Fernando Gros's Blog, page 9

Short Book Reviews For January 2022

I’ve discussed books in various ways here over the years. Often books just get mentioned in articles, and occasionally a book is reviewed as part of a whole blog post.

This means a lot of books I read don’t get a mention. But I’d like to start a conversation around reading more this year. And, in particular, reading more broadly.

So, every month I’m going to post the books I read in the month (I’m a few days late here with January). The criterion is simple: books I finished in the month, regardless of when I started. In the future I might include books I didn’t finish, but for now all of these were read in full.

So, here’s to more reading in 2022, starting with the books I read in January.

No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute, by Lauren Elkin

The best way to explore any new city is by bus. Not a tourist bus. Just a regular commuter bus. Hop on and see how people live in that place. This short memoir chronicles the daily commute through Paris of a lecturer during a tumultuous year of collective and personal tragedy. It’s beautiful and poignant, in a way that feels full of detail but uses language economically, almost to the point of Zen-like simplicity.

The Art of Memoir, by Mary Karr

Famous for her fearlessly frank memoirs, here Karr takes on the role of mentor to potential memoir writers. In particular, Karr addresses the excuses we often make when we tell our own stories – from not being sure exactly what happened, not wanting to offend people, and what to do if we remember a moment differently from how others do. What emerges from Karr’s reflections says something not just to writers but to anyone who wants to fully own their lived experiences.

Hyphen, by Paris Mahdavi

Many of us express more than one national identity. British Indian, or Chinese Canadian, for example. In the US, this sometimes takes a hyphen: African-American, Italian-American (although usage is changing). This short book explores though memoir, ethnography, and the history of language the question of what it means to have a hyphenated identity. Our identities are becoming more intermingled over time, and this book asks a lot of questions about what this means for us and how the language we use to describe ourselves and others can shape the society we live in.

Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, by Kelefa Sanneh

This isn’t a book about musicians. At many points, Sanneh doesn’t even seem to understand how musicians think about their craft. Rather, it’s a book about constructing your identity through the music you listen to and the genres you identify with. It’s a book about the intersection of music fandom and culture. This makes the omission of some current trends, like the popularity of K Pop and the near ubiquity of Latin influences on the charts, somewhat surprising. At times, I found myself wanting to argue with how Sanneh presented music’s recent history. But that debate, were it to happen, would probably resemble so many of the impassioned debates I used to have with my friends in record stores and when comparing mix tapes, back when music was a metaphor for everything that was good in life.

Obit, by Victoria Chang

This anthology of poems is about grief, which means it’s also about hope, or, at least, about how we continue to live when people and things and places we loved are gone. The opening inscription quotes Macbeth: “Give sorrow words.” Chang digs – almost archeologically – for the roots of sorrow to find exact moments when the parts of life crack and tear and reveal wounds that may never heal.

Letters to Wendy’s, by Joe Wenderoth

Imagine visiting a fast food store every day for a year and filling out one of those customer comment cards every time. That’s the premise of this funny, tragic, and at times surreal novel. Yes, it’s a comment on fast food and consumer culture, but it’s also so much more. Not all existential epiphanies happen in chic cafés.

Still Possible, by David Whyte

A collection of new poems by the popular poet David Whyte. I was introduced to his work through the On Being Podcast and during the pandemic enjoyed his bi-monthly online talks where he reflects on poetry and life. This collection meditates on the passing of time and the slow evolution of our character. As we get older, it can feel like life is taking opportunities away from us. But it’s also true that we are realizing how many important lessons we’ve learnt from the paths we’ve walked and things we’ve observed for so long.

The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage into Self-Mastery, by Brianna Wiest

Self-sabotage is one of those phrases that gets thrown around, but it never really stuck for me. It just sounds so damn illogical. Why would you sabotage yourself, I wondered. But, as this book unpacks, there’s all sorts of ways we get in our own way and mess things up for ourselves, and it connects to the stories we tell about our past, our ability, and our circumstances.

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Facing The Third Year Of The Pandemic

I’ve been reading my tweets from two years ago. It’s eye-opening to see what mattered back then.

At the start of February 2020, I was sad about my favourite daily planner, the lovely JIYU-style, being discontinued. I feared it would “turn my world upside down”.

On No!!!

My favourite “JIYU-Style” planner from @sannopub looks like it has been discontinued for 2020. My world’s been turned upside down!

— Fernando Gros (@fernandogros) February 3, 2020

Of course, something else turned all our lives upside down. As we enter the third year of the pandemic, it does feel things have changed.

Turning Towards The Next Challenges

We’re no longer facing a mysterious threat. There’s plenty of knowledge available about the disease – how it’s transmitted, evolves, affects the body, can be treated – and the cost of recovery. We have vaccines, masks, tests, and a sense of how important good ventilation is to making indoor spaces safer.

But it’s not all good news. A lot of people aren’t vaccinated, booster programmes are slowing, masks have become politicized or poorly utilized, the airborne risk hasn’t been well communicated, and the ferocity of the sickness is often downplayed, as are the long-term effects. There’s more impatient and wishful thinking that just wants the pandemic to end according to some sort of convenient human timeline.

Sometimes, it feels like the world has gone a little crazy from spending so much time locked inside staring at the internet. Speaking about this recently, the director-general of security at the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation explained that the pandemic has increased exposure to “…extremist messaging, misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

The internet is the world’s single most potent and powerful incubator of extremism. Online radicalisation is nothing new, but COVID-19 sent it into overdrive. Isolated individuals spent more time online, exposed to extremist messaging, misinformation and conspiracy theories.

— ASIO (@ASIOGovAu) February 9, 2022

Writing in The Atlantic, Ed Yong explained the risk presented by the Omicron variant as less risky for us as individuals, but riskier for us as a society. This feels true about the pandemic as a whole right now. We can get vaccinated and boosted, wear high-quality masks and face very low risks. But we also live in societies and don’t always mind our collective risks.

Here in the UK, for example, the government is moving towards not reporting numbers of cases or hospitalizations and not asking people who have the disease to stay home, making every social interaction more like a journey into the unknown.

The Danger Of Being Stuck

“When did you settle on your current routine?”
“By early – maybe mid – April 2020. For a long time it served me well.”
“And when did you realize it wasn’t working for you anymore?”
“About February or March 2021.”

This moment in a therapy session a few months ago crystallized something important. I was stuck in a routine that had kept me safe in the face of fearful uncertainty. Except now the way I’d adapted to a crisis had become the pattern of my life.

Last month, I got on a plane for the first time in nearly two years to visit my daughter in the US. Just like my last flights before the lockdowns started, I was fully masked all the way. So, too, were my fellow passengers. And we had tests, extra paperwork and digital pings to tell us if we’d potentially been exposed.

Washington D.C. was hit hard by Omicron over Christmas. But everyone there was masked up, with many wearing proper N95 and KN95 respirators. My daughter’s college requires students to be vaccinated. Apparently fewer than 20 students are not. All students have to be tested every two weeks or else their student card stops working, meaning they can’t enter buildings, shop on campus, or borrow books.

The trip was the first time since March 2020 that I’d visited a cafe, or gallery, or any kind of physical store. I felt safe – largely because everyone around was also trying to be safe.

It was eye-opening.

