Alexandersmap

    Category: Writing

    • Unbroken Snow & Writing

      There are different kinds of snow, and different kinds of snowshoeing. Snowshoe hiking up a mountain is very different than snowshoeing across a snow-covered field. Like walking on these terrains when there’s no snow, there’s a certain tactical change that develops with each. Hiking up a mountain, there’s a unique relief in flipping up the heel lifts on snowshoes to level your foot to the incline that you naturally wouldn’t feel on flat terrain. There’s also a wholly different intensity in grinding up an unbroken mountain trail. Steep terrain and unbroken snow are a workout. For me it’s a bit like technical writing, you know the payoff will be big but in your lowest moments the effort feels like it isn’t worth it (it’s almost always worth it).

      Flat terrain snowshoeing is a different story altogether. Easier, in a lot of ways, but that ease releases you to explore more than you might on something more technical and demanding. But that very freedom can force people to stick with the formula of the familiar. Why be uncomfortable in breaking new ground? Because that’s where things get most interesting!

      There are times when you’ve got to stay on the path. Inevitably, you’ll begin on broken ground: trails that lead from a parking lot to open fields, or woodland trails that must be honored before you reach open space. There’s an obligation, unsaid, to help groom the trail by tamping it down with your snowshoes. We do our part, but it feels like paying penance, and you look ahead to where you might break free. The very unevenness of the broken trail is what makes it a chore. Compacting broken snow means staying in your lane, taking what others have left for you and finding a path through it. Broken snow, especially when regular walkers use the same trail, exposes boulders and roots and ruts that lead to post holing on the trail. There’s a certain satisfaction in tamping down the brokenness, akin, in a way, to editing a sloppy bit of writing.

      But the real fun begins when you find an opening to fly. A small break in an old stone fence that leads you to a virgin field of unbroken snow, or a wide open field with a single broken path going across it each whispers, “It’s time: FLY!” and gives you the opportunity to break from all expectations and obligations and just go for it. Like a plane freeing itself from the obligation of the runway, launching yourself into unbroken snow is freedom. It’s just you and the snow, and you can go in any direction you want.

      Writing can feel very much the same. You chafe at the obligatory structure, you get caught up in the rules of punctuation and order, you try to clean up run-on sentences and spelling errors and the like as you go. But to really fly with writing you’ve just got to just launch yourself into it, technique and order be damned, and just see where it takes you. Inevitably to places you never imagined when you started. If you truly let yourself go you don’t worry about editing the broken trail you leave behind you. There’ll be time for that another day. No, this is your time to take wing.

      If you’ll forgive me another analogy about snowshoeing and writing, it’s the conditioning. When you haven’t been out on snowshoes in a while you forget the pace and rhythm and become a bit breathless. When you do it every day you quickly find your pace and rhythm and just get right to it. It becomes natural–a part of you. And when you reach that point you can cover so much more ground than you would otherwise. The lesson, of course, is to get to it every day.

      The obligation of the broken trail
      The freedom of unbroken ground

    • For All That Is Life

      “You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti

      Having a nightcap with friends at a clever book and bar establishment in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, my attention drifted to stacks of books all around me, chess boards and kitschy furniture from another era. This was my kind of place, and one I made note to wander around in again in daylight, when I wasn’t compelled to be polite and focused on our conversation, instead of just drifting off into this newly discovered world of wonder so tantalizingly close. Such is the nature of books—they pull you in when you least expect it.

      It’s not just books. How could it be, really? All that is life is around us, nudging us to pay attention, to immerse ourselves in the moment, to listen and understand, to act and to be a part of, to share and empty ourselves to others that we might fill ourselves up again with new and wonderful bits. Like a tide flowing in and out of a bay, our accumulation and sharing of knowledge keeps our mind fresh and alive.

      We spend a lifetime trying to understand what’s all around us, and yearning for all that ever could be. We are the audience in our own life, but also an active participant in the play. None of this is all that it could ever be, but isn’t it wonderful just the same?

    • Living Like Sidney Poitier

      I had no way of knowing that there was madness in what I was trying to do.” — Sidney Poitier

      That quote was from an interview that Sidney Poitier did with Lesley Stahl in 2013 that was broadcast a day or so after his passing last week. He reveals the bold, you might say reckless, leap into acting for a man with a strong Bahamian accent who couldn’t read at the time. It would telegraph the boldness and courage with which he would live his life and manage his career.

      I didn’t want to let too much time pass between the passing of Sidney Poitier and my writing about him. He was a favorite actor, not because I’ve seen every movie that he’s done (I’ve only seen three) or because I was star struck by his screen presence, but because of the elegant, dignified way that he lived his life. There’s a lesson there for all of us.

