Alexandersmap

    Category: Productivity

    • Go Be It

      “The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process, is its own reward.” — Amelia Earhart

      I woke up sore all over, with muscles tight and grumpy, protesting the last week of doing what they’re supposed to do but somehow forgot about in lazy compliance with the mind. The soreness is a lag measure of work applied, simply that, and eventually the lag will be replaced by acceptance of the new reality. It was certainly far easier to get out of shape than to climb back to shape. Such is the way.

      Decide what to be and go be it… simple on the face of it because it is in fact that simple. The hard part is hidden under the surface of those words: Go be it. Talk is cheap, and decisions without action are nothing but talk until we drag ourselves along for the transformation.

      It’s far easier to have a bit of wine and cheese after a long day than it is to change into workout clothes and earn the right to wear them. It’s far easier to start our work a bit later, and end it a bit earlier. And it’s far easier to doom scroll on our phones than to turn off all distraction and dance with the important but not urgent tasks that move the chains in our lives. But there’s a reason easy has a negative connotation. Deep down, we know it in the moment.

      So sure, I’m sore today, just as I’ve been sore for well over a week. It’s just the gap between where I am and where I want to be expressing itself. And what is expression but the manifestation of a feeling? Whatever discomfort we feel in the moment is part of the process of becoming, a manifestation of what we want to be. It’s that voice in our head reminding us that this time, if we stay with it, we might actually be it.

    • Creating, Out of Yourself

      “Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.” — André Gide

      The writing comes slowly. The writing comes effortlessly. The work has bursts of creativity mixed with repetition and familiarity. The things I’m most proud of often fall flat, the hits keep getting views and likes. So it shall be.

      We must do the work, and see where it takes us. The work took me to André Gide recently, and I’m delighted with the discovery. Another stepping-stone on the journey across the mad stream of noise and nonsense that wants to sweep us all away before we’ve done the work. When you find such solid ground in the midst of chaos you celebrate the landing. Gide reminds us not to settle, but to make something of ourselves in our time.

      The work deserves our best, because it represents our best in our moment. Should it fall flat in its time or become a surprise hit matters little, save a bit of ego stroke. Work that matters doesn’t fly on the wings of a clever hashtag or marketing campaign. That may matter to a publisher or salesperson or PR firm. What matters in the creative process is how it resonates within us. And where it takes us.

      If we’re lucky, maybe it carries us to places we haven’t been before. To something unexpected and delightful in ourselves. Should be keep at it just a little bit longer.

    • Every Single Day

      “If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”― Ray Bradbury

      I went for a long walk late in the day yesterday, dodging raindrops, a rarity this summer, to power through nine muggy miles (14.5 km). The mileage wasn’t a surprise, for it was agreed upon before the walk began. The trick in longer walks is to set your expectations and pace, and naturally, to wear good shoes. The rest is just putting one foot in front of the other and observing the world as it comes to you.

      The similarities with writing, or any other mission you decide to show up for every single day, are within reach if one should be inclined to harvest them. We establish our routines, dance with the muse one idea at a time and let it run through us to become something tangible. When it’s finished we share a sense of accomplishment and loss all at once, linger for a beat and shift our mind to what comes next.

      Life is a series of days, repeated one after the other, optimized by expectations and pace. We do with them what we will. And then? We move on to whatever comes next. Yet we always return, don’t we, to the things that matter most to us?

      It would be bold to expect another 20,000 days in my own lifetime. That would make me a very old blogger indeed. But I do have this one, and maybe tomorrow, or maybe not. So I work to make this blog post count for something, maybe stand up as that final post should it be that. Of course, every sentence can’t end in an exclamation point, we’d be seen as more insane than most think of writers as already, but we can’t put our best into everything we do in the moment… just in case.

      Hope to see you tomorrow. 😉

    • Becoming That Shape

      “The ability to fantasize is the ability to grow. [For] boys and girls… the most important time of their day, or especially at night before going to sleep, is dreaming themselves into becoming something, or being something. Into being something. So when you’re a child you begin to dream yourself into a shape, and then you run into the future and try to become that shape. When I was 10, 11, 12 I began to dream of becoming a writer, and the rest of my life has been the real task of shaping myself to that boyhood thing. So fantasizing has been very creative.” – Ray Bradbury, from Day at Night Interview, with thanks to The Marginarian for showing the way.

      It’s easy to spot potential in others, when you pay attention to such things. A nephew with a knack for brilliant cooking, a niece with an eye for brilliant photography, a friend with the aptitude and attitude for finish carpentry, a son or daughter with the unique combination of empathy and talent that they bring to the world. When you look for the spark in others, often it’s easy to see. And sometimes it’s barely detectible, needing space and air to spark into something more substantial. We, witnesses to the fire burning inside others, either feed the spark or snuff it out. Which will we offer in the moment?

      And what are we with ourselves? Are we stoking our own dreams or snuffing them out? We ought to be arsonists with our spark, stoking our dreams and lighting the way for others. For in those moments alone with a dream, when we see so clearly what we might become, we discover our anima. In Latin anima refers to “a current of air, wind, air, breath, the vital principle, life, soul” (wiki). There’s magic in air as we dance with that vital principle, for there we form our (dare I say it) life’s purpose. For us humans trying to reach our potential, the question or what animates us ought to be front and center in our journey to becoming what we might be.

