While I think the true answer is that both are important, this quote hit me pretty hard today. How rarely do I make atmosphere — over activities — my focus.

I recently stumbled upon the Foolish Baseball YT page, which has held my fascination for the last few days. So of course I had to go read an interview with its creator, a 20-something named Bailey who recently did this AMA. There was one quote from it that stood out that is one of the primary keys to good content creation that so many people miss. Here it is.

Q: I love your show!! Seriously! After I burned through Sunday baseball with Indy Neidell I was so happy to find baseball bits. I’m curious, how do you find your topics?

A: That’s a tough question to answer. I like to look at players who are huge outliers, for starters. That’s kind of how I ended up doing videos on Locastro and Radbourn, for example. Often, a passing reference I hear in a podcast or read in an article can lead be down the rabbit hole. I think the best way to come up with topics is just to have an insatiable curiosity about the game.

It’s the last part — the best way to come up with topics is just to have an insatiable curiosity about the game — that got me nodding my head and that is also such a massive piece of the content creation formula that gets missed. You can have clarity, imagination, good ideas and the best equipment in the world, but if you don’t have an insatiable curiosity with what you’re doing, then it’s going to fall flat at some point.

I don’t know if this is what separates good creators from great ones, but I’m fairly convinced that it divides those who make it for a bit from those who truly endure and also that an insatiable curiosity is what helps your favorite artists, writers or creatives coat their work with an almost childlike wonder that we’re all naturally drawn to.

One of my very favorite parts of being a dad is that I get to read books I would be reading anyway, and I get to read them aloud and experience them as my kids are experiencing them. What a gift! And how glad I am that I saved Harry Potter until now, until I could read it with my eight-year-old daughter. Until she would love it just as much as (or even more than) I would.

There are many parts of being a dad I have struggled with. This is one of the few I haven’t. I love reading to our kids. Love it. Which is why this recent post by David Mathis was both encouraging to me but also instructive for how I should read aloud to our kids. This was the best part of it.

Perhaps my main piece of counsel would be to read with energy. When Dad and Mom put more into it, the whole family gets more out of it. Even after a long day, it’s worth pushing yourself to not just go through the motions and read monotone. Put energy into it. Pour in more enthusiasm than you first think is needed. Read with color and warmth. Do voices, if you’re that type. Pursue contagious joy, not infectious boredom. You are the teacher, not the book. The book is your prop, your medium, your context for relationship with your children, and your opportunity to invest in them, their maturity, and their personality.

Desiring God

Praise God for Johannes Gutenberg and that we get to live in a world where books are so easily accessible and so easy to share with our children.

The illusion of busyness is this: It can look a lot more productive than productivity. A recent example is the book I wrote last October and November. Because my job is to constantly publish, and I wrote that for 60 days without publishing or making public a single thing, it felt like busyness but it was actually productivity. It was simply hidden. On the flip side, there are innumerable things on my daily Todoist (coincidentally) that are busyness but look like productivity. You ticked 29 boxes today, congratulations! Yeah, but how much good, meaningful work did you do?

I recently had lunch with a pastor from my old church and I asked him about how he teaches and preaches. I’ll never forget his answer, and I think about it every time I enter into a big project. “Kyle,” he started, “I’m not a dynamic speaker like a lot of other folks you’ve experienced. So instead I have to just get the text all over me before I teach or preach.”

What tremendous instruction, and I thought about it recently when I was reading Dream Golf about the making of Bandon Dunes. Mike Keiser, who started Bandon, tasked Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw with building his third golf course, and here’s how they went about it.

How it works for Bill and Ben is this: They get out on the site and start walking. Their entire design process depends on coming to know a site, every last inch of it. Their crew members sometimes move around a site on vehicles, but Bill and Ben have an unspoken rule that they will walk everywhere. They don’t want to miss a single thing. They walk and look, pause, mull over some detail, discuss it, and start walking again. When Mike was in Oregon, he walked with them, and it wasn’t easy to keep up with him and Bill and Ben. Neither rain nor sleet nor cold nor mud kept them from walking Bandon Trails from one end to the other, and I came to realize that this is what happens every day.

Dream Golf: The Making of Bandon Dunes by Stephen Goodwin

Obsession with craft, it seems, is the lone path to success. That can be (and often is) done in a healthy way, but it’s certainly a treacherous tightrope. As much as I don’t want this to be true — as much as I desire to dip my toe in many waters simultaneously — I’m afraid the true path to success on knowing every last inch of something, of getting it all over you.

I recently read David Foster Wallace’s piece on Roger Federer for the first time — which, shame on me — but this part of it stood out because it’s something that I feel in a lot of the pieces I write. I don’t know if it’s what comes out, but it’s what I feel in my soul as I write and think and mold something for folks to consume.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.

DFW — NYT

I think we so rarely think about sports as “the expression of human beauty,” but when I do, it always makes me thankful for a God who made us in a way so intricate and measure that beauty could be seen in the way we run, jump, throw and swing. There is a kindness in that reality that I so often take for granted.

I recently stumbled upon this interview with former NFL star Bill Romanowski, and the ending both staggered me and also resonated with me. The article was a look back at his crazy career and the insane training and work that went into it. Here’s what he said when he was asked why he did it all.

Once, after knee surgery in the off season, he was back in the gym four hours later with anesthesia still drifting through his head.

What was driving him? “A fear of failure. The fear of not being good enough,” Romanowski says. “In professional football the competition is so intense. ‘Is he good enough? Is he fast enough? Does he hit people hard enough? Does he get hurt a lot?’ I didn’t want that to happen to me. I didn’t want to lose my job.”

Bill Romanowski

It’s easy to laugh this off as a Football Guy being a Football Guy, which is partially what it is. But I’ve had such similar thoughts in my own life and career. I pretend as if I’m driven by a desire for achievement or so I can create good stuff for other people. That I operate out of rest, peace and joy. But the reality is often closer to fear of failure and the terror of being found out as incompetent than I would ever care to admit.

This is really good — especially the ending about the gospels and how they are spectacularly binary.

This is excellent, and while I don’t agree with it 100%, I do agree with the idea of depth over breadth when it comes to friendship.