There are 62 posts filed in Stuff I learned (this is page 3 of 7).
People often ask me about what my job is about or what blogging is. I thought this single sentence from Johanna Blakley from this Ted Radio Hour on nothing being truly original was brilliant:
“The genius is really in curating things from the past and reviving them in the present.”
Perfect.
I’m not sure I actually learned anything from this book but it was one of my favorite reads of the year. The memoir is about a guy around my age (29) who returns to his parents’ farm where he grew up.
He returns to help and to learn and he ends up building a structure in which he lives. Maybe that means more to me because I just watched the Tiny documentary but it really buried me at the end.
Here’s one of my favorite excerpts:
For just a brief second I had the feeling of being glad to be alive at that exact moment. The anxiety of time receded back to its furthest point, and the present took up all the available space.
I suddenly wanted to find my mother and h and tell them that I loved them. I wanted to stay here forever in the hollow, closed off from the world, in the shelter I’d built, with a table and a chair, a bed and a full bookshelf.
I wanted my grave dug under the black walnut, with Sarah’s there beside it, our children to plant a forsythia that would bloom in the spring, the first yellow flowers of March. I wanted our bones to molder and the stone to grow dim, the rain to seep into the box and the tree roots to grow down through it, and someday the creek to rise and wash us all away.
Immense.
There’s a cool, funny piece in the New Yorker this week about wine and how we’re affected so much by its context. We’ve been trained to think (or at least say we think) that a given wine is better than another given wine because of certain factors (cost, locale, etc.)
One wine critic put it this way:
“Take art criticism, restaurant reviews, smart phone or car criticism,” he told me. “In none of those fields do you ask someone to critique a product blind. It’s just not done, and it would be crazy. A reviewer tells you about the context, the arc of an artist’s or a chef’s career, how they are doing now relative to before. How this version of the iPhone compares to the others.”
This goes perfectly with the story about the two people who sold a bunch of items online. One just posted photos and the stuff and one hired people to write these long, elaborate stories about where their stuff came from.
Guess which one made more money?
Context matters to people because they want to feel good and important and like what they are doing is meaningful beyond the act of whatever it is.
The Pickpocket’s Tale (NYT)
Two couples, one mortgage (The Atlantic)
I learned about a thing called Reading Pack from this which I think I’m going to try out for a while. (Pocket Blog)
While narratives change a lot, people tend to remain the same, and I would wager that the only thing about LeBron James that has changed since The Decision back in 2010 is that he now knows precisely what kind of horseshit sports fans and sportswriters want, and how to deliver that horseshit. (Deadspin)
Six ways your phone is changing you (Desiring God)[1. Gonna walk off that back-to-back Deadspin/Desiring God one-two combo.]
The older I get the more I enjoy AP stories and one-on-one interviews. (Jeff Pearlman)
“The US steel industry enforced a twelve-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week schedule until 1923. During a 1912 millworkers strike for shorter work hours in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the mostly women workers sang ‘Yes, it is bread we fight for. But we fight for roses, too.'”
– Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte
Kind of makes that 500-word blog post I need to write seem a bit less daunting.
I realized over the weekend the thing I love most about golf is that to be good at it you have to be self-aware enough to make the necessary adjustments to your game as you play.
That’s useful as an endeavor in sports, for sure, but how much more so in business, friendships, and life itself?
I’ve realized recently that I’ve gone away from the discipline of reading. The discipline of being rapt to a singular bit of language that’s helping me learn and do good work in my craft.
I’ve begun skimming a lot or even, gasp, pulling tweets and using them as my news. I haven’t been reading, though.
Karen Swallow Prior puts it this way:
This does not mean that our appetites are not in need of some, or even great, disciplining, but the goal of all discipline is not restraint but freedom. The trained appetite is free to gain the most pleasure—and use—from the best books. –Lit Review
I think you can swap out blogs, articles, or stores for “books” and still come to the same conclusion.
For me the easiest way to train myself is to have to curate what I read. I do it here. I started doing it here. And I need to do it here more often.
As I wrote earlier this week I’ve been trying to clean up my Twitter feed. There was too much of the same news and too many folks who tweeted too many not-very-thoughtful thoughts about said news.
I realized that I’m on Twitter for two reasons and beyond those two reasons I should use it as little as possible.
But here is the unintended consequence of cleaning up my Twitter feed: It made me think about how I use all the tools in my colophon.
Twitter, I’ve come to realize, does not need to be left open or checked incessantly. I’ll check it ever hour or so or leave it open during big events to watch the commentary pour in.
Facebook is pretty much a non-starter for me. I’ll post my stuff from CBS or PFB on there but I get in and out as quickly as possible.
Instagram has become a check-a-couple-times-a-day tool for me and mostly to see if there’s anything post-worthy for my two gigs.
I’ve begun feeding the stories I want to read into three places: Email (newsletters), Pocket (stuff to read later), and my RSS feed.
All the stuff I want to read that isn’t specifically for work but I believe is beneficial to keep my mind sharp and creative, I let somebody else curate that and deliver it to me via email or on Twitter. I’ll just the Pocket the stuff I want, leave everything else, and read it all at a later date.
The RSS feed I’ve come to lean on heavily for my two jobs. I’ve curated those and I sift through them constantly for tidbits or quotes to use in my blog posts. That’s the stuff that it’s my job to find.
So I think for now this little guide to the Twitter world (which is actually bigger than the Twitter world) has been a good thing for me and writing through everything has helped put things in their place.
If only I could figure out how to get that Twitter feed down to about 200…
What I usually recommend: get up early. Get up early and work for a couple hours on the thing you really care about. When you’re done, go about your day: go to school, go to your job, make your family breakfast, whatever. Your teacher or your boss or your kids can’t take your work away from you, because you already did it. And you know you’ll get to do it tomorrow morning, as long as you make it through today. – Austin Kleon
I concur.
If you give me three hours in the early morning or six in the middle of the day, I’ll usually get the same amount of work done.
I started unfollowing a bunch of Twitter accounts this week as part of my personal guide to Twitter. I realized following 500 accounts was ridiculous so I got it down below 400 and I’d like to ideally get it down to 200-250.
For some reason I feel bad about unfollowing folks but I think if I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t follow many of my friends or people I know. I’d rather spend real-life time with them than try to make our digital relationship thrive.
Something started happening when I began unfollowing accounts, though. My parameters were (loosely) “is this person or business smart or funny or can they provide me news I can’t get anywhere else?” If the answer was no to all of the above I hit unfollow.
What I started realizing, though, is that a lot of times I’m not smart or funny and a lot of times I don’t provide interesting news about the topics I cover. My feed is just kind of dumb sometimes.
In unfollowing a ton of accounts I came to the conclusion that I need to be somebody who other people, if they used my parameters for following/unfollowing, wouldn’t want to unfollow.
