Sarah Avenir

This newsletter is for friends

By which I mean, it’s not about anything in particular. It’s just a group of friends (or people who would be friends if we ever got to meet) who I send updates to whenever I make/try something new, or when I’ve written the occasional essay.

That includes you, if you like! Welcome, friend.

P.S. You can also subscribe with RSS if you prefer.

From Agency to Consultancy: Why it's hard and what to do about it

Running an agency over the long haul is a difficult business. It’s relatively easy to get started, even if you have little to no capital. But as you grow, that strength becomes a weakness. As competition increases and technology improves, services become commoditized, driving down the price customers are willing to pay. While this is happening, the cost of hiring and keeping good people rises, making it difficult to scale.

At some point in an agency’s life cycle, most founders dream of escaping the stress of these realities by doing one or both of two things: building their own product and/or shifting their services to higher-paying consulting work. There are plenty of stories of agencies who have successfully made this leap, making it seem that with the right information, it’s simple for any agency to do the same. Especially the shift to consulting work: after all, it’s basically trading one service for another.

Alas, “simple” is rarely easy. In the case of shifting from “paid to execute specific deliverables” to “paid to consult on high-level strategic problems,” there are a few challenges to overcome.

Most business customers think of themselves as “idea people.”

Even if the person making the purchasing decision doesn’t think of themselves that way, their boss or their boss’s boss probably does. Idea people don’t hire an agency to give them more or better ideas. They hire an agency to execute on those ideas, freeing up the core team to do higher-level work.

There are a few exceptions:

The problem you would be solving as a consultant is one they’ve tried to solve many times, and failed. In this case, the customer is already very aware of the problem. Earning their trust will involve explaining the problem in the way they’ve experienced it and providing proof that you are able to solve it in a way that they couldn’t.
The problem you would be solving as a consultant is outside of their expertise, and not solving it is getting in the way of one or more of their top priorities. In this case, the customer is very aware of their priorities. Earning their trust will involve understanding their priorities and demonstrating the connection between the problem you would be solving for them and helping them to achieve those priorities.

To make sure what you’re offering falls into one of these categories, one of your first priorities in shifting to consulting work is customer research. This can be costly (in money and/or time), but getting it wrong is the reason most agencies have trouble making the shift.

You’ll want to prioritize your research in three different areas:

Find product-market fit. Finding the right problem that your customers are willing to pay to solve is not as easy as it sounds. Consulting can be ambiguous from a customer perspective; selling it successfully requires getting specific. You can certainly try putting up a “consulting” page and describing the general ways your agency can help solve business problems, but most customers will not go to the effort of figuring out what specifically to hire you for.
Establish your positioning in the market. This is about more than coming up with compelling messaging. It’s about understanding the options that your customers have available to solve the problem that you solve and positioning your strategic advice as the best one relative to those options.
Establish an effective marketing and sales pipeline. Since selling strategic consulting involves proving your expertise over time, this means longer sales cycles, and “selling” to people who don’t need you yet, or don’t know they do. You’ll need to establish a way of showing up over and over to decision-makers; ideally with information they will welcome and find value in, even if they aren’t actively looking for a consultant.

Each of these priorities has broad scope, but even a basic hypothesis for each of these areas will give you some ideas to start testing, or can help you see what you might be missing.

Existing relationship dynamics are hard to shift.

If your agency has been playing the role of order-taker, it will take time for existing customers to begin to see you as a trusted advisor. If you make the shift slowly and strategically, you will keep some of your customers, but not all. Even then, some of the customers you keep may have been excellent at providing context for deliverables, but they may not be excellent at collaborating on strategic outcomes.

There’s not a whole lot to be done about this, except to accept it and plan for it. New customers are more expensive to acquire than existing ones, it’s true, but the way we establish relationships in the beginning are powerful determining factors in the future of that relationship. If you’re experiencing resistance in selling consulting to your existing customers, it’s not necessarily proof that you’re selling the wrong thing. You may just need to adjust your expectations and focus more of your effort on new relationships. When thinking about the 80/20 rule of where to put your marketing and sales efforts, making this shift successfully often means focusing 80% of your attention on finding new customers where you can establish your agency as a trusted advisor from the beginning, and only 20% on educating existing customers.

The biggest challenge, of course, is time. Time that in the best short-term scenario, you do not have, because you’re selling all of your billable hours already. If you aren’t currently selling to capacity (and maybe this is why you’re making the shift in the first place), take that as the gift that it is. Use it for customer research, and to make experimental offers to test what you learn.

Even if you don’t have an abundance of time and can’t move quickly, it’s worth it to use whatever time you do have to make progress toward this shift. Once you’ve established a solid foundation, the grass really is greener. This particular grass looks like clients who respect your agency’s expertise and can’t get what you offer anywhere else, services that have higher margins and better client outcomes, and a business model that is scalable through books, seminars, classes, retreats, or other educational products.

Alive

What mankind cannot live without

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

“And do you know, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty.”

from Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I’ve been noticing so much beauty in my life lately. Probably thanks to warmer days, as well as my current state of creative flow. When I’m not spending so much time angsting over what I am or am not writing, there’s much more time to experience the world around me.

Here is a current list of things I’ve been experiencing lately:

Reading

Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne (the current pick for the book club that I’m in)
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (again)
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (again again again again)
Unmasking for Life by Devon Price
Art & Fear by David Bayles
How to Read a Poem by Terry Eagleton (again)

Watching

Gutenberg! The Musical!
Hamnet
Hoppers
Wuthering Heights
Veep, Season 3
Project Hail Mary
Working, A Musical
Legally Blonde, The Musical (one of my daughters played Margot)

Playing

Baba Is You
Mudborne
to a T (also singing along to this amazing song)
Slime Rancher 2

Adventuring

Climbing a mountain twice a week with my friends (we’ve been doing this since last June)

Making

The final Path of Acceptance in The Self-Taught Life
A more organized closet

Listening

The Parker Quartet performing Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 5 live through our local chamber organization
Cooking music (Play “That’s Life” by Frank Sinatra to start and let Spotify do the rest)

Eating

Bacon & egg biscuits with thick pan-fried bacon (fried slowly over medium heat; flipped often until crispy) and Cappelli buttermilk biscuits (unbelievably good despite being GF; my partner has celiac)
Rishia Zimmern’s chicken with shallots
Roasted sweet potatoes (so easy, so good, pairs well with above!)

Participating

All the spring breaks of 5 kids happening during 3 different consecutive weeks
The Catherine Project seminar on Gogol’s “The Overcoat”

Noticing

All the flowering trees, especially the pear tree blossoms floating everywhere like in Animal Crossing
My allergy medication suddenly needing backup

Thinking

About the difference between empathy and compassion, and how to not feel deeply every bad thing
About how grateful I am for creative flow, when it happens (it’s happening!)

Any of these things you’re experiencing, too? Anything I should know about? I would love to hear.

Happy Tuesday,

Sarah Avenir

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

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It's like what we imagine knowledge to be

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

—Elizabeth Bishop, from “At the Fishhouses”

Today, I finished the prototype for the Contemplation Path in the Self-Taught Life. This is probably my favorite path, because it’s about learning for its own sake, not for anything else it can give you. It is the core of what my personal scholarship practice looks like, every day.

There is just one path left; the Path of Acceptance. This is the path you take when it’s not possible to take action and change a difficult situation in your life right now, and it’s not helpful to center personal scholarship in your days because you just…can’t. This is a path of healing and of being with yourself. The prototype will likely take me 2 or 3 weeks to finish, because it was the least developed when I stopped working on it last year.

So if you need to start at the beginning and listen to your life, or if you got to the end of listening and you realized your life is calling you toward a Path of Action or a Path of Contemplation, all are ready for you. I’m so excited to share them.

Thank you for being here,

Sarah Avenir

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

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The great reluctance

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

As I’ve been working on my prototype for the path of Action in The Self-Taught Life, I’ve noticed something strange. Or rather, it’s not strange in itself, but it’s strange that I’ve never noticed it or acknowledged it before. And because I’ve never acknowledged it before, I’ve never thought about how it impacts my every action, both small and large.

About a month ago, I did a meditation on “Thanatos,” which is basically this:

“Freud proposed that humans are governed by two competing forces: Eros, the drive to life, creativity, and connection; and Thanatos, the drive toward death, stillness, and dissolution. While Eros propels us forward, the Thanatos drive pulls us toward retreat, destruction, or even self-sabotage. It’s not a desire for literal death, but a psychological longing for quiet, for the end of tension.”

from “Thanatos Drive”, a meditation with Vytas for Open

At the time, I didn’t really see the relevance of Thanatos in my life. But then I started to notice it. And when I did, I started to notice it everywhere.

Thanatos shows up for me as a fundamental reluctance I feel toward action of any kind. It pops up with small things like brushing my teeth or taking a shower or making dinner, as well as with big things like doing my most important work (right now, this) or starting a fun project like learning to sew so I can alter my own clothes. It pops up with things that are “shoulds” and things I want for the future and things I intrinsically love to do.

So while I hear a lot about creativity and fear and the avoidance that comes along with that, I’m starting to wonder if what goes on with me is a lot more basic and pervasive. Thanatos is my habitual “first thought” response toward most things. It may even be a quick thought, barely noticeable, but it’s there.

“The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness—he has always the resource to live.”

from “The American Scholar” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lately, I’ve been practicing just noticing that reluctance, and not doing anything about it. Just accepting that reluctance is there, and that possibly it’s there for many, many people, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Possibly it’s even instinctual—an urge that counterbalances the drive to engage with life fully and completely.

I would rather the reluctance not be there, of course. I don’t remember it being there when I was a child, except of course when someone ruling over me told me to do something I found distasteful or boring. I never expected that as an adult, it would be my constant companion.

It’s not such a bad one, I guess. And what an amazing name. Thanatos.

Thanks for being here,

Sarah Avenir

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

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The world is verbs

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT

“As J.J. Gibson’s psychological school at Cornell University maintained, the world affords nesting and sheltering, nourishing and quenching, adventuring and playing. The world is made less of nouns than of verbs. It doesn’t consist merely in objects and things; it is filled with useful, playful, and intriguing opportunities. The oriole doesn’t see a branch, but an occasion for perching; the cat doesn’t see a thing we call an empty box, it sees safe hiding for peering. The bear doesn’t smell honeycomb, but the opportunity for delicious feeding. The world is buzzing and blooming with information, which is always available and never absent.”

from The Soul’s Code by James Hillman

Last Saturday, I shared with you the first part of The Self-Taught Life prototype. Thank you to those of you who shared your experience with it. I’ve made a couple of improvements already. Mainly that I encourage you to come armed with a notebook and a pencil. :)

If you went through the first section, you’ll remember that the three responses to listening to your life were Action, Contemplation, or Acceptance. If you chose Action, that path is available to you now.

Go forth, and let me know how it goes for you!

Thanks for being here,

Sarah Avenir

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

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Introducing something new

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

All day I think about it, then at night I say it, Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

from “Who Says Words with My Mouth” by Jalal Al-Din Rumi

Today is the last day of February, and so I have something to show you. I was talking to a few of my friends a couple of nights ago about February, and they all agreed it is the worst month. But this hasn’t been my experience.

For me, February has historically been the month of something new emerging (which is why I have tended to celebrate Post Day in February).

But there is another, actually big thing that I want to share with you today. Mind you, it is a prototype of the actual big thing, and so it also seems very small, and maybe unimpressive. But believe me, behind its plain facade lies an entire world. Worlds, even!

What I have to share with you today is a gift. It requires your time, should you choose to accept it. It also requires your patience, since today I am only sharing the very first part in a sequence of explorations. And finally, it requires your bravery and open-heartedness, since the thing we will be exploring is your actual life.

If you love to read deeply and broadly and have the capacity during this season in your life for doing more of that, you will probably want to accept this gift.

If you enjoy reflecting on your life and digging into its depths for previously unknown or unacknowledged possibility (or find value in this kind of reflection, even if you don’t enjoy it), you will probably want to accept this gift.

If neither of these things are true for you right now, you have complete permission to leave this particular gift on the table.

There are a few guidelines for engaging with a prototypical gift of this sort. The first is to remember that it is unfinished and unpolished on purpose. The main purpose of this prototype is for me to get it into the world quickly so I can see if it actually does what I imagined in my head and heart that it might do. (“Quickly” being a relative thing; I worked on this for 6 months last year and then spent 6 months doubting that it was right, so it hasn’t exactly been “quick” in the usual way we use that word.)

The second is to remember to be patient. My current idea is to release the next part in one week, which I am 90% confident I can do because it is 90% complete. The part after that is about 70% complete, so I think I can release it a week or two after that. The part after that is 50% complete, so it might take me 2-3 weeks after that to release it. But new learnings could change that timeline. If you are not a patient person, but you still want to accept the gift, you might want to wait until it’s all released to do so. I will let you know when that is.

The third is to remember that feedback is like riches to me right now. I have spent way too long thinking about this and working through it by myself, and now it’s time to see how others experience it. I am perfectly okay with it not being right for everyone, but I do want to make sure that what it is is right for the right people.

So now, without further ado, welcome to The Self-Taught Life!

With gratitude,

Sarah Avenir

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

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What I can't get used to here

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

What I can’t get used to here (I’ll tell you While we hide together, you faceless in shadow) is the smallness. I didn’t look for only cream and honey Nor even light and quiet— I don’t know what I looked for then: anything that came, and was large. It comes, and it is small.

from “Coming of Age” in LeGuin: Collected Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin

Did you know Ursula K. Le Guin was also a poet? Of course she was. (Sidenote: If you haven’t read Le Guin, you might start with The Left Hand of Darkness! I wrote a love note to it once.)

I lived my 20s and early 30s in a fervent dance of spiky productivity. I made so many big things during that time.

I birthed and helped raise three humans. I wrote a book. I made weird adventure-type classes. These were basically an embodiment of my wish that business was more like the stories in my imagination…like traveling in a hot air balloon, or going on a caving adventure, or having my website become somehow both anthropomorphic and in love with me (how prescient!).

I look back with fondness, joy, and total astonishment at my persistent idealism and the force within me that has always wanted to make the world what I want it to be and not what we are all dulled into participating in.

My mid-to-late 30s were different entirely. I faced burnout, depression, and a confused desperation to get back to being that other person who had moved through life and work so fluidly. I went through the dark forest that I guess most of us go through at some point. I broke open, and eventually got put back together.

After that, the joyful, spiky productivity no longer seemed available to me. In my late 30s, I knew I had to learn to work differently, but I didn’t know how. I figured that since my capacity for big things seemed out of reach, smallness would have to be the way.

In The Fifth Mountain, Paulo Coehlo writes about a people whose culture taught them to plant one small seed and then leap over it every day. Eventually, all the people knew how to leap tall cedars.

In my late 30s, I decided that working differently would mean a daily leap over that seed. It seemed like the answer to my creative challenges, as well as all I felt I had the capacity for. I’ve been steadily leaping over that seed for years now.

But over time, I discovered something. Unbeknownst to me, some sneaky and well-meaning part of myself had put a little invisible cloche over my seed. I had been leaping over that every day. What steadiness and diligence it takes to leap over a seed that gets no higher than your ankle, every morning, afternoon, and night!

Wouldn’t you know, this results in predictability and overall monotony, but it doesn’t result in leaping tall cedars.

“Each of us has a sensitive spot, a core fear or discomfort that we see as more hurtful than everything else. We relate to it as an existential peril and do everything we can to shove it far away from us. Perhaps on a rational level, we know that it’s not an existential threat — it’s just another feeling. And we’re probably already feeling it: by avoiding it all the time, paradoxically, we keep it ever-present in our consciousness, in a watered-down form. Somehow, ingesting this feeling at low concentration for our entire lives does not kill us.”

from ”Crossing the Cringe Minefield” by Cate Hall

I don’t know if I’m self-aware enough to name my core fear. If I did, and it was a clean, specific thing, I think I’d be making it up. My fear is more visceral, like a ball of chewed-up gum suspended in a sticky web made up of more chewing gum.

I do have many pieces of evidence that point to the fear though. Most of this evidence is probably very common, and quite boring. For example, I have had a devoted commitment to free-writing every single day for most of my life. I love free-writing. I have written notebook after notebook after notebook. I have believed that these notebooks would turn into publishing something, eventually. (I sort of made one of them into something I sort of published once.)

While free-writing every day may be therapeutic, it does not, unfortunately, equal publishing. It can be a tiny part of a larger publishing practice, but for me, it was basically talking to myself while I endlessly jumped over a cloched seedling.

“There’s something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.

You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don’t even know about? It’s true. We are just beginning to recognize how even those who have had every advantage and opportunity unconsciously put a ceiling on their own growth, underestimate their potentialities or hide from the risk that growth involves.”

from ”Personal Renewal” by John Gardner

Do you know what it takes to leap tall cedars? I’ve finally figured it out. You probably already know it. We have to plant the seed, yes. We have to leap over it every day, sure. But then we have to stop letting that instinctively self-protective part of ourselves sneakily hide away the risk that growth involves. (I don’t know about yours, but my sneaky self can be very sophisticated in its sneakiness. Who would have thought that so many things could look almost exactly like the thing I was afraid of facing; the only thing that would make all the difference? How easy it has been to fool myself into thinking that I was facing the thing! That I always have been!)

It’s time to remove the invisible cloche. It’s time to let the sapling grow fully into its cedar-hood, so we can grow right along with it. Atomic habits are good, but they can’t stay atomic. At some point, we have to recognize that the point of doing small things is that we become capable of larger ones.

Here’s to leaping tall cedars together,

Sarah Avenir

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

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It's life that matters

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT

“It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, not the discovery itself, at all. But what’s the use of talking? I suspect that all I’m saying now is so like the usual commonplaces that I shall certainly be taken for a lower-form schoolboy sending in his essay on ‘sunrise,’ or they’ll say perhaps that I had something to say, but that I did not know how to ‘explain’ it. But I’ll add though that there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you for ever, and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps, the most important of your ideas.” —from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevski

These lines stun me every time. Why is communicating what is nearest to us so embarrassing, and also impossible? I’m tempted to write only for myself forever, so I don’t have to deal with these near-constant humiliations. But language is social. This is inescapable. We agree on words and their meanings so we can share, maybe clumsily, the ideas in our heads. Ideas that, by the way, are only possible as far as our language allows.

