I won't be blogging much for the next few weeks

As I prepare to depart for Istanbul, I am putting the majority of my creative energy into annotating the texts that I read over the course of the past year or so. I can’t take everything with me that I want to write about, and there are so many books in my inbox that I haven’t even got to yet! Nevertheless, I expect that this winter will be long, cold, and dark—with a lockdown or two thrown in for good measure—so I want to bank up as many notes as I can before I leave.

Perhaps this is a cop-out, and I’ve gotten lazy with my practice. I sometimes feel this way. But, in the end, what I am really doing is prioritizing other things, such as saying goodbye to all my friends and favorite places here in Philadelphia. There will be more time to write when being out and about is less pleasant. Especially if this year is not a repeat of last year in terms of my mental health, when I sank into a funk that made doing much other than my work—what little I could accomplish even there—nearly impossible. With the help of my nearest and dearest, I pulled through all of that, and with this blog and numerous creative pursuits to show for it.

At any rate, I’ve also decided to spend much less time on Twitter—even going so far as to give control of my password to a friend—and the positive effect on my ability to concentrate is notable. This scares me a little bit, because I do like Twitter, and it can be a useful tool professionally. But I have a tendency to let it absorb every spare moment of my day and to dominate my thinking—what if I tweeted this, or that, would people respond? (And “oh, god damnit” if they don’t!) Not an energy I really need in my life, to be perfectly honest.

So for now, I’m going to keep laying track. This week I conducted my first subject matter expert interview—off the record, for now—for the Da Sheng podcast project, and I’m working my way through annotating one of the most important books that I read in the past year. It feels good to focus and work toward something concrete. I’m going to stick to it for now.

Process > Product

As often happens, when I get excited about a new interest or project, I tend to dive straight into the deep end. Last week’s post about my new podcast project is no exception. I got really into the idea of the whole thing. I was so pleased with the unfolding of a small little kernel of something into a potentially viable pursuit. It started some time ago with a short passage in one book that I then connected to another, which led to the first version of something I wanted to create. That idea then bumped up against the reality of “oh, someone already did this" and also “shit, I don’t really know how to draw.” But, I knew from my creativity gurus that sometimes you just need to wait, but your idea on the back burner, and wait for serendipity to strike with inspiration for the next step (i.e., let the Rock Tumbler turn). And it worked! Soon enough, my desire for something realizable, the hook that I baited and threw out into the lake bobbed and there it was.

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Purposively practicing writing

The psychologist Anders Ericsson is famous for studying so-called “expert performers.” From decades of research into how these masters of games, craft, music, athletics and so on, Ericsson hypothesizes that the secret to their success is deliberate practice. I’ve written about deliberate practice obliquely before, as it has much in common with flow. The basic idea is that when learning a new skill, you can pick up the basics pretty quickly, but if you want to really see improvement, you need to be a bit more intentional and systematic about how you practice. For example, if you are taking piano lessons, you would do well to commit to a regimen of rehearsal. The results will be vastly different if your practice involves repeating an exercise or a tune for a set amount of time without regard to how well you do it as compared to if your goal with practicing was to be able to play your piece at the correct speed, three times in a row without a mistake. Ericsson refers to the former method as naïve practice and the latter as deliberate practice.

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