The Pandemic Is Not Over

There’s a chorus of commentators who want to pretend the pandemic is over. But it isn’t, and hoping it will be within a convenient timeframe won’t make it so.

INSTW

This tweet reminds me that, if anything, we’re barely halfway through the journey. We don’t know all the long-term effects of this disease, either on the bodies who experienced it, or the societies that sometimes entered a cold civil war over it.

And, collectively, we haven’t really paused to grieve.

We’ve started to hear a lot about the disease becoming endemic. Like the famous meme, that word doesn’t really mean what many people think it means.

A micro-linguistics lesson:

Pandemic, epidemic, & endemic are words for diseases in populations, so they all contain “demic” which means people (like “demographics”).

Pan- means all
Epi- means upon
En- means within

En-demic. Not End-emic.

Within the people. Always a problem.

— Dr Ellie Murray, ScD (@EpiEllie) January 24, 2022

Along with the misleading “Omicron is mild” chorus, there’s been an even more misleading suggestion that COVID will naturally evolve to be less dangerous. That’s a big maybe. It might – or it might not.

The New Normal Revisited

A few days after returning to London, I was pinged by the NHS, which meant someone on my flight back, or the drive home, had tested positive. After a couple of PCR tests and a slew of rapid tests, it was clear I was okay (and thankful for having worn my N95 throughout the flight and the trip home from the airport).

We can probably expect 2022 will continue to be like this. We can do things we used to do, taking risks that we can negotiate, but to a large extent the experience will depend on the behaviour of others. For some, it might be “like the old days”; for many, it won’t.

The lingering question is how will we cope and what happens as more and more people get tired of this? Recent articles in the New York Times and Washington Post explore how the 1918 pandemic didn’t end in a day and, in fact, a great deal of suffering continued even after people acted like it was over.

Living With Risk

I’ve been in three car accidents. Only one of them put me in hospital. I could argue that makes car accidents pretty mild, given the number of car trips I’ve made in my life, and that it therefore wouldn’t make sense to have lots of rules and precautions around getting in a car. Except that kind of argument would be insane. Driving a car is risky, and all sorts of rules, customs and technology silently make it much, much safer.

Lots of things involve risk. But we do them safely because of all the work, most of which we don’t do ourselves, that makes them safer.

Take skiing. That’s pretty risky. But skiers today benefit from all sorts of safety-enhancing technology in their equipment. Add to that all the on-mountain work of preparing the ski fields, monitoring the weather, planting signposts, and other careful maintenance. That’s all before you even start taking lessons or adding your own knowledge to the equation.

I Want to Try, But…

On that trip to D.C., I visited an art gallery. At first, walking though the “Countervailing Theory” exhibition by Toyin Ojih Odutola at the Hirschhorn Museum felt odd. I noticed my body moving too fast. I was out of step with the tempo required to take in the work. As I slowed down, I didn’t just see more in the pictures, I felt something welling up inside myself – the awe, the joy, the unsettling of comfortable expectations that comes from experiencing art in person.

I was moved, and I wanted more.

Now, back in London, I’m not sure. Going out feels like climbing into a small boat to sail into a storm. Sure, I’d probably survive. I’m vaccinated and boosted and not shy about wearing an N95. Yes, I’ll get mocked and harassed. But I’ve lived with bullies my whole life anyway.

Still, I find myself asking – is it worth it?

I’ve waited so long for this great wave to finally wash over us, I now find myself asking, “Why not wait a little longer?”

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Thoughts For 2022

This is my 45th and final blogpost for 2021. I hope these pieces have helped you navigate this moment in our history with some sense of hope and inspiration. None of us got the year we were expecting, and my writing during 2021 took me into some unexpected and challenging places at times.

In 2022 the blog will change a little. Since, in the past, these changes have caused some readers to jump to conclusions, I thought it best to write a few words about what will be different and, perhaps more importantly, what will stay the same.

Its major themes in recent years have been creativity, productivity, technology, and simplicity. I’ll continue to concentrate on them. But as well as that, I want to discuss more freely the books I’m reading. You get a bit of that in the articles. But I want to be a bit freer about writing reviews or summaries of things I’ve read or tools I use, without having to make them fit those themes.

I recently wrote a thread on Twitter about three big philosophical problems that are troubling me: bad faith, credentialism, and the future of criticism.

Don’t worry. This isn’t going to turn into a blog full of political rants. But I am concerned about the quality and tone of the conversations we have. They affect our frame of mind and our ability to focus on our creative passions. And so we have to address them.

I’ve always tried to balance having a personal blog and writing things you might find useful. This balance will continue but will shift a little in 2022 (it’s already been shifting this way for a few years). I’ve always thought of myself as more of an essayist than a blogger or online content creator. Increasingly, this means approaching what I do as creative non-fiction.

My hope is always that the words you read here would be just as effective if printed in a book or magazine.

The Blog In 2022

For the past few years I’ve written about 50 articles a year. The tempo will be similar in 2022. But because of the way I’m structuring the year, together with my forthcoming relocation, there will be more weeks when I don’t post or write for the blog. You’ll probably see fewer posts in the coming year.

The This Week I Quit series will continue in 2022. But I will bring the series on Mastery to a close soon. The topic still fascinates me. But the drafts I have on hand are long and yet terse. It seems to me that much rewriting is necessary before they become helpful.

I’m considering removing comments from the blog. They now look like a relic from another era, and over the years they’ve caused me a lot of pain. I’ve deleted so many cruel and unhelpful comments, and no longer feel any joy when I see a new comment waiting for me.

There will be other small tweaks that you may not even notice. But then again, you might.

I may be getting ahead of myself here, but the blog will turn 20 in 2024. That is still a long way off, but given how quickly time seems to pass these days, also feels like something that will be upon us surprisingly soon.

Obviously my creative practice isn’t where I want it to be right now. But I have an idea of where I’d like to be by 2024 (and 2031). It’s a destination I’ve been navigating towards for some time, and 2022 will be another course correction in that direction.

This blog has always been a window into my creative practice. It started as I made the transition out of academia. And at every stage when the blog has been most fun to write and also most engaging for readers, it’s been a reflection of that creative journey.

Tensegrity In 2022

Finally, in keeping with my yearly theme for 2022, I want to try and embrace a tension and move the blog in two different directions at the same time — by making it both lighter and more serious.

The surprising gift of the past two years is that I’ve enjoyed writing the blog more than I had in a long time. Necessity drove me to write more, but I’ve also had more fun doing it. But I also know that many of the posts were heavy; again, of necessity. For 2022 I’d like to find a bit more levity, a bit more inspiration, a bit more hope.

I also want to write things you can trust. Well-researched pieces that will be worth the time you spend reading them, and will give you a chance to think seriously about your own life.

We need both right now. Seriousness and fun. My hope is that in 2022, when you read something here, you will experience some pleasant sense of anticipation as well as the thought that what you’re about to read will be worth considering.

Until then, I hope you have a joyful new year, and that 2022 brings joy and delight in the things you do. I look forward to sharing the coming year with you.

all the best,

f.

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Scheduling And Recreation In 2022

“That’s the way an artist thinks about time.”

I was talking to Mike Vardy about time management. Mike is bit of a legend in the productivity world and the host of the Productivitist podcast. I received some coaching from Mike in 2018 and we were catching up at the start of 2020 to talk about how my approach to planning my week had evolved.

