Colin Wright's Blog, page 10

Kairos

I have several mental models I use to generally keep moving in a desirable direction, despite (and sometimes fueled by) the vicissitudes of reality.

One such model is imagining myself as a spring that coils and uncoils, compresses slowly before rapidly expanding outward, taking my time to collect energy, sometimes moving in what might feel in the moment like the wrong direction but which ultimately proves to be preparation for some subsequent expansion or growth.

Another is perceiving ever...

Time Is Weird

If you live to be 77-years-old (the average lifespan in the wealthy world), you will have lived about 4,000 weeks.

That’s…intimidating, isn’t it? It’s not a small number, but it also seems impossibly minuscule to encompass everything we’ll ever do—no second time around, no take-backs.

I think about that number sometimes, because although I hope to live beyond this average (it’s a bit higher for women than men, a bit lower during pandemic-times, and varies by several years between wealthy c...

Dabbling

The word “productivity” has its origins in the 19th century, back when industrialization and scaling-up everything was becoming the dominant approach to, and philosophy of, labor.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the word literally refers to the rate of output per unit of input: how many widgets a worker can make each hour, for instance.

In recent decades, this word has sprawled to encompass other aspects of life.

There are productive and unproductive uses of our time, the former...

Lifestyle Episodes

I’m in the process of rifling through old notes and photographs and terse, phone-shot videos, unearthing and examining contemporaneous media artifacts to remind myself of the context surrounding bits of journal-writing I’ve jotted over the past several years.

This is something I do when cobbling together the outline for a new book, as I currently am.

I’ve got years of backlog, spanning quite a few well-defined lifestyle “episodes,” and I’m looking for parallels, connections, major shifts a...

All My Weird Priorities

For what feels like ages, I’ve been trying to figure out how to unify my many and diverse projects into a more sensical whole, without stifling the identity and benefits of each project, individually.

I’ve also wanted a sort of brand-container where I could put new things—experimental undertakings, one-off books or recordings of talks, pop-up projects with a pre-defined beginning and end—where they would continue to be discoverable and valuable without requiring endless promotion.

A librar...

Infinite Right Ways

Since mid-2020, I’ve been trying to figure out how to rearrange my disparate jumble of professional activities into something more cohesive and comprehensible.

Many people who engage with something I make only engage with that one thing, and are maybe tangentially aware that I do other things, as well, but maybe not.

Some sturdy few have engaged with the entire Colin Extended Universe of work, ranging from my books to my podcasts to my essays, and have maybe even come out to hear a talk or...

Cycles

There are countless possible ways to measure and parcel-out our time, but one of the more practical ones, for my purposes, is that of “cycles.”

Within this context, a cycle is a period of energetic continuity that can last 15 minutes or three hours, but which is distinct from other cycles based on ebbs and flows of cognitive posture, creative capacity, focus (or lack thereof), and general state of mind.

I might enjoy a 30-minute cycle each morning during which I have precisely the right mi...

Expansiveness

In my experience, the more I learn about all the things, the easier it becomes to learn about any single, specific thing.

My understanding of design grew more rapidly after I started looking into fine art, computer science, and publishing.

My comprehension of South American history plateaud until I learned more about the economics of supply chains.

Reading a book about prediction markets helped me better understand my own decision-making process, and reading a journal article about embo...

Doing What We’ve Always Done

These past few weeks I’ve been shoveling money into my third-hand, 2007 Prius to replace the hybrid battery and the ABS system—both of which have recently stopped working—and to replace the catalytic converter after it was carved out by thieves.

I like my little car: bringing renewed life to old things is satisfying to me, but it’s also been a reliable (and fuel-efficient) companion as I’ve driven it around North America these past few years.

This hasn’t been a pleasant round of investment...

Infrastructure

When you travel, you have what’s in your bag—a small portfolio of hopefully not-too-heavy infrastructural components—but beyond that you have to live off the land, in a way. You’re reliant on whatever infrastructure is available wherever you happen to be on a given day, and consequently you learn not to take such things for granted and to adjust your habits accordingly.

This has been on my mind lately because I’m in the process of setting up a home base here in the US: possibly temporarily, b...