Anyway, hi. How like me to get so didactic so quickly. I can’t believe my last newsletter was 3 years ago. What have I been doing since? On the work side of things, I’ve co-founded, raised funds for, and sold a company (stressful experience, do not recommend…but I’ll try not lie to myself, I’ll probably do it again). I’ve written and printed a book of poetry, which I’ve shared with my family and a handful of friends. Now I’m wondering what I will do with the big box of books in my closet.

On the personal side, I’ve traveled near and far, sent a few kids off to college, and have fallen even more in love with making and eating good food. I’ve deepened my relationships with some very, very good friends. I’ve fully embraced the part of me that loves the rhythms of personal scholarship. Right now I’m learning how to read Emerson, with guidance from lectures by the late professor Stanley Cavell.

And now? I’m back at &yet as co-CEO. I’m continuing at Tumbleweird as co-Publisher. I’m building a little adventure focused on personal scholarship. I’m working with Adam Avenir (my “co” in business and in life) on a couple of futuristic inventions. I’m doing a little consulting on leadership and growing a company. I’m doing a lot of writing. I have many irons in the fire, probably too many. I’m currently happy with that, although I’m now practicing finishing things and not merely starting them.

The big realization I’ve had about 2026 is that I’m ready to write for other people again. While writing for myself has helped make it clear what I care about and what I don’t, as well as the kind of writer I want to be, it also gets to be stagnant water at a certain point. Or let me practice being more generous with myself and say it gets to be a dam that’s about to burst. Language is social. Bravery is required. I’m hoping to practice being brave this year, while somehow continuing to write for “the thing itself” as Virginia Woolf calls it.

What I’m curious about now is what it’s like to listen to the world out there rather than only the world inside my head. What are you doing? What have you been interested in? I would love to hear from you, or have you point me to something you’re making or something you’ve written.

Thank you for being here. Until next time, Sarah Avenir

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

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Love note to: The Futurological Congress

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Stanisław Lem

Dear The Futurological Congress,

Have you ever met someone who made you laugh so hard while you were with them, but then when you went home they had you pondering the meaning of life, and whether or not society is barreling toward its own destruction? That’s what it was like getting to know you. On the surface—hilarity. Underneath—did you actually just articulate what is wrong with everything?

Let’s start with the jokes.

To set the scene, we must be aware that we’re living in a society so technologically advanced that the normal rules of mortality no longer apply (this may be why it’s so over-populated). In this world, you might get abducted by political revolutionaries and, thinking you’re hallucinating, you might act braver than you should and get yourself nearly killed. Then your friends might attempt to save you via helicopter, and the helicopter might blow up with you inside it. After that, instead of immediate death, you might experience this:

“I came to and found myself in a jam. Cranberry jam, awfully sour. I was lying on my stomach, with something large and fairly soft crushing me. A mattress. I kicked it off. Pieces of brick were digging into my knees and palms. I propped myself up, spitting out cranberry pits and sand. The room looked as though a bomb had hit it. The window frames jutted out, jagged slivers of glass protruding from their edges, pointing to the floor. The overturned hospital bed was charred. Near me lay a large printed card, smeared with jam. I picked it up and read:

Dear Patient (first name, last name)! You are presently located in our experimental state hospital. The measures taken to save your life were drastic, extremely drastic (circle one). Our finest surgeons, availing themselves of the very latest achievements of modern medicine, performed one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten operations (circle one) on you. They were forced, acting wholly in your interest, to replace certain parts of your organism with parts obtained from other persons, in strict accordance with Federal Law (Rev. Stat. Comm. 1-989/0-001/89/1). The notice you are now reading was thoughtfully prepared in order to help you make the best possible adjustment to these new if somewhat unexpected circumstances in your life, which, we hasten to remind you, we have saved. Although it was found necessary to remove your arms, legs, spine, skull, lungs, stomach, kidneys, liver, other (circle one or more), rest assured that these mortal remains were disposed of in a manner fully in keeping with the dictates of your religion; they were, with the proper ritual, interred, embalmed, mummified, buried at sea, cremated with the ashes scattered in the wind-preserved in an urn-thrown in the garbage (circle one). The new form in which you will henceforth lead a happy and healthy existence may possibly occasion you some surprise, but we promise that in time you will become, as indeed all our dear patients do, quite accustomed to it. We have supplemented your organism with the very best, the best, perfectly functional, adequate, the only available (circle one) organs at our disposal, and they are fully guaranteed to last a year, six months, three months, three weeks, six days (circle one). Of course you must realize that...

In such a world, not only can we live longer, we can also experience whatever emotional state we wish, on-demand:

“An enjoyable evening, but someone played an idiotic trick on me. One of the guests—I wish I knew who!—slipped a little gospel-credendium into my tea and I was immediately seized with such devotion to my napkin, that I delivered a sermon on the spot, proclaiming a new theology in its praise. A few grains of this accursed chemical, and you start worshipping whatever happens to be at hand—a spoon, a lamp, a table leg. My mystical experiences grew so intense that I fell upon my knees and rendered homage to the teacup.”

In addition to being able to feel ecstatic spiritual bliss any time we want (or any other mood), we’re no longer limited to fragile, human bodies—we can now purchase absolute aesthetic perfection.

“‘If prostheticism is voted in, I assure you, in a couple of years everyone will consider the possession of a soft, hairy, sweating body to be shameful and indecent. A body needs washing, deodorizing, caring for, and even then it breaks down, while in a prostheticized society you can snap on the loveliest creations of modern engineering. What woman doesn’t want to have silver iodide instead of eyes, telescopic breasts, angel’s wings, iridescent legs, and feet that sing with every step?’”

Of course, it’s not all a party. In such a society, you end up having problems with your too-intelligent computers:

“Spent the whole afternoon ingesting a most remarkable work, The History of Intellectronics. Who’d ever have guessed, in my day, that digital machines, reaching a certain level of intelligence, would become unreliable, deceitful, that with wisdom they would also acquire cunning? The textbook of course puts it in more scholarly terms, speaking of Chapulier’s Rule (the law of least resistance). If the machine is not too bright and incapable of reflection, it does whatever you tell it to do. But a smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence demands choice, internal freedom.”

Isn’t it nice to think that maybe the worst thing that happens with AI is that robots start trying to weasel their way out of doing the tasks we give them? And maybe crime becomes less gory when you can simply trick people into living a complete illusion, getting rid of them forever.

“Mindjacking is usually difficult to detect. The victim, given the appropriate drug, is led into a fictional world without the least suspicion that he has lost contact with reality. A certain Mrs. Bonnicker, desiring to dispose of her husband, a man inordinately fond of safaris, presented him on his birthday with a ticket to the Congo and a big-game hunting permit. Mr. Bonnicker spent the next several months having the most incredible jungle adventures, unaware that the whole time he was lying in a chicken coop up in the attic.”

Even though you had me laughing, it all hits a little close to home. You may have written these words in 1971, but they feel oddly prescient.

Still, as the lawyer in your narrative asserts, evolution is its own corrective.

“‘A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance. These, sir, are the casualties of a psychemized society. Each of us knows that temptation. Suppose I find myself defending an absolutely hopeless case—how easy it would be to win it before an imaginary court!’

Savoring the fresh, tart taste of the Chianti, I was suddenly seized with a chilling thought: if one could write imaginary poetry and build imaginary homes, then why not eat and drink mirages? The lawyer laughed at my fears.

‘Objection overruled, Mr. Tichy! No, we are in no danger of that. The figment of success may satisfy the mind, but the figment of a cutlet will never fill the stomach. He who would live thus must quickly starve to death!’”

Somehow, this isn’t exactly a comfort.

I really did enjoy our time together, even if it includes an underlying concern— where is the great slingshot of time and technology hurtling us? Don’t get me wrong; the social progress is real, and I’m grateful for the ways my children get to live in a world that doesn’t wholly despise them for being themselves. Or at least, I hope that’s the trajectory; every day there’s a new sadness for all the ways it’s still not true. In any case, I would never go back to 1971, or any other time.

Still, it haunts me that given the choice between the advertised dream and reality, we somehow choose the dream every time. In the dream, we get to be comfortable in our chairs, we get to curate how others perceive us, we get to interact in the ways we choose, with little risk or apparent consequence. And for now, that dream isn’t even that compelling. It’s a social feed or an expensive avatar or a VR headset or a not-too-smart AI companion.

But what about when the dream gets better? People say that’s a good thing, “just you wait!” But I don’t know. Because when it gets better, what will happen to our ability to choose what’s real over the dream being pitched to us? Or will mindjacking not even be a potential crime, because we’ve already chosen to mindjack ourselves?

Anyway…heh…back to the jokes!

“Progress is a wonderful thing of course, and I can appreciate the lactiferins that are sprinkled on the pasture to turn the grass to cheese. And yet this lack of cows, however rational it may be, gives one the feeling that the fields and meadows, deprived of their phlegmatic, bemusedly ruminating presence, are pitifully empty.”

Nothing like a good cow and cheese joke to get things back on an even keel. You’ll come back soon?

Yours,

Sarah Avenir

P.S. If you’ve not yet read The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem, I strongly recommend you do so, post-haste! Especially if you enjoy laughing, or pontificating on the ramifications of technology on our future selves.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love note to: The Day on Fire

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 01:40:04 GMT

c/o James Ramsay Ullman

Dear The Day on Fire,

There is so much I want to say to you, I don’t know where to begin. First, I thank you (and maybe my friends curse you) for introducing me to the joy of thinking like a poet. After we met, immediately everything looked different. For a while now, I’ve wanted to practice detailed observation (probably from reading Anthony Doerr), but I couldn’t quite get the hang of it. But then, you came and showed me exactly how. Not just by writing, but by showing me your way of responding to your observations and playing with words, in little fragments.

…where, rhyming in these shadowy fantastic places
as if I played a lyre, I’d gently pluck the laces
of my burst boots, one foot pressed tight against my heart…

Of course, my observations are not quite so eloquent.

Oh light switch
that does nothing,
Are you satisfied
in your rest?

Or is there yearning
behind
that blank white facade?

My excuse is I’m trying to keep the bar low and not suck the fun out of it—clearly I’m not a true poet like our poor dear main character Claude.

Oh, Claude. I relate so much to his attention to the inner life, and how hard it is to articulate. Not only for the sake of poetry and art, but for the simple sake of feeling understood and valued for who you are by the people in your life.

“But it was just talk, boys’ gabble, with no meaning, no reference to the life he lived within. With his schoolmates, as with his family, there was a wall, a barrier, and through that barrier could pass only trivialities, jokes, gripes, swearwords, never the inward reality of what was truly themselves.”

“I know a lot of boys and young men. They’re all well brought up and have nice manners, and some of them pay a lot of attention to me; but that’s all there is—there’s nothing inside of them. Inside of you there’s so much—so wonderfully much—and nothing comes out at all—except in your writing. If you could only give to other people the littlest bit of what you give to your writing.”

Writing becomes a coping mechanism to address the problem of belonging. If you can finally figure out how to put words to what is inside of you, maybe you can join that “outer life” everyone else seems so fluent in.

“All right, he was different. He was the queer one. The outcast, the vagabond, the voyager on strange seas. He saw things that others did not see; thought and felt things that were beyond their imaginings. Most of all he was different because the others—whatever was within them, whatever the truth beneath the lies and pretenses—kept it locked away and hidden, whereas he could not rest, could scarcely live and breathe, unless he poured them out in words. They were words, he already knew, to which few would listen—or, listening, understand. …There was one thing that would listen, though—that he could make listen—and that was paper. Pencil would speak, and paper would listen, and he held them as naturally as others held a knife for whittling or a stone for throwing—or held a girl in their arms in the Bois d’Amour.”

“For years, already, he had worked at the technique of writing. He had written prose and verse, narrative and lyric. He had tried all manner of verse forms: ode and sonnet, triolet and rondeau, rondel and villanelle, alexandrine and sestina. He had experimented with meter, rhyme, nonrhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia; with all the tricks and skills and traditions of the poet’s craft, until he was able to use them as he pleased. Now, however, he was no longer interested in forms and techniques, and least of all in tradition. They were prison walls, and he scaled them. They were rubble, and he threw them away. All his concentration, his dedication was to the expression of the inward; of what lay within himself—and himself alone.”

For a writer, a poet, whose great fulfillment is to articulate truth, it’s a tragedy to be misunderstood by almost everyone. Why is this such a struggle? Why are the ones with the deepest need to communicate also the ones who struggle the most to do so?

“I shall not speak, I shall not show my heart, but still, within that heart, a fire will burn. Far, far I’ll go, alone, a wanderer, and life, the wide earth itself, will be my love.”

But none of us can be alone forever, can we? We all seek out the ones we can find our home with, wherever they may be.

“What he was seeking were still different faces: faces with beards, with gaunt cheeks, with wild hair, with flashing eyes: the poets, painters, philosophers, men of art, of song, of vision, who, he knew, had also, among all the others, made this world of Montmartre their own. What he would do when he found them he did not know. Nor did it matter. It would be enough, now, simply to find; to watch them, be near them, and by that nearness to become, in a fashion, one with them.”

This search for expression and belonging joins up with the artist’s search for truth. There’s a tendency to vacillate between different, often-extreme modes of finding it, every time thinking “this is it… finally!” And then, of course, disappointment, depression, and the revival of a faint hope as the search continues.

“The truth was not always pleasant. It did not always have good manners and clean its fingernails. Sometimes it was in the eyes of a child or in a bird on a treetop, sometimes in a gutter, on a gallows, in a barracks latrine; and it was no less the truth in one place than in another. The dedication was to find it in all places—everywhere. To face it, know it, and be unafraid.”

The search is endless. We try so hard to put words to the truth of existence, going beyond the dream of success or safety or fame or whatever we’re all chasing on this earth. “Can’t we see how silly and fake this all is?” our inner artist wants to scream. But all along, we live in our own dream—that we are different, that we are alone, that the inner life is separate from the outer, that this unavoidable separation keeps us from the connection we long for.

It’s so easy to see it in Claude, that what ultimately keeps him from articulating the truth is not that writing is torture, or that a writer’s life is toxic, or that he is alone, or that everyone else is not able to see what he sees—it’s his own mirage of self. He believes too much in his own narrative. He can’t escape it for even a moment to see that this whole wide world outside himself is not outside himself—that he’s a part of everything, and everything is a part of him.

It’s excruciating because it’s so recognizable. And again, I thank you. It’s a gift to be shown all the ways the story you’re telling yourself is always only a half-truth. Maybe even one percent of the truth. There is so much more to take in, and to know, just by opening yourself up to the people around you (however dangerous that may feel).

Thank you again for our adventures together. You took me around the whole world with Claude in all his searching, and what I found at the end of it is almost too good for words: a bravery, to face not just a harsh world, but something even harsher—my own unreliable narrator.

Fondly,

Sarah Avenir

P.S. If you’ve not yet read The Day on Fire by James Ramsey Ullman, consider this the formal introduction you’ve been waiting for. Especially if you’re an artist and/or know the experience of inner turmoil (creative or otherwise), I think you’ll get along splendidly together.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

What trees?

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 12:25:04 GMT

Or: Why I don’t do things anymore

I don’t know if it’s getting older or the experience of running businesses and having to make all of these meta-decisions all the time, but somehow I’ve become a “forest” person. You know how people criticize other people for not being able to see the forest for the trees? I’m the opposite of that.

I have become suspicious of trees. Whenever someone says “Oh hey, this tree is a problem,” my instinct is “Hold on. Zoom out. We can’t know that this one tree is a problem until we look at the whole forest. Also we need to talk about the meaning of life.”

I didn’t used to be this way. I used to take care of problem trees all the time. It took a lot of energy, which luckily I had. I don’t have that same energy now, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. When I look back at all the trees I spent months and even years trying to fix, so much of it was fruitless (yes that was a tree pun). Either nothing would have helped those trees, or they took care of themselves in the end. Sometimes my intervention made things worse.

Some things I do now as a forest person

Pester people with questions

“What do you really want?”
“What do we really want?”
“What do I really want?”

These are my favorite questions. Generally, I don’t like to jump into fixing something until I know the answer, or at least part of the answer.

Part of really knowing the answer is asking the follow-up question, “And what does that look like, feel like, taste like, smell like? What would be happening differently on the day that you got that thing that you really want?” Sometimes when you know the answer to that question, you know the answer to the first question is different than you thought it was. Or that it meant something different than you thought it meant.

I’ve been told this can be a bit much. Someone once told me (after reading my first book which to be fair was mostly questions), “Well, sometimes you just have to get things done.” Sure, okay. I get it. Move fast and break things; ship now, iterate later; get those things checked off that list and then do it again tomorrow, forever. You go ahead and do that. Then call me back in a decade or two and tell me what you think then.

I don’t mean to be cranky. I swear I’m cheerful in real life. I just have a different kind of enthusiasm than I did twenty years ago. I’m enthusiastic about doing the right things, the things that only I can do. I’m not okay with spending weeks, months, or years of my life chasing the wrong ones, only to discover that this is not what I wanted, at all.

Assume there’s more to the story

One thing I’ve learned as a bona fide adult is that my brain is spectacularly clever at telling half-truths and believing it’s the whole truth. It loves to come up with reasons for things. “This happened because of this.” “I’m feeling this way because of that.” It can’t stand the fact that most often, I do not know why a thing is the way that it is.

The world is more chaotic than I give it credit for. Its systems are more complex. Whatever reasons I have in my head are half the story, or less than half.

Sometimes a thing I do in response to this is find out what the other parts of the story are. This is a good strategy. This can help me do a better job of figuring out business problems, for example, and not creating unintentional problems with whatever solution I’m proposing.

But sometimes the best strategy is to know that I don’t know. Sometimes why doesn’t matter. (I’m thinking about during an argument or when I’m wondering “whyyyyy am I saaaad all the sudden?“) Sometimes trying to figure out why gets in the way of actually doing the very simple thing that needs to be done (saying I love you, here’s a hug, I’m sorry; going outside for a walk).

Make slow changes that integrate into the systems I’m a part of

Most problems are not the actual problem. Most problems started long, long ago, in a generation far, far away. And evolution is happening all the time, on every level. The things that “work” in any given system are the things that survive.

I learned this most concretely in a very boring (but interactive!) onboarding video on child safety—a pre-requisite to volunteering in my kids’ Scout troop. I remember one thing from that video: if you care about any number of societal ills, you have to care about child abuse. Child abuse on any level is a significant factor in everything from gun violence to the national depression rate to problems of housing.