Scheduling and Daily Themes

In our coaching sessions Mike had helped me set a theme for each day. This lets you group similar tasks. You don’t feel like you’re constantly switching your focus and you can comfortably assign important but non urgent tasks to the next available day for that activity. It’s faster to pay all your bills if you do them together, rather than logging in and out of your bank account at all sorts of random moments during the week.

This approach took a lot of stress out of my life at a time when I was struggling with anxiety issues. My life was already pretty complex at the time, running a freelance business, building a house, helping my kid finish high school, planning a move to London, and learning Japanese calligraphy – there was a lot going on!

But, with the move to London and my daughter leaving for college I was thinking, at the start of 2020, my life would be simpler.

Of course it didn’t work ot that way!

Lessons In Time Pandemic Time

I was used to working from home. But having my wife and daughter also working from home as well was a shock. Add to that the constant interruption of deliveries as all food, groceries, and household items came by post, and the burden of cooking all our meals when eating out wasn’t possible.

I wrote about time-blocking and time-tracking because my own sense of time became untenable. I wanted to remind myself of what I knew and experiment with what was happening to me in this moment.

Thankfully the principles I’d learnt from Mike helped me adapt well to this moment. And the time tracking showed me that I was doing better at managing time than I thought. Yes, there were lots of interruptions. But, they weren’t that disastrous.

The problem was the voice in my head, complaining every time the doorbell rang, or I had to unpack boxes. Yes, I was losing time to the chore, but not as much as I imagined, and it was worth it for the peace of mind that came with staying home during the worst weeks.

Three Questions Emerged

Looking back to Christmas 2019 I had such a clear sense of when my holidays began and ended. But now the opposite is true. I take time off from one thing or another. But, I haven’t had a proper holiday since early 2020.

My feeling for the seasons is also blurry. I couldn’t easily describe Spring this year. Or Autumn. I know we had a summer, because I remember wearing shorts and enduring sleepless nights in the too hot, too poorly ventilated terrace house where I live. But, ask me to remember which blogposts I wrote over the summer, or what meals I cooked, and I’m not sure I could.

And, while my days have been productive and, more importantly, healthy and safe, they’ve also been monotonous as well. I write, every day. That much is good. But most days, that’s it. I cook. And watch TV, far more often than I’d like.

These reflections, which have come up again and again when I journal, meditate, or just walk around my local park, leave me with three questions I want to address in 2022.

1. How can add holidays back into my life?
2. How can I feel the seasons of the year again?
3. How can I make my days feel more colorful and creative?

Learning To Create Structure

“Education is a game. Not all students learn to play it well.” I’m not sure if Dylan William said it exactly like that, but it was something similar. Dylan was the Dean of my School at King’s College London his research opened my eyes to the way class shapes the experience of students.

I grew up with parents who were always encouraging me to take my studies seriously. But, I struggled with structure. In High School many students turned up on the first day folders that were magically well suited to organizing large amounts of notes per subject. But, others of us spent the first weeks scrambling to find similar ring pull binders, separators, hole punches and writing paper.

At university some students seemed to know how make sense of their week with only a few hours of lecture and seminar commitments. All I saw was an opportunity to play guitar and surfboard all week.

By the time I tried university again I finally knew some people who’d graduated, and had enough life experience myself, to understand how to structure my weeks and be productive. I saw that people in academia planned their weeks and years in very precise ways. Eventually I started reading things like Getting Things Done by David Allen, or the early writing of Merlin Mann, and learnt to create structure for myself.

Holidays and Re-Creation

Once I’d become a research student I knew how to divide my year up to make sure there was time for holidays and also personal development. After I left academia I kept the same habits, making sure I scheduled breaks, conferences, and time for personal and professional reviews.

Up until 2020 I kept that habit going. Most artists, creatives, and freelancers do something similar. Of course, in the pandemic it got weird. Mostly, it was my calendar reminding me that I was supposed to have flown to some place in the world when instead I was stuck in London.

I really don’t know what 2022 will look like for me. Whatever happens I will be moving to Australia. But, the details of everything are vague.

But, it’s still possible to put down some markers. To choose some weeks, for holidays, for reviews, for recreation.

The last word, in particular, feels important. I like to think of recreation as re-creation – remaking ourselves through play. Hiking through a forest, skiing down a mountain, or walking along an empty beach all remind me of who I am.

We might not be able to do the ideal versions of our recreation yet. But, we can schedule time for them, and do what we can when that time shows up.

Digital Sabbaticals

I’ve sat in front of my TV screen way too much in the past two years. Far more than I normally would. TV, by which I mean streaming services, YouTube, and live sports, soaked up the time that might’ve gone into concerts, galleries, and going to the cinema. But also, it often soaked up nightime reading and late nite guitar playing as well.

Hiding behind how many “good shows” there are on all the streaming services is a lame excuse.

Especially given how elusive seasons have felt recently.

So, I’m going to take a regular sabbatical from screens. One week in seven. Only essential email and messages. No social media, no blogposts, no youtube, no streaming tv, no zoom, no online courses, no non-urgent communications.

Once a month felt like too much. Once a season, not enough. Every seventh week will mean a break from screens is never too far away.

But, it will be regular enough to force me to rethink my routines. To remind me that time is passing and it’s important to consider where it goes.

I’m not interested in “giving up TV.” I’ve always felt the folks who brag about not owning or watching TV are kind of misguided. The line between TV and Film is opaque now. And YouTube can be as much of a tool for education as for entertainment.

But, to avoid feeling like every day is the same you need to make some days different. And just knowing that for at least seven weeks in 2022 I won’t be sitting on the safe looking at a TV screen already makes me feel different.

Artist Time

In the conversation with Mike Vardy that I mentioned at the start of this piece I was describing how my days were actually more or less the same. I’d dropped some of the daily themes and was doing the same thing, writing in the morning, working on music or visual art in the afternoons.

This reflected my ideal day. It was also the less complicated version of life I hoped to create after moving to London. I want to navigate towards a new version of that in 2022.

I’m going to try something I’m calling “touch everything every day.” I’ve got writing, photography, music, calligraphy. Within those there’s one or two projects I want to work on. Of course, I can’t do them all every day. That would be madness.

But, I’m going to touch on them.

This might mean just taking one serious photo in the day, or making some calligraphic marks in my regular note taking.

Mostly, it’s about making every day more artful.

That’s something I’ve missed but struggled to name about my “old life.” It just felt more artful and creative. Not in the sense of overall output. But, in the small moments of the day. In the details.

So, here’s to 2022, whatever it might bring. Yes, it will be difficult. But, my hope is to also make it a little more artful, less monotonous, more full of play. Hopefully come this time next year we can all remember what we did each season a little more clearly and feel a little freer in our lives as well.

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Tensegrity – Yearly Theme For 2022

New Year, New Me. It might feel like a cliché, but most of us still feel like the New Year is a chance to hit the reset button.

We know New Year’s resolutions don’t work. We usually give up on them before January is over. Sometimes they’re too ambitious. But mostly they fail us because they create feelings of shame as soon as we fall behind with our goals.

Say you’ve set a resolution like “I want to read 50 books this year.” If you read 40 books, did you fail? Was your resolution about hitting a number, or was it really about feeling more informed, or getting back to the joy of reading?