      In our brief dance with light and air, we must build our beacon in earnest. Shaping ourselves into whatever we believe possible shouldn’t be the stuff of childhood fantasy, it can be our lifetime pursuit. For dreams ought to be stoked, if only to see how brightly that spark might burn.

    • Input vs. Output

      We must consume books and art and bits of the universe both sweet and bitter to produce anything of consequence. From birth we’re actively consuming to stay alive and grow, to learn from those who came before us and ultimately to mold ourselves into an active, thinking adult. But we weren’t born to be sponges, we were born to produce.

      Input and output go hand-in-hand, but output isn’t guaranteed simply because there was input. We need agency, don’t we, to transform all that input into something resembling output? It’s comfortable always being the student of life, soaking in all that this universe offers. The stakes go up considerably when we put ourselves out there with our own work. To raise our hand and speak up, to offer a new twist, to boldly contribute to the Great Conversation.

      If there’s a disease in humanity, amplified in these times, it’s mistaking combativeness and criticism for output. This is “Man in the Arena” territory, where those who don’t do the work feel perfectly fine condemning those who do the work. We ought to collectively have no patience for it and turn the trolls and charlatans away. Yet too many treat the noise as input, and think themselves clever by parroting the same sound bite as their own output. These are empty calories for the brain, and distract us from building.

      We don’t need more noise, but we definitely need more insight, more contribution to the critical issues of our time, more solving of problems, and more collaboration and meeting in the middle to find a way forward. We are what we consume, this is true, and we are also what our actions demonstrate we are. We must do better, collectively, with our output.

      Input is fine, I suppose, but where are we going with it?

    • Staying Alive Between the Covers

      “A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” ― E.B. White

      Someone recently asked me why I write a blog every day. Surely there are other things I could do with the time. But other than exercise and sleep I can’t think of anything done regularly that improves you more than consistently putting yourself out there in the world. Writing forces contemplation, feeds both the stack of books and the small and large experiences consumed to be shared, and maybe in some small way make the writer alive for the reader, whether you’re reading this today or 50 years from today.

      Lately I’ve felt a sense of loss when I finish a blog post. It’s a tangible shift from my work to my past work as I click publish. It’s similar to the feeling of putting a letter in the mailbox once felt, before email and text made letter-writing feel less… self-gratifying. When you click send on an email or text the response back is close to immediate. There’s a high in surfing this wave of electronic banter that the sender experiences in real time. I suppose a blog also offers likes and views and subscribers that may feed that sensation. But getting back to the point, dropping that letter in the mail was consequential: “I’ve created this, for you, and now I’m releasing it.”

      Don’t you miss crafting such letters and dropping it in the mail with all your hopes and dreams sailing away on the wings of a postage stamp? Don’t you miss the experience of receiving a letter from a thoughtful friend, full of introspection and insight? Maybe we ought to write more letters, I don’t know, but we certainly should be writing more. Writing offers a chance to fly into the future for the author, and a time machine back to our present for the reader. It’s our moment with the infinite, even as we realize the fragility of the exchange.

    • What We Will

      “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” — E. B. White

      I grow cilantro, not so much to eat it, but to watch bees roll around in the wispy white flowers that wave ever so lightly in the breeze. Surely someone must grow cilantro for all the tasty dishes (or soapy dishes) one might imagine it worthy of, but give me the bees, please. Summer officially ends for me the moment the cilantro peters out—like life itself—entirely too soon.

      The dance between the earnestness of rolling up your sleeves and fixing things versus opening up your heart and savoring all the world offers is a constant struggle. As with everything, we must skate the line between the world of order and the world of chaos, Yin and yang. Nobody said this living business would be easy, but it’s such a short ride we ought to make the most of it.

      Still, there’s work to be done, and no time to waste in solving the world’s problems. As anyone out there trying to get things done knows, there’s just not enough people willing to make a go of it and do the work. Every school, every hospital, every landscaper and construction firm and restaurant is struggling to find a warm body with an eager mind to simply do the work. Who are we to ignore the call? Yet so many do.

      Every day should be filled with a bit of challenge, and a bit of seduction. Every life lived well ends with a measure of satisfaction for the things we did well and a measure of consternation for that which wasn’t accomplished. That’s life, and we must learn to skate that line. In the end, we do with it what we will.

    • An Active Event

      “We think of inertia as the state of being inert or motionless—one of our purer displays of passivity and disengagement. It’s not. Inertia is an active event in which we are persisting in the state we’re already in rather than switching to something else… The most reliable predictor of what you’ll be doing five minutes from now is what you’re doing now… The most reliable predictor of who you’ll be five years from now is who you are now.”
      — Marshall Goldsmith, The Earned Life

      Yes, you might detect a pattern in the writing recently. I keep returning to the Tom Peters statement that excellence is the next five minutes. Habits are hard to break, routine is either a prison or a path to a brighter future. And inertia now can predict who we are in five years if we don’t take that next step to change right now.