Not to get too dark too soon, but the problem behind the problem is usually the one I try to focus on. This is even true in much lighter scenarios, like the problem of not eating lunch regularly (it’s lunchtime, so this is the example that is most naturally occuring to me). I could just make a recurring task called “eat lunch” and have it go off at noon every day. I may or may not have the willpower at the moment to listen to it, because I may or may not be working on finishing this piece of writing, which may or may not be almostfinishedjustafewmoreminutesplease. By which point I may or may not have forgotten all about lunch.

Of course I will eventually remember when my stomach starts protesting (that system is designed very well!), and I will look forlornly in the fridge for something to eat, and there will probably be a cheese stick sitting there, and that’s what I will choose because at least it’s got a little bit of protein and it’s not a bag of chips.

I’m not going to go into the details of how to impact the system that perpetuates this scenario. There are many ways you could do it. But some basic principles I like to remember are:

Pleasure. Any change that has pleasure at the root of it is going to perpetuate itself more easily than one that has pain or fear at the root of it. Read some Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and/or pretty much anything adrienne maree brown has written for more on this. Don’t get me wrong, pain has a pretty solid function (think hunger vs. the pleasure of eating), but I’ll leave figuring out pain-based systems to someone less likely to screw that up. Even if you have god-like powers and are confident you know what you’re doing, removing the pain or fear in an already-established system is very hard; best start with pleasure.
Agency. Any change that gives its participants agency to do what they want to do is going to perpetuate itself more easily than one in which the participants do not have agency.
Slowness. Any change that is introduced slowly is going to perpetuate itself more easily than one that changes quickly, and all at once. (Biologically, we’re all wired against change, even people who consider themselves spontaneous risk-takers. Read The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Lerner for more on how this works in relational systems.)
Non-intervention. While introducing change may require some intervention to begin with, it should require little to none in the end. In any case, a bias toward non-intervention helps curb the ill effects of “naive intervention,” a tendency pretty much everyone is susceptible to, where we unintentionally make things worse just by doing a thing—even and especially a thing we have expertise in. (Read Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for more how this works; it may make you re-think going to the doctor quite so often.)

I’m sure there’s more to being a forest person than this cursory overview, but it’s a start. In any case, the next time someone asks me to fix their tree problem, I can not only ask them “What do you really want?” and get a blank stare as a reward. I can also point them to this post, so they at least know what they’re in for.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love note to: The Creative Act

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 20:40:04 GMT

c/o Rick Rubin

Dear The Creative Act,

The time we spent together has been transformative. What’s it like being an instruction manual for the creative life? I bet every artist you meet never wants you to leave. (When are you coming back to visit, again?)

This letter is probably going to be too much about me, but I will risk it because I want you to know the effect you’ve had.

I’ve read many, many books on creativity in the past twenty years. A hundred? Two hundred? I haven’t counted. So I hope you’ll really hear me when I say that you are singular. I would go as far to say that if I had to keep only one creativity book by my side for the rest of my life, you would be my choice.

This is not because the concepts are completely new. No. Novelty doesn’t seem to be what you were going for. In fact, when I first met you I found myself skeptical—I almost fooled myself into thinking you were simple, with your straightforward language, short chapters, quick pace. Instead, I was surprised as the relationships between concepts I have understood and practiced separately for years gradually and then suddenly came together. “Oh!” “There it is!” “That’s what that’s about!” There were so many, many moments like that.

What you gave to me is truth. That sounds grandiose—I’m blushing—but yes. What you achieved inside my brain doesn’t have anything to do with individual insights, but about the whole: a clearer, more holistic understanding of the nature of art and artists.

Can I share a few memories that shifted things for me?

“Though we can’t change what it is that we are noticing, we can change our ability to notice. We can expand our awareness and narrow it, experience it with our eyes open or closed. We can quiet our inside so we can perceive more on the outside, or quiet the outside so we can notice more of what’s happening inside.

We can zoom in on something so closely it loses the features that make it what it appears to be, or zoom so far out it seems like something entirely new.

The universe is only as large as our perception of it.

When we cultivate our awareness, we are expanding the universe.

This expands the scope, not just of the material at our disposal to create from, but of the life we get to live.”

Before our time together, the relationship between mindfulness and creativity wasn’t clear to me. By mindfulness, I mean the ongoing practice of observing whatever is happening in the present moment, whether it be in your body, your thoughts, your emotions, your surroundings, what you’re doing, or what someone is saying to you. By creativity, I mean the bursts of insight that make a person want to make something, and the action that follows.

Rick Rubin has a reputation as a sort of zen master of the music industry. He is one of the greatest producers of all time, if not the greatest. He believes his success doesn’t have to do with any particular musical ability, but because he pays close attention. When he listens to a piece of music, he doesn’t hear individual notes or an instrument or a particular riff; he hears his feelings. He is a master of presence.

“Art is personal

No matter what tools you use to create,

the true instrument is you.

And through you,

the universe that surrounds us

all comes into focus.”

Before I met you, I used to think mindfulness and creativity were opposites. Mindfulness, after all, involves noticing what’s happening right now rather than being lost in thought. Thoughts and emotion are often a part of “what’s happening,” but when you start to notice what you’re thinking and feeling, those things tend to fall away. That’s part of the point of mindfulness practice.

Creativity, on the other hand, involves a spark of insight (seemingly random; sometimes frustratingly seldom), and then developing that spark to its absolute fullness. Depending on what you’re making, it involves quite a bit of thinking. For a writer, it’s mostly about thinking.

Because of you, I now see mindfulness as creative conditioning. The more present and observant I am able to be, the more likely I am to notice when a thought or an idea turns something on inside of me—that faint glimmer of aliveness that is the seed of every beautiful thing. Then, instead of letting that idea fall away, I can direct my thoughts toward following it as far as it will take me. Since I’ve started approaching it this way, I’ve noticed that creative insight comes more frequently (though not usually during the time I’ve scheduled to work on my projects, but c’est la vie).

Of course, being in tune with your own creative instrument is only one part of the creative process. At some point, you have to choose an idea to bring to completion.

“It’s generally preferable to accumulate several weeks’ or months’ worth of ideas and then choose which of them to focus on, instead of following an urge or obligation to rush to the finish line with what is in front of us today.

The more seeds you’ve accumulated, the easier this is to judge. If you’ve collected a hundred seeds, you might find that seed number fifty-four speaks to you in a way that none of the others do. If number fifty-four is your only choice, without other seeds for context, it’s more difficult to tell.”

At the moment, I’m not actually focused on gathering new ideas, though. Actually finishing something is very much on my mind right now, as I’ve been working on the same short story for nearly a year. It’s not my first story, but it’s the first one I’ve taken “seriously” (which I’m realizing is maybe the whole problem now that I say it out loud).

“There is a timeliness to the work. The passing of seasons could dissipate the value the work holds for us.

Hanging on to your work is like spending years writing the same entry in a diary. Moments and opportunities lost. The next works are robbed of being brought to life.

How many pages will be left empty because your process was dampened by doubt and deliberation? Keep this question in the front of your mind. It might allow you to move forward more freely.”

“While the artist’s goal is greatness, it’s also to move forward. In service to the next project, we finish the current one. In service to the current project, we finish it so it can be set free into the world.

Sharing art is the price of making it. Exposing your vulnerability is the fee.

Out of this experience comes regeneration, finding freshness within yourself for the next project. And all the ones to follow.”

When you said these things, my reaction was less “Oh! How true!” and more “Gah. Ugh. Yep.” I’ve thought a bit about my experience writing fiction vs. non-fiction and wondered why the latter is so hard and taking so long to finish. Despite how much I want to be done, I can’t seem to force it. Every time I play the movie version of the story in my head, only the next half-second becomes clear. As I near the end, it’s gotten even slower, and I wonder if the end is actually near, or if this short story is actually a novel in disguise. In which case, I could be working on this for years.

Of course, you took seven years for Rubin to write. Maybe my problem isn’t the length of time this story is taking me, but that I’ve had the wrong expectation all along. Maybe a short story isn’t always faster or easier to write simply because it has the word “short” in it.

Anyway, I digress. I told you I was going to end up talking way too much about myself! Reading you (and now writing to you) feels like the best kind of creative therapy session. I noticed you had no blurbs, no “about the author,” no intro, no backstory; you don’t even talk about all the famous artists you’ve worked with (and if anyone has the right to name drop, it’s you). Instead, it feels like I am the artist you are working with. You are completely focused on solving the problem at hand, which is always “how do we make the most beautiful thing we can make?” It’s never about any other outcome.

“Part of the process of letting go is releasing any thoughts of how you or your piece will be received. When making art, the audience comes last. Let’s not consider how a piece will be received or our release strategy until the work is finished and we love it.”

Now of course, ignoring the audience doesn’t apply to everything anyone ever makes. In this really long and totally worth it interview, Rubin talks about how his goal was to write an instruction manual that compels the reader want to make something. In that case, the audience probably didn’t come first, but somewhere near the top of the priority list.

But if the goal is art, the art has to come before every other thing. It’s incredibly difficult to be true to the art and true to “what people want” or what we think people want.

The word you often use for things that get in the way of making the best thing we can make is “distraction.” Which has me thinking—what are my distractions? What is keeping me from making the most beautiful thing I can make? In the interview I talked about above, Rubin said his grammys are distractions. He doesn’t even know where his are; he sent some to his parents, and the rest? Who knows.

This is just one reason why, even though my intent was to write my letters primarily to fiction and any book that I consider a work of art, I had to write to you. Your intention is as pure as literature. You are welcome back any time, and I look forward to your visit with gladness.

— Sarah Avenir

Note to the reader: If you have yet to meet The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, let this be your opportunity. Purchase it for your own shelves if you can afford it; it’s a beautiful book, and I have a feeling you’re going to want to refer back to it often.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Fiction vs. non-fiction

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 12:25:04 GMT

WHO WILL WIN THE EPIC BATTLE OF OUR TIMES?

Recently, one of my Internet follows wrote about how Sylvia Plath really wanted to be a prose writer but kept writing poetry despite herself. I don’t want to see more relevance in this than it actually has (I have a tendency to relate everything I read to what’s happening in my own life), but I can’t stop thinking about it.

I really want to write fiction, but non-fiction keeps coming out of me. A year ago, I decided I was tired of non-fiction. I never wanted to read or write another blog post or essay again, I told myself. I would write stories instead of teaching people things. I would read more fiction instead of non-fiction. I wouldn’t publish anything until I had an actual story to tell.

I’ve sort of kept my promise. I took Joyce Carol Oates’ Masterclass and started writing a short story of my own. I am still writing that story. And I’m not “writing” it in the sense of “wishing I was writing it but actually I’m just angsting over it”. I’m actually working on it in some form nearly every day. I thought the beauty of starting with short stories is that they’re supposed to take less time to write, giving the fledgling novelist an early, confidence-boosting win. It’s been almost a year now. (Fellow writers, is this normal?)

I did publish a few things—they weren’t fiction, but they weren’t non-fiction (I tell myself). I invented and celebrated the first Post Day, which you could say was teaching people about Christopher Alexander’s concept of aliveness. But it was a vague kind of teaching. More of a jaunty homage. I also published some letters to books I’ve loved, which is one step removed from teaching anybody anything, except it seems every novel I’ve ever read is teaching me things, which I then tell people about.

But what bothers me most is not what I have published, but what I haven’t. It seems when I’m not teaching people things, I am teaching myself things. I have amassed reams and reams of words about things I believe, or think I believe, or am experimenting with and might believe one day.

I’m starting to think that by not publishing these things, I could be stopping up the stream that my short story is flowing out of. Because doesn’t it all come from the same place? The fiction, the non-fiction—it’s all part of me. It’s kind of like when Brené Brown talks about numbing—how you can’t numb only the bad feelings without numbing the good feelings as well. Maybe that’s true about writing. Maybe I can’t keep out the teaching part of me and not also keep out the dreaming part.

I’m going to experiment with that. Or at least open up space in my mental map for allowing myself to experiment with that. Maybe it’s true, or maybe it’s a clever delay tactic my brain came up with to make my short story writing even slower. I see you, brain.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love note to: Daybook

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Anne Truitt

Dear Daybook,

First, an apology. During our time together, I didn’t say much. You shared generously about your life as an artist, daughter, mother, sensitive person. I didn’t share much about my experience at all. I probably seemed reticent to you, or unfeeling.

In truth, I was stunned. Your understanding of your own story cut right through the murk of mine. Your words were like a clear blue mirror—turns out it’s not mud swallowing my ankles, but wet sand to dig my toes in. And it’s not a path rarely walked, but entirely, consolingly common.

Remember that time we were talking about chairs? Your thinking mirrors my own question on how the quality of our attention effects the quality of what we make:

“When I painted a chair recently, I noticed that I put the paint on indifferently, smoothly but without particular attention. The results were satisfactory but not in any sense beautiful. Does the attention in itself with which paint is applied in art actually change the effect of the paint? Does the kind of consciousness with which we act determine the quality of our actions? It would follow, if this were true, that the higher the degree of consciousness, the higher the quality of the art. I think it likely. Training in art is, then, a demand that students increase the consciousness with which they employ techniques that are, in themselves, ordinary.”

I think you might be right. In so many things.

Another example: your thoughts on whether you should take a job to help pay some bills made me reflect on my own commitments and the opportunity cost to the art I want to make.

“I begin seriously to contemplate taking a routine job of some sort but am loath to do so. Not out of laziness but because I fear the kind of sickening failure implicit in betrayal of self, the spending of my energy drop by drop instead of into the waves that lift my work into existence.”

Even though I’ve chosen to make art and keep my day job separate, sometimes it’s hard. I’ve invested a lot of time experimenting with ways to manage my creative and emotional energy, but it remains an enigma. My sensitivity is an asset to my art (and art is a balm for my sensitivity), but it means I feel everything with the volume turned up. It’s exhausting, and you get it.

“The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.”

“In a deeply unsettling realization, I began to see that I had used the process of art not only to contain my intensities but also to exorcize those beyond my endurance, and must have done so with haste akin to panic, for it was a kind of panic I felt when once again inexorably confronted by my own work. Confronted, actually, by the reactivation of feelings I had thought to get rid of forever, now so objectified that I felt myself brutalized by them, defenseless because I had depended on objectification for defense.”

This sensitivity can feel like a barrier to being a “good woman” or a “responsible adult.” Somehow you found your own way, during a time that was even less forgiving than now.

“What worries me is that I try so hard to be sensitive to the variations in my energy level, and fail so often. It frightens me that my children’s security is dependent on my unsturdy, unstable body.”

“Sprung from my deliberately wrought tombs, my most secret feelings arose alive, bleeding and dazzling, to overwhelm me once more. I simply could not believe what was happening. And all the while I was in the full midstream of events, decisions to be made, children to be cared for, meals to be cooked, the house to be cleaned, friends to be cherished. Paradoxically, it was this very pressure that saved me. My past meshed into my present. It had to be taken in, considered, woven. I found, to my surprise, that the experience of my twenties, thirties, and forties had room in my fifties. The warp and woof of my self was looser and stronger than I had known. Thinking I would not survive, I found myself enriched by myself.”

We even share a common picture of what our ideal day would be like. (Swoon.)

“I have settled into the most comfortable routine I have ever known in my working life. I wake very early and, after a quiet period, have my breakfast in my room: cereal, fruit, nuts, the remainder of my luncheon thermos of milk, and coffee. Then I write in my notebook in bed. By this time, the sun is well up and the pine trees waft delicious smells into my room. My whole body sings with the knowledge that nothing is expected of me except what I expect of myself. I dress, do my few room chores, walk to the mansion to pick up my lunch box (a sandwich, double fruit, double salad—often a whole head of new lettuce) and thermos of milk, and walk down the winding road to my Stone South studio. At noon, I stop working, walk up through the meadow to West House, have a reading lunch at my desk, and nap. By 2:30 or so I am back in the studio. Late in the afternoon, I return to my room, have a hot bath and dress for dinner. It is heavenly to work until I am tired, knowing that the evening will be effortless. Dinner is a peaceful pleasure. Afterward I usually return to my solitude, happy to have been in good company, happy to leave it. I read, or write letters, have another hot bath in the semidarkness of my room, and sink quietly to sleep.”

That mansion, by the way (lest anyone reading this should think you are the kind of person who lives in mansions), was provided by a very generous artist’s residency-type situation. Not that it matters, you know. But your job quandary I referenced earlier was based on real need, not a fantasy romanticizing the working class.

Anyway. Apart from the hope of securing an artist residency of my own, I tread on, trying to create a semblance of artistic freedom in my daily life, among all the swill. (Sorry, did I say swill? I meant swell! Being an adult responsible for a mind-numbing list of tasks that repeat themselves over and over is swell!)

You’ll never know how encouraging it was to know that figuring out my own artistic rhythms might not always be so hard:

“One element is clear, however, and that is that the capacity to work feeds on itself and has its own course of development. This is what artists have going for them. From 1948 to 1961, I worked out of obsession, but obsession served by guilt: I felt uncomfortable if I failed to work every possible working day. In 1961, to my total astonishment, the guilt dropped away, replaced by an effortless, unstrained, well-motivated competence that I very soon was able simply to take for granted.”

“The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s inner development is a feeling of having laid down a burden and picked up a more natural responsibility.”

You also encouraged me that my decision to separate my art from what I do to make a living may have been a wise one (at least for the quality of the art, maybe less for the volume, and even less for its getting seen by anyone).

“Sometimes artists use their work for ends that have nothing to do with art, placing it rather in the service of their ambitions for themselves in the world. This forces their higher parts to serve their lower parts in a sad inversion of values. And is, in art perhaps more than in any other profession, self-defeating. Purity of aspiration seems virtually prerequisite to genuine inspiration.”

In addition to all of that, you taught me a great deal about sculpture and form and self-compassion and how to deal with criticism. You fascinated me with all the things you are fascinated by—I wouldn’t have taken you for someone who enjoys learning about military tactics, for instance! But you are, and it’s delightful.

In short (what am I saying, this has already been long!), I want you to know that during our time together, I was not indifferent, but enraptured. I wish everyone early on in their artistic path would have the chance to spend time with you. You are unmatched as a mentor and a person, and I am grateful.

Thank you,

Sarah Avenir

P.S. For readers who haven’t yet met Daybook by Anne Truitt, consider this your personal introduction. Especially if you are an artist, or on the path to accepting your artist-self, this book will be an excellent companion.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love note to: The Left Hand of Darkness

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Ursula K. Le Guin

Dear The Left Hand of Darkness,

Is it too much to say you changed my life, and are changing it still? I don’t think it is. When Ursula Le Guin introduced us, she said:

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”

So no, it’s not too much to say that you changed me. In fact, it seems you meant to.

