cal newport

Jeff Tweedy mentioned this Dolly Parton philosophy in his memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Come Back):

Dolly Parton once said that her advice to anyone wanting to be an artist was to “Find out who you are and then be that on purpose.” Or something like that. As I’ve gotten older, those are the people I find myself drawn to work with and stay close to. People who have figured out who they are and are good at being that on purpose.”

Collage, the way I do it in my notebook, is the art of making connections between two seemingly unrelated things lying around. It’s a physical manifestation of the way I think. I made this one while listening to an interview with Cal Newport, who’s out there promoting his new one, Digital Minimalism.

Newport was talking about a definition of solitude he borrowed from the book Lead Yourself First: Solitude is “freedom from inputs from other minds.” (That’s not exactly how they put it in the book, but I like the word “freedom.”) According to the authors, Kethledge and Erwin, solitude is a “state of mind,” a spiritual condition, not necessarily a physical one. Here’s how Newport explains it in Digital Minimalism:

Many people mistakenly associate [solitude] with physical separation—requiring, perhaps, that you hike to a remote cabin miles from another human being. This flawed definition introduces a standard of isolation that can be impractical for most to satisfy on any sort of regular basis. As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

So, under this definition, you can find solitude in a busy train car or a coffee shop, or wherever. I am slightly nervous about this re-definition (it seems to me that being truly alone has a ton of value), but I am also attracted to this idea that you don’t necessarily have to be alone to be with your thoughts, you just have to be free from input.

Pete Shotton, a long-time friend of John Lennon, once talked about how Lennon couldn’t bear to be left completely alone — he always wanted someone around, even while he was writing. He’d always have the TV on or a friend around. But they didn’t need to be interacting, really. Lennon just wanted to feel another body in the room.

I’m like this. I like to have somebody else around when I’m working. I especially like it when my six-year-old comes around and we “parallel play” — we work on our own things, across the studio from one another. (I also like to have other people in the room in the form of a book. When I’m stumped when writing, I pick up one of them and start reading.)

On the other hand, I’ve been experimenting with very ways of courting old-fashioned all-by-my-lonesome solitude in my own life. Meditating by the lake. Going for long walks without headphones. I’m not sure they’re valuable to me as productivity measures. How they’re valuable can’t necessarily be measured with any kind of output or progress. These practices don’t help me be with my thoughts, they help me get rid of them. They help me empty out, drain the anxiety and rage out of my head. (Demons hate fresh air.) They let me be in my body. Without thought.

If I want to have some thoughts or do something with them, I’ll head over to my bliss station.

Thinking, after all, is not just about pushing ideas around in your head. Writing and collage are ways of thinking by pushing ideas around on the page.

Sometimes I don’t even think I can think without seeing it on the page.

And sometimes I don’t know who I am until I’m down on the page.

Oh, there I am.

My book Show Your Work! was an attempt to answer questions my readers had asked me about self-promotion: “How do I get my stuff out there? How do I get noticed? How do I find an audience?” It is, as it says on the cover, a book about how to get discovered.

(Nowhere in the text do I address the question of why anyone should want to get discovered. There’s a little bit of that in the new book and chapter 6 of Steal Like An Artist: “Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.”)

It isn’t a book about living in public, it’s a book about working in public. It is, I think, about sharing your work with intention, and using the technology available to you to connect directly with the audience you seek.

I tried very hard in that book, when it came to social media, to be platform agnostic, to emphasize that social media sites come and go, and to always invest first and foremost in your own media. (Website, blog, mailing list, etc.)

I still stand by that advice, but if I re-wrote the book now, I would encourage artists to use much more caution when it comes to using social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

It seems ridiculous to say, but 2013, the year I wrote the book, was a simpler time. Social media seemed much more benign to me. Back then, the worst I felt social media did was waste your time. Now, the worst social media does is cripple democracy and ruin your soul.

I’ve just got finished reading Jaron Lanier’s 10 Reasons for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. It’s not a particularly well-written book (Franklin Foer’s review is worth reading — he calls it “less polished” than Lanier’s other books and, even, “hokey”) but it has an important message. And I can’t say I disagree with any of the points, especially the last one, in which Lanier argues that the social media machine “hates your soul.” Here’s Foer, summarizing:

He worries that our reliance on big tech companies is ruining our capacity for spirituality, by turning us into robotic extensions of their machines. The companies, he argues, have no appreciation for the “mystical spark inside you.” They don’t understand the magic of human consciousness and, therefore, will recklessly destroy it.

This was a point, I think, made much better in his earlier book, You Are Not A Gadget, which contained a list of things “you can do to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others”:

Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.

If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.

Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.

Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

It’s about pushing against these mediums and using them in a way counter to the way they’d like you to use them.

Another book I might recommend to writers and artists worried about their social media usage is Cal Newport’s Deep Work. (Especially the second half.) Newport also wrote a popular NYTimes Op-ed, “Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It” and has given a TEDx talk called, “Why You Should Quit Social Media.”

Two caveats before you read Deep Work:

1) I’m not sure about the terms “deep” and “shallow”. Often in my work, what might seem “shallow” is often what leads to what is “deep”

2) Newport is an academic — he makes his primary living teaching computer science at a university, so he already has a built-in network and a self-contained world with clear moves towards achievement. People doing creative work have neither of those things. (For that matter, Jaron Lanier is already famous and well-respected and has a good gig at Microsoft.) One must always be beware of the advice-giver’s context.

I was struck, in Warren Ellis’s last email newsletter, how much he emphasized solitude, and carving out disconnected time for working:

The trick, for me, is carving out time for things and trying to do them with some wit…. I am not ready for the world until I’ve had my 45 minutes with four espressos in the back garden with earbuds in…. I spend a lot of time on my own, and mostly in my office. You can emulate these obvious role-model traits by excavating yourself a cave in your back garden or taking over a room in your apartment, fitting it with uncomfortably bright lights and way too many screens, filling all the spaces with books and skulls, playing nothing but music that sounds like it’s emanating from a dead moon, and waiting for everyone to leave you alone forever, and then dying in seclusion and being eaten by cats.

And this terrific advice he gave to people worrying about living online:

You don’t have to live in public on the internet if you don’t want to. Even if you’re a public figure, or micro-famous like me. I don’t follow anyone on my public Instagram account. No shade on those who follow me there, I’m glad you give me your time – but I need to be in my own space to get my shit done. You want a “hack” for handling the internet? Create private social media accounts, follow who you want and sit back and let your bespoke media channels flow to you. These are tools, not requirements. Don’t let them make you miserable. Tune them until they bring you pleasure.

I still find value in being on Twitter (just yesterday I learned about a new-to-me artist from a follower) but it is increasingly hard to justify much time spent there and on other social media sites, like Instagram. (I have not deleted my Facebook account, but I rarely sign in there.) That’s why I continue to write here every day and keep up my weekly newsletter, both of which produce better thinking and better work from me and give me a stronger, more deeper connection to my audience.

I’ll be writing more about the need to disconnect in my next book, so stay tuned…