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.
Boy do I hate that word.
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.
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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.
The novel I’m currently reading reminded me of that 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.
Work is love made visible.
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.
— Khalil Gibran via my friend Sara, whose book about work is excellent.
“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.
To be clear, I don’t think either are bad pieces of advice. I just think it depends on where you are. I suppose I’ve come to the same conclusion Glennon did when tasked with sharing her best advice:
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 a warm feeling in your body, take note.
I had these feelings earlier this fall, when I got to visit the Guggenheim for Jenny Holzer’s Light Line exhibit. I’ve loved Holzer’s truisms for years now. I barely felt my feet watching them scrolling across the edges of that gorgeous rotunda in person, the way they did in 1989, except at all 6 levels.
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 marble composition book, taking notes on the world, and learning more about herself—and her relationships with friends when they read her words.
One way I’m breaking my Amazon habit is by patronizing independent bookstores through Bookshop. Check out my favorite books on creativity, making stuff, and living well at my Bookshop.
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 name, with my own code. Let’s do this.