I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die.
The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
— Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, one of my favorite books about writing.
January 1st may be an arbitrary Gregorian boundary condition, but I love an annual moment to take stock and plan change. This year I’m focusing less on resolutions to achieve ambitious goals—write a book, run a marathon, drop 40 pounds—and more on intentions to improve my daily habits in small ways. Things like: plug my phone in another room before I go to bed, start my day with morning pages, eat a hearty breakfast to fuel the day, stop snacking after a lighter dinner, add one more workout per week.
I’m only fifteen days in here, but so far, so good. The first week I had to train my attention on these changes and work to make them. This week, they are feeling a bit easier and more automatic. If I keep at it, at some point these changes will be no-brainers, and it’ll be time to make new tweaks and improvements. Wish me luck. What changes are you making in 2026?
Happy New Year! My favorite January tradition is treating myself to a fresh new notebook. A friend asked our group what our best notebooks are, and that question was a gift because I have thoughts.
Here’s what I said.
(via) Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay about publishing today is that it’s all about self-publishing. These points jumped out at me:
Being a book author has a lot more cachet attached to it than being a blogger. I’ve been both, and for me, engaging with an audience online is way more fun and fulfilling than having a book with my name on it sitting on a shelf.
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.
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.
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.
