to share thoughts with others quickly and repeatably
as iāve started my productivity coaching practice, iāve learned that having specific thoughts packaged neatly makes for easy sharing of information to people iām working with. i can process a thought once and then share it over and over.
ānone of us can ever knowthe value of our lives or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world if only by how radically it changes us.ā
she basically said that writing (1) changes her during the process of putting the thoughts down and (2) has impact in the world because sharing how you perceive and experience the world can make tiny changes in how other people think about the world and that can have serious implications on their thinking, which influences their actions.
for the memories
in the first episode of harry potter and the sacred text season 2 (one of my favorite new podcasts), my friend,Ā casper, reflects on his last living grandparent dying. he mentioned that each time someone dies, all their memories are lost forever (well, i guess those that arenāt currently already living in someone elseās head). he then said that as he thinks about his experiences that only he knows about, if he writes them down, theyāll be around even after he isnāt. and in reference to a particular passage of harry potter that theyāre discussing, he said that writing is a good way to make sure that things you experienced werenāt a dream.
anyway, iām sure there are more reasons that will come up as i think through this more. maybe iāll keep updating this post; maybe not.
i just finished the mary karr episode of on being. honestly, it had the air of one of the episodes that i tend to skip because of the framing of the title: āastonished by the human comedy.ā just didnāt seem appealing to me. iām glad i listened anyways. i probably have four different thought posts inspired by the content, though they did all come in the last 15 minutes of the episode. just goes to show that you really canāt judge things by their outward appearances (or that you shouldnāt make assumptionsā¦ or something, heh).
āthe people who follow jesus, more so than people who call themselves christians or catholics or whatever seemed to always be the ones working in the soup kitchen and also seemed the least hateful and angryā¦ thatās why i started trying to figure out the whole jesus thing.ā
that totally resonated with me because i had a very similar trajectory. the only real different is that i started out in the church. i rejected the blind faith and dogma because it just didnāt seem effective or impactful.
and, just as i was having that thoughtā¦ she dropped this:
āā¦ thatās why itās a spiritual practice and not just a spiritual belief. people talk about doctrine all the time (and even fight about it) but what i care about what you do on a given day. i donāt care so much what you believe in; what do you do?ā
bam. totally same lane as me. i loved her leaning into the framing of spirituality as a practice. practice is action based (similar to love). given how iāve seen christianity (and many other religions) be destructive, i wonder if this way of thinking about spirituality and spiritual differences would allow a much more healthy coexistence of multiple religions/spiritual practicesā¦ i know for me, i donāt particularly care what you believe, as long as it impacts your life and the world positively.
letās be honest: time management fails knowledge workers (i wrote about a piece of this over here. anyone who has worked a desk job is keenly aware of this. it shows up in all sorts of ways. dragging out or procrastinating on simple tasks and being overworked despite a clearly defined set of deliverables are just two examples.
the 40-hour work week, which was advocated for by labor activists on behalf of workers who were working 70 hour weeks, but also a little bit from henry ford, made (more) sense in an industrial era. when you and your organization produce widgets at a certain rate productivity can absolutely be measured in time. 100 widgets (cars, bikes, planes, stamps, pencils, whatever) per hour times the number of hours is your output. it makes sense in that context that, if youāre being paid on output, that measuring time is an appropriate proxy.
however, the outputs of knowledge work are totally different. first of all, the what that is being produced has totally changed. knowledge workers produce so many different things that itās nearly impossible to imagine comparing them all with a single metric (output per unit time). additionally, how those outputs are produced varying wildly. not only do they vary from job to job, but sometimes within a single personās role in a single organization, producing the first āthingā can take a week, the second can take a year, and the third could take two days.
there are a ton of other reasons why counting time fails in a world of knowledge work, but for now, iāll let that be.
what i really want to be thinking about is how to shift into a new frame.
for the past few months, ross and i have been tossing around terminology like āfull-focusā versus full-time. full-focus, although imperfect, implies more directly that your production is aimed towards a single job (or task or whatever). it then doesnāt matter how long it takes you to produce what it is you produce. as long as you get it done when it needs to be done, it shouldnāt matter how long it takes.
sometimes people wonder how i am so well connected. they ask me how it’s possible that i know so many people in so many different places and contexts. i think the reason is because i try really hard not to write anyone off. i fundamentally believe in the possibility for each person i meet to be an awesome person. even if, by certain metrics, they aren’t one right now.
now, why do i believe that? because i believe in the possibility that all people can transform. i’ve seen it before (in friends, in guys i’ve mentored, in stories across history) and now this section is resilience is adding a little more fuel to my belief.
so there was this amazing study done (in boston, of course) about how different types of meditation affect the brain. i think an analogy might be helpful to explain the gist.
imagine a cart that is being pulled along by horses on a dirt road. the horses and cart come down this road 100 times a day. the road splits into two directions: let’s call them hate street and acceptance street. when the dirt road is new, it’s just as easy for the horses to pull the cart onto either street. however, if the horses go down acceptance street repeatedly, grooves begin to form in the road. these grooves make it easier over time for the cart to wind up on acceptance street.
basically, this is what happens in your brain with neural pathways as you meditate for hundreds of hours. in the book, they explain the science of this in a very precise way. the results from this study have definitely confirmed my belief in the ability for people to transform themselves.
and for that reason, i think everyone deserves to be seen not as who they are now, but as who they have the potential to be. second chances all around.
a few weeks ago, one of my closest friends, jonathan krones, got married. at his wedding reception, i met his aunt, gail. a few times a month she gives art & architecture history tours of the main branch of the boston public library, a place my co-founder and i often work out of. not only did i learn a ton about the bpl, i also learned how symbolic working there is for us. as always, this could be more elegant, but as i always say, better done than perfect.
at the opening ceremony for library back in the 1880s, poet oliver wendell holmes read a poem that included a line calling the library “a palace for the people.”
the two front statues are art and science.Ā
the artist/craftsperson who designed the 7 tiled ceilings in the library wanted to use his work in the library as his calling card; it was his first piece in america.
there are a set of murals at the top of the stairs on the 2nd floor. the artist was parisian and never stepped foot in the building. the architect made a scale model of the building and sent it to the artist along with samples of the marble of which the room the murals would go in was made. the artist then painted the murals and sent them across the ocean where they were installed. aka - they were a virtual #thereisnothingnewunderthesun.
sometime recently on a tour, a 10-year old tour participant thought that two characters were on a digital tablet and cell phone when one was just looking at a stone tablet and the other just had their hand to their temple in contemplation. ha.
the library was funded mostly by the city government (first municipally funded library in the u.s.), but there was also state and private money to take it up a notch. #publicprivatepartnership?
the murals in the abbey room are that artists first murals. he was known as a portraitist. he tried a new thing when someone gave him a chance to stretch himself (which we believe in). ironically, the mural is of the search for the holy grail…