So many resolutions have hard targets that set us up to feel like failures. Lose this much weight, go to the gym so many times, take this many trips. No wonder they soon overwhelm us.

What Are Yearly Themes?

A yearly theme allows us to set a course for our lives without the restrictions of New Year’s resolutions. Maybe your book reading goal was tied to learning. Well, if your theme is learning, you just keep navigating towards that.

Even if you don’t read any books for a few weeks, you can still choose learning. And, if you decide partway through the year that reading journal articles and magazine essays works better for you, then you can switch and still be on theme. Or you could pivot away from so much reading and try courses instead. That’s still learning.

I’ve written before about yearly themes and how to choose one. If you’ve never done this before, take a look at the article. It goes into detail about how to choose a good yearly theme for yourself.

Yearly theme for 2022 – Tensegrity

During the pandemic, I’ve regularly attended online Pilates classes with the Erika Bloom studio in New York. These classes have taught me a lot about the body and how to take care of it. During the classes, one word consistently popped up.

Tensegrity.

The concept of tensile integrity, or tensegrity, is popular in architecture. It happens when compression and tension happen at the same time and hold objects in place, giving a structure its form. It was popularised by Buckminster Fuller and can be used to create some magical-looking structures.

Tensegrity also describes tension between muscles, fascia, ligaments, and tendons. This tension pulls on our bones and joints to create a body structure that is stable, strong, and able to move freely. These oppositional forces and how well we harness them define our shape.

In 2022, freedom, stability and strength are things I want. There’ll be plenty of tension in life, and I need to turn that into a positive force, to see the tension as a path to integrity and living my values.

Everything suggests 2022 will be another hard year, for me personally, and for all of us collectively.

Looking Back On Previous Themes

The theme for 2021 was Imagination. I didn’t expect life to return to “normal”, and I hoped Imagination would help me create and not get stuck. It mostly worked. The middle of the year was hard. I fell away from the theme and my core habits for a while. But mostly, the theme guided me to a satisfying life of the mind, guiding my choices in everything from the films I watched, the art I studied, and even the way I thought about my upcoming move.

If you want to look at previous themes, you can read about them here.

2021 – Imagination
2020 – Momentum
2019 – Conviction
2018 – Simple

Moving Beyond Balance

Our admiration for work–life balance is just one example of the way we prize balance. But, life is lived in tension. Life comes at us in extreme ways sometimes. It knocks us off balance, and the real art of living is how we cope and recover.

Besides, the middle ground is seldom distinctive, interesting, or a fertile place for creative activity.

A lot of the Pilates practice that inspired this theme of tensegrity is about balance in movement. It’s not just stand-on-one-foot balance. It’s stand-on-one-foot-while-you-move-your-arms-and-swing-your-other-leg balance. Which, of course, is preparation for the “you’ve slipped and you’re falling, can you regain balance” moments you may encounter.

The tensions we live with never fully resolve. This reminds me of something Pádraig Ó Tuama recently wrote:

“There was a Polish rabbi in the 19th century, Rabbi Simcha Bunim, who urged his followers to write ‘The world was created for me’ on one piece of paper and keep it in their pocket. On another piece of paper, they should write ‘I am but dust and ashes’ and keep it in the other. This, he proposed, is a necessary tension.”
– Pádraig Ó Tuama

So, here’s to 2022, to tension and integrity, to getting knocked off my feet and getting up again. To tensegrity.

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2021 Year In Review

The pandemic was meant to be over. At least, a lot of people thought it would be. I don’t know; maybe they still do. I’ve been in isolation since 9 March 2020. No cafes, concerts, cinemas, galleries, or sporting events. I haven’t even been to a supermarket.

I feel like a lost astronaut on an abandoned space station. Going through essential routines. Maintaining basic fitness. Waiting to return to earth.

We experienced time differently this year. Our clocks became snakes that ate their own tails. Déjà vu was our normal waking state. And the world increasingly felt like a strange, surreal sort of place.

2021 – The Eternal Winter

Some days were hot and sunny, but in a way 2021 feels like one long winter. The way life becomes smaller and slower and we become more pensive seems to have marked out 2021 for many and most of my friends.

Christmas this year almost blurs with Christmas last year, as new cases rise steeply thanks to another variant. Hopefully, fewer people will die and ambulances won’t drown out the sound of carols. But there will be a lot of suffering while we huddle again in small festive gatherings.

Just last week, the UK was rocked by reports Number 10 had parties during last year’s lockdowns. We had full stadiums during the summer wave of new cases following “freedom day”. Even now, the Premier League is canceling games because some teams can’t field enough players, and again the stadiums are full of unmasked fans.

There’s been a rush to get boosters and vaccinations in the past week. And a few more people are wearing masks. But in shops or workplaces, many are not. It’s been a pattern throughout the year – people behaving at the first possible opportunity like this is over, only for that behaviour to contribute to the pandemic lasting longer.

For many of the rest of us, this has increasingly become a winter of discontent.

Our Restless Mood

We feel like our decision-making reserves are nearly spent. We’re tired, with a hard-to-pinpoint feeling of discontent. The word “languishing” was thrown around a lot, thanks to an influential article by Adam Grant in the New York Times. But other words might summarize it better.

We are restless.

You can sense this in the so-called great resignation. Vast numbers of people have quit their job in 2021. It’s like we’re going through a collective realignment of where we live, where we work, and how we play.

Commenting on Jack Dorsey’s recent departure as CEO of Twitter, this article hinted at the restlessness many tech leaders feel. It might be hard to relate to the bored billionaire syndrome. Maybe these guys just don’t want to fix the mess they created. But there’s also the sense the world has shifted in the past two years, and the fun opportunities are not where they once were. As one interviewee in the piece says, “Silicon Valley tech is the old guard.”

There are undoubtedly many reasons we woke up and decided we wanted to quit jobs, change priorities, move home, and get fitter, smarter, kinder, or all three. But there is one thing we seem to have in common.

We are spending more time on screens.

A Life On Screens

Given how much of life is mediated by screens and the growing madness they seem to induce, it’s no wonder that news was dominated by the online world as well.

In fact, it’s been a huge year for tech again, with innovations like social audio, but also an increasingly bleak picture of how some platforms – Facebook and Instagram in particular – weaponize misinformation and trade the health of young people especially to generate ad revenue.

Of course, our screens also bring us joy as well, from video calls with friends and loved ones to wonderful entertainment, especially on the growing number of streaming platforms. There’s a reason TV features so prominently on the list of things I loved in 2021: these platforms are aggregating talent, insight, and cash to make some incredible shows.

But we have the prospect of screens dominating an even greater portion of our lives, with the prospect of virtual reality, the so-called metaverse. It’s already running into problems, with racism, and violence against women, even before it’s really a thing.

Something even more troubling is happening with the thing we used to call the internet.

Neo-Medievalism

The year 2021 was marked by the mainstreaming of digital currencies, the rise of non-fungible tokens, and the clamour over Web 3.0. A lot of this feels frantic, sudden – and, if you dive into much of the rhetoric in tech circles, almost cult-like. These technologies promise to cure our social ills. But they also allow no room for doubt, or questioning.

