How does anyone achieve something big? The answer is always, “They worked hard and got lucky.”
Most people emphasize how hard they worked to accomplish something. Others looking at them think they got lucky. It’s never one or the other. It’s both/and. Lots of people work hard and never get lucky. Some people get lucky but don’t put in the work. Those are the folks you don’t hear about.
When you get sucked into our collective fascination with the heroes, champions, geniuses, and creators who have achieved a level of success, don’t forget both the hard work and good luck involved.
Not long ago my writing group was discussing how to process criticism of your work, and I shared Ann Friedman’s classic Disapproval Matrix. First, know where the criticism is coming from. Feedback from folks in the top two quadrants are the ones that matter.
What would happen if you surrendered your computer, phone, books, and pens and went silent—no contact with anyone—for 10 full days? There was something irresistible about this question to me. I needed to find out the answer for myself.
The prospect of being alone in your own head for 10 days is scary to a lot of people. I happen to be a person who loves being in my head. It’s safe, comfortable, and logical there. I rely on facts and narratives to form my understanding of the world in there. My body rarely gets involved, at least consciously. And that served me just fine—until it didn’t.
Just sent the first installment of the newsletter. When I confirmed it arrived in my inbox, I noticed a typo.
The key difference between an email and a web page: once it’s been sent, you can’t fix typos in an email. This typo is forever cemented in my inbox, right smack dab in issue #1.
The typo could haunt me for the rest of my days. Or, I could view it as a personal monument to practice over perfection.
The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Louis Vuitton luggage are not.
— Art director Linds Redding in a classic viral essay about his 30 years in advertising. Following his cancer diagnosis, Redding passed away at the age of 52.
Writer Ann Patchett describes the idea she has for her next project as a beautiful, wild butterfly fluttering about her mind, a three dimensional miracle of color and movement she enjoys for as long as she can.
When it’s time to put pen to paper, she plucks the butterfly from her mind, smashes it onto her desk, and pins it down. What’s left is her book: a flat, one-dimensional, “dismantled, and poorly reassembled” version of her butterfly.
No one wants to smash the butterfly, but it’s the only way to turn an idea into something tangible.
Planned Parenthood delivers vital healthcare and defends reproductive freedom for all. Help provide services like birth control, cancer screenings, and STD testing and treatment. Donate to Planned Parenthood today.
Your true self is intensely interested in your real life’s work—but it could give a rat’s ass about anything else. When you pursue a career that pulls you away from your true self, your talent and enthusiasm will quit on you like a bored intern.
— Martha Beck with a signature delightful turn of phrase. I’ll forever think about my talent, enthusiasm, and energy like interns I can give interesting work they’ll enjoy and grow doing, or anything else that will make them quit on me.
I had the chance to see artist Jo Hay’s huge portraits of iconic women in person last week. They are stunning. Looking at any one of them feels like making eye contact with a wise old friend telling you: you got this. Prints, posters, and pins are for sale here—the bigger the format, the more striking they are.
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
— Dr. Katie Mack with a wakeup call to any of us lulled into a sense of trust that the machine’s giving us the right answer.
I started lifting weights about 6 months ago as a complete beginner. Once a week I meet my trainer for a strength workout. On a few occasions I’ve had to miss a week or two, for different reasons. Every time I walked into the gym after weeks off, I was sure I lost all my progress and was starting again from scratch.
In reality, the opposite was true. Every workout I do after time off, I break personal records for weight lifted. My trainer tells me that unlike cardio, that’s how strength training works. When your muscles get time to fully recuperate, you come back stronger.
This is counterintuitive to a cardio type, so it surprises me every time. But rest precedes leaps in certain creative and professional endeavors, too. You come back stronger after a break.
Blogging is fun, so I’ve started again. Winnie the Pooh said, “I always get to where I am going by walking away from where I have been.” What I’m doing here now on this site has a lot to do with where I have been.
Erika Hall painted a truckload of delightful chicken portraits while she was supposed to be writing a book. They await your appraisal at Clickens. The work one does while avoiding something else is some of the best work.
Open a new account at Ally Bank using my referral link and you’ll get $100 (and I’ll get $50). I like how Ally reimburses ATM fees, helps you track specific goals with savings buckets, and sponsors women’s sports. Open your new Ally account now.
One thing [director Kip Williams] said on the first day of rehearsals was: you can only eat an elephant one spoonful at a time. I was like, okay yeah sure. I’ll do it that way. Now I’ve got to eat the Broadway part of the elephant.
— Sarah Snook on bringing The Picture of Dorian Gray from the UK to Broadway. This weekend Snook won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress for her performance in the one-woman show, in which she plays 26 characters. Here’s my review.
My former colleague Stephen Koch spotted some neat M.C. Escher tile art in a book, and spent a holiday weekend bringing it to the web using SVGs. This fascinating pattern is made of 4 tiles which repeat, rotated. Set the tile color with the color’s the hex code in the URL, like this pool blue.
You know those 4-box quadrant models consultants overcharge for? I made a little app to easily make one, and collect the ones I don’t want to forget. Which ones did I miss?
My favorite color is blue, but I can’t easily visualize or describe the differences between common shades of blue, like cornflower or cobalt or electric or navy. There are many different kinds of blue! So I built an interactive blue color palette to reference, that I can also quiz myself with to learn.
This was my first jaunt into coding a little tool with AI and it was both fun and frustrating. It didn’t take long to grab the wheel and get into “I’m just gonna finish this myself” mode. Worth the running start, and the world still needs programmers.
I’m a big todo list person. I run my life on my todo list. I love writing down tasks, putting a date on them, and then checking them off. Deadlines are motivating. I am a productive person! I GET STUFF DONE!
But I can’t todo list myself through this liminal space, this being in between the past and future.
I really tried. I put every passing interest on my todo list, because hey I’ve got time to do it. The problem is, when I assign myself the task of exploring a curiosity: it becomes a obligation, with weight. A great way to kill a lighthearted interest is making it into a project with deadlines.
So except for necessary run-our-lives things one must do, I’m clearing the todo list. Very scary. I’m trying something new, which is to take notes, versus assign tasks (no “I should” allowed). Notice the things that catch my interest, and literally take a note. That’s it.
Then, trust the stuff that I’m really interested in will emerge and move me to action, without a deadline or a checkbox.
Do things without a deadline or a checkbox?! Very very scary. Let’s see how this goes.
I’ve been preoccupied with how to make the most of what little time we get here in this life for as long as I can remember, and it’s only increased with age and brushes with illness. Over ten years ago, this Wait But Why piece by Tim Urban on visualizing the entirety of your life as a finite number of weeks (versus years or months) made a big impression on me.
A week is a short enough time to hold in your head, and long enough time for big things to happen. Then there are eras of your life that span collections of weeks.
At the end of 2024, I was inspired by a few year-end media roundups, like Soderbergh’s extensive list and a friend who keeps a spreadsheet of every movie she’s ever watched. So I started writing very brief reviews of all the media I consume at Media Menu. It’s been a rewarding—and sometimes difficult!—practice to write about what I like and what I don’t. I plan to keep this going.