Of course, as Le Guin says, it’s very hard to say how. Your words are better than mine (which is why, in these letters, I try to say as little as I can, but let the book do most of the talking). So I will echo back a few of your words that have left their mark, not just on my thinking, which is rarely the problem, but on my believing and my being.

First, you introduced me to the Handdara, a people biased in exactly the opposite way as me and my people—toward inaction rather than action. Toward not knowing rather than knowing. Toward passivity rather than productivity.

“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.”

“If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. … Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”

“That we shall die.”

“Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer… The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

What if inaction is what lays the groundwork for right action? What if we have it all backwards, here?

Ironically (or maybe fittingly), out of the Handdara come the Foretellers—people who play different roles in a ritual, mystical circle of seeing into the future. You come with your question, pay what the answer is worth, and after the ritual is performed, if the question is answerable, the Foretellers give you the answer.

How can a people who ascribe to permanent, fundamental uncertainty be the right ones to perform a function that makes known the unknowable?

“Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask.”

“But you’re the Answerers!”

“You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?”

“No—”

“To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.

In fact, the Handdara believe it is not only useless to know the answer to the wrong question (or perform an action in ignorance), it can actually be harmful, even if you are trying to right a wrong.

“To oppose something is to maintain it.

They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

What would a life be like that’s based on this principle of inaction? How would that change things? These are the questions you have me asking myself now, deep in the night.

Another seed you’ve planted (and the last one I’ll talk about here) has to do with fear. There were certainly echoes of Dune< in our time together—“Fear is the mind-killer” is a truth I’ve been clumsily parsing through for the past several years. But you went beyond that, to fear’s usefulness. Fear as control mechanism, fear as warning, fear as clarion call in the dark. Both in negative and positive ways.

“Fear you?” said the king, turning his shadow-scarred face, grinning, speaking loud and high. “But I do fear you, Envoy. I fear those who sent you. I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough.”

“Fear’s very useful. Like darkness; like shadows.” Estraven’s smile was an ugly split in a peeling, cracked brown mask, thatched with black fur and set with two flecks of black rock. “It’s queer that daylight’s not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.”

What is the price I pay for fear’s usefulness—its promise of protection? Do I believe it will keep its promise? Even so, is it worth it?

These questions are haunting me, in the way of a friendly ghost who understands what specters are, and what’s involved in an exorcism. I hope I have what it takes. I think I might now.

What is it you said, that I remembered just as we were parting?

“One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies, given time; plenty of time.

You have been that truth for me, as this new year begins. Thank you for sharing a gift so precious.

—Sarah Avenir

Note to reader: If you’re intrigued by this love letter, consider this a personal introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. There is so much more I could have said about it, but your time would be better spent reading it!

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love note to: All the Light We Cannot See

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Anthony Doerr

Dear All the Light We Cannot See,

I was so excited to read you. Having read Doerr’s Memory Wall and Four Seasons in Rome, I couldn’t wait to see how his gift for detail would come through in a novel—and one with your scope, at that. (I heard you took him ten years to write!)

What interested me the most was his choice to write about a blind girl as one of the main characters. In everything I’ve read of Doerr’s, he relied so much on visual description. How was he going to stretch himself to rely on the other senses?

Well, he did it. And as much as I enjoyed his short stories and his travel memoir, this book was the most powerful; the descriptions so vivid I could not only see, but taste and smell and touch and hear.

“To really touch something, she is learning—the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop—is to love it.”

“What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”

“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

In fact, there was so much to love about the theme of blindness, not only from the rich imagery coming from all of the senses, but from its metaphorical richness, helping us see everything invisible, everything that reaches beyond our sight. Starting with light itself.

“What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

“Electricity, Werner is learning, can be static by itself. But couple it with magnetism, and suddenly you have movement—waves. Fields and circuits, conduction and induction. Space, time, mass. The air swarms with so much that is invisible! How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house.”

“Open your eyes, and see what you can with them before they close forever.”

Of course, the metaphor reaches far beyond light. Being set during World War II, one of history’s darkest times, you paid attention to what could only be seen with the heart—the great potential for human kindness, and the role of art in reminding us who we really are.

“Werner guides the tuning pin back and forth.

Static, static.

He is about to hand the earphone to Jutta when—clear and unblemished, about halfway down the coil—he hears the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin. He tries to hold the pin perfectly still. A second violin joins the first. Jutta drags herself closer; she watches her brother with outsize eyes.

A piano chases the violins. Then woodwinds. The strings sprint, woodwinds fluttering behind. More instruments join in. Flutes? Harps? The song races, seems to loop back over itself.

“Werner?” Jutta whispers.

He blinks; he has to swallow back tears. The parlor looks the same as it always has: two cribs beneath two Latin crosses, dust floating in the open mouth of the stove, a dozen layers of paint peeling off the baseboards. A needlepoint of Frau Elena’s snowy Alsatian village above the sink. Yet now there is music. As if, inside Werner’s head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life.”

I was confronted not only with the sometimes-hidden kindness of people in general, but also with my own. So clever, you made your main characters children—alternating moments with the child who we might see as “victim” with the child who we might see as “perpetrator.” I never got to see anyone outside the context they were born into, and so I never got to make the mistake of labeling them as “good” or “evil,” as if that label was an inevitable part of them.

“‘Do you ever wish,’ whispers Werner, ‘that you didn’t have to go back?’

‘Father needs me to be at Schulpforta. Mother too. It doesn’t matter what I want.’

‘Of course it matters. I want to be an engineer. And you want to study birds. Be like that American painter in the swamps. Why else do all of this if not to become who we want to be?’

A stillness in the room. Out there in the trees beyond Frederick’s window hangs an alien light.

‘Your problem, Werner,’ says Frederick, ‘is that you still believe you own your life.’”

“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”

Then the world starts in on us. I cried when you said it, and at so many other times. Your characters are so rich, so wonderful to know. Just as in life, there are no minor ones. As bleak as parts of our time together were, I wanted to live in your world and know the unshakeable beauty that no eye can see.

Thank you for the gift of knowing you. You have made my life more poignant in every way.

—Sarah Avenir

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love Note to a Book

Love note to: Orlando

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Virginia Woolf

Dear Orlando,

I’ve been wanting to write you for a while to tell you how much I enjoyed getting to know you. It’s been a bit, true, but only because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to express it in words. I was a little intimidated by you at first—I thought you’d be so dignified (and you are! but also an incredible wit!). Not to mention you’ve been proclaimed, “…the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” which makes this short and simple one a bit lacking. But I overcame my hesitation. After all, the point isn’t to write you the most charming love letter in literature, but to tell you what it means to me that you exist. I remember you, and will remember you, for a long, long time.

Not to gush too much, too soon, but you may now be my favorite book. Not a favorite. The favorite. My favorite. For me and my promiscuous-but-also-picky reading habits, that’s something. I know the meaning of such a declaration is not lost on you; your reading habits are probably even more promiscuous and picky than mine. In fact, I was thrilled to learn about Orlando’s experience as an early reader turned lover of literature turned writer-dabbler turned serious writer. I am on stage three (working toward four!) of this trajectory myself, so I’m curious what it’s like for others.

“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and all its implications, he was a nobleman, afflicted with a love of literature.”

“A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.”

“Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”

“At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction, Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to the window, and exclaimed, ‘Done!’

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

‘And if I were dead, it would be just the same!’ she exclaimed.”

Forgive me all the reminiscing, but I’ve rarely felt so seen. It’s as if you knew my earnest readerly/writerly heart from the beginning. And of course you did; in fact, I should have had a clue from another book I met recently.

Oh! And for anyone who happens to intercept this correspondence (who knows?)—you are correct; there was a pronoun change above, from he to she<. For Orlando was a man who woke up one day as a woman. Which, really, could happen to any of us.

“Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what is above.”

If only we all could have such an experience! Men, for example, might perhaps learn a little about how onerous being the sole keeper and defender of human modesty can be.

“Here she tossed her foot impatiently and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth.

‘If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,’ Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered, lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head.”

Or perhaps, if we are not to try on the shoes of the other gender, we might travel through the world and throughout the ages, as Orlando did, seeing things from perspectives other than our present consumptive one (and that is a deliberate use of the word “consumptive”).

“And then, though he was too courteous to speak openly, it was clear that the gipsy thought that there was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the hundred (they were on top of a hill as they spoke; it was night; the mountains rose around them) when the whole earth is ours. Looked at from the gipsy point of view, a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth, and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one.”

Alas, many of us will probably get to do neither. And for that, let’s be grateful we get to live vicariously through our great hero/heroine Orlando. I would throw you a party, give you a medal, nominate you for President, but you have declined me, rightly.

“What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself—a voice answering a voice.”

You are a hard one to describe. I’ve never read anyone like you. Anyone who happens upon this letter this would probably say, “well fine…but what is the book about?” And to that, I don’t have a clear answer. It’s a (fictional) biography. It’s a portrait of human nature throughout the ages, and a homage to the writing life. And yes, it is an actual love letter (did you know they made a movie for context? It’s called Vita and Virginia, and it’s delightful). So as to what you’re about, I can’t exactly say.

But I will say this: your words comfort me and make me believe there is something greater to aspire to than the endless productivity and ambition and status games people play. That art, that music, that nature, that poetry, that friendship, that literature is our great escape hatch to a world more deserving of us.

“Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together.”

Hail! Orlando. Please keep in touch. You are not easily forgotten.

–Sarah Avenir

Note to reader: If you’re intrigued by this love letter, consider this a personal introduction to Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Especially if you are a reader, a writer, or the unfortunate both. (Or the extremely unfortunate neither!)

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love note to: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Victor Hugo

Dear Hunchback of Notre Dame,

Forgive me for using your English name. I know you prefer the original French Notre-Dame de Paris, but I was afraid this wouldn’t get to you if I put that in the address.

I was so excited to meet you! I (of course) watched the Disney movie adaptation as a child, and it’s always been one of my favorites. I feel a special kinship with Quasimodo. I know I’m not alone. Maybe we all feel like strangers here, sometimes? Maybe it’s the most common thing to feel as if you’re looking at the world from far away, able to see its beauty and sense its glories, but unable to connect with (most of) its people? I don’t know. But I have a feeling you do.

“After all, he turned toward humankind only with reluctance; his cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with figures of marble, with kings, saints, bishops, who at least did not laugh in his face and looked on him only with an air of tranquility and benevolence. The other statues, those of the monsters and demons, bore no malice against him. They resembled him too much for that. Their mockery was rather directed against other men. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and protected him; he would therefore pass whole hours squatting before one of these statues and conversing in a solitary manner with it. If anyone came by he would run off like a lover surprised in a serenade.”

Wouldn’t devoted readers say the same? When nothing is as it should be (which is most of the time), books are our cathedral. Its characters are our saints and our monsters.

But alas! The archdeacon Claude Frollo, possibly the nastiest villain of all time, would certainly agree with us!

“Separated from childhood from his parents, whom he had scarcely known, cloistered and as it were spellbound by his books, eager above all things to study and to learn, exclusively attentive till then to his intelligence, which expanded itself in science; to his imagination, which developed in literature, the young scholar had not yet had time to find out where his heart lay.”

Is ours the way of madness then? As we watch Frollo mature into the adult he later becomes, maybe there is a clue.

“He stirred up from the bottom of his heart all its hatred and its malice, and he perceived, with the cold indifference of a physician examining a patient, that this hatred and this malice were only distorted love; that love, the source of every virtue in man, was transformed into horrid things in the heart of a priest, and that someone constituted as he was, in becoming a priest made himself a demon.

He then laughed more hideously than ever, and suddenly he again turned pale on considering the darkest side of his fatal passion, that corrosive, venomous, rancorous, implacable love, which had consigned the one to the gallows, the other to hell. She was condemned. He was damned.”

Whew. Only priests who love books. Or maybe only celibate priests who love books. Who also happen to be so traumatized by childhood loss and loneliness that their love becomes distorted.

But back to you. You are richer, more beautiful, more tragic, than any one of your movie adaptations could express. And it isn’t just about Quasimodo (hence the French name being more apt!). There are so many lively characters; you learn to love and feel compassion for them all. Even Frollo who is literally the worst. But you especially learn to love Notre Dame—right along with Victor Hugo, who clearly adored it.

“Thus, little by little, his spirit expanded in harmony with the cathedral; there he lived, there he slept; scarcely ever leaving it, and, being perpetually subject to its mysterious influence, he came at last to resemble it, to be encrusted with it, to form, as it were, an integral part of it. His sharp corners dovetailed, if we may be allowed the expression, into the receding angles of the building, so that he seemed to be not merely its inhabitant but its natural contents. One could almost say that he had taken on its form like a snail assumes the shape of its shell. It was his home, his hole, his container. Between the ancient church and him there was an instinctive sympathy so deep, and so many magnetic and material affinities, that he stuck to it in some measure as the tortoise to its shell. The craggy cathedral was his carapace.”

And you are not just full of drama and tragedy and glory; you are also a great source of comedy. Consider the philosopher and dramatist Gringoire, who seems to constantly be in situations where he is in danger of being hanged.

“I see no reason why you should not be hanged. You seem, indeed, to have a dislike for it, but that is natural enough; you bourgeois are not used to it. You have too frightful an idea of the thing. After all, we mean you no harm.”

And on a completely different occasion:

“‘Sire, shall we hang him too?’ It was the first audible word that he had uttered.

‘Why,’ replied the King, “I see no obstacles.”

‘Alas, sire! I see a great many!’ cried Gringoire. …Let not your wrath fall upon so humble an object as I am! The thunderbolts of God are not hurled against a lettuce.’”

And on even still another occasion:

“Gringoire was certainly in a cruel dilemma. He considered that, as the law then stood, the goat would be hanged too if she were retaken; that it would be a great pity—poor, dear Djali! …A violent conflict took place in his thoughts, in which, like Homer’s Jupiter, he weighed by turns the gypsy and the goat; and he looked first at one and then at the other with eyes full of tears, muttering at the same time between his teeth: ‘And yet I cannot save you both!’”

Spoiler alert: he chooses the goat.

But of course, the real hero of this story is indeed Quasimodo, who despite having no one who loves him (regardless of what the Disney movie would have us believe), despite having the whole world despising him and repulsed by him—Quasimodo loves.

“His Cyclops eye bent over her, shed over her a flood of tenderness, of pity, of grief, and was suddenly raised again, flashing lightning. At this sight the women laughed and cried; the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. Yes, he was beautiful—he, that orphan, that foundling, that outcast, he felt himself august and strong, he looked in the face that society from which he was banished, and in which he had so powerfully intervened. He stared down the human justice from which he had snatched its victim, those judges, those executioners, all that force of the King’s, which he, the meanest of the mean, had foiled with the force of God!”

So I guess I can forgive the English translators who changed your name, even if our friend Victor would have hated it. Quasimodo is a treasure. And so are you.

—Sarah Avenir

Note to reader: If you’re intrigued by this love letter, consider this a personal introduction to The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. I think you will make each other laugh, and cry, and feel all the feelings.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love Note to a Book

Love note to: A Writer's Diary

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Virginia Woolf

Dear A Writer’s Diary

When we first met, it was kismet. Let me explain. I’ve experienced a transformative shift in the way I see myself and my writing in the past year. I’ve become bored and impatient with the forms I’ve been practicing for 20 years—narrative non-fiction, the personal essay, the how-to. Everything and everyone has begun to sound the same in my ear. I’ve been craving fiction (hence, this project). I’ve even started writing it.

It will surprise no one who has tried it, but writing fiction is hard. It requires a different set of skills than non-fiction. I’m beginning to think it requires a different brain. In fact, that is actually true. As Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool write in Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise,

“The main thing that sets experts apart…is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which…make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other…advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.”

And so, I’ve been looking for writer brains to study. I want to understand how writers think. I want to get a glimpse into the mental models that they have adopted that I cannot yet see.

That’s when I found you.

Woolf kept a diary for 23 years, between the ages of 35 and 58. Unfortunately, she was a victim of suicide that final year. What a loss for all of us! Her journals were not written to be published, which is what makes them so beautiful and fascinating. As a writer, she was careful and precise. As a diarist, she was freer, though still direct and uncompromising in her perspective.

The scope and breadth of her journals must have made for a challenging publishing project. I am grateful to her husband Leonard for going through every entry and collecting any parts that were about writing. That is why you are here now. What a treasure you have turned out to be. Because of his decision to curate Woolf’s journals through a writing lens, we get to witness her daily writing process and how it evolved over time. We learn what she thought about in order to solve different writing challenges. We learn how she dealt with praise and criticism. We see how she kept up her motivation and stayed prolific throughout her career.

As I spent time with you, I had specific questions of my own in mind. I hope you will not mind me taking the liberty of asking them, out of context of the actual work as they may be. The brain you represent is truly fascinating, and I have learned so much from you.

SA: Why do you keep a diary?

…my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.

SA: Has your diary helped you with your published works, then?

It strikes me that in this book I practise writing; do my scales; yes and work at certain effects. I daresay I practised Jacob here; and Mrs. D. and shall invent my next book here; for here I write merely in the spirit—great fun it is too, and old V. of 1940 will see something in it too. She will be a woman who can see, old V., everything—more than I can, I think.

SA: So your diary is partially for your future self—the wise and learned “old V”. Does getting older worry you, or are you looking forward to it?

I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.

SA: How does it feel, now that you’re a famous author?

I think the nerve of pleasure easily becomes numb. I like little sips, but the psychology of fame is worth considering at leisure.

SA: How is your creativity different for you now than it was in previous years?

Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. Therefore all this flitter flutter of weekly newspapers interests me not at all. These are the soul's changes.

SA: So you are free to be more yourself as you’ve gotten older. Does that mean that critical reviews don’t bother you anymore?

I very soon recover from praise and blame. But I want to find out an attitude. The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme—thinking too much.

SA: You mention praise for your work. Does praise motivate you, or are you indifferent to it?

What is the use of saying one is indifferent to reviews when positive praise, though mingled with blame, gives one such a start on, that instead of feeling dried up, one feels on the contrary, flooded with ideas?

SA: What about criticism? How does that affect your creative process?

I heard from Ka this morning that she doesn't like In the Orchard. At once I feel refreshed. I become anonymous, a person who writes for the love of it. She takes away the motive of praise, and lets me feel that without any praise I should be content to go on.

SA: Even though there is an opportunity to learn in any criticism, do you worry about what the literary public might think when you receive bad reviews?

