Likely everyone will listen to this Michael Lewis podcast on Longform. For one thing Michael Lewis is a badass and for another thing the Longform podcast is tremendous.

But I’m not sure everyone’s takeaway will be the same as mine.

Lewis said this at the 24:22 mark on how he got better:

“I was living in London and I wrote lots of long letters to friends in which I tried to entertain them. I was a very energetic, natural kind of read. I read carefully.”

I’ve never heard someone describe their reading like that, much less their writing.

Whatever your beliefs or religious affiliation, it’s difficult to deny the beauty of these words:

What’s true is what Samuel Rutherford said when he was put in the cellars of affliction: “The Great King keeps his wine there”—not in the courtyard where the sun shines. What’s true is what Charles Spurgeon said: “They who dive in the sea of affliction bring up rare pearls.”

John Piper, 1994

I loved this on the business side of writing and entrepreneurship…

“Every day isn’t like that, of course. We just went through tax time (laughing). I typically ignored that stuff in the past, but have come to understand the importance of staying on top of the paperwork. The photographer Tom Schierlitz, who is super organized, told me, ‘The best way to be lazy is to be organized.’ It’s true, but it’s so not my nature.”

(Great Discontent)

Everyone loves the art, nobody loves the task of punching 1s and 0s into an Excel file.

Still, you’ll never rest properly if you don’t do it.

What we’re trying to do when we read

“In the end we’re still trying to make certain chemicals in our brains fire off and make us feel good, but reading seems to be a more indirect path to that outcome now. Because the internet is so rapid in producing new content, we’ve learned to spend less time reading and instead just fast-forward to the social validation part. In other words, we’re forgetting to appreciate a piece of writing by ourselves.”

This feels like progress but it actually isn’t.

Actually Reading by Len Kendall

(now I’ve shared this piece in two different places)