The year 2021 also started with an insurrection in Washington, DC. Really, it was more of an attempted self-coup. Alarmingly, this wasn’t just young men, the most easily radicalized demographic, but often older folks of all genders. They seemed to share a worldview, at odds with the rest of society, and fuelled by extreme and quite violent beliefs.

To me, as someone with a background in religious studies, all of this feels familiar. A prescient article in New York Magazine summed it up best: the world increasingly feels like the Middle Ages and we are the peasants in a new feudal society.

Our lives are governed by technology we don’t understand and often can’t control, created by people we’ll never meet and cannot reason with, and it is fomenting disparities in wealth that could exceed anything seen in human history.

In fact, this technology is like a semi-spiritual layer of meaning that shrouds the rest of life. Our experience of the world is mediated through screens anyway. But now, there’s this grid full of beliefs, conspiracies, and misinformation that lies over it.

These beliefs foster a mistrust of existing structures of society and encourage people to align as guilds, each with their rules for belonging, as a way to cope and find companionship.

We should worry what the consequences might be.

Humanity Gets Left Behind

When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he said, “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.” While I prefer the word humanity to mankind, the point still stands; one astronaut was a proxy for an adventure we were all part of.

Space doesn’t feel like that anymore.

We won’t be invited to the billionaires’ party. Bezos’s plans sounds like the most exclusive networking club. As much as it might disappoint my childhood self, who dreamed of designing spaceships, I don’t feel like any of this is money well spent.

But as we’ve seen from the fragmented response to the pandemic, climate change, and threats to democracy, we’re not good at collective action right now. We need that to change.

Urgently.

Some Good News You Might’ve Missed

I want to stop there and focus instead on the good we saw in 2021. The WHO started rolling out a malaria vaccine and China was declared malaria-free, with more countries likely to become malaria-free in the next few years. Also, cervical cancer rates have fallen by 90 per cent, thanks to the human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV). A promising heart disease drug was approved, and we may even be on the cusp of a cure for HIV.

NASA’s Perseverance rover collected rock samples that will be the first material from Mars to be flown to earth. Substantial progress was made in the use of renewable energy sources and the roll-out of electric vehicles. Financial markets have started to take a dim view of coal and oil investments. China has made an important move towards sustainability with new green energy projects, reforestation efforts, the banning of bitcoin mining, and the protection of endangered species, with pandas no longer under threat of extinction.

The Oscars had their most diverse year ever with an exciting slew of winners. Keystone XL and PennEast pipelines were cancelled and the role of indigenous groups in fighting environmental degradation was highlighted. Chile and Switzerland approved same-sex marriage. Several countries voted to legalize or increase safe access to abortion.

Facebook came under serious scrutiny, and Donald Trump was banned from Twitter!

And let’s not forget, despite the struggles we’ve had, we vaccinated most of the world’s population, saved many millions of lives and helped alleviate the suffering of many more.

21 things I loved in 2021

I can’t imagine being a young adult today, finishing high school, going through college, or starting a career. I’ve watched my daughter wrestle with her university experience, the online classes, the feeling of disconnection, the uncertainty of returning to campus, and I’ve loved her all the more.

Career advancement and accolades have come to my wife, even as she worked every day in the improvised home office and live-streaming space we hastily created in March 2020. We’ve never spent as much time together as we have in the last two years, and it’s been fascinating to see more of the way she works. So often big slices of the lives of our significant others are partitioned off from us, and working from home creates a chance to glimpse into that world.

I’ve loved a lot of new music this year. Like Taylor Swift’s reimagined Red Album, the insanely catchy “Leave the Door Open” collaboration between Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, Adele’s 30, Daddy’s Home by St Vincent, and the stand out jazz album of the year, Daring Mind, by the Jihye Lee Orchestra.

I complained earlier about watching too much TV, but the reason is partly the amount of great stuff there is to watch. I particularly enjoyed The Cook of Castamar, season 2 of El Cid, Foundation, Ted Lasso, and WandaVision. While I saw fewer films than normal again this year, The Power of The Dog, Nomadland, and The Green Knight stood out.

Three books had a big impact on me in 2021: James Nestor’s Breathe: The new science of a lost art; Kathleen Belew’s Bring the war home: The White Power movement and paramilitary America; and Tom Nichols’ The death of expertise: The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters.

I had a lot of fun with social audio this year, from helping host big pop-culture-oriented rooms on Clubhouse to much smaller but no less impactful spaces discussing art and technology on Twitter.

And Chelsea won the Champions League!

Looking Ahead

I’m feeling very cautious about the start of 2022. The year will eventually find me living in Australia again. I’m deeply ambivalent about that. Yes, I look forward to seeing my parents again. I’ve often thought about how good it will be to explore the wilderness again. But Australia feels foreign now. Can you be an expat in your own country?

The year 2021, like 2020, has changed me. It might take a while to really understand that change. I started seeing a therapist again. The whole question of well-being, from avoiding disease to maintaining a good mindset, has felt like an urgent daily struggle. And I’ve become deeply aware of how much I don’t understand about human nature.

I feel tired. But also, I feel myself fighting an urge to retreat and withdraw. I dream of taking a long holiday away from it all. I frequently wonder what the point of my work is and if anyone is listening. Something needs to change, and keep changing, for a long while.

The post 2021 Year In Review appeared first on Fernando Gros.

State Of The Apps 2021

Every year the co-hosts of the Cortex podcast publish a “state of the apps” episode where they review all the apps they currently use, noting what they installed and deleted during the year. It’s usually a long, meandering, and at time hilarious riff on the idea of having a well thought out collection of software tools.

Having recently begun another series of This Week I Quit, I’ve been asked a few times what apps and services I’m keeping. So, it feels like the right time to do my own State of the Apps for 2021.

Before We Get To The Apps

keycrhon
Everything about the way I live and work is still adapted to the ongoing pandemic. This means a lot of the apps, from flight tracking to ride hailing not to mention the apps I use when traveling around Australia or Japan, haven’t had any use this year.

My creative focus has been on writing, and my studio is still in storage. So, a common criterion for the apps I use is that they can work across iOS, iPadOS and macOS platforms.

In 2021, I bought a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which I pair with a Keychron K6 mechanical keyboard and an Apple trackpad. This is my setup for almost all of my writing and daily work. When I need a Mac, I use my 2011 Mac Mini, paired with a 27-inch Apple screen, Keychron K4 mechanical keyboard and an Apple trackpad.

For social audio and podcasting, I have a Rødecaster Pro paired with a Shure SM7b microphone and AKG K240 headphones. On my daily walk, I listen with an old pair of Apple AirPods, and for more serious listening, I use a set of Ultimate Ears Pro Reference Remastered in-ear monitors.

I’ve built a tiny “pandemic studio” around a Tascam Model 12, Arturia DrumBrute, Polyend Tracker, Elektron Model:Cycles, Strymon Iridium, TC Electronic Plethora X5, and my new Ibanez RG5120M Prestige guitar.

Writing – Thinking – Reading

Scrivener is the backbone of my writing process. This hasn’t changed since I started using Scrivener and I can’t imagine it ever will. It’s rock solid, works across devices and platforms, allows you to organise your work effortlessly and doesn’t distract you when you need to focus. That said, I wish the iPadOS version had more of the desktop features, like snapshot comparisons and the ability to work with templates.

