The other day I took out a small, blank slip of paper. Then, thinking “what are the areas of focus in my life?” I tried to come up with the fewest number of areas. I wrote the first one that came to mind, and then I left some space. Then I wrote a second area, and left more space. I let my mind wander over all the things I’d recently done, things planned, and things aspired.
As I thought of things, I considered if they fit one of the areas I had already noted (and wrote some of them under those areas as examples.) I came up with five areas into which I felt everything in my life fit. Granted, the little slip of paper ended up pretty full with examples. The smallness of the slip is part of the usefulness of the challenge as it forced me to distill, to try to limit the number of areas and to prioritize. (Issues № 87, 80, 66 and 45 touch on priorities.)
What are you working on? When will you change your mind? What can you learn, what can you challenge?
~ Seth Godin, from What are you thinking about?
Godin asks good questions. Me? In recent weeks I’ve been challenging myself to shift my focus to longer timeframes. I’ve reached a level of sophistication where—give or take—what I do on any given day does not matter; I don’t go off the rails.
Unfortunately, what I do, is get anxious about “all the things” when I get lost thinking about what is the perfect, one thing that I should be doing right now.
Instead of hyper-focusing on the right-now, I need to zoom out. What I just accomplished has moved me towards a goal. Yes, even if I just blew off some scheduled thing to go play outside, that moves my health forward energizing me for another day. And each day, simply making some progress is exactly the right thing for me to be doing.
Then simply pick a next thing.
One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
As days have passed, I’ve been checking in with my little slip of paper. It’s far from perfect. I’ve thought of some things which don’t fit well into any of my five areas. I’m thinking I’ve found another area which would be good to add; Maybe this other area I first identified should go under this area I’ve now thought of?
This exercise has given me a new perspective. I mean that literally. It’s as if I suddenly found a much taller ladder, or a new rooftop vantage point. Small slip of paper. Small number of areas. The details necessarily get blurred out. But each continues to fully represent and encompass all those details.
When a person relies heavily on the clock to determine what to do and when to stop, research suggests they might also have a looser relationship with their own sense of control. This is because they look towards an external cue to guide their actions, according to Sellier, and that external cue, rather than something within them, is what seems to control the world around them. Event-time people appear to believe, more than clock-time people do, that their actions make a meaningful difference in determining what happens to them.
~ Shayla Love, from Is it better to live in ‘clock time’ or ‘event time’?
This feels closely related to my point above about shifting my focus to longer time frames. My default is definitely clock-time. How would I go about being intentional about choosing one style over the other? I suppose simply asking myself: Is this thing better done in clock-time or event time?
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
~ David Eagleman
If I could take knowledge with me, I’d really like to again be the age I was, when I thought I’d surely have my shit together by the time I was the age I am now.
I wish when I was younger I knew what I know today, what I feel like today, a kind of ease with myself. Because when you’re younger you are much more intense and everything’s much more important and you look back and you think, “Oh what was that all about?” Nothing is that important, just live your life because we’re here so briefly.
~ Anthony Hopkins, from Anthony Hopkins
There’s a concept of “ages” in one’s life. About five years ago, I believe I started to transition to the age of air.
Somehow these less-than-ideal conditions raised his game, spurred him on to greatness. There’s a definite lesson here. Fair winds do not a great captain make. We dream of finding our own greatness one day, but we want it to happen when the sun is shining.
~ Hugh Macleod
[…] Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted out a video promoting, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created.” The response has been overwhelming, and overwhelmingly negative: for many viewers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crushing a heap of musical instruments, art supplies, and vintage entertainment into a single tablet inadvertently articulated a discomfort they’ve long felt with technology’s direction in the past couple of decades. As the novelist Hari Kunzru put it, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized branded slab is pretty much where the tech industry is at in 2024.”
~ Colin Marshall, from Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)
Setting aside the marketing brouhaha, I was gobsmacked by the phrase, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized brand-slab […]” Yes, “homogenized brand-slab” is brilliant and feels like a line of dialog from THX-1138. But I was really fish-hooked by the “symbols of human creativity” part.
I talk a lot and often these days about creativity, but I’d never really considered the question: What are symbols—images, place holders, iconography—of creativity? Because it doesn’t make sense to me that a paint brush, or a trumpet (for example) represent creativity. Those are tools for creative expression. I see how using tools as symbols works, but why isn’t there something that directly represents creativity?
And is “creativity” one of the areas of our lives that we should have on our little slip of paper?
Until next time, thanks for reading.
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