The top image of Friday’s newsletter, like many of my images, came straight from my diary:
I forgot to link to this blog post from earlier in the year, “Fire and Focus.”
SHITT: Should I Try That?
From yesterday’s newsletter comes a new acronym I made up: SHITT, or “Should I Try That?”
We know that social media can cause FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), but reading about how other people work can cause a variant of FOMO we’ll dub SHITT — SHould I Try That?
A silly example of SHITT: You’re having trouble with your writing and then you read about how So-and-So only writes longhand and all the sudden you think maybe you should start writing longhand. So you spend the whole day shopping for pens and paper, only to sit down the next morning and remember you hate your own handwriting.
Much like FOMO, how susceptible you are to SHITT depends on your mental state, how tender and vulnerable you are, and how well your own work is going.
Read more here.
Recent interviews
I had a nice long chat with Jaime Rodríguez de Santiago about creativity, parenting and Don Quixote. The full video is on YouTube and here’s a little excerpt.
I had a shorter but still sweet interview with Jane Ratcliff on being (not) too weird to be popular:
I assumed everything I cared about was too weird to be popular and that I’d always have a day job. The fact that I have readers and make a living from the stuff I make is a blessing beyond belief and every week I try not to squander my luck.
Filed under: interviews
Always be knolling
Here are some pages from Tom Sachs’ zine, Ten Bullets. (More bullets here.)
He suggests that in the studio one should “always be knolling.”
See also: “When in doubt, tidy up.”
The inner state of the average man
In his book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, the Jungian analyst James Hollis recalls being asked to speak to women’s groups who ask him to help them understand men:
I have suggested that women look at men this way: if they took away their own network of intimate friends, those with whom they share their personal journey, removed their sense of instinctual guidance, concluded that they were almost wholly alone in the world, and understood that they would be defined only by standards of productivity external to them, they would then know the inner state of the average man. They are horrified at this notion.
They then ask Hollis if there’s anything they can do, and he replies, “No.” (It is up to men.)
Hollis has told a variation of this story in several audiobooks and podcasts I’ve listened to and his diagnosis always chills me. I found myself recalling it to a friend yesterday on my bike ride.
One thing I find hopeful is that I think you can reverse-engineer a to-do list from this diagnosis:
- build a network of intimate friends (start by being a good node)
- learn to listen to yourself, pay attention to your thoughts and feelings, authorize yourself that what you notice is important, and trust your intuition
- search for meaning in your life outside the realm of the quantifiable
Easy peasy, right? Ha. (Cries.)
As for being a man, finding myself a member in a club I never asked to join: Whenever I think that we’re making no progress whatsoever, I think about the fact that I have two friends, grown men my own age, who, unprompted, within the last year, have told me that they loved me. And I told them I loved them back.
It’s a start.
The teacher as gardener
John Holt in 1983, talking to WBOS-Radio, on how teaching is like gardening:
The most important person in the learning process is the learner. The next most important is the teacher… The teacher does not fill up bottles—it’s much more like gardening. You don’t grow plants by going out with Scotch tape and sticking leaves onto the stems. The plant grows. But the gardener creates as far as she or he can the conditions for growth—in the case of plants, soil, fertilizer, acidity, shade, water, etc. It’s simple with plants. With children, it’s more complicated. What the teacher does—and the parents at home—is to create an environment, which is in part physical—there are books, records and tapes, and tools—and in part emotional, spiritual, moral, intellectual, in which growth can occur. Now that’s a very subtle, very difficult, very interesting task. Nobody in any school of education that I’ve ever heard of would describe it that way.
So where do teachers learn to teach?
You learn to teach by teaching. I never had any educational training, luckily. I say “luckily” because I went into the classroom knowing that I didn’t know anything, and therefore realizing that if I wanted to learn something, I’d better keep my eyes and ears open and think about what I was seeing and hearing. The only way you learn about teaching is to do it and to see which of your inputs into this environment produce helpful results and which don’t, and maybe to talk about your problems with other teachers and say, “How are you making out?”
Maps of scenius
The latest newsletter is about “scenius,” which I described in Show Your Work!:
There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
You can read the rest of the letter here.
One fun part of putting this together was matching maps of scenius with maps of neurons in the brain.
Here’s how researchers Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich put it in their paper about how our social networks act as collective brains:
Innovations, large or small, do not require heroic geniuses any more than your thoughts hinge on a particular neuron. Rather, just as thoughts are an emergent property of neurons firing in our neural networks, innovations arise as an emergent consequence of our species’ psychology applied within our societies and social networks.
And I forgot to mention this in the letter, but it matches up nicely with the stuff Annie Murphy Paul writes in The Extended Mind about thinking outside of your head.
Filed under: scenius
In The Guardian
What have you done?
“But have you gotten a rocket to Mars?”
Walter Isaacson’s response to a woman criticizing the subject of his new biography reminds me of Gareth’s defense of Chris Finch in “The Quiz,” my favorite episode of The Office.
“He’s thrown a kettle over a pub! What have you done?”
Old notes to myself
Today’s newsletter is about this recently-rediscovered list of notes to myself I wrote in 2014:
11. “If you don’t go to work, you never leave work.”
Wise words from my brilliant editor, Meghan Kleon.12. Death + deadlines.
The little deadlines keep you fed and the big deadline keeps you pushing towards finding meaningful work.
Read the rest here.
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