The phrase “doing my own research” has become a red flag lately. So, let’s call it reading and thinking. Two new apps, Readwise and Obsidian, have quickly established themselves in this category. My habits of reflecting on past reading highlights and making notes are helping me identify ideas and themes for future writing.

I thought I’d lost my beloved Kindle PaperWhite this year. I dropped it in a sous-vide bath (don’t read and cook). But, putting it in a linen bag full of silica gel bags worked. So, it’s still the way I read ebooks. And Safari is still my browser of choice for everything else. I rely on the Reading List to stop any “read later” articles and the Reader View to remove online clutter.

Although I can’t really justify the cost of my Bear subscription, especially given how good Apple Notes is these days, the Bear interface just makes me happy every time I use it for any sundry note-taking.

Productivity

My dream for this decade was to travel often, running my life out of a sexy little notebook full of fountain pen scrawls. The reality, as I’ve written about many times already, was different.

This led me back to OmniFocus and building a smaller, more modest version of the interruption-proof productivity management system I had used before. I should say a word of thanks here to Tim Stringer of LearnOmniFocus, who not only brought me up to speed with the newest features of OmniFocus but also introduced me to MindNode. I’d always considered mind maps to be one of those cool but only occasionally useful things. But having a mind map of all your commitments and then using mind maps as a way to start planning projects is a great way to stop the kind of overloading that led me to quit OmniFocus the first time around.

Notion has played an increasingly smaller part of my life this year. I still use it for editorial planning and custom databases for reference material. As much as a I love the customisability and layout options, it’s so slow and cumbersome at times.

Timeular is still my time tracking app of choice. Fantastical is my calendar, mostly for the ease of creating new calendar entries. And a special mention needs to go to the Dymo Label app, which is actually a terrible piece of UI design, but since I haven’t visited a post office since February 2020, being able to print postage labels at home (and use the Royal Mail collection service) has been a lifesaving connection to the outside world.

Communication

Whenever possible, I do all my communications inside the Apple ecosystem. I’m not going to argue that any of Contacts, FaceTime, Mail or Messages are best in class, but they’re all familiar and work together.

Twitter has been my main connection to the outside world. In 2021, I reinstalled the iOS app so that I could use Spaces and my feeling about Spaces and social audio have gone on an emotional rollercoaster ever since. However, Spaces is the best innovation Twitter have rolled out in over a decade (even if, as Twitter always do, they overlooked the potential for bad actors to weaponise the new feature). Overall, the experience of using Twitter has improved, thanks to the banning of the platform’s most high-profile troll and the “better late than never” improved user safety controls. But it’s so frustrating that not all features are available on all versions. The iPadOS version is the worst, as there are no bookmarks or Spaces. The iOS version works well, but you can’t schedule tweets. The desktop OS version is my fav, but you can’t start a Space or use the new “downvote” replies feature.

Media

Of course, I don’t use Spotify. Nothing they do is good for the music world, and they seem to be wrecking the podcasting space as well. So I listen via the Apple Music and Podcast apps. Again, they might not be the best apps available, but they work well as part of an ecosystem and that’s what matters to me.

I still read the app versions of The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post, at least on iOS. Increasingly, I’ve reverted back to the browser versions of most long form services (like New Yorker, New York Magazine, and New York Review of Books) because they feel faster and seem to encourage more serendipity. I don’t want to be fed news based on an algorithm. I want the personal friction of looking for unfamiliarity and talking myself out of reading the same topics over and over.

Apple TV has consumed an alarming amount of my attention during the pandemic. Further, the major streaming services – Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, and Netflix – have had their claws in my mind. If I had to pick only two, they would be Netflix for its global breadth and Apple TV+ for its sense of style.

Creativity

I still lean on Adobe for visual creativity. Lightroom Classic is my photo app, and all sorts of tweaking and design stuff happen in Photoshop. I’ve also been playing with Procreatelogic pro
for some digital art inspired by Apple Pencil (early days with that).

Logic Pro still is and probably always will be my DAW of choice. My Logic Pro Master certification expired a few years ago, but Logic’s keystrokes and shortcuts still feel like a familiar second language. I’ve finally started the process of replacing Sibelius with Dorico. Although I’m not arranging music right now, I’m playing with Dorico and it will become the foundation for my next studio.

For guitar, I still love Amazing Slow Downer after all these years of close listening and transcribing music. I was so glad to see an excellent iOS version. Rounding out guitar practice, The Boss Tone Studio app works in conjunction with the WAZA-Air binaural headphones for late night jamming.

Food, Health And Home

The Internet of Things hasn’t won me over for my home just yet. I operate my Anova Sous Vide cooker manually instead of using the app, for example. But the Meater+ thermometer has become a staple for roasting and smoking. I also have HomeKit automations running smart plugs from Merkoss and WeMo for the stand light in the living room, the air filter in my bedroom and the Christmas lights.

The Membership from Erika Bloom has helped me stick to a routine of 2 or 3 live pilates classes a week via video through the Mindbody Live app. There’s also a library of workouts and exercise advice as well. I supplement this with workouts from Apple Fitness+.

And while they aren’t apps, it’s worth noting the home food delivery services that have kept me fed during this grocery store and supermarket free couple of years. There are restaurant in-a-box services like Made in Oldstead and Rick Stein at Home. I get meat from Farmison, Field and Flower, and The Fish Society; produce from Abel and Cole and First Choice; speciality goods from MexGrocer, Japan Centre and Sous Chef; cheese from The Courtyard Dairy; chocolates from Chocolate Trading Co; and flowers from Freddie’s Flowers.

The March Of The Undead

There’s a small group of apps that feel almost dead to me. It’s been months since I logged into either Clubhouse or Goodreads. I hardly use Calm or Instagram anymore. Bluejeans, Line and Zoom are there by obligation, not passion.

You all probably have a private hoard of zombie apps you want to dispatch with a final decisive blow. Or maybe that’s just me. Some of these might be part of a This Week I Quit sometime soon. Or they might just carry on lurking in the shadows.

Apps Or Tools

Looking ahead to 2022, my biggest desire for the suite of tools I use, day to day, is just for me to be less digital and screen based.

Hopefully, this time next year I’ll be writing about tools and not just apps, and the lists will include brushes and lenses and pens and outboard studio gear.

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Perfectionism

Hello, my name is Fernando, and I’m a recovering perfectionist. Like everyone else I know, I often talk about my perfectionism as a thing I need to “overcome”, something that gets “in the way” of completing work.

In fact, most of the common maladies that befall creative types, from imposter syndrome to writer’s block, are attributed to perfectionism.

So, when it came time to write a series about mastery, it made sense to look more deeply into perfectionism. And, as often happens, the picture that emerged is more complex and more fascinating than we might’ve imagined.

So, is perfectionism bad? Well, it’s complicated.

What Is Perfectionism?

Perfectionism is the belief that what you do has to be perfect to be acceptable. It develops when our self-worth gets tied up in unhealthy ways with the value of the things we make.

Often, perfectionism is accompanied by an inner voice that points out every imaginable fault in what we’re doing or even rehearses the criticism we might face when we finish.

Perversely, this obsession with perfection can hold us back from finishing, or sometimes even starting, creative projects. Every setback, every frustration, gets interpreted as proof we will never attain the perfection we desire.

