny money out here, but especially when you can claim a water view.

      There are two memorial plaques at the beach. One is hidden from view up the hill a bit from the beach, placed there to commemorate the tercentenary anniversary of that first encounter. The second, and more obvious one, is right as you walk from the parking lot onto the beach. Each offer a history lesson in worldview of the time.

      1920: “On this spot hostile indians had their first encounter December 8, 1620”

      2001: “Near this site the Nauset Tribe of the Wampanoag Nation seeking to protect themselves and their culture had their first encounter 8 December 1620”

      Both are true, aren’t they? But the devil is in the details, and none of us really know how that first encounter went down. We have historical record from one side but not the other. And that’s history for you; recorded by those who ultimately survive to write about it. Ultimately both inform, and the site itself pulls at history buffs like me. How do you visit Cape Cod for decades without a pilgrimage to the site of the first encounter between those who had it all and those who would ultimately take it from them?

      Now all you need is a parking spot at $15 per day for non-residents. For all the historical import of the site, today it’s mostly just a pretty, family-friendly beach. And a nice place for a quiet Spring walk with your significant other. And maybe a few hugs and kisses.

    • The Lindy Effect

      A few years ago Nassim Nicholas Taleb described a phenomenon known as the Lindy Effect in his book Antifragile. Soon after you started hearing about it in other work, referenced in blog posts, magazine articles and even its own Wikipedia page. I tend to shy away from uber-trendy topics, but I’ve thought a lot about this Lindy Effect since reading about it in Taleb’s book.

      “I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

      Lindy’s was a famous deli in New York where comedians and actors would gather and discuss such things as the durability of a Broadway show. The observation is that if something survives for a period of time longer than the norm, it implies that it will survive at least that long into the future. The Lindy Effect only applies to non-perishable items, so you and I and that orange on the counter don’t count. But that picture you take or that book you write or the product you release to the market do count. The implication is that you might build something that outlasts you by a long stretch.

      Henry David Thoreau died just eight years after publishing Walden, but the book lives on to this day. When it was originally published it was hardly noticed. Yet today it’s been read by millions. When Ansel Adams took the photograph “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome” in 1927 he was creating something that still captures the imagination of people around the world almost 100 years later. It was the picture that built his legacy and helped preserve Yosemite.

      Ernest Hemingway published his first classic, The Sun Also Rises, in October of 1926, six months before Adams took that photograph. Hemingway had a burning desire to be a great writer, and to publish great and lasting work. Many people point to the last lines of the novel for the way it captures the relationship between the two central characters. You might also see the final line as a hopeful wish from Hemingway that this book might fly:

      “Oh Jake,” Brett said, “We could have had such a damned good time together.”
      Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
      Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
      – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

      I’ve noticed a small trend in this blog where 6-10 specific blog posts seem to get views all the time, while the other 1000+ have their moment in the spotlight and fade away over time. Millions of books and paintings and pictures similarly fade away over time, but some stand up forever as legendary. Making art may have a formula, but creating its stickiness remains a mystery to most of us.

      Ironically, Lindy’s, the delicatessen that gave birth to the concept of building something that might last forever, closed forever in 2017. For businesses are perishable too. Yet its name lives on. Maybe, like Thoreau or Adams or Hemingway, that is as it should be.

    • Leaning Into Revelatory Writing

      “I feel it’s important for me to be completely honest in what I write about. To me artists fall into two categories, they are revelatory or obfuscatory. There are artists that want to create an image of themselves, that isn’t really them, but it’s part of the product, the brand and stuff like that. So whenever they are in the context of performance… they adopt this persona. And the words that they write are from this persona not from themselves… I have always been a revelatory artist. I am most interested in writing about the things that I actually think about rather than trying to think about what someone wants to hear and write about that.” – Todd Rundgren, from The Moment podcast interview

      There are days when I’d rather have published anonymously. There’s something liberating about the free pass granted to the anonymous – you see it in Tweet and troll comments I suppose, where people feel they can say anything that comes to mind. But, deep down, can you really respect the anonymous? I don’t believe so. We respect those who put themselves out on a limb.

      We all balance the character we want to present to the world with who we actually are. As you get a bit wiser you stop worrying about becoming a character and you just become yourself (and some of us are real characters). Artists either play for the hits or mine deep for the gold. Now and then you get both in the same work.

      If you’re lucky and a bit brave, you reach a point where you just write for the love of discovery and revelation. Joyful bits of magic stumbled upon and written about, one post at a time. Some frivolous, some tedious, but now and then you scrub the words together just so and something sparkles. Sometimes you’re the only one that sees the glimmer, other times it bounces around the room like laser light on a disco ball.