      “I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else’s vision of me. If the screen does not make room for me in the structure of their screenplay, I’d step back. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it… I live by a certain code. I have to have a certain amount of decency in my behavior or pattern. I have to have that.”

      At the end of the interview, Lesley Stahl was asking Poitier about a book he’d just written. His words were equally revealing about how he identified himself. As someone who chips away at this writing thing, I found his words compelling and relatable:

      Poitier: “I was not intending to make an impression. I was finding release for myself within myself. I was looking for who I am at this point in my life.”
      Stahl: “Did you find out?”
      Poitier: “Somewhat, yeah.”
      Stahl: “Who are you?“
      Poitier: “I’m a good person”

      During this interview he reminded me, in his quietly elegant way, of my favorite Navy pilot, my step-father who passed away last year. Maybe that’s why I found him such a compelling guy. I think it was more a passing similarity based on the interview. More to the point, it came down to his decision to live his life by a code of honor, similar to what a Navy pilot might have, and the way that he exemplified it to the end.

      Shouldn’t we all aspire to live our lives in this way?

    • Beacons

      “The books I read are like the stone men built by the Eskimos of the great desolate tundras west of Hudson’s Bay. They still build them today, according to Farley Mowat. An Eskimo traveling alone in flat barrens will heap round stones to the height of a man, travel till he can no longer see the beacon, and build another. So I travel mute among these books, these eyeless men and women that people the empty plain. I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I’m terrified that I’ll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      These stone beacons, called Inuksuk by the Inuit, are like cairns for hikers above tree line. Dillard’s description, borrowed from Mowat, stirred my imagination. I’ve used a similar analogy of stepping stones across a stream in this blog before but I love this concept of books guiding you across a barren landscape. Each of us moves through our days, finding beacons that show us the way, or, if we need it, how to get back to where we started.

      It made me wonder, reading Dillard’s words, what are my own beacons? They come readily to mind. And I smile at the recollection. For they’ve been guiding me all along through the starkest and stormiest of days. Reliable and ringing truth in my most uncertain moments. Beacons save us when all hope seems lost.

      And then, I wondered, what beacons am I building?

    • To Be a Philosopher

      “You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or externals, and apply yourself either to things within or without you; that is, be either a philosopher, or one of the vulgar.” — Epictetus, The Enchiridion

      Do you ever wonder why the Stoics are more popular than ever? Why would Epictetus, who died in 135 A.D. be relevant today? Why would Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180 A.D. be so revered? Or Seneca, who died in 65 A.D.? I believe it comes down to a few key reasons: First and foremost, they wrote from a very human perspective that is still relatable no matter what millennium you’re passing your time in. Second; if it weren’t relevant it would have long ago been vanquished to the trash heap like the lesser work of millions before and after them. And finally, you might also say they gain a lot of momentum as the great men and women who followed them referred to them for wisdom and inspiration. And if it worked for them, why not us?

      On our journey from the vulgar, callow juvenile inside each of us to the refined, philosophical sage we may wish to become, we learn to cultivate discipline. Discipline draws us deeper into our true selves, structures our lives in such a way that we might accomplish a few things and bring us closer to becoming who we want to be. To stop looking from one shiny object to the next and focus on what means the most, now, and when we reach that stepping stone find the next.

      Will our own work become timeless, or vanquished with the lesser work of millions? We’re dealt an unfair hand trying to measure up with the greatest thinkers of the past. That’s not stoicism, that’s upward comparison. Comparing yourself to others leads to unfocused misery. It’s better to compare yourself with the person you used to be instead. Stoicism is a quest to become the best person you can be in your short time on earth. Ultimately everything we do shows the way for those who follow us. Just as those great Stoics did. If it’s transcendently great it might become timeless. But it’s not for us to decide such things.

      Our only purpose is to maximize our potential in the time we’re given. To cultivate our own ruling faculty and apply ourselves to becoming what we might. While we may.

    • Scheduling “Accomplishing Great Things” Time

      “A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world.” — Naval Ravikant

      The week after New Year’s Eve is when everything hits the fan. People are back from vacations, tasks that were deferred come due, new initiatives kick in, and most people want to start the year off on the right foot with a high level of activity. You want to push hard on the flywheel to regain any momentum you lost over the holidays, and to have a running start for the year ahead. This buzz of activity inevitably translates into a very full calendar.

      You want to get things done, so you say yes to meetings and projects that you believe will carry you to your goals. In the meantime everyone else’s hopes and dreams need to be met with some of your attention as well–maybe a 30 or 60 minute block of time next Tuesday? And this is where those lofty resolutions begin to hit resistance.

      This is the whirlwind that Chris McChesney speaks of in The 4 Disciplines of Execution. The more you can stay out of the whirlwind, the more you can focus on your real priorities. And the more you can do great things in this world. Don’t we want to do a few great things in our time here in this world?

