Colin Wright's Blog, page 10

Intrinsics

I’ve spent most of the past 12 years reassessing and realigning.

In essence, I’ve been trying to better understand myself and what I want out of life: what I think is important, how I want to spend my time, who I want to spend my time with, how I want to feel, what I want to be capable of.

I’ve also been considering how to apply this knowledge so my reality, over time, better aligns with those ideals.

This is an iterative process, and not one that can be completed. I don’t expect to wak...

Opportunity

I’ve been thinking about opportunity a lot as I’ve revisited some old opportunities—those pursued and those set aside—and started in on the process of shuffling and assessing and selecting from some contemporary ones.

Important to recognize in any discussion about opportunity is that it’s not equitably distributed.

As with most things related to an individual, from height to athletic ability to economic status, we’re born with ceilings and floors in terms of our various properties and capa...

Documentation

What aspects of what I’m doing today will be meaningful ten years from now?

Or rather, which components of what aspects of the many things making up our lives at any point are worth noting in some external fashion, and which can be left undocumented?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, of late, as I’m writing a book that encompasses fairly broad swathes of life, reaching all the way back to 2015. And some periods are fairly well chronicled through journal entries, essays, and photographs,...

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...