Perfectionism As Self-Sabotage

Perfectionism is one of the most common forms of self-sabotage. I searched on Twitter, and among my followers there, every mention of perfectionism was negative. It was like reading about a disease that, if caught, will undermine your mindset and everything good about you.

Sometimes, we aren’t even aware we’ve been sucked into it.

So, it’s understandable that most advice in the creative world stops there. Perfectionism is bad. Be realistic, or accept your limitations, just finish and move on.

But maybe that’s not the whole story.

Perfectionist Goals and Self-Criticism

While researching for this article I found myself reading a study called The Effects of Self-Criticism and Self-Oriented Perfectionism on Goal Pursuit. The opening lines instantly made me question everything I understood about perfectionism.

“The possibility of normal and neurotic forms of perfectionism was first suggested by Hamachek (1978), who distinguished normal perfectionistic strivings from more unhealthy aspects.”

Wait, what? “Normal and neurotic forms of perfectionism?” Could it really be that “perfectionistic strivings” can be “normal”? What about the consensus that perfectionism is always bad?

It turns out the literature around perfectionism is pretty substantial. While perfectionism can be associated negative habits – fear of failure, procrastination, and excessive rumination – along with conditions like anxiety and depression, it can also be associated with positive behaviours like agreeability, as well as with higher functioning, deeper satisfaction, greater self-esteem and increased well-being.

To understand the good and bad versions of perfectionism, we need to look at two things that shape the kind of perfectionism we experience: motivations and goals.

Perfectionism and Quality

The positive version of perfectionism arises from internal motivations. It affixes to tangible goals that are at the upper end of what is possible given your current skills or the skills you’re currently acquiring.

This kind of healthy perfectionism usually goes by other names, like the pursuit of excellence, or the concept of Quality we looked at recently. It’s the attention to detail, the care, and focus we associate with mastery in any craft or art-form.

The unhealthy version of perfectionism is driven by external social motivations, like peer pressure, the need to fit in, fear of failure, or fear of losing self-esteem. It obsesses over grandiose and outsized goals at the extreme end or your abilities or depends on skills you have no discernible plan for acquiring.

Because this kind of unhealthy perfectionism is obsessed with unattainable goals, it breeds a lot of unhealthy coping strategies like wishful thinking (I’ll succeed if everything goes right), procrastination (putting off starting, to avoid the pain of not meeting expectations), or seeking excessive validation (I can start when I have enough qualifications or supporters).

Perhaps the worst perfectionistic habit is harsh self-criticism. Many unhealthy perfectionists describe their inner critic as a bully, nag, or troll. There’s a constant, denigrating inner monologue that saps their self-belief, exhausts them by constantly drawing attention to possible criticisms, and, in the end, leads them to wanting to give up.

Toxic Perfectionism

We shouldn’t underestimate how toxic negative perfectionism can be. When perfectionism is expressed as harsh self-criticism, it undermines us in so many ways.

And it might well be asymmetrical, with the benefits of good perfectionism offering only a limited upside compared with the potential chasm of self-doubt that negative perfectionism can pull us into.

“Taken together, the results seem to suggest that perfectionistic strivings without concerns can indeed be helpful and that self-critical perfectionistic concerns without healthier strivings may be particularly toxic.”

My own journey with perfectionism has been rocky. Sometimes, I feel the thrill of positive perfectionism, accompanied by intense focus on details and a general feeling I can do this difficult thing I’ve set my mind to. More often, the negative perfectionism appears, full of fearful self-talk, and a fear of loss of self-esteem.

It’s this fear of losing self-esteem that’s most debilitating. People talk about fear of failure, but that’s not really it at all. The fear is more like a fear of losing self-worth, of believing the haters and naysayers were right all along.

If any of the negative aspects of perfectionism speak to you, consider talking to someone. Perfectionism isn’t something to be laughed off. The research is pretty clear that when negative perfectionism is present, the effects can be bad. And my experience – from years of suffering with negative perfectionism, and dealing with it more recently in therapy – suggests it takes a lot of work to overcome.

Perfectionism Is A Blunt Tool

The popular concern about perfectionism isn’t wrong. But it’s overly simplistic. It’s a generalisation. And, potentially, a thought-terminating cliché as well.

The conversation around perfectionism has to address our goals and motivations. And also, how we deal with failure. Or to put it another way, what kind of mindset we have.

The unhealthy perfectionist is prone to moralise failure. To take any failure to achieve success as a marker they don’t deserve success. Failures aren’t simply setbacks; they’re statements, as if the universe is telling them they’re unworthy.

Instead of generalizing about perfectionism, we should ask in what direction our striving for excellence is pointing us.

When perfectionism is expressed in a desire for Quality, in tangible goals, which arise from our own internal motivation, then perfectionism moves us in the direction of mastery and fulfillment.

But when perfectionism is expressed in unrealistic goals, reflecting who we think we need to be to be validated, then perfectionism isn’t taking us towards mastery but, instead, leading us in a much less healthy direction.

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This Week I Quit Writing Amplifier (Newsletter)

How did I talk myself into running five newsletters at the same time? Well, it’s a parable for our age. “Start a newsletter,” they said. “Newsletters are the hottest things right now,” they cried.

Like a fool, I listened.

Two of those newsletters are automated. One delivers every blogpost from this site as an email. We’ll come back to that. Another did the same for the podcast I quit recently. That one’s already gone.

There’s a newsletter I send twice a year to update everyone who has bought my products over the years. And there’s a little experimental newsletter, a curated set of interesting links, which I’m running to test out Revue (which was recently bought by Twitter).

And then there was Amplifier.

Created to be the kind of newsletter everyone would talk about, Amplifier had a (hopefully) catchy title and a clear (and hopefully interesting) angle. It was a newsletter that asks what kind of voices get amplified in today’s culture.

But the idea is one thing; making it work, another.

The Great Newsletter Bubble Of 2020

Every writer I talk to is newsletter obsessed. They are being told to start one, or several. It’s not surprising, since “What newsletter are you enjoying?” has become the new “What podcast are you listening to?” which, of course, was the new “What books have you read?”

The newsletters you read are now a cultural marker, a sign that you are well informed and making smart choices about where you put your attention.

All sorts of publications, from newspapers like the Washington Post to new sites like The Information, offer newsletters. They cover everything from cooking to the creator economy.

The growth of newsletters is driven by new platforms like SubStack, which lets you put a paywall around your newsletter and even offers writers the chance to get employee-style benefits like health care.

While newsletters are presented as a new opportunity for writers, they’re also a reaction to changing conditions in the world of publishing and journalism. In the past few years, many writers have lost their jobs, and freelance opportunities have dried up or don’t pay as well as they did.

Technology is changing as well.

How Google Is To Blame

Go back a decade or so, and readers subscribed to blogs via RSS. There were several ways into this, but perhaps the most popular was Google Reader. You could add the addresses of your favourite blogs, and they all collected on a page, like an email inbox, which you could then access at your leisure.

When Google dropped Reader in 2013, it decimated the blogosphere (as we used to call it). It suddenly got harder to get people to read your posts regularly. This suited Google, since it wanted to be the intermediary in every interaction between reader and content.

Google wants you to find things via search, not via subscription.

