2: How to Do What You Love and Insane Daily Schedules; Daily Blogs
Hi friends,
I'm halfway through my Semester in the Library experiment, next week I’ll be sharing a short post mortem of how it went so far. Stay tuned for that.
However, I’ve yet to publish my next long-form piece which explains why I decided to take a creative sabbatical and what I hope to do. I promised many people I would publish this more than a month ago. Why has this taken me so long?
Perfection. Every time I look at my draft there’s something that I want to improve. This is a never-ending loop.
Inconsistency. I don’t work on this consistently thus I tend to put this off to the side leading to procrastination.
Fear. Writing this piece requires me to express my true feelings. To put a piece of me out there for others to judge, that’s the creative risk that comes with this work. That risk is never easy.
This is no excuse.
To combat this, I’ve sent my friend 100$: If I get it published by this Sunday I get the 100$ back, if I don’t, then I’ll donate it to a cause I don’t believe in like the NRA—definitely not something I want to do.
Time to get to work.
Stuff I enjoyed this week
Barn Burning
Haruki Murakami | Short Story (30min read)
I love reading short stories and here’s a great one I came across from one of my favorite authors. This story serves as the inspiration for the hit Korean film, Burning.
The Proust Questionnaire
Marcel Proust | Article (5min read)
Marcel Proust created this questionnaire believing that answering these questions reveals someone’s true nature. These questions are used often by modern interviewers. Here are the first 5 questions:
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
What is your greatest fear?
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Which living person do you most admire?
This is a great exercise in self-awareness. I’ll publish my answers soon.
One Piece manga creator’s work schedule is absolutely insane
soranews24.com | Article (2min read)
I’ve heard of many insane daily schedules but One Piece’s, Eiichiro Oda, takes the cake. Here’s one excerpt from the piece:
● Wake up at 5 a.m., start working
● Continue working through the day, only taking breaks for things like eating
● Go to bed at 2 a.m.
In other words, the guy is working for six or seven times as long as he’s sleeping. This isn’t just his schedule for especially busy stretches, either, but his regular routine throughout the year. And we literally mean throughout the year, since Oda says he rarely takes a day off, even on the weekend.
Crazy right. What’s crazier is that Oda has kept this daily schedule for 18 years. He did all of this without sacrificing the quality as One Piece keeps getting better and better.
How to Do What you Love
Paul Graham | Essay (21min read)
The classic piece from YCombinator founder Paul Graham. I re-read this piece often and get something different from it every time.
James Altucher: On How to Improve
Big Questions with Cal Fussman | Podcast (1Hour 7min)
Sometimes the best way to move up is to move laterally. In this podcast, James and Cal discuss experimentation as a means for improvement. Ins summary, there’s a risk that comes with stepping out of the norm and experimenting. But experimentation leads to innovation and that helps you progress forward more rapidly than others.
Daily Blog Posts
Open Door Policy
Whenever I work in an office there’s the concept of an open door policy. That if my door is open, you’re free to come in.
The same is true with the internet, except now the office is almost the entire world! If I see someone with their DMs open on twitter, or have included their email on their site, that’s an open door. And I’d love to come in and say hi.
I have an open-door policy as well, I encourage people on my site to reach out for anything.
So if you’re out there browsing on my site, feel free to drop by my office and say Hi.
Game Recognizes Game
What’s the difference between a top 1% and a top 0.1% jazz pianist? I have no idea.
To a non practitioner, like myself, the difference doesn’t matter, but to the practitioner, it makes all the difference.
I can barely tell a bad jazz album from a good one let alone a good one from a great one. But a jazz musician can tell you all about the difficulty, the nuance, the small details that make the piece special.
For example, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, is one of the hardest songs to play in Jazz. In fact, in the recording of Giant Steps, the pianist has a hard time keeping up with the chord changes I didn’t notice this until it was pointed out. A Jazz musician will have that appreciation for detail, the average fan like me, doesn’t even notice.
There’s a certain appreciation that craftsman have for eachother, even moreso the greats, game recognizes game at the end of the day.
I find that this is the same with writing. I’ve improved at it since, and now I’m starting to appreciate the effort and process that goes into writing a piece. However, I still have trouble distinguishing a good piece of writing from a great piece of writing.