      It feels like the most important thing to do is to simplify. But that’s a convenient buzzword to throw around. It’s easy to say it, but much harder to do in the crush of daily life. The answer, I think, is to book big chunks of time for thinking and working on your top priorities. To jealously guard the edges of your day when you can do the most. I’d rather get up two hours early and write than sleep in. I’d rather spend two hours reading at the end of my work day than turn on the television. Those four hours don’t make it on to my calendar, but they’re often the most productive time in my day.

      If I were to add one thing to Naval’s quote, it would be this: “A busy calendar, an unfit body and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world.” For I believe we forget sometimes (I do anyway) that a fit body and a productive mind are related. If we aren’t eating well, drinking in moderation, sleeping well and exercising regularly our minds pay for it. Blocking off time for exercise is as essential to accomplishing great things as giving yourself space to think.

      With that in mind, I’m beginning to use my calendar differently than I used to. I schedule more “accomplishing great things” time. I’m keeping myself accountable by listing and checking off the key priorities in my bullet journal. And I celebrate when I draw a box around my top goals of fitness, nutrition, writing, reading and my top work priority when I can check all of them in a day. My goal is to string together a full week of closing the boxes. This turns busy into productive in a visible way. When I do, I know that I’m on the path to greater things.

    • Decide What to Be and Go Be It

      What do we make of this last day of the year business? What do we make of any day, really? 2021 was a tough year, just like 2020 was, but looking back there was still some epic in-country travel, there was still some great hikes (fewer than I’d have liked), there was still time with family and friends of consequence, and there was still productive output in the work I choose to do. Does that make it a bad year? It’s very hard to string together 365 great days, but just as hard to string together 365 bad. Shouldn’t we acknowledge each for what they are? Good or bad, each day carried us to here, and another chance to make a go at it tomorrow. It’s just life.

      So what do we do with the compass and the map on the last day of the year? Do we be so bold as to make big plans? Do we settle into more of the same? Resolutions are like fortune cookies; a thrill of possibility in a stale pastry of will to follow through. Empty promises, empty calories.

      Better to choose the small stepping stones of habit formation that bring you to where you want to be. Streaks are the only thing that work for me. Check the box with whatever measure is the bare minimum for you on writing or exercise or learning a language or reading more books than you did last year. Try to do more than the bare minimum but keep the streak alive.

      December 31st is just another day, just like January 1st is. Every day we get to reinvent ourselves, every day is a journey to becoming. It’s simple, really, when you think about it. Decide what to be and go be it.

    • 4 Steps to Actually Achieving a Goal

      “To achieve a goal you have never achieved before, you must start doing things you have never done before.” – Jim Stuart, The 4 Disciplines of Execution

      We’ve reached that time of the year again, when people start listing New Year’s resolutions and thinking about life goals. I don’t believe in once-a-year resolutions, but I’m a big believer in maintaining strong habits and positive streaks. I write every day so that I don’t break the streak. Simple. Easy to understand. Achievable. There are days when I don’t even have a coffee but still manage to write. So how do we apply that to the rest of our lives when there’s just so much on our plate already? Apply the four principles from The 4 Disciplines of Execution to our personal lives:

      “The principles of execution have always been focus, leverage, engagement, and accountability.”

      Let’s face it, the reason we don’t finish New Year’s resolutions is because life gets busy again. It’s easy to make grand plans when you’re taking a few days off around the holidays. It’s a lot harder to maintain them when the craziness of life kicks back in. The 4DX authors call this the whirlwind. We all have a lot to do in our day-to-day, and that makes sticking with a new habit challenging. It’s not a part of our routine yet, and the routine is what gets us through our crazy days.

      So what are the four disciplines for executing on your goals?

      Discipline 1 is focusing on one or a maximum of two goals. More than that and you lose focus and face diminishing returns. At that point you get lost in the whirlwind and it’s all over. The 4DX authors calls this a Wildly Important Goal (WIG).

      The fundamental principle at work in Discipline 1 is that human beings are genetically hardwired to do one thing at a time with excellence.

      Discipline 2 is to act on the lead measures. This is an important distinction from what most people do. We all tend to focus on the lag measures: What does the scale tell me? What did we sell yesterday? Did I finish writing the book by December 31st? Lag measures are important indicators of achievement, but they don’t move the rock. You need a lever to move it, and that’s what lead measures are. Instead of focusing on how much weight you lost today, focus on what you put in your mouth. Focus on how many steps you walk today. These are lead measures that move the lag measure over time.

      “A good lead measure has two basic characteristics: It’s predictive of achieving the goal and it can be influenced by the team members.”