      You know when you’ve put it all out there, just as you know when you’ve held back a bit of yourself. I’ve written a few posts where I clearly obfuscated and see it immediately when I look back on it. I think most people see it too. Deep down we all know when someone is holding back or playing to the audience. Fluff writing designed for clicks and likes and whatnot.

      Rundgren reminds me that there’s more to do. You want your work to crackle and spark imagination and wonder? Go deeper. Leaning into revelatory writing is a leap into the the chasm. But where else would you rather be?

    • Good Fences

      There where it is we do not need the wall:
      He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
      My apple trees will never get across
      And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
      He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
      Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
      If I could put a notion in his head:
      ‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
      Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
      Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
      What I was walling in or walling out,
      And to whom I was like to give offense.
      – Robert Frost, Mending Wall

      It happened once, and it seemed awkward at the time. The neighbor walked between his fence and my fence to retrieve golf balls he’d been chipping beyond his fence. He quietly picked them up, we waved at each other and the moment ended. Except that it didn’t really end. The neighbor now works from home in a pandemic on conference calls all day, head set on, chipping golf balls back and forth in his yard. And so this scene is repeated several times a day.

      You might be wondering why there are two fences up. Well, that’s a good question with a reasonable answer. The folks that originally put up the neighbor’s fence put it up four feet inside the property line, and had it curved slightly to follow the tree line. A few years later we got a black lab who liked to explore the neighborhood on his terms. We installed a black chain link fence around the perimeter of our yard to discourage this, thinking it blended in with the woods beyond. The dog was mostly contained, the trees between the fences obscured the unusual nature of two fences running parallel to each other. Mission accomplished! Who thinks of Arnold Palmer straying into your personal space at moments like that?

      Fast forward fifteen years and the brush and small trees are cleared out. The neighbors have changed over twice. The dog has since passed. All that remains is the cold reality of a pair of fences quietly marking time. And the frequent moments of the golfer gathering his golf balls while on his conference calls on the edge of our back yard. A back yard that for twenty years offered the illusion of privacy with the woods beyond.

      It’s my own fault, really. I mentioned in passing one day that the land between was his, and Kilroy has since taken great pains to stake his claim to it with errant golf balls and purposeful walks to scoop them up. It seems passive aggressive to me, like running a lawn tractor in your driveway when your neighbor is having a birthday party. Wait, that’s him too…

      If this seems like a justification for building a taller fence, well, it may be. Wouldn’t that be something, two privacy fences running parallel to each other along the yard? Frost’s old neighbor would say good fences make good neighbors. And Frost would rightly question, just what are we walling in and walling out?

    • Like Stone Nestles on Stone

      “Poetry is language against which we have no defenses.” – David Whyte

      I’ve been spending a bit of time with David Whyte lately, catching up on words I ought to have read long ago but wasn’t ready to hear. I was a different person then, more closed to the world despite the outward bravado. You learn who you are through the windy path of words flowing from you onto the page. And then you set them free to find an audience ready for that particular jumble of words to add to their own foundation.

      Let the words join
      one to another
      the way stone nestles on stone,
      the way water just leaves
      and goes to the sea,
      the way your promise
      breathes and belongs
      with every other promise
      the world has ever made.

      Now, leave them to go on,
      let your words
      carry their own life,
      without you, let the promise
      go with the river.
      Have faith. Walk away.
      – David Whyte, To Break a Promise (Cúnga Fheichin)

      For me releasing the words into the wild is a form of building my own foundation. Each place visited, each poem immersed in, and each mountain climbed is like stone nestled on stone joined together just so as a work very much in progress. Building a life out of adventurous conspiracies and schemes, written down and sent on their way out into the world for you to see.

      “The act of writing anything worthwhile always takes place at that strange and sometimes disturbing crossroads where aloneness and intimacy meet… This break of the boundary between what we think is a self and what we think is other than our self is where the rich vein of beauty and insight become a reward in and of itself, and where the words suddenly seem to belong to everyone.” – David Whyte, from the forward of Essentials

      Experience and words create that thing that is other than our selves. It’s the building of that puzzle that is our self one piece at a time. What seems a chaotic pile on the table slowly forms into a picture of who we are. The funny thing about a puzzle is you finish and throw it all back in the box and build another picture. You can’t build another part of your identity until you clear the table of the old one.

      So which is it? Are words and experience stacked together like a stone wall or foundation, laid to be resilient, or like a puzzle built very much the same way but temporary in nature? That’s one of those forest for the trees questions, isn’t it? The universe views the stacked stones and the stack of words the way it views those jigsaw puzzles on the table. Everything is temporal. Words are like carbon, momentarily ours and one day something else entirely.

      I believe we ought to keep stacking words and building new puzzles, but to do it for the joy of the process. To set those words free to fly on their own. Scattered throughout the world to land where they may. To that meeting place between aloneness and intimacy.