But when I do, that would be a huge milestone for me as a writer.
Counterfactual
Have you heard of the Effective Altruism movement?
My introduction to EA came from 80,000 Hours. The premise of EA is, “how can we do the most good?”, and 80,000 Hours explores that question from a career perspective. The name 80,000 Hours, comes from the number of hours the average adult will work for throughout their career.
The frameworks they have are fascinating. One of which is called Counterfactual. Here’s an example:
Say I’m a high school student, and I’m deciding what I want to study. From an EA perspective I can ask myself, what can I study that would provide the most good?
How about a doctor? That’s a high impact career in which I’ll be saving lives.
However, when thinking about this from a counterfactual point of view. There’s a limited number of spots in med school, which means if you decide to become a doctor, you are taking that spot away from someone else. That person might have been a better doctor than you, thus by becoming a doctor, you have not done the most good.
Keeping this principle in mind, when you are choosing an action, we want to consider not only how good the action is, but how good it is relative to the alternatives.
A Velocity of Being
Maria Popova’s book, Velocity of Being, is a collection of letters accompanied by illustrations to the children of today and tomorrow about why we read. These letters—121 in total—are written by some of the most interesting and inspiring people in the world including Jane Goodall, Richard Branson, and Yo-Yo Ma to name a few.
I’ll write my own letter someday.
In the meantime, here’s Kevin Kelly’s letter.
Dear Young Hero,
Imagine you can choose your own superpower from one of these three: flying, invisibility, or being able to read. You’d be the only person in the world with that superpower. Which one do you choose? Flying is not so useful without other superpowers. Invisibility is okay for being naughty or for a little fun but not good for much else. But if you were the only person who could read… you’d be the most powerful person on Earth. You would be able to tap into all the wisdom of the smartest people who ever lived. Their knowledge would go from their heads through squiggles on paper right into your head. You would learn things from them that no ordinary mortal would ever have enough time to learn. You would be as smart as everybody in total. Not that you have to remember it all. With reading you just look it up.
Reading is a superpower that also gives you a type of teleportation; it moves you a million miles instantly. That feeling of being immersed in a different place, or even a different time period, can be so strong you may not want to leave.
When you have this superpower you can see the world from the viewpoint of someone else. This helps protect you from the mistakes and untruths of others as well as your own ignorance.
More and more of our society is centered on pictures and images, which is a beautiful thing. But some of the most important parts of life are not visible in pictures: ideas, insights, logic, reason, mathematics, intelligence. These can’t be drawn, photographed, or pictured. They have to be conveyed in words, arranged in an orderly string, and can only be understood by those who have acquired the superpower of reading.
This superpower will always be with you; it will never leave you. But like all superpowers, it increases the more you use it. It works on paper and screens. As we invent new ways to read, its value and power will expand and deepen. At any time, reading beats any other superpower you can name.
Yours, Kevin Kelly
Sleep On it
We all have a powerful tool for creative thinking and problem-solving. Yet, many of us don’t use it to the best of our ability. I’m guilty of this as well. That tool is sleep.
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious” - Thomas Edison
I’ve done this unintentionally in the past. Sometimes I would dream up a solution to a math problem or figure out the best way to market an event. But there’s a way to do this deliberately.
How can we leverage sleep?
One technique I learned is to ask myself what’s the most important question I want to be answered and be as specific as possible [1]. I do this right before bed. Then let my subconsciousness work on it. First thing in the morning, I brainstorm on pen and paper for around 15 minutes.
I’ve been doing this on and off for a couple of months now. It’s quite surprising some of the ideas I come up with.
Its time I should build this into a habit.
NOTES
[1] Credits to Josh Waitzkin for this technique.
Expanding My Musical Palette
I created a 2020 Reading list to read the best books from a variety of genres.
How about I do the same thing but with music?
I’ll choose different genres that I don’t ordinarily listen to such as metal, folk, and opera. Find the best albums within those genres. Then spend time doing nothing but listening to these albums.
The purpose of this would be to increase my musical palette. I’ll release my album listening list soon.
Thanks for reading! I’d appreciate if you can comment on what you liked, what you didn’t like, and what you would like to see.
Until next week,
James