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.
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.
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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.
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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.
A friend is considering taking a sabbatical from her job, and is weighing all the considerations: finances, healthcare, job market. She put out a list of questions to a bunch of us, and I wound up writing a little bit about my current, in-progress sabbatical.
Spent what felt like a dumb amount of time looking at money stuff at the start of the year, summing up what we spent in 2024 and on what, and making what basically everyone calls a “budget” for 2025.
My new mantra for 2025: Try easy. No more over-striving, no more perfectionism, no more gritting teeth and grinding through because of some misguided notion that the hardest worker wins. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.)
This year, there will be more relaxing into tasks, letting things take as long as they take, paying attention without judgement to how they are unfolding, more flow, more ease, more deep focus time with fewer distractions, more openness, more delight in the doing versus the outcome. It’s a new and wild and weird way to live. Happy New Year!
I often get asked, “What would you tell your 16-year-old self?” I’d tell her to get over the perfectionist thing. Stop trying to be a straight-A student. We think striving for perfection is an accelerant but, in reality, it makes you risk-averse, emotionally bound to your scorecard. It’s too hard to live under that.
– Sarah Friar, saying a helpful thing for my my 40-something-year-old self.
Someone asked me to do a thing. It was a nice someone, and an optional thing. A thing that’s generally a nice thing to be asked to do.
It would be an easy thing to do, if not an exciting thing. It was the kind of request I felt good about getting–not because I love doing this thing, but because getting asked made me feel important. The request came from someone I want to like me, and to feel like I am there for them. The thing wasn’t something I was thrilled about doing, but it felt easier to say yes than no at the time of the request. So I did say yes, even though it was a very neutral yes.
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The novel I’m currently reading reminded me of this useful concept for creatives called “the taste gap.” It’s the idea is that there’s a difference between what you want to create and what you are able to create. It’s the reason why a lot of creative projects stall and never get made. Most people give up trying when they see how vast and disappointing and insurmountable the gap seems.
All of us who do creative work get into it because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t good. But your taste is still killer. And because of your taste, you can tell what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point quit.
Glass’s advice? Do a huge volume of work. Keep practicing, and your abilities will start to catch up to your taste.
I like Mandy Brown’s twist on this: that practice increases your competence which in turn elevates your taste. Therefore, making things cultivates rather than closes the taste gap–and that’s where the joy of making stuff is.
As you build your craft, whether it’s writing or radio or glass blowing or leading a team, you develop ever more ideas about what’s possible in your work. As your skill grows, so too do your ambitions, such that your taste always and forever outstrips your abilities. For every increment of improvement, you extend your desires out that much further. This is not to say you will never be satisfied with your work—although, that is a not uncommon scenario, and not necessarily as dreary as it sounds. But rather that as you become more capable, you are wont to find as much joy and satisfaction in the process of developing your skill as in the outcomes of it.
The work of creativity, at the end of the day, is the work of creativity—not what you create, but who you become in the act of creation.
Emphasis mine. Who do you become in the act of creation? More you. A more true you.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
“Fake it till you make it” is a common piece of advice that served me for a long time, especially when I was younger in my career, suffering from imposter syndrome, wanting to achieve more but unsure of myself.
Years ago, I asked T how she thought I could be get promoted to a partner at the firm. She responded with a version of “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” She said, “Forget the promotion. Just act like a partner. Show up to the office like a partner. Lead like a partner. Make the actual promotion a no-brainer, administrative step, because you’ll already be one.” That sparked something in me. I set my mind toward doing that, and it worked. It worked then, and for several other career-related achievement cycles afterward.
Today, I’m in the midst of a life transition, a path towards something different than the one I’ve already travelled. So I’m looking around and questioning everything-the stories, the tools, the feelings, the systems, the beliefs, and the advice that got me here. And I want to throw most of it out of the window. What got me here won’t get me there.
That’s why I’m discarding “fake it till you make it.” Because faking it got me farther from myself than I liked, and now I need to come back. These days, making it seems like the very opposite of faking it.
So, while “fake it till you make it” served Past Me, “keep it real and you’ve made it” is for Now Me.
There is nothing that I can think of that I could say is correct and true all the time. […] There are things like principles that have guided me well through certain periods of my life and then are completely untrue in the next part of my life.
There’s a lot of advice out there in the world, some of it truly great, and none of it is true all the time for everyone. Pick, choose, and revise what’s right for you.
Pay attention to the things that expand your heart. When a person, a work of art, an essay, a film, a song, a photograph intrigues you, makes your chest feel bigger, gives rise to that warm feeling in your body, take note.
Lean into the possibility and expansion. Pull on the thread. Where else can it go? Ride the wave all the way to the shore. Ask yourself: what about this connected with my true self? What is the thing it’s saying for me I haven’t said yet?
One way back to yourself is reconnecting with the things you loved as a child.
When I was 11 years old, Harriet the Spy was my bible. In retrospect it’s so obvious: A tomboy writer in NYC carries around her marbled composition book, taking notes on the world, and learning more about herself–and her relationships with friends when they read her words.
When you experience something in life–and as much as I’ve experienced in the game of basketball–the beautiful part of it for me is to give back. You don’t experience things to keep. You experience it to give it back.
– Basketball great Teresa Weatherspoon on what she brought from her start as a player in the inaugural season of the WNBA to coaching today.
Lately I’ve noticed a clear and consistent pulse of an old feeling I haven’t had for a long time: I want to share more of how I think, what I learn, and what I like online. That is, I want to give it back. But not on cookie-cutter content platforms where we’ve all signed up to work a data entry job feeding an LLM. On my own webpages, on my own domain names, with my own code. Let’s do this.
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