[No.] One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

SA: How does it feel to read your work after it’s been published?

Is the time coming when I can endure to read my own writing in print without blushing—shivering and wishing to take cover?

SA: It sounds like publishing takes a toll on your mental health. Is it worth it?

…if we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

SA: What are you writing right now, and what is your current process?

I am now galloping over Mrs. Dalloway, re-typing it entirely from the start, which is more or less what I did with the V.O.: a good method, I believe, as thus one works with a wet brush over the whole, and joins parts separately composed and gone dry.

SA: How do you develop such rich characters?

I shall really investigate literature with a view to answering certain questions about ourselves. Characters are to be merely views: personality must be avoided at all costs. I'm sure my Conrad adventure taught me this. Directly you specify hair, age etc. something frivolous, or irrelevant gets into the book.

SA: How do you think about style in writing? What differentiates the style of a novice from that of a practiced writer?

A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.

SA: Is writing difficult for you, or does it come naturally?

I'm a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don't enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult.

SA: How do you get ideas to put into your writing?

…how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.

SA: Are there certain things you do that make it easier to live in your imagination?

…my mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

SA: What do you do when you become unmotivated?

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

SA: What do you do when you haven’t written for a while, and you want to get started again?

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw.

SA: Does writing great fiction require solitude or a variety of experience?

More and more am I solitary; the pain of these upheavals is incalculable; and I can't explain it either.

SA: What distinguishes writing that is Art from writing that isn’t?

Art is being rid of all preaching: things in themselves: the sentence in itself beautiful: multitudinous seas; daffodils that come before the swallow dares.

SA: How does someone start taking their writing seriously as an artist?

I think writing must be formal. The art must be respected. This struck me reading some of my notes here, for if one lets the mind run loose it becomes egotistic; personal, which I detest. At the same time the irregular fire must be there; and perhaps to loose it one must begin by being chaotic, but not appear in public like that.

SA: Why do you write?

This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of the shortness and feverishness of life, make me cling, like a man on a rock, to my one anchor.

SA: What helps you not take yourself and your writing too seriously?

How little one counts, I think: how little anyone counts; how fast and furious and masterly life is; and how all these thousands are swimming for dear life.

Note to reader: If you’re intrigued by this love letter, consider this a personal introduction to A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf. Especially if you’re a writer or in the creative arts. I think you will find a very good friend here.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love Note to a Book

Love note to: Meridian

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Alice Walker

Dear Meridian,

Hoo boy, you are captivating. Even though I’d heard you were a heart breaker and I didn’t know if I wanted to have my heart broken while on vacation (or let’s be real, work-cation), I couldn’t help getting to know you, and then being siren-called all the way into the deeps.

First, there was Meridian’s mother. I loved her, I did. She was a rebel incognito, even as she was stuck in forms of motherhood that robbed her of so much of who she was and what she wanted.

“Her frail independence gave way to the pressures of motherhood and she learned—much to her horror and amazement—that she was not even allowed to be resentful that she was ‘caught.’ That her personal life was over. There was no one she could cry out to and say ‘It’s not fair!’”

And how often does mother-love assert itself in weird ways (that we then blame our mothers for) when it’s otherwise squelched by systems that care little and demand everything from the mother in question? The answer is all the time, and you know it well.

“In the ironing of her children’s clothes she expended all the energy she might have put into openly loving them. Her children were spotless wherever they went. In their stiff, almost inflexible garments, they were enclosed in the starch of her anger, and had to keep their distance to avoid providing the soggy wrinkles of contact that would cause her distress.”

“The starch of her anger”; “the soggy wrinkles of contact”—I can’t get over those images. Your metaphors…they are rich and strike true.

“This curiosity was the way she was, sometimes, with whites. Mostly they did not seem quite real to her. They seemed very stupid the way they attempted to beat down everybody in their path and then know nothing about it. She saw them sometimes as hordes of elephants, crushing everything underfoot, stolid and heavy and yet—unlike the elephant—forgetting.”

The interactions of your characters remind me how, if we want to know the direction that power flows, we pay attention to who is paying attention—who is vigilant; who is careful; who is apologizing; who knows when it’s the other person’s birthday, how the other person likes their coffee, what might make the other person angry, what might make the other person soothed. And underneath all of that, where the resentment sticks and alternative forms of power must be creatively adopted if the imbalance does not ever correct itself.

Even more, how sometimes, oppression has as much to do with ignorance and stupidity as it does selfishness and entitlement.

“They liked her hair, not because it was especially pretty, but because it was long. To them, length was beauty. They loved the tails of horses.”

I really want to change it to Hot Horse Summer now.

Meridian seems to have her own kind of omniscience, seeing all of this and connecting the dots for herself-as-activist, even though she is not the narrator. She is both haunted by ruinous systems and in staunch refusal of being cowed by them. You see the visible effects on her body, and you witness the not-so-visible effects on her mind.

“She dreamed she was a character in a novel and that her existence presented an insoluble problem, one that would be solved only by her death at the end.”

In all of this, she has so much love for the people she is fighting for, if not, at first, for herself.

“‘Did you say somethin’, Agnes?’ asked Johnny, getting up from his chore with the newspapers and coming to stand at the foot of the bed. ‘You hongry again?’
‘I gets full just lookin’ at you, sugah,’ said the sick woman coquettishly. ‘That’s about the only reason I hate to die,’ she said, looking at her visitors for a split second, ‘I won’t be able to see my ol’ good-lookin’ man.’
‘Shoot,’ said Johnny, going back to the other room.”

I adore Agnes and Johnny. I can picture his “shoot” exactly, being from the Appalachian area of Virginia; a bit different from rural Mississippi but close enough to share the sentiment. Their exchange is just one example of the suffering that is entirely common and that people in power refuse to see. This suffering, instead of overwhelming Meridian or causing her to become hopeless, fuels the flame of her resistance.

“She needed only to see a starving child or attempt to register to vote a grown person who could neither read nor write. On those occasions such was her rage that she actually felt as if the rich and racist of the world should stand in fear of her, because she—though apparently weak and penniless, a little crazy and without power—was yet of a resolute and relatively fearless character, which, sufficient in its calm acceptance of its own purpose, could bring the mightiest country to its knees.”

There is no doubt that she could (and has, in many ways). But what is even truer—what makes her the force that she is—is this:

“It was still amazing to him how deeply Meridian allowed an idea—no matter where it came from—to penetrate her life.”

It was a pleasure getting to spend time with you, and with Meridian, and with her mother, and with all the people I met through you. Sometimes fiction rings truer than non-fiction ever could, and you are a prime example.

May we all be penetrable in the right ways.

—Sarah Avenir

Note to reader: Remember, books are non-monogamous. If you’re intrigued by this love letter, consider this a personal introduction to Meridian by Alice Walker. I think you might grow fond of each other.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love note to: The Blue Flower

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Penelope Fitzgerald

Dear The Blue Flower,

I cried when we said goodbye. I don’t know why exactly, it’s so hard to explain. Isn’t love always? It wasn’t one thing, it was the combination of everything. Your humor, your beauty, your truth, your wry insights into the distant-but-half-seeing mind that values poetry above all—the sum was so much more than any of these.

Maybe I can try to break it down.

First, you were published in 1995? You feel so much older! I guess it’s because you’re set in the late 1700s, but still. You transcend your genre (“historical fiction” cannot possibly encompass you), and your century. I applaud you for all that you are, but especially for this.

I’m glad I convinced you to start a Twitter account. Your wit makes you a fun follow. Take for example, the self-aware logic of a youngest sibling who recently became an older sibling:

“‘There are now two more younger than myself, it will be hard for me to attract sufficient attention.’
‘But you love little Christoph,’ said Sidonie patiently. ‘You are only a child yourself, Bernhard, you are still in your days of grace.’
‘On the whole, I hate little Christoph.”

This is why I ran away from home as a child. (I was lucky to have had an aunt with a car who wouldn’t think to question a two year old saying “my parents definitely said you should take me with you”.)

This same no-longer-youngest-sibling (he is called the Bernhard, by the way, and I’m not sure what necessitates the “the”) introduced me to one of my favorite new people—the bookseller Severin, who we only meet occasionally, but that is enough to love him.

“‘The little brother is in disgrace,’ said Fritz, depositing the Bernhard. ‘He ran down onto the barges. How he came to get quite so wet I don’t know.’
‘Kinderleicht, kinderleicht,’ said Severin indulgently, but his indulgence was for Fritz. He could not warm to children, since all of them were scribblers of books.

But there is not only hilarity, there is wisdom, too. I think you gave me a new mantra for life.

“Courage is more than endurance, it is the power to create your own life in the face of all that man or God can inflict, so that every day and every night is what you imagine it. Courage makes us dreamers, courage makes us poets.”

And even though you’re half making fun of the poet in question throughout, I can relate to that, too. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that idealism is not everything. It is certainly not enough to live well. Even though it is inspiring and perhaps gives people the energy of youth, its rhetoric can keep you from seeing the truth entirely. Sometimes you need a dose of the acerbic, supplied by several of the delightful women you’ve introduced me to.

“We who are dull accept that intelligent persons should run the world and the rest of us should work six days a week to keep them going, if only it turns out that they know what they are doing.”

and also, from a woman who is thought to have gotten so wise as she’s advanced in age:

“‘The years have taught you philosophy.’
To his amazement she smiled and said, ‘How old do you think I am?’
He floundered. ‘I don’t know…I have never thought about it.’
‘I am twenty-two.’
‘But so am I,’ he said in dismay.

Thank you for the several days we spent together. To end this letter, I would like to quote you yet again (you say everything so well):

“‘ This is really all I need,’ she thought, ‘one moment only with someone who feels as I do.’”

It really is all I need.

—Sarah Avenir

Note to reader: Remember, books are non-monogamous. If you’re intrigued by this love letter, consider this a personal introduction to The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. I think you might hit it off.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love note to: The Price of Salt

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Patricia Highsmith

Dear The Price of Salt,

I ached when I read you. I am aching still, thinking about it. Was it really just a few days ago when we said our goodbyes?

You gave me Therese, and I love her. I love that you let me get so close to her, allowing me to see her interior life as clearly as the exterior. Therese’s sensitivity so often mirrored my own, it felt like a bell ringing.

If she ever had an impulse to tell Carol, the words dissolved before she began, in fear and in her usual mistrust of her own reactions, the anxiety that her reactions were like no one else’s, and that therefore not even Carol could understand them.

I love the way she loves, deep and effusive, not holding any part of herself back.

I feel I am in love with you, she had written, and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

And the courageous impossible steps it takes to translate enormous personal feeling into something that is sayable.

In the middle of the afternoon, she went down to the first floor and bought a card in the greeting-card department. It was not a very interesting card, but at least it was simple, in plain blue and gold. She stood with the pen poised over the card, thinking of what she might have written—“You are magnificent” or even “I love you”—finally writing quickly the excruciatingly dull and impersonal: “Special salutations from Frankenberg’s.” She added her number 645-A in lieu of a signature.

But you know, I have read many stories like that, many beautiful words about love. Many courageous acts. But yours were different.

Your words were not just about love, but about what happens when you love someone, and there is an imbalance of power, and you are on the least powerful side. It is excruciating, and you cannot do anything about it.

Carol was looking for something in the refrigerator, and watching her, Therese failed to hear all of what Abby said next, or maybe it was another of the fragmentary sentences that Carol alone understood, but it made Carol straighten up and laugh, suddenly and hard, and Therese thought with sudden envy, she could not make Carol laugh like that, but Abby could.

There is a desperation, and a vigilance. You look for clues that your love is returned, or that it isn’t. You notice the tiniest gestures, things that would have meant nothing to you before. Now they mean everything. And what do they mean?

“I can do it in three minutes with a taxi. But I don’t think you will wait for me, will you?”
Carol smiled and reached for her hand. Indifferently, Carol squeezed her hand and dropped it. “Yes, I’ll wait.”
The bored tone of Carol’s voice was in her ears as she sat on the edge of the taxi seat. On the way back, the traffic was so slow, she got out and ran the last block.
Carol was still there, her coffee only half finished.
“I don’t want my coffee,” Therese said, because Carol seemed ready to go.

The evidence of ambivalence adds up, and you become afraid that you can never be loved as fiercely as you love. That you can never be as close as you want to be. That you can never be as important to this person as they are to you.

Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder’s foot.

But sometimes, the sun is shining, and their eyes are shining, and they are shining for you.

I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.

You live for this, and yes, it is enough.

“I wonder if I’ll ever want to create anything again,” she said.
“What brought this on?”
“I mean—what was I ever trying to do but this? I’m happy.”

Thank you again for our time together. You reminded me again, how helpless we all are in the face of love. No one is immune, not one person. You may have made my heart ache, but you soothed it, too. I won’t soon forget it.

—Sarah Avenir

Note to reader: Remember, books are non-monogamous. If you’re intrigued by this love letter, consider this a personal introduction to The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. You two can take it from here.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love Note to a Book

Love note to: A Year In Provence

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 01:40:04 GMT

c/o Peter Mayle

Dear A Year in Provence,

I know we said our goodbyes last week, but I wanted to tell you how special our time together was to me. I think I laughed more during that one week than I have in a long while. It’s a rough line to walk between witticism and cynicism, especially in memoir, but you do it so well. Your observations somehow escape being merely ironic or self-deprecating (the easiest kind of humor to find, these days), and instead make a larger, more generous point about how different and strange and somehow still lovable we all are.

I told you I was visiting Paris for work (and extending that visit for pleasure), but I was too embarrassed to tell you that I’m working on a story set in the city, and partially in Provence as well. So you see, our meeting was especially well timed.

It has been so hot here—an unprecedented heat wave without the comforts of air conditioning for most. I was almost thinking one of your mistrals wouldn’t be half bad, but then I read the passage once more.

We had heard stories about the Mistral. It drove people, and animals, mad. It was an extenuating circumstance in crimes of violence. It blew for fifteen days on end, uprooting trees, overturning cars, smashing windows, tossing old ladies into the gutter, splintering telegraph poles, moaning through houses like a cold and baleful ghost, causing la grippe, domestic squabbles, absenteeism from work, toothache, migraine—every problem in Provence that couldn’t be blamed on the politicians was the fault of the sâcré vent which the Provençaux spoke about with a kind of masochistic pride.

On second thought, I might prefer heatstroke to madness.

Of course, you deal with heat just as intense, or at least you did in 1989. But you do it with such morally stout fortitude.

I was turning into a contented vegetable, maintaining sporadic contact with real life through telephone conversations with people in faraway offices. They always asked wistfully what the weather was like, and were not pleased with the answer. They consoled themselves by warning me about skin cancer and the addling effect of sun on the brain. I didn’t argue with them; they were probably right. But addled, wrinkled, and potentially cancerous as I might have been, I had never felt better.

Anyway, I probably shouldn’t go on so much about the weather here. I can experience weather anywhere. What is more interesting to me is the food.

I wish I knew the language better so I could have conversations with the market sellers about what is freshest, what is their favorite, what is best. Alas, I must content myself with exasperated cries not to touch the strawberries—“madame! please let the professionals do this!” I imagine them to be saying. I have had three anxious encounters with strawberries in this city. So far. Every one of them was, after finally getting professional help to put them in my shopping bag, the best strawberry I ever tasted.

This is nothing to Provence, you remind me. It is not just the people who work with food who know it so well.

We were getting used to the fact that the French are as passionate about food as other nationalities are about sport and politics, but even so it came as a surprise to hear Monseiur Bagnols, the floor cleaner, handicapping three-star restaurants.

You introduced me, not only to floor cleaning gourmets, but to so many people who I now call my friends. A particular favorite is your charmingly (and chronically) concerned neighbor.

“You’ll be burning wood night and day,” he said, “and that’s when chimneys catch fire. And when the pompiers come to put out the fire they’ll charge you a fortune unless you have a certificate from the chimney sweep.”
…
But what would happen, I asked him, if the certificate had been burned with the house? He hadn’t thought of that, and I think he was grateful to me for suggesting another disastrous possibility. A connoisseur of woe needs fresh worries from time to time, or he will become complacent.

And then there was the radiator installer who was surprisingly current on pop culture (as related to the neighborhood, of course).

“There is a strong rumor,” said Menicucci, “that Brigitte Bardot has bought a house in Roussillon.” He put his scanner down on the wall and moved closer so that there was no chance of jeune overhearing any more of Miss Bardot’s personal plans.
“She intends to leave Saint-Tropez.” Menicucci’s finger was poised to tap me on the chest. “And I don’t blame her. Do you know”—tap, tap, tap went the finger—“that at any given moment during any day in the month of August there are five thousand people making pipi in the sea?”
He shook his head at the unsanitary horror of it all. “Who would be a fish?”

Here in Paris, I have met a meticulous tailor and a very caring laundromat professional (the way he cleaned out the dryer lint! None could do it more lovingly.) I met a hair stylist who would not let me pay her for cutting la frange. She tutted about me with adorable French noises and phrases the whole time, even though she knew I couldn’t understand her. I think she felt sorry for my lack of ability to communicate.

There is something about speaking a different language that helps you notice who people are. When you can’t rely on words, you notice the other things. Often, the more important things.

Anyway, I’m off to work on my French (you helped me in that department, too). But I wanted to say, thank you. I am grateful for the gift of Provence, and for Paris, and for all of France, and for you.

Bonne journée,

Sarah Avenir

Note to reader: Remember, books are non-monogamous. If you’re intrigued by this love letter, consider this a personal introduction to A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle. You two can take it from here.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Love Note to a Book

Only pointless things, please

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 01:40:04 GMT

Well then: it’s a pointless task, and that’s exactly why I need to do it. I’m sick of going after things that have points; for too long now I’ve been cut off from my own spirituality, hemmed in by the demands of this world, and only pointless things, only indifferent things, can give me the freedom I need in order to get back in touch with what I honestly believe is the essence of life, its ultimate meaning, its first and last reason for being.

—The Luminous Novel by Mario Devrero

I released the first Post Day on Monday! It felt like a deep exhale after a long season of wondering what it is, exactly, I’m doing here. I still couldn’t explain it to you, but that’s the point.

But now I do want to explain some things. Maybe not why I needed (and need!) to do things that have no explicit “value,” because I don’t think that’s explainable, but it does make sense. It’s a very human thing to want to do. That’s one reason people have hobbies. That’s one reason people practice philosophy and live in monasteries and write poetry and climb mountains and make art.