This is part of why newsletters became so popular. Instead of the inbox in an RSS reader, newsletters gave access to the inbox in people’s email app. Email is a strong connection you can use to market to your readers if you’re so inclined.

You can see why the suggestion that everyone needs a newsletter has become so popular.

Welcome To My New Newsletter

“Do you have a newsletter?”
“Yes, it’s called The Blog.”

OK, I haven’t had this conversation yet. But I’ve rehearsed it in my mind. It’s the way forward.

Sometimes we take popular advice and use it to build mental cages. That’s what I did with newsletters. I kept adding another newsletter in response to every trend and technological twist.

I had an epiphany listening to someone talk about their favourite newsletters. They said, “I love Cal Newport’s newsletter.” I didn’t interrupt but immediately thought to myself, “Hang on a minute. That’s not a newsletter, that’s just Cal’s blog sent out every week as email.”

Just like I already did!

Sometimes I’m a little slow. I was hearing the advice about newsletters and adding to my already full schedule extra pieces of work, then feeling all sorts of shame that I didn’t do enough to make them flourish. What I didn’t do was ask myself if I had the answer for this trend in the work I was already doing.

And, you guessed it, I did!

Ask Yourself “Am I Already Doing This?”

It’s so easy to assume inadequacy as a default starting point for every new trend we encounter.

It’s the lesson in This Week I Quit and in Digital Minimalism: our lives lose focus and our work fragments when we keep just adding things. Digital technology creates the illusion that infinite addition is possible. You can keep adding apps to your devices forever.

But, as humans, we are not wired that way.

One way to avoid the perils of adding too much to our lives is to ask “Am I already doing this?”

It might also involve a little thinking about the way you do things as well.

When people talk about newsletters, they mean something like a body of content delivered via email. It’s a system that exists because content via RSS is so broken. What people put in newsletters is often exactly the same kind of essayistic writing you find on this blog. And, just as newsletters rose in popularity, they may also lose their lustre in time.

This helped me see that instead of listening to the internet gurus who said “start a newsletter” and feeling inadequate, I should ask how I can make the work I already do fit this current newsletter trend.

Less Is Quality

Instead of thinking I have all these content buckets to fill – five newsletters, a blog, however many social media channels – I’m now looking at this as one main body of work: the blog. Or, to put it another way, the writing.

Obviously, the Amplifier newsletter is finished. So is the bi-annual newsletter. Instead, every six months, I will write a blogpost that contains updates to my work, any new products, or changes to the site, then send that to everyone on the list.

The blogpost equals the newsletter.

And the Revue newsletter has changed to become a curated collection of links related to the reading and thinking that goes into these blog articles.

“Less is more” was Mies van der Rohe’s famous saying. I think of it as “Less is quality”. I’m not really motivated by more. I don’t lie awake at night wishing I had more readers or more followers. But I do worry about not having quality. I want to be a better writer. To have more ideas and also more creativity.

Offering less choice will mean more quality for you.

This Week I Quit is an occasional series about using minimalism and simplicity to foster creativity, productivity, and well-being. The series originally ran from 2016 to 2019, and you can read a summary of that series here. You can find an archive of all This Week I Quit articles here. You can also follow the hashtag #ThisWeekIQuit on Twitter.

The post This Week I Quit Writing Amplifier (Newsletter) appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Gary Rogowski On Quality And Mastery

When I started writing about mastery, a book I knew we’d have to discuss was Gary Rogowski’s Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction. Rogowski is a legendary furniture maker and teacher, and was a contributing editor of Fine Woodworking magazine for 14 years. Handmade has become one of my favorite books to cite in conversations and on this blog.

Using the practice of working with your hands as a foundation for understanding life philosophy makes Handmade a welcome companion to books like Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft (which I’ve previously mentioned here and here).

Handmade is an expansive book. Amongst the practical advice about working with tools, or the way mistakes in the workshop build character, there are reflections on jazz, philosophy, even mountain climbing.

In particular, I’d like to focus on the way Rogowski uses the word “quality”, which for him takes on such a philosophical meaning it often appears capitalized, as Quality.

The Concept Of Quality

For Rogowski, Quality carries someone from being a brash beginner who thinks they know it all to a practitioner with a humbler attitude, someone who has acquired a deeper sense of the challenge of mastering their craft.

“Workers go from know-it-alls, which is their insecurity talking, to a humility that allows them to learn more about their craft. As they learn what real Quality is, they learn to be open.”

– Gary Rogowski

Quality isn’t just a property of something. It’s also a thing both the maker and the final user experience. It’s a connection between them, something they both participate in. Quality isn’t a feature or benefit to be marketed but a cultural connection between the maker, the user, and the thing that was made.

“If we care enough about our work to do the work well, then the user will in some small way see this. There will be no separation between what someone is and what someone does. This is Quality, and our culture’s pursuit of capital, of fame, of being heard more loudly in a sea of shouting, misses the importance of it.”

– Gary Rogowski

For Rogowski, Quality extends across time, from the making and sharpening of your tools, the decisions that go into designing the thing, the frustration of making and unmaking many mistakes, the small details, the satisfaction of a job well done, the delight of a customer as they take your product home, and the enduring memory of the work you completed. The whole cycle is Quality.

The Foundation Of Quality

Let’s say you make a really good chair. Then you sell that chair to someone who loves it and appreciates the work that went into making it. Does it matter then if you post a picture of the chair on Instagram and no one likes it?

If your focus is on quality, the popularity of something on an Instagram post is secondary. Given the atmosphere most of us work in, that’s quite a revolutionary idea.

Quality is a philosophy of work. It gives us a sense of self that is stronger and more resilient than one which comes from online validation.

You know Quality when you see it. You also know Quality when you feel yourself working towards it. There’s no bullshit in Quality.

Quality and Mastery

Earlier this year, popular guitar player Mateus Asato quit Instagram. He was hugely popular. But he felt the game of making popular Instagram video clips of his playing had led him down a joyless path. Instead of playing songs and making music, he was just performing short, flawless clips, snippets of music for the algorithm.

“I got lost inside the boxes of 15–60-second videos.”
– Mateus Asato

Tommy Emmanuel, in the Masterclass I recently wrote about, said it was important to make your practice sessions fun. The act of picking up your guitar competes with other potential sources of joy and satisfaction, like playing computer games or switching on Netflix.

You’d better make sure your practice routine gives you a dopamine rush!

Of course, it’s not that simple. Sometimes practice is hard. It’s work. And all work is frustrating at times. Heartbreaking, even. But this is why Quality matters. It sets the standard, the goal, and the measure. It keeps us off the unfulfilling path.

“The difference between the professional and amateur, however, is that the pro quits beating himself up and gets on to fixing things. The whining and crying and arguing with myself usually takes longer than the fix anyhow.”
– Gary Rogowski

Mastery Is A By-Product

Quality puts the goal of mastery into perspective. It corrects us if we’re too prone to focussing on one step of the journey, on learning, acquiring tools, being excellent at just one part of the craft. It reminds us we’re here to make things others will enjoy – and to become better people along the way.

“Mastery, of anything, is an accumulation of experiences that, if you have a brain instead of rocks in your head, points out to you the truth of these things: you will get old, you can learn from your mistakes, and you should help others to their own truth. The things that you make will also accumulate and survive you.”

– Gary Rogowski

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