      Does that sound unnecessarily urgent? Perhaps, but aren’t the stakes just that high? We are what we repeatedly do, and more often than not we repeat the same damned thing this five minutes as we did last. So we ought to take this next five minutes and demand something more of ourselves than the previous five. We ought to make it an active event that transcends our previous place.

      The easiest way to determine the truth in that is to look at what we did last week and compare it to what we did last year. Sure, there are highlight moments of trips and events that break up the sameness, and a pandemic mixed in to skew the data, but on the whole things are roughly the same. If our habit loop is positive this can be a very good thing, but if we keep repeating bad habits we might be living in a rut that runs straight to the grave.

      “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits

      It’s easy to spot inertia when we look at intentions. If we intend to write the book or run the marathon or summit the mountain but find ourselves dancing with the same excuses we had yesterday and five years ago, well, let me introduce you to our friends inertia and low agency. On the flip side, if you’ll allow me to use a few of my own examples, inertia is publishing this blog every day for the last four years, reading early every morning and most nights and maintaining a streak on Duolingo that’s approaching 1000 days. Maybe each is small in the big scheme of things, but each is a +1 on the path to becoming.

      @jackbutcher

      Moment-to-moment we make decisions that pull us forward or set us back. We default to the familiar, which both reinforces our identity now and reinforces it in our future. That past moment isn’t this moment unless we choose the same thing. Will it be a plus or a minus? Our vote ought to be for an active event, our action should be a plus.

    • Action and Contemplation

      “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.” — Howard Thurman

      Most people remain too busy to worry about such things as coming alive. They’re too busy getting things done. Bills to pay, a calendar full of meetings, chores to do, calls to make… it’s all too much, really, to be thinking about things like doing something more than this.

      I wonder, who is more alive, a monk living in seclusion and contemplating the big questions or a business tycoon living their answer to a different set of questions? Are humans built for thinking or for action? Most people would point to the latter, for the modern world and our very resilience was built on action: overcoming enemies and disease and solving the riddles of science and technology to arrive right here at this extraordinary moment in time (!).

      But who do we seek out for answers? It’s the poets and philosophers and deep thinkers who seclude themselves from the madness and settle down with the questions everyone else is too busy to answer. The wisdom of the ages was derived from contemplation. So can’t we make a solid case for the monk?

      The world needs both, of course. Action and contemplation are each essential elements for the progress of humanity. Yet each can be a form of procrastination and avoidance. It’s fair to ask ourselves which path is right for us, but we can’t get so caught up in the question that we don’t go anywhere. The world is already full of people who never come alive. Ultimately, we must stop wrestling with questions and seek our own answer.

      So is it ready, aim, fire or ready, fire, aim? The order isn’t always as important as the balance between the two. Running around in circles is just as pointless as sitting there thinking about what you’re going to do without ever actually taking a step. Action and contemplation lead us to vibrancy together. We can’t know what makes us alive without each.

      As Thurman says, ask, but then do.

    • Clearing the Hurdles

      “Life will throw everything but the kitchen sink in your path, and then it will throw the kitchen sink. It’s your job to avoid the obstacles. If you let them stop you or distract you, you’re not doing your job, and failing to do your job will cause regrets that paralyze you more than a bad back.” — Andre Agassi, Open

      When you witness excellence in action, it’s hard to comprehend the work that went into the performance. Seeing Sydney McLaughlin destroy her own 400 meter hurdles record is awe-inspiring because she does the incomprehensible. But the work that brought about the moment isn’t ours to see, or feel. The hurdles aren’t the only obstacle she had to clear on her way to a record-breaking performance—she had to clear every other distraction along the way to get to it. People like McLaughlin or Agassi or Tom Brady are anomalies to the rest of us. They’re obsessively focused and a bit quirky in their habits. Most of us balk at the price of greatness, for them it’s simply the act of doing your job.

      Disciplined routine is the answer. Doing your job is the moment-to-moment bias towards productive action and good decisions. Anyone in New England will hear Bill Belichick’s own words ring in that Agassi quote. Do your job… and do it well. It’s a simple thing to grasp, must harder to execute with an undisciplined mind. We must get up daily and do the work that calls to us. No excuses needed, you either do or do not, there is no try (thanks Yoda). This is a tough mindset to acquire, but it’s required for reaching excellence.

      “Excellence is the next five minutes”, as Tom Peters put it, “or nothing at all”. We get too caught up in excuses that lie beyond the immediate. Surely we must know where we’re going, but we must then get beyond long term thinking, for it’s a form of procrastination. We often kick things down the curb that we ought to be doing right now. Planning isn’t doing, so we mustn’t tell ourselves what we’re going to do, we mustn’t tell ourselves anything at all, really. We must friggin’ do it.

      There are so many obstacles to navigate in life that it can be overwhelming. But most of it is BS playing on a loop between our ears. The only way to break that loop is with a viable habit loop that forces us to execute in the now. Excellence is the next five minutes, or maybe the next 50.68 seconds, or maybe just this very instant. What we do with this moment determines so much of who we’ll be at the finish line. Don’t regret the moment.