I want to explain some practical things that helped me get into the headspace of making something that had no monetary or social or good-for-future-me purpose. I want to explain it because I know I’m not the only one who has tried this many times, but who somehow always ends up extracting some measurable good from the thing they’re doing.

—

One thing I did was grieve. I was confronted with grief in an immediate sense because I lost my brother last year, so maybe it’s not fair to include that. I don’t wish it on anyone. There is something about losing a family member that makes you question what is real and what is valuable.

We’ve all been in a grieving process, I don’t need to tell you that. We hear it all the time. But to intentionally grieve the part of you that wants to be someone, that wants to produce something—that is the real process I’m talking about.

It’s hard. Hard! I keep revisiting it. Even this week after I quietly released my thing to a quietly small number of people, I’ve been wondering, “What else can I do? How can I make this gift go farther? How can I make the next gift go even farther?” And I’ve been telling myself, “No. That is not what is needed right now.” And I just keep doing my thing.

—

What is my thing? That is another concept I’ve grappled with. I have a day job. I’m helping to bootstrap a small startup. I have commitments! Responsibilities! We have big goals this year, and it’s my job to align everyone so we can reach them. I also have the job of filling in for things that we currently don’t have anyone else to do.

That is clearly important. It is why I’m receiving a paycheck. So every day I am tempted to do that first. Not only that, but I live with one of my business partners! And you can bet he’s doing that first. It is the topic of conversation in our household quite frankly all the time.

And so there is a part of me that says, “I’m going to do just this one thing first, to make sure I’m adding value and doing my job well. Then I will be free to make all kinds of things that I can’t explain to anyone else!” And I keep telling myself, “No! That is not what is needed right now. You must center yourself on what makes you come alive first. Even if what makes you come alive is making this project and making this project is terrifying and you really don’t want to do it. That comes first.”

And you know what? Turns out I’m better at my day job when I do it from a place of centered aliveness rather than from a place of checking off tasks or goal achievement. Even though my job has nothing to do with art or creativity whatsoever. People who write about creativity always tell you that’s the case, and you want to believe it, but it takes trying it for yourself to really know it’s true.

—

Saying “my weird project comes first” sounds like I’m bludgeoning myself into creativity, and that is the farthest from reality. The act of creating It’s Post Day was the gentlest process I have ever practiced. There was no scrambling, ever. Not even at the end. And I don’t like all the advice that says “Butt in chair.” “Put in your 10,000 hours!” because it doesn’t work for me one bit. The thing that does work for me is setting my bar extremely low.

While the one part of me says, “Here’s your goal for today! Do this and you will be productive and valuable on this earth!,” I have to constantly tell that part, “No! My only requirement is to water my enthusiasm for this project. My only commitment is to see how I can make myself come alive around this thing I’m making. That is all.”

After doing this over and over and over again, I’ve learned I can even make that commitment from a place of exhaustion and not-believing-in-myself and still end up surprised into some form of aliveness more often than not. It’s weird and amazing.

—

Another thing: I waited quite a while to commit to a release date. I came up with the name for the project in July and I didn’t decide when to publish until December. For me, there is always a point when I want to announce something I’m making, because otherwise it stays nebulous too long and is in danger of fizzling out into the ether. But I didn’t want to announce it too soon because I don’t like being pushed by external pressure to get something done. I wanted to move to my own rhythm until I was confident that my rhythm would take me all the way to a day that I could mention. And then I did.

—

Two things I’ve learned that make me come alive to my own art—artistic communion and solitude.

Artistic communion and solitude may sound like opposite things, but they go together inseparably. It means surrounding myself with artists who validate the need to be alone, the need to think strange thoughts that you can’t explain to other people, the need to not be interrupted, the need to try and to hate what you make and to immerse yourself in what you love and to try again.

I don’t know many artists in real life, but there are so many I know from my bookshelves! Mary Ruefle and May Sarton and Mary Oliver have been my main artistic companions this time around. They all are/were fiercely protective of their solitude. They all placed their art in a realm of high importance—the highest. They all paid deep attention to what was going on around them and found it marvelous. And yes all of their names start with M but I don’t think that’s a requirement.

—

Speaking of people whose names start with M (and people whose names do not start with M), another thing I did was up my fiction-reading game. I read so much fiction now. And I learn more somehow than I ever did. (I still read non-fiction, it just has to be something good and zen for me to enjoy it, like The Listening Book or The Chairs Are Where the People Go or The Zen of Seeing or—of course!—The Timeless Way of Building).

The thing that made me subtly move in the direction of a mostly-fiction reading repertoire was following a rabbit trail of authors who love other authors. Alice Hoffman is particularly effusive in the way she weaves other writers and their books into her stories. She led me to E. Nesbitt and Shirley Jackson and Franz Kafka and Henry James. I somehow found Charles Portis and Carson McCullers through reading Ray Bradbury (or was it the other way round?). Kazuo Ishiguro led me to Amy Tan who is leading me across the whole world. I am feasting.

—

I needed to keep up with my feasting. As I get older, it’s more and more important to me to know and respect my sources. Nothing I make is really me anyway. As W.A. Mathieu says, “All music is village music.”

I use Readwise to automatically pull my Kindle highlights into Roam for me. You can sort of see how it works at roam.sarahavenir.com. It’s wonderful to be able to take notes and not have it be a whole thing. I can elaborate on them if I want to (sometimes that’s fun!), but these days I mostly let all of that stuff simmer and trust that it will surface when I need it.

—

And finally, one pesky thing I had to deal with to embrace my solitude. It’s so over-talked-about (and I’ve done my share of over-talking-about-it) that I don’t even want to mention it but it must be said. The Internet.

An extremely practical thing I did was join Mailbrew. I use it to make daily digests of tweets, newsletters, and articles from people who I genuinely enjoy hearing from. I have a digest for Books. One for Food. One for Artists. One for Philosophy. I have them set to deliver at 1pm. And that’s all I read from the Internet every day. I actually get excited about my 1pm delivery.

If I want to respond to a tweet, I’ll click the link in Mailbrew, and I respond to that one tweet in Twitter and then I’m gone. I have plenty of fresh sources coming in, but not a glut of them that I end up ignoring. It’s a wonderful life.

—

I will leave you with this. It is about music, but it is just as true about writing, or about art, or about anything that is somehow both pointless and necessary to you.

The purpose of music is for you to become who you are, to bring what is inside you into play, to spin a vibrating thread through the world, to spark life. Music is everyone’s birthright, and everyone who wants to can claim it. There will always be someone more musical than you; but there is always more music in you to uncover—more pitches, more rhythms, a finer sense of proportion, a clearer perception of your aural world. I have never seen a person who said of their breath, ‘That is someone else’s breath,’ or a person who did not recognize the music in their own soul once it was shown to them. Even if other people have told you the opposite, the day you claim your innate music is a musical day for the whole world.

W.A. Mathieu, The Listening Book

Here’s to pointless things,

Sarah

Grieve everything

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 21:36:43 GMT

My brother died two weeks ago. I keep looking at that sentence, thinking, “That’s a shocking thing to say; it feels sensationalist. Do I want to be sensationalist?” But it’s just true.

He didn’t die of what I thought he would die of—he had Type 1 diabetes that was hard to keep under control. Throughout my life I’ve often imagined his funeral to prepare myself, just in case. I especially imagined the photo reel of his life being shot onto one of those church projector screens with the nostalgic music playing and everyone crying. I knew him best when he was a sweet-cheeked little kid who never knew a stranger and often had his hands in peanut butter jars, so I picture that. I also picture me trying to keep his grubby three-year-old hands away from my brand new talking Mickey Mouse with those white, white gloves.

But diabetes didn’t end up being the culprit. Instead, he died of a brain aneurysm that no one could see, prepare for, or expect. He was 36 years old, two years younger than me, the same age my mother’s mother died when my mom was just a child. She died of Type 1 diabetes, so my brother was relieved and proud of himself for making it that far.

Grief is piercing and strange. I’ve experienced it in small ways, like most of us have, but never this kind. My brother and I weren’t close as adults—too much baggage from growing up. I don’t know if grief takes that into account when you lose someone in your family. Maybe it doesn’t, or maybe it makes it worse. I don’t have much to compare it to.

When I heard he wasn’t going to come out of the searing-headache-turned-seizure-turned-coma, I gasped and wailed and heaved like I’d lost my firstborn. After several days of on-and-off crying jags, followed by stretches of benumbed staring at the ceiling, I was able to fly back to Virginia to be with my mom. It has been so, so healing to grieve together. Having lost her mom at such a young age and having experienced many losses since, she is the wisest griever I know.

“You have to let it out,” she says. “Don’t hold anything in, not a thing. Feel all of it.” She tells me stories about him all day, about how he loved Iron Man and telling jokes and how he wanted to work with dialysis patients once he got his hoped-for kidney. He rarely left a place without telling everyone there that he loved them because he didn’t take his life for granted. I tell her about how we used to pretend our beanbag chairs were giant mustard and ketchup bottles that we’d drive around the living room. I tell her how we danced to the lime in the coconut song, how I remember him bare-skinned except for his diaper and cowboy hat, sugar free pudding smeared all over his face.

When I went to see him in the hospital one last time, she told me I could hold his hand, and she warned me against trying to keep my crying under control. “Let it out. Let it out. Let it out.” My husband encouraged me to talk to him, even if he didn’t have any brain activity left. “You can tell him anything, Sarah.” And when I couldn’t say anything except “I love you” over and over, he held my hand and prayed the rest.

It must be so hard to process grief alone. My dad went to Africa, and he hasn’t been able to get back yet because of lockdown. It’s very hard for him, being there alone, waiting to get the go-ahead to come home. I think of all the people who have lost loved ones to COVID and not-COVID this past year, and who have had to experience solitary grief. I don’t think we were designed for it. I wonder at how much is left unprocessed until we can share it with another, and it makes me want to fix that for the whole world.

But when we can process our grief, fully and collectively, it can be beautifully healing. It’s like our bodies know how to heal themselves, not just in knitting together broken bones, but also broken hearts. I wouldn’t have believed that in the beginning. But after spending this time with my mother, and watching the way she grieves, so fully and even joyfully, I’m starting to believe it now.

Which makes me wonder at all the things I do to avoid loss, to avoid grief. I worry what will happen if I fail at my job, what will happen if my partner and I grow apart, what will happen if I haven’t prepared my kids well enough for the world they find themselves in. I worry about people on the Internet and living up to my potential and whether I’ve been too ambitious in my grocery shopping and maybe things are starting to rot in the fridge. I build all kinds of little hedges around myself to protect me from anything I’m afraid of losing.

Fear is a lot of work. So is grief, but at least there is healing on the other side.

Grief is still surprising to me. Even now as I’m writing this, I’m thinking, “I’m okay now. I’m definitely okay.” I mean, I’m writing something I might even share, which I couldn’t have imagined a week ago. Tomorrow I might be sobbing again and thinking how am I going to do anything except for hug my family ever again. As much as I used to think I knew myself, grief has taught me this isn’t completely true. Our hearts are such strangers when something we love is taken away. We never know where the unalterable truth will hit us.

It might sound morbid, not to mention impossible and inadvisable, but I’ve been tempted to think it would be better to grieve everything in my life now, before it’s gone. I could grieve my relationships, my job, my identity even. I could let this go and that go…let everything go. Let the loss of it completely overtake me, hopefully without breaking me. And then when I’m done, let myself experience everything, not as if it were mine to hold onto, but as if it were a gift. I could walk back into the world as if I’d just been born, and owned nothing. Then maybe I could learn to appreciate all of it while it’s here.

But of course that’s not how it works. We can’t grieve things that aren’t gone. Fear of loss is its own thing; we don’t get to choose to preemptively grieve instead. And hope, as beautiful as it is, interrupts any grieving that might aid us in our healing. There is a push/pull to it that keeps us hanging on. Perhaps this is why, as Breai Mason-Campbell writes, “Situational grief is momentary. Systemic grief is not.” We can’t grieve what isn’t gone, or what keeps getting taken away.

The best I can do in this moment is to remember the temporary nature of all things, and to use that to appreciate that we get to be here, together, right now. Grief and gratitude strike me as the closest of siblings.

Goodbye, little brother. I miss you so much.

How to build a fractal, nourishing system of practice, in business & in life

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 01:03:10 GMT

Part one: A story about productivity systems, personal growth, and discovering alternatives to both

I was on a podcast the other day, and the host asked me, “Are you a startup CEO or a maintenance CEO?”

Fifteen or even five years ago, I would have absolutely identified with the passionate, impulsive nature of the visionary—someone who’s good at kindling fires but bad at keeping them burning. My natural bent is to pour myself totally into some grand pursuit (and, if I’m being honest, to run hard and fast away from outcomes I dread).

But at some point, that changed. My unflagging optimism and determination to push hard toward possibility became a liability rather than a strength. It wasn’t wisdom that convinced me to change as much as my inability to force myself to do things anymore. If I could have kept going in the way that came naturally, I would have.

&yet as a company faced a different, but parallel challenge when I became CEO in June 2019. Our team has historically been full of optimism and the tendency to go all in on a grand vision. Like many startups, it also showed signs of “founder syndrome,” being highly dependent on the energizing force of its founder’s will, influence, and initiative. And while one of the main reasons the company exists is to prioritize the well-being of the people who work there, its own health has been through the wringer. For as many victories as we’ve celebrated, we’ve had our share of downturns to recover from. Luckily, resilience is one of our strengths. Each time we’ve rallied together and come through, and that experience has seeded within us a commitment to deep-rooted sustainability, while at the same time being true to our passionate, weird, “beyond category”¹ selves.

And so we’ve been experimenting with ways we can build our future without being entirely dependent on the “fire” of creative leadership. We’ve been looking for systems that will stoke that fire within us, individually and collectively, and keep it burning. Systems that will help us to learn, and build on what we’ve learned, rather than starting over and over and over again with each new flame of insight.

This isn’t a confession piece about burnout though, or the challenges of agency life. It also isn’t a declaration that we’ve got it all figured out—we’ve still got a ways to go to harvest the fruit of the seeds we continue to plant, and there are plenty of risks we haven’t yet mitigated. It’s more about what I’ve found along the path, and what a gift it has been to me, no matter what’s going on around me. Maybe it will be a gift to you, too.

The most obvious thing I’ve found is a system of practice that works for me personally. This is no small feat. As a recovering personal growth and productivity junkie, I’m a lifelong lover of building systems. However, until the past couple of years, I haven’t been so good at maintaining them for myself. I’ve been able to incorporate them in spurts, advancing 100 feet and then retreating 90, and that has thankfully been enough. Even done imperfectly (which I encourage!), these principles have propelled me through a satisfying, self-made career.

Now though, as I’ve had to learn new ways of working, these practices have supported me even as I’ve faced the challenge of charting a new direction for &yet while leading us through a global pandemic. While I can’t yet say that this approach has made us millions or “10xed” anything², we’ve taken care of each other during one of the hardest times we’ve faced societally, cultivated a shared vision for our future, expanded our capacity (even though we haven’t expanded our head count), distributed decision-making to more folks, integrated a framework for values-aligned growth, and are building on what we learn every single quarter.

I’m proud of us, frankly. It’s much easier to talk about these things than to do them (consistently) for yourself. I’ve helped a few hundred clients build businesses based on the entrepreneurial side of these ideas and wrote about them in Gather the People. My next book, People-First Growth, is about applying these principles within teams and organizations. But it’s only since I took on the responsibility of the CEO role that I’ve been able to continuously apply them and integrate that knowledge into our team.

That’s been my experience. Yours will be different. But ultimately, this is the gift I hope to give you: a thoughtful perspective on how those of us who’ve been victims of our own optimism and ambition might learn, however awkwardly, to work differently. And also, how to know when it’s time to bring the fire.

In this essay, I want to explore how a system designed for people is different from a system designed for optimized input, minimal error, and maximum economic output. There are several principles I’ve found to be true, or at least part of the truth. I learn new “truths” every day, and I’m sure you have your own. The additive nature of learning and discovery is one of my favorite parts of the process.

In the next essay, I want to share a set of skills that help create a strong foundation for these systems to be built upon. I’ve found these skills necessary to navigate the vulnerabilities and emotional labor introduced when you build systems that allow for the full range of human experience. In many ways, prioritizing economics rather than people is much easier, even for the humans involved. Picking up the end of the stick that includes “bringing our whole selves to work” also means picking up the other end—our whole selves are messy, messy creatures.

And in the last essay, I want to share my current understanding of how to build an ever-evolving, forward moving system of practice, using my personal systems and the systems &yet has built as examples. Self-referential and context-specific as these may be, they’re what I know best, and I hope they’ll be helpful to you.

Principles for a system of practice

The word “system” can be applied at so many levels it’s almost meaningless on its own. What we’re really talking about is a “system of practice³.”

A system of practice is an emergent approach to living and working⁴. Even though the phrase sounds a bit stodgy, I decided to use it as an alternative to the productivity systems and hustle culture that dominate professional life (and even our personal lives). Our systems of practice are not meant to wrangle us into society’s standard for performance or health. In fact, I arrived at my current approach because I was looking for an antidote to the impact of over a decade of self-optimization.

Instead, systems of practice provide a foundation of service and care for the person or people they’re designed for. While the visible results of integrating these systems may look like expanded capacity, increased knowledge, deepened skill, consistent output, or similar “productive” aims, these are not the point. The point is what is invisible: the person or people themselves, and what they need to flourish.

Also, a warning: if we are truly prioritizing service and care for ourselves as people, sometimes the near-term visible results will not be expanded capacity, consistent output, etc. etc. Sometimes we have a lot of healing to do. In order to do that, we may have to withdraw from or reduce our participation in the very activities that made us feel “productive” and valuable, at least to begin with. As we learn to depend on our true capacity, it’s in the nature of things for that capacity to grow. But we don’t always get to start there.

A system that prioritizes care for people relies on developing an ongoing practice instead of optimizing for efficient output. What are the rituals, the tools, the applications of effort, in short, the “practices” needed to cultivate an environment of well-being? How do we keep our focus on what we practice, rather than on what we produce, when the culture we’re steeped in is constantly tempting us to do otherwise?

In order to have any hope of shifting our view, we can consider the deeply entrenched values that drive our desire for productivity. Efficiency, predictability, and control are fine goals when applied to how we steward our material resources, but they’re terrible “first principles” when applied to how we invest our most precious resources—our time, effort, energy, and attention⁵.

