003 - The Creative Notebook
Self-improvement | Alive Time or Dead Time | Work-from-home
Welcome to the third edition of the Creative Notebook, a newsletter by Nicholas Mills.
Quarantine has been good to me. I say that with the utmost compassion and empathy for those around the country not as fortunate as I am. But it's in these moments where gratitude must be the strongest attitude, and I am grateful for this opportunity to better myself.
I'm fully invested in my health - mentally, physically, and financially. There are no more excuses. I have the time and a schedule I can customize to my needing.
With that said, I've put on about 10 pounds (which is a good thing for me), and I can move again. I ran a 7:15 mile, and then topped it off with an 8:30 mile. That's some of the fastest running I've done in years. I ride my bike a few times a week, and I strength train at least twice a week. It's time-consuming and expensive for a trainer, but the money is worth it. I've made a commitment to move each day - yoga, walk, run, bike, stretch, lift. My time is being spent alive, not dead.
What I'm Reading:
I finished reading Again to Carthage.
John Parker Jr. returns to the world of Cassidy and Bruce, this time bringing the old runner out of retirement for one last chance at the Olympics. And by old I mean in his late 20's.
As opposed to the first book, which had a heavier focus on running and the pure pursuit of achieving something great. This book was more about recapturing the emotions and feelings of striving for perfection.
More than anything - the running, work, love - this book was about finding your limit. It is about pushing yourself to achieve something and to find your wall. That is the achievement in-of-itself. It's doing something for the sake of doing it, not for the reward of the activity. So it was in those closing miles of the marathon that Cassidy trained his entire life for, that he finally found his finish line. And at that moment, he knew he could move on with his life because he ran to the edge, faced the demons, and befriended them.
I gave up on the books I was reading this week: Normal People and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. The books weren't engaging me, and I made an effort to be more willing to quit books.
It's counter-intuitive, but the more books I quit, the more books I read. I stopped reading these two books that didn't seem to interest me, and I bought a few more that I'm already more engaged in. Don't stop reading, change the book. Rarely do you care when you change the channel, or put on a different movie. Books feel like a larger investment, but for that exact reason, and because they take more time to read, don't feel bad about starting a book and not finishing.
This has been part of the inspiration: How to read with a strong filter
New books I bought:
Mamba Mentality by Kobe Bryant
Ideas I'm Researching
What I always come back to is how do you get better at something like reading or learning? How do you get better at something that is difficult to measure, or difficult to train for? Sports are Easy. I always come back to this point. I'm watching The Last Dance, the documentary on the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan. Watching his progression is easy because you can see the work he puts in. Of course he's going to be successful because "success comes from the work put in."
But what happens when identifying what to practice is hard? In the book, Again to Carthage, this point is talked about. The protagonist is beginning to train for the marathon at a time when not much was known about running at long distances at a very fast pace. Per the book:
"There is simply no way to practice running a hundred-mile race. Your goal in training has to be to simply prepare your body as efficiently as you can for a really rare but pretty daunting physical ordeal."
I've found that last point a great insight into this idea. In this case, the reference point is running, which is something I understand. But you can change that to any activity. Writing, for example. If you don't have a final report or a thesis paper you need to write, it's hard to practice. Sure, you can write every day, but how do you know you are making progress? This is when deliberate practice is hard.
With running you can begin to see your times increasing and your body feeling stronger. In writing, it might be that the words come easier and your sentences grow stronger. But you really aren't sure. So the deliberate practice here is to keep writing and simply prepare yourself as efficiently as you can for the rare opportunity to submit your writing for the daunting mental ordeal.
You are priming yourself for an important email, report, performance review, or potential book proposal. That is your deliberate practice.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in an email to all staff on Tuesday, May 12th, 2020 that work from home will be permanent. Some jobs that require physical presence will still require employees to come in. This is one of the first large company to come out and talk about the changing landscape of how we work.
The question beginning to surface for me, and I think others, is what are cities going to look like in this post-coronavirus world. Are people going to get scared away from the density of the cities and move back to the suburbs, or the fringe city neighborhoods?
The Atlantic put out a fantastic article about the lasting impact on retail in America. And actually one of the claims made by the author was that it's not the number of people that are the problems in the city of the future, its the fact that the retail that drives the walkability of a city is going to disappear. This is the much broader, philosophical discussion that probably needs to be had as well. How much of it I buy, I'm still not sure, but it did resonate as a current renter that lives in one of America's largest cities.
And now add in that highly paid technology workers can work remote, why wouldn't they relocate out of Silicon Valley for more affordable lifestyles.