      Discipline 3 is the discipline of engagement. This is getting things done. What things? The lead measures of course! Eat the broccoli and move more! Find creative ways to fit it all in when you’re caught up in that whirlwind of your day-to-day. But in order to stick with it you’ve got to maintain a scoreboard to track yourself. Without it you’ll get lost in the whirlwind. Remember that writing goal I had? The scoreboard is the stats. I can see clearly that I haven’t missed a day in three years and don’t want to break the streak, even when I don’t feel like writing.

      Discipline 4 is creating a “cadence of accountability”. Find a support group that keeps you on track. Weight Watchers is successful because it’s based on a weekly cadence of accountability. Find people who will give you a nudge when you aren’t meeting your lead measures.

      “The magic is in the cadence. Team members must be able to hold each other accountable regularly and rhythmically.”

      The book is focused on the very real challenge of getting a team to focus on achieving a wildly important goal that makes a significant impact on an organization. But the same principles apply in your personal life. Decide what you want to be exceptional at and what the lead measures are to move you along every day towards that goal. Then make a scoreboard that speaks to you (it can be as simple as checking the day on a calendar when you do what you said you were going to do). And then build a support structure around yourself to help keep you accountable.

      Execution on an important goal isn’t complicated, but it also isn’t easy. These four disciplines can help keep you on track in the face of the whirlwind. Just imagine how fun actually accomplishing that goal will be!

    • If We Are to Live Ourselves: Thoughts on Didion

      “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
      ― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

      I feel the truth in Didion’s observation, seeping into to me like caffeine hitting the bloodstream. For who doesn’t look back on who they used be and shake their head? That’s no longer us, and in many ways, we might wish it never was. But that person helped carry us here.

      Joan Didion passed away yesterday. There are people far more familiar with her work—far more qualified—to write her obituary than me (See Parul Sehgal’s Joan Didion Chronicled American Disorder With Her Own Unmistakable Style”). If you want to glimpse the soul of a writer of consequence, read the words that they themselves offer to the world in their most personal moments. The words that bring you into their world in common bond. Such as this quote Sehgal highlighted:

      “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package,” she once wrote. “I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

      Can’t you see it? Didion placing her hands on your shoulders, looking you square in the eye and imploring you to listen. Get to it straightaway! Live a bit more recklessly. Sing and dance and live outside your comfort zone. Take more chances. Decide who to be, and go be it.

      Didion knew urgency and pain. She lost both her husband and adult daughter within a couple of devastating years of each other. She herself suffered from Parkinson’s Disease in her final years. She might have lived a glamorous life bouncing between Malibu and Manhattan early on, but she suffered losses that would floor any of us. And she shared her journey out of the abyss with her readers:

      “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. — from The Year of Magical Thinking

      Ultimately we either shatter into pieces and fade away ourselves or climb back out to make something of our remaining time on this earth. Didion was a fighter. And her words that remain even as she passes betray her spirit and prompt those who remain to carry on the work:

      “Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” — from Blue Nights

    • What Living Ben Franklin’s Five Hour Rule Really Tells You

      Google “Ben Franklin’s five hour rule” and you’ll receive page after page of business magazine articles gushing about how you too can transform your career and life using old Ben’s technique. They spin it to current times saying Bill Gates and Elon Musk follow this rule too! Just click and read on… and you get pretty much the same paragraph from every one of them:

      “The five-hour rule is a process first implemented by Benjamin Franklin for constant and deliberate learning. It involves spending one hour a day or five hours a week learning, reflecting and experimenting.”

      I could link to one of those articles, but which one? They all use the same two vanilla sentences. No deep dive into actual Ben Franklin quotes. I’m at a point in my life where this just doesn’t hold up for me anymore. Life is deeper than a Twitter-sized rule for living.

      You know who’s not breathlessly scanning those business articles for that one key rule used by Ben Franklin? Bill Gates or Elon Musk. Because they’ve long since passed that level of reading and shallow thinking in their own lives through consistent, dedicated learning, applied personal growth habits and occasionally taking audacious risks measured against that acquired knowledge.

      And that last bit is the key. Knowing when to take the leap into the unknown isn’t just instinct, it’s detecting patterns and opportunity gleaned from multiple sources of informed learning. Put down the mobile phone and pick up a book, find a quiet corner of your hectic life, and read. Learn something new that brings you to something else new. And as you acquire that wisdom do something with it. Gates and Musk, like Franklin before them, are just people like you and me who take things to a level the rest of us aren’t prepared or willing to go to… but could.

      For the last several years I’ve read every day, sought meaningful encounters wherever I am, stretched my reading to sometimes uncomfortable places, learned a bit of another language every day and firmly established the habit of writing about it right here in this blog. I’m living that Franklin rule without calling it that. I’ve learned that life is more complicated than two sentence rules for living. But the occasional spark of applied audacity has its place too.