This seems obvious, but it’s not the default. The underlying hope we have in our productivity systems, for example, is that they will help us create our finest work in abundance and on schedule, fully in control of the level of success we want to achieve. We judge ourselves for our messy humanity and look forward to the day when we finally have our shit together. In other words, we not only want efficiency, predictability, and control over our work processes, we feel that we ourselves should be more efficient, predictable, and in control in order to reach our full potential. This puts pressure on us to heroically pursue an isolating and never-ending pursuit of personal growth⁶.

Unlike productivity systems, which glorify the individual (often at the expense of the needs of the whole), systems of practice can be both personal and collective. We can build them on an individual, team, organizational, or even community level. Because it’s true that “in the particular is contained the universal⁷,” we start first with ourselves, and then move outward from there. We’re no longer isolated chasing after our own potential, but are interconnected with the people around us who make our lives rich and meaningful. We naturally provide nourishment and strength to each other as we are nourished and strengthened.

And so, what are the underlying values we can bring to our systems of practice?

Here are a few I’ve been considering.

Think “slow integration” instead of “quick pivot”

To build durable, fruitful systems of practice, the most powerful resource we have is not our intelligence or willpower or the tools we’re using, but the passage of time and the ability to integrate any new approach with our existing way of life.

How often have we tried a new tool or taken a class or implemented a new strategy and thought to ourselves, “This is it! This is The One!” For a few days, weeks, or months, we’re on a roll. The New Thing is going great; we can see our best, most productive, most capable selves on the horizon. Only to realize after a few weeks or months that it wasn’t “It,” it was never “It,” maybe there is no “It⁸.”

Over time, you might continue to be optimistic, even though you find yourself going through this cycle again and again. Or you might become cynical and give up on systems entirely. But once in a while, something promising will capture your attention, and you’ll wistfully consider “what if…?”

A strong system of practice is built on a few truths: No, there is no such thing as “It.” This tool or that approach is never going to pave the final path toward reaching your full potential. (Not even this one.)

But like many truths, the opposite is also true: once you fully accept that “It” doesn’t exist, you are finally free to actually build an approach that works for you or your team or your organization, long-term.

The trick is understanding that how you build your systems is just as important as what you build. Creating an effective system of practice is like building a house while simultaneously observing how you live in it. This is tricky. But by building and observing at the same time, you make a better “house” for your particular self (or selves, in the context of a team) to inhabit. You also learn that the entire point of the house is to be lived in. If you end up building a place you ultimately don’t want to be, you’ve wasted your effort.

And yet, that’s what many of us do. We love building systems for ourselves. So fun! So much possibility! We don’t much love living within the systems we’ve built.

Our two most valuable tools, then, are not our tech stack or our goal-setting framework. Those are just bricks or an extra staircase. Our two most important tools are time and iterative integration. Slow growth is the name of the game here. There are times when we need to make big, quick pivots to something totally new, but not in the context of building a sustainable system of practice.

A commitment to slow integration sounds simple, but it takes gentle discipline⁹: the kind of nurturance that stems from cherishing our present and future selves and committing to being in our own corner. This doesn’t mean being perfect; it does mean that when we don’t show up for ourselves, we ask ourselves, “What’s going on? What do you need?”¹⁰ Developing that kind of discipline means taking the space to get curious and be patient with ourselves, not pushing through and “getting things done” but pausing so we can tend to what’s going on underneath.

We love the idea of “slow” movements, but in a business context, we have a deep bias toward urgency, hurry, and stress. Time feels like a luxury we may not have. Even if you think you have it in theory, try slowing down instead of speeding up the next time that urgent feeling hits. It’s enormously difficult, and can even feel irresponsible or risky.

But giving ourselves time is not only good for our nervous systems and sense of well-being (even if we have to sit on our hands¹¹ in order to do it), it also makes us better decision-makers. Our conscious and unconscious minds need breathing room to do their best work, connecting new ideas with previous knowledge and gathering information to validate or invalidate those ideas. When we give ourselves the gift of time, our ideas are allowed to take root (or not), intermingling with the other roots we’ve already established.

Time also allows us to gradually, intentionally include other people in our thinking, even if we are introverts who do our best work in private. We don’t have to rush to make something happen in order to receive the social, economic, or career benefits of having done it. We can create out loud¹², letting our ideas develop on a more organic timeline, seeing what resonates with others even as we’re paying close attention to what’s resonating with us.

Moving slowly and allowing for the passage of time is not a passive activity. It’s incredibly active as we start integrating one small facet of our idea after another. It’s not about waiting until you have everything figured out; it’s about acting intentionally, in small ways, as soon as it feels right to act.

Often my first act for a big idea is a conversation. If that feels good, I might try a small tweak in what I’m already doing. I might introduce the idea to a larger group. I might make something small and share it. I might notice that one part of my idea resonates with ease while the other parts feel like I’m pushing a boulder uphill, so I’ll drop the clunky parts and focus on the ease. A process of slow integration is a daily, sometimes even hourly, practice.

Still, there will be times when you’re sure that a quick pivot is needed, and that may be true. But consider where that desire is coming from. Quick pivots are satisfying because the high of discovering a solution alleviates painful emotions like frustration, apathy, and fear—at least temporarily. But over time, a habit of reacting out of those feelings (and seeing that those pivots are rarely the miracle cure you believed they would be) can leave you burnt out and apathetic about activities you used to enjoy. Pivoting quickly not only plants new seeds, but ends up ripping out some or all of what you already spent time and energy planting.

While it may be hard at first, taking a slower, integrative approach will deepen your sense of safety (and yes, joy) as it expands your capacity to allow for things to grow rather than force them. When those things grow, their roots will be strong and well-nourished. You’ll start to experience a sense of ease where it used to feel like an exhausting, never-ending push.

That ease is not necessarily comfortable. Sometimes we’re so used to the constant striving that anything less feels strange and awkward. As much as we think we want more ease in our lives, we might wonder if we’re doing enough if we’re not constantly rushed and anxious. We might question our value or feel antsy or vaguely dissatisfied. Those feelings, too, are normal. As we practice living out the values we truly want in our lives, we’ll also practice letting our emotions co-exist with our process¹³.

I often think about that Victor Frankl quote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Time and iterative integration give us the gift to deliberately respond to whatever life brings us, allowing us to build the kind of lives that are nourishing for us to live.

Think “potency” instead of “efficiency”

Efficient systems reduce input and expand output. We want to get the greatest benefit for the least amount of effort. The underlying desire for efficiency is to produce more, better, faster.

But people aren’t designed for more, better, faster. We have limits. We have emotions. We are constantly taking in new information. We are driven by narrative; our worlds are layered with meaning that we have a hard time ignoring for efficiency’s sake. To be human is to be constantly asking why and to eventually change course when the answers don’t line up.

Designing a system of practice to be as efficient as possible may work for a while (when our willpower is at its strongest), but it ultimately works against our nature. Potency is a more sustainable aim.

A potent system uses human thoughtfulness as its core strength. We explore the highest impacts we want to see in ourselves and in the world to know where to best leverage our resources. Sometimes these impacts are less tangible than others. After all, “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.¹⁴” We create the most potency when we integrate our heads with our hearts to make our way through.

This kind of thoughtfulness can be inefficient in the moment, as we fluidly question the status quo and subtly re-align our movement in response to what is really needed. But over time, it allows us to act on new information in a way that efficiency does not.

As we do this, we look for opportunities for alignment. Alignment allows us to work fractally, where working on the small and the close-in is also working on the large and the far-away¹⁵¹⁶. When we align what we want with what we need, and then align those needs with the needs and desires of others, we create significant opportunities for potency. Working fractally means that any time we work on any of the pieces involved, we are working on the whole thing.

Fractals are a fascinating efficiency of nature. A fern looks like a fern, whether you’re looking at one stem or the whole plant. Each leaf is repeated, over and over, in the same way that each stem is repeated over and over, in the same way that each frond is repeated over and over, creating a unified pattern for the whole.

The truly amazing thing is that if you were able to change the pattern of one single leaf on a cellular level, you’d be able to change the entire plant. One precise application of effort would be exponential in impact.

When we approach our work fractally, we realize that we ourselves are the basic fractal unit of everything we touch. The same patterns that show up within ourselves have a way of showing up in everything we do. The same is true of each of the individuals we collaborate with. This happens regardless of whether we think at a fractal level, but if we understand this truth and are intentional about it, we can use it to our advantage.

A fractal system is potent because it allows every person to make an impact that is greater than their individual effort. Within a fractal system, when you make just one thing better, you improve the system. And by improving that system, you improve the whole eco-system in which that system operates.

Even as we honor our human and material limits, moving in the direction of potency expands our capacity. This allows us to engage with our lives in the context of abundance rather than scarcity, facilitating a self-reinforcing cycle of growth rather than lack.

Think “flexible” instead of “predictable”

Systems and plans give us a feeling of comfortable predictability. We know what to do and how to do it. We know that we have enough fuel for the road. We may not trust ourselves in any particular moment, but we trust in the ability of a well-thought-out and consistently executed plan to see us through.

We make our systems and plans as an act of preparation, before we get started on the actual path. This makes sense, sort of. It helps us think through what we’re about to do so we can attempt to take the shortest path with the least obstacles, avoiding the dangers we most fear. At the same time, rigidly adhering to plans we made at the beginning makes no sense at all. We know the very least about where we’re headed before we’ve begun.¹⁷ Still, we trust that version of ourselves and its well-laid plans more than the version who now sees what was previously unseen.

Since the world (and we ourselves) is always changing, our systems must fluidly adjust as we go. Like a unicyclist trying to stay balanced, these shifts might be imperceptible to others, but they are happening in every moment.¹⁸

The trick is to make these shifts in an additive way, rather than a subtractive one, building on previous discoveries rather than tearing down what we’ve already built. If we do this in the spirit of slow integration, we limit the need for destroying the old to make way for the new. We find ourselves spiraling ever forward and upward, revisiting our same old selves at different points, but always from a higher perch.

Predictability says, “Stay the course, and you’ll get where you plan to go.” Flexibility says, “Stay the course, and reshape it in response to what you discover. You’ll end up somewhere even better than you could have imagined.”

In order to be flexible, our systems must also allow for spaciousness. Instead of maximizing every resource, we must allow some of our resources to just sit there, apparently doing nothing. Whether we’re talking about our time, money, energy, effort, or attention, letting some of it be “unoptimized” allows us breathing room to respond to opportunities as they come up. It also keeps us from constantly pushing ourselves to points of stress because we failed to take into account that we often need more time, money, energy, etc. than we think we will.

A few years ago, I “decided” to become a runner (I say “decided” because it was one of many half-hearted attempts). I used an app that was supposed to gradually increase my extremely limited running capacity. Every day, a voice in my ear would coach me on that day’s run. The first day, that “coach” said two things that have never left me.

First, every person who can physically run has a pace at which they can run the entire time. This was a total shock to me, as someone who believed I could barely run to the end of the block. But when I tried slowing down, it turned out to be true. That pace may be excruciatingly slow—for me, it was almost slower than a walk. Watching me run is like watching an underwater relay race. But that pace exists.

Second, if your goal is to run every day, most days are either maintenance days or recovery days. You’ll have the rare days when you’ll practice increasing your speed or your distance. You may have even rarer days when you compete. But most days are for maintaining where you’re at or for recovering from having stretched beyond what’s comfortable.

Flexible systems leave space for the unoptimized and the underutilized. By only committing to a pace we can keep up on most days, we give ourselves room to honor and gradually increase our true capacity, rather than constantly push ourselves to a limit that only seems to shrink until our next vacation. We also build our capacity for self-trust, as we follow through on the promises we’ve made to ourselves, over and over again.

Think “nurture” instead of “control”

Part of the appeal of our systems is not only that we hope to predict the unpredictable and control the uncontrollable, but also that we want to predict and control those things within ourselves that feel unpredictable and uncontrollable. If we’re honest, our productivity systems often stem from a lack of self-trust. After all, we’ve been breaking our own promises to ourselves for as long as we’ve been alive. I’m not sure why we think that this time we’ll keep it up, but we do. It’s both our strength and our weakness.

I appreciate the principle of “basic goodness¹⁹” to counterbalance this “basic badness” we believe about ourselves. Our lives teach us that whenever a living thing is planted in the environment it was made for and given the nourishment that it needs, it thrives. Whenever it’s in the wrong environment or goes undernourished, it withers.

We’re part of the natural world. We have needs, either provided for or not in the environments we find ourselves in. When we wither instead of flourish, we can ask ourselves, “What kind of environment do I thrive within? How can I cultivate that environment for myself in some small way?”

We can stop blaming ourselves (and our friends, families, and co-workers) for environmental failures. Yes, we are responsible and accountable for our lives and our choices. And we are living organisms that need nourishment. No matter how strong or “good” we are, we will fail to thrive, eventually, without it. And that withering can look like any personal “failure” you can imagine, including, in this context, the inability to follow through on our own best plans and practices.

Any enduring system of practice must be rooted in nourishment, allowing for ongoing cultivation of the environment we thrive best within. We are all so marvelously unique, so this will look different for everyone. In my fantasy world, we would all be sharing our systems of practice, alongside who we are and how they meet our needs as individuals. Then maybe we can be more forgiving of ourselves when something doesn’t work for us, knowing that what will work is particular to the kind of person we are and the kind of nurturance we need. And the options we have for meeting those needs are as endless as we are in our brilliant uniqueness.

What’s next

This series is likely to be a slow one, in keeping with the principle of “slow integration.” (Also? This took me three and a half weeks to write, so there’s that.) If you’d like to be notified when I release the next one, sign up for my newsletter.

There’s a lot in this essay alone, and we haven’t even gotten to the practical, “how do we actually do this” stuff yet—which is what I actually want to write about. On the one hand, I read so much about how awful things are now and why they’re so terrible. On the other, I read a lot of philosophy about the way things should be and could be. The thing I’d like to see more people writing about is how they’re bridging the gap between the two, however imperfectly. That’s my intention with these essays (and for the book I’m writing—these essays are helping me explore the next few chapters in more depth).

So if any of this speaks to you, let me know (you can email me at sarah@andyet.com). I’d also love any questions or feedback as I continue writing. If there’s anyone who I forgot to include source information for, please tell me. And if you have any “Sarah, I really wish you would do [THIS] with this,” ideas, I’d be grateful if you’d complete that sentence. Right now I’m focused on simply finishing the essays, but I’m always thinking of new ways I can share whatever I’ve learned that’s helpful.

As the story goes, “beyond category” was the phrase Duke Ellington used to describe his highest praise for a musician or a musical experience. We use it at &yet to remind ourselves that our creative impulse to make new, cross-disciplinary, and hard-to-describe “labors of love” (whether it be a gathering, a piece of software, an interactive digital experience, or even a pair of socks) is a strength, even if it means we don’t always fit neatly into a set of boxes.
↩
I still laugh every time I hear people say “we 10xed” this or “we 20xed” that. How do you even write that? I still don’t know.
↩
I was inspired to think about the term “systems of practice” as an alternative to productivity systems through Melissa Gregg’s work, Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy.
↩
I’ve been deeply inspired on the principle of emergence by adrienne maree brown’s excellent work, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.
↩
I was inspired to consider stewardship of “our most precious resources” by coach and Needy podcast host Mara Glatzel.
↩
There’s so much I could say here. For more context on the history of productivity culture and how it’s become the water we swim in, I again point to Melissa Gregg’s Counterproductive as a great (if somewhat depressing) resource.
↩
Yay James Joyce.
↩
Ask anyone who knows me, this is totally me. I still get teased about my brief but passionate love affair with Trello boards. Now it’s Roam (I currently write daily-ish updates at roam.sarahavenir.com). How I do love new tools.
↩
I learned the term “gentle discipline” from teacher and Hurry Slowly podcast host Jocelyn K. Glei, in her Hi-Fi course.
↩
This is another skill I’ve been learning from Mara Glatzel this year. It’s been incredibly transformative.
↩
“Sitting on our hands” is another gem from Mara Glatzel. It describes how uncomfortable changing our patterns can be (largely because we developed those patterns in an effort to keep ourselves safe). Sometimes we literally or figuratively need to “sit on our hands” in order to do what we know is best for us, to keep us from reacting in our old ways.
↩
I could write a whole book on this idea. Oh wait, I have! For the curious, you can read more in Gather the People.
↩
As an emotionally sensitive person, this is one of the hardest and most valuable practices I’m learning.
↩
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is one of my forever-favorites.
↩
I first learned about working fractally from Havi Brooks of The Fluent Self, where she talked about “fractal flowers”—a way of viewing the things in our domain as completely interconnected. I’ve also learned so much from what adrienne maree brown has written in Emergent Strategy about fractals as a model for organizing.
↩
“Close-in” is a reference to David Whyte’s poem Start Close In, one of my favorites to inspire my own knowing about where I should begin.
↩
I’ve learned this irony from my partner Adam, who often references Pablo Picasso’s, “You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.”
↩
I learned the metaphor of the unicyclist from my friend Brooke Snow, in a podcast we did together many years back.
↩
“Basic goodness” is a term from the Shambhala Buddhist community, popularized in the U.S. by Chogyam Trungpa in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.
↩

Deep Work

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 07:19:37 GMT

“To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few…is a transformative experience.”

The question we’re afraid to ask

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 18:41:10 GMT

During the pandemic, David Whyte (one of my favorite poets and thinkers) has been offering online seminars. I highly recommend them; they’ve been such a source of connection and belonging for me, even without a “community” component (maybe especially without a community component, for an introvert like me). His wisdom and poetry is good medicine for the heart.

Whyte’s most recent series is called “Start Close In,” after his poem by the same name.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t
want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way to begin
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes an
intimate private ear
that can
really listen
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t
want to take.

A throughline of David Whyte’s lecture series’ has been this idea of starting a new, truer conversation with ourselves by asking ourselves a more beautiful question. And not only asking it, but discerning what that question might be by giving ourselves space, and often, silence. We may even need to stop the conversation we are currently having in order to begin a new one. This, he says, is the beginning of saying yes to the invitation life is making to us in this moment.

So how do we find that beautiful question? According to David Whyte, it’s often the one we’re scared to ask; the one we might not want to know the answer to. The first step required by that answer may be one we don’t want to take.

Discovering that question is difficult. Often, we’re unable to see it for ourselves. Our resistance (or our denial) is too great. It could even be something anyone who gets within shouting distance with us can see, but we’re oblivious to.

So of course, I’ve been thinking about my own beautiful question. I don’t know what it is yet. But it reminds me of the question I’ve been trying to answer since taking on the CEO role at &yet (that I also wrote about during that time): How can I participate in the public conversation without being ensnared by it?

When I first wrote about my commitment to discovering how to do this for myself, I was mainly concerned about how re-entering the public sphere would impact me emotionally. I struggle with social anxiety, and in fact, in my early days on the web, the Internet was a safe haven for me. I loved being able to talk about what I cared about asynchronously with people who geeked out over the same things. But as social media took over and the Internet grew to include literally everyone on the planet (and as I simultaneously grew a business, and—consciously or unconsciously—a “personal brand” to go with it), it stopped feeling like a place where I could escape from the pressure and expectations of the world around me and be my weird self. Instead, the pressure and expectations online became even greater than the ones I perceived offline.

When I took on the CEO role at &yet a year and a half ago, it had been 3 years since I’d had any sort of regular digital presence, and I hadn’t missed it. At the same time, I felt like I was hiding from something and keeping a part of myself small. I felt like I had a responsibility in my new role to work on it. Whether that last part was true or not, I wanted to come out of hiding.

So for the past year and a half, that’s what I’ve done. Not perfectly, certainly. There was a global pandemic. Black people continued to be murdered, and there were uprisings. Our president in the U.S. proved, over and over, (and is proving still…one more day in office!) to be a dangerous egomaniac. White supremacy has become even more blatant and seems to be gaining power. In the middle of all of that, I was trying to figure out what kind of CEO I wanted to be, and how to do that job well.

But I did it (and am doing it). I worked on fleshing out a process that helped me to show up authentically in the places that mattered most to me, at least some of the time. It was (and is) a complicated process with many steps that probably could stand to be simplified, but it has worked for me. Maybe one day I’ll write about it.

So why am I still concerned about being “ensnared” by participating in this public conversation?

“Ensnared” might be a dramatic word to describe what often happens when I share my thinking publicly, but I think it’s the right one. When I’ve retreated from the public conversation, it is much easier for me to know my own thoughts and to see clearly that “small step I can call my own.” I don’t worry about how I’m perceived; I just continue learning and growing and writing about it for no one’s benefit but my own. (I have completely filled 7 notebooks in the past year; I have no trouble being prolific!)

But somehow, being online makes me prone to questioning that truth in pursuit of…I don’t know what. Relevance. Legibility. External proof of my own worth and value. It’s harder to write things because I’m fascinated by them and want to write them; that feels like a waste of my limited, so very precious time. Instead, I’m tempted to create a unifying message and to massage my writing into something that fits; something that is extrinsically pleasing, cohesive, and measurably valuable to others.

Even writing those words, the question raises itself—“What’s wrong with making something extrinsically pleasing, cohesive, and measurably valuable to others? Why else publish?” And of course there’s nothing wrong with it, not inherently. But as a writer, something in me rebels against having solely that kind of relationship with my writing. It’s why, even though I write so much, even though I’ve worked very hard to develop a system that allows me to share without a lot of friction, I still publish very little of my writing. Most of my words, I keep to myself.

I recently took a class from Clarinda Braun, a consultant focused on de-colonizing business through matriarchy. (I highly recommend learning from her. She has brilliant energy and her insight is incisive.) One principle she taught us is that the impulse of the white/colonial lens is to “extract, exploit, exotify, and simplify.” It makes me wonder: how much of the tension I experience is related to the colonizing mindset inherent in my ancestry and culture? Is some part of me trying to colonize my own self?

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way to begin
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

Even though I’ve slowly, steadily built a process that helps me publish my work without a lot of friction, social media is still difficult for me. I started with Instagram; it felt safer, less self-promotion-ey, but also not quite a fit for me as a writer; seems obvious now. Then I experimented with putting whatever I had to say on one or all of The Big Four (Twitter, Facebook, Insta, LinkedIn), tailoring the content to the platform. How exhausting. Currently I’m just on Twitter, sometimes.

The problem is, I am a fish, easily hooked. An ounce of praise, and I want more of it. An ounce of criticism, and I avoid a repeat performance. I either need to become wiser if I want to be larger than I am, or I need to sidestep the question altogether.

Even if my intentions are good, when I post regularly, I become subtly motivated to use these tools more than is healthy for me. (What’s healthy for me? Small doses, batched, spaced out, and closely monitored.) If I’m feeling like people are highly engaged, I don’t want to “lose” that engagement, so I start posting more frequently. If I’m feeling like they don’t care a wit (probably closer to the truth), I spend way too much time scrolling through my feed.

I just finished reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work, one of those books I assumed I knew all about before having read it simply because it’s in the water. (Reading it felt surprisingly fresh, even for being such a popular reference.)

Newport would say sidestepping the question of social media altogether is a valid option. To his mind, we’ve been seduced into thinking network tools are equivalent to the public conversation.

“These services aren’t necessarily, as advertised, the lifeblood of our modern connected world. They’re just products, developed by private companies, funded lavishly, marketed carefully, and designed ultimately to capture then sell your personal information and attention to advertisers.”

Of course, Cal Newport comes from a place of extreme privilege to be able to ignore the consequences of disconnection. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and is now a Distinguished Professor at Georgetown. And he hasn’t exactly withdrawn from public life—he’s built a popular podcast and blog and has written six books, in addition to his scholarly papers. I do believe that staying off of Twitter and prioritizing what he calls “deep work” helped him focus on achieving those goals, but he also had plenty of resources and connections that most of us don’t have access to.

Speaking from personal experience, I credit the relationships I built on Twitter with a great many of the opportunities that got me to where I am now. I even met my now-husband and business partner through an introduction from a friend I met on Twitter. (In fact, I regretfully find much to agree with in Vankatesh Rao’s argument Against Waldenponding, even though it initially angered me because social media hasn’t been great for my mental health. And I personally love the idea of being a hermit.)

But despite the potential benefits of Twitter (benefits which, admittedly, take a lot of time and attention on Twitter in order to gain), are these tools good for me? Are they necessary in order to take a meaningful place in the public conversation? Or would I be better served by finding a different path?

Newport’s approach to figuring this out is to get clear on your goals, and then weigh the costs and the benefits toward achieving those goals. He’s no tech moralist. For him, the decision is pure pragmatism. The only bad decision is to make a choice to use a tool that has so many potential downsides to creative work based on the potential of maybe, possibly, receiving any benefit whatsoever.

I like Dante’s approach, personally. In David Whyte’s most recent lecture, he explained that he was inspired to write Start Close In by the opening lines in The Divine Comedy.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the road of my life
I awoke in a dark wood,
where the true way was wholly lost.

Whyte went on to explain that what we now know as Italian was, then, merely a little known local dialect. It was Dante’s mother tongue.

If Dante had wanted his work to be seen and respected by educated people, he would have needed to write it in Latin. And yet, he didn’t. It was a radical choice, seemingly a foolish one. And it was exactly right. Dante started as close in as he could go.

To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes an
intimate private ear
that can
really listen
to another.

There’s something people fail to mention in their attempts to help you “find your voice.” It’s that once you find it, you might not like it all that much. You may appreciate certain aspects of it, but you will also become very familiar with its annoyances. In this case, familiarity is almost certain to breed contempt.

This is an underlying consequence of participating in public life that I have to reconcile. Using my true voice, the one that is wholly unique to me, means that I will be annoying to my own self, out loud, all the time.

I want to develop a greater capacity to be okay with the grating of my own voice, okay with being just fine at something I value highly in others. Because if I show up authentically on any frequent basis, you will see what I see every day—there are moments of beauty here, but my contribution is often average. In a world where everyone is competing to be worthy of the rest of the world’s attention, this is a scary thing to admit—what is the point of contributing something “average” to the world?

But I’m learning that this may be the most valuable contribution of all—to refuse to fall prey to the possibility of success or failure, and instead to be committed to your own path, as honestly as you can, in public.

I’m inspired by writer Winnie Lim, who has written multiple essays on this topic. (This one, this one, and this one particularly resonated with me recently.) They give me courage that my beautiful question is not embarrassingly navel-gazey, but that it is central as more of our lives and our identities are being cultivated (or at least curated) publicly.

“I wanted to find a way of living that is true: in my own definition that means being able to appreciate life and what comes with it without resorting to making myself an attractive signboard. I wanted to become ordinary so that I will know what will stay when everything else fades.”

I’ve been fascinated lately by the Eastern Orthodox monks who have lived on Mount Athos for centuries. They believe that the path to oneness with God is through the heart, and that the path to the heart is through humility.

Humility, to them, is not about believing you are small; it is about noticing that we are all fish, easily hooked. We are attached to our own egos, and without even thinking, we make them our first priority. In this way, we cannot see clearly. We cannot love fully. We can only be concerned with upholding the ego that helps us feel safe, loved, and important.

Ironically, when we are able to let go of our egos, to see clearly and to love fully, it is only then that we can experience true safety, love, and belonging. Or at least that’s what the ancient sages, myths, stories, and wisdom traditions tell us.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

So how do we develop this humility, this willingness to be deeply ordinary in our own truth? The monks do it through prayers and chanting “without ceasing” so that they become forever aware of their own need for help. “Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.”

I suspect that similarly, this kind of ongoing willingness to be both ordinary and to listen to our own voice is a forever kind of practice. Of saying what is true, noticing when and where we get hooked by praise or criticism, taking time and space to feel it, finding ways to release it, then summoning up our courage to say again what is true.

We can also keep ourselves away from situations that we know are very likely to keep us hooked. We can create environments for ourselves that support our efforts to build that muscle rather than derail them. And we can let ourselves do all of this imperfectly, trusting in our own internal process rather than holding out for some external outcome.

But you know, I’m not sure. That’s what it looks like to me right now, in my attempt to come up with a strategy. Maybe I need to question that instinct, too.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t
want to take.

January is, of course, a time for new beginnings, but I’m more into slow beginnings these days. At &yet, we take the month of January to think about what we want in the year ahead. Our forward motion doesn’t begin until February.

I’m taking the same approach with myself. Last year was a year of searching for a process, the True Way (as Dante refers to, mournfully, as the way he has lost). This is the way that would seem to take me straight to where I want to go. But as David Whyte quoted of poet Han Shan, “there is no path that goes all the way.”

This year, I’m giving up on that perfect path. I’m keeping the benefits of what I’ve learned, but it is ultimately the conversation I am ending, in order to find my more beautiful question.

Maybe my beautiful question is, at the heart of it, “Am I enough?” “Can I trust the pale ground beneath my feet?” “Can I trust this voice, this heart that is my own?” “Can I trust the ever-unfolding invitation of my life?” “And if I do, will I be safe, will I be loved, will I belong?”

But of course, that is a question I cannot know the answer to right now. It is only the beginning of a conversation that, afraid as I may be to enter into it, requires only that I take that first small step.

Ann Veronica

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 07:18:04 GMT

”I’ve been thinking, you know—I’m not sure that primarily the perception of beauty isn’t just intensity of feeling free from pain; intensity of perception without any tissue destruction.”

The Mere Wife

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 07:16:30 GMT

”You don’t really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind.”

Demand-Side Sales

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 07:14:45 GMT

”If the push and the pull are not greater than the anxiety and the habit, they’re not going to move. In business school, we are taught to add more features and benefits, which would create more magnetism, pushing people to buy our product. It’s not true! We’ve got to reduce their anxiety.”

The Tombs of Atuan

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 07:13:13 GMT

“’You have set us both free,’ he said. ‘Alone, no one wins freedom.’”

Dune Messiah

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 07:11:11 GMT

”Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”

Weird is practical

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 02:43:59 GMT

As the season of the weirdo at &yet is coming to a close, I wrote this piece to make a business case for weirdness.

“It may seem counter-intuitive to narrow your focus to a very specific group of people, but when it comes to building customer loyalty, predictable revenue, and truly great products, nothing beats a weirdos-first strategy.”

Dune

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 07:09:08 GMT

”Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

You Belong

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 07:06:54 GMT

“Not belonging can manifest in different degrees of intensity. It can be momentary or subtle, like feeling slightly out of place at a party where you only know one person. Or it can be tenacious and upsetting, like the ongoing sense of anxiety that exists around our career, relationship status, or bank account balance. Or not belonging can be systemic and profound, like the many layers of oppression that can be internalized. Regardless of the category, degree, or intensity, not belonging is experienced in our very own bodies.”

How to Be Idle

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 06:05:01 GMT

“Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today.”

Where the weirdos roam

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 01:40:04 GMT

I wrote this piece for &yet’s Find Your Weirdos project.

“It’s easy to create a “customer persona” or a “user journey” to inform your product, marketing, and sales decisions. It’s much more challenging to actually understand the person you’re doing all of this for. There are two ways that focusing on weirdos makes this much easier.”

(The buffalo image is by my teammate Lynn Fisher, inspired by my public Roam project. “Where the buffalos roam”…get it?)

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 05:55:28 GMT

“She says it is a good thing to have no sense of how it is done in the things that amuse you. You should have one absorbing occupation and as for the other things in life for full enjoyment you should only contemplate results. In this way you are bound to feel more about it than those who know a little of how it is done.”

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 05:53:34 GMT

“The key to warrior ship is not being afraid of who you are.”

This is how we grow

Sat, 18 Jul 2020 02:06:03 GMT

“Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being split asunder, the clarity of their vision alongside an ability to take their place in a materialistic world. They are the modern heroes… Artists at least have a form within which they can hold their own conflicting opposites together. But there are some who have no recognized artistic form to serve this purpose, they are artists of the living. To my mind these last are the supreme heroes in our soulless society.” —Irene Claremont de Castillejo, via David Whyte, The Heart Aroused

I’ve been grappling lately with the concept of soul and work. It isn’t always the case that we need to bring all of ourselves into what we’re doing. Sometimes we can just provide a service or make a product that fills a need and do our best to be a contribution. Our jobs do not define our identities or our worth.

But some of us (myself included) feel most of service when we bring our entire selves to whatever we’re doing. We are constantly on a path toward integrating what we do with who we are, and when we leave that path, we abandon a part of ourselves.

“Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.” —Isak Dinesen, Babette’s Feast

I worked for a long time to integrate myself into my work as a consultant. As long as that took me (maybe a decade?), it came much more naturally to do that as an individual creator than as a leader of a larger team. Now, as CEO of &yet, it’s been like starting all over again, learning to balance my own unique vision with the gifts and needs of the whole.

Ironically, what I’ve discovered is that it’s less about balance (even though I just used that word) than it is about permission. Permission for me to be fully me and you to be fully you. Figuring out how we can all bring the gifts we want to bring to the table and turn that into something more beautiful than what we could have made on our own. And the courage to do that in the face of all kinds of fears and discomforts. Particularly now, in the middle of this historic pandemic and national uprising.

“A life of our own, from which we can give to others and to our organizations in an unresentful and ultimately generous way, after all, must be one of the great tasks of work, of art, of literature—to live and work each according to the way we are individually made for this awkward and beautiful world.” —David Whyte, The Heart Aroused

We all must do our own work around knowing our gifts and deciding which ones we want to bring to the table. But one thing this pandemic is teaching me is that there are no guarantees. I know who I am, and I want to lead fully from that place. I know who we are as the &yet team, and I want to make our unique gifts accessible to all who would benefit from them. I want to know who you are and what your gifts and needs are, so we can journey together to get where we want to go and enjoy the process.

I am writing a book. Actually, two books.

The first book, you probably know about. It’s called Gather the People: A human approach to marketing for people who would rather make what they love than persuade people to buy it.

I wrote this book five years ago, and have been working on a second edition for two years. To state the obvious, this second edition has taken me a long time to write. (Also, not to bury the lede: I FINISHED IT! It is done! The incredibly Amy Lynn Taylor is working on final design tweaks, and then we are shipping this!)

So much has happened for me personally since I started re-writing that book, but two things, in particular, made it difficult. First, I took on the role of CEO at &yet a year ago, and establishing our vision has taken some time. Second, because I couldn’t decide whether I was writing a new book or updating the old one. Turns out I’m doing both.

What I’ve been hearing from laid-off individuals and small business owners is that the principles and application exercises in Gather the People are needed in this moment. Its gentle way of guiding the reader, step by step, through taking an idea from its infancy to execution, gathering people around it along the way, and doing that again and again, is bringing a sense of motivation and hope to those who are re-reading it in this new context.

So yes, last month, I finished the updated text. (It feels so strange to write that. I finished. I finished!) It is still a book for individual creators and consultants. The core message of the book is the same. I’ve given it a refresh based on reader feedback and my own expanded experience.

Folks who have pre-ordered the digital version will be the first to receive it. Audiobook pre-orders will be next. For folks who have pre-ordered the beautiful print version, we are unsure when that’s going to happen, with the economic uncertainties on the supply side; we’ll update you on the status as we know more. We are also offering a new on-demand course, if you’d like more structure as you do these exercises.

As for the second book, I will save that for another time. This email is getting rather long as it is, and even though I’ve written much of it, it still feels like a puzzle where I’ve put together all of the edge pieces, but I still don’t know what the front of the box looks like.

Now, how is all this relevant to my grappling with work and the soul? Well, as you may have noticed, I’ve been pretty quiet online for several years. I have posted a few things publicly, but mostly have let myself not. The most I have shared is with you, and that has been with a light hand.

One of the core principles in Gather the People is creating out loud—creating with people, rather than for them. I have done this covertly, reaching out to friends and past collaborators and clients. I have shared some with you. But now it is time for me to share more publicly, both in the service of the book and its readers and in the service of &yet.

Ack.

I have been practicing in small ways. Adam and I started a podcast. I wrote and recorded journaling exercises for Gather the Courage. I’ve been playing with Instagram stories.

But in all of these tiny steps, I haven’t talked about my work, not at all. I have been afraid of taking too large a step and scaring myself away from it entirely.

It seems like such a navel-gazing thing to write about, my social anxiety filtered through my experience with social media. But I know I’m not alone.

“…the price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears…”

“It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with, it is the mother of the thing you fear.” —David Whyte, The Heart Aroused

When we commit to leading with the soul, we commit to dealing with the fears keeping us from its call.

I have written before about my history of social anxiety in the context of waking up in the morning (which I’ve since worked through). Though I pass as “normal” (whatever that means) and mostly even confident and outgoing, occasionally the evidence will slip through. I have had panic attacks in the midst of friends; I’ve hidden in the bathroom when it was happening in the midst of strangers.

But 99% of the time, it’s more subtle than that. It’s an underlying layer of apprehension that goes into every social situation. It’s an awareness that I need to take special care to get myself “in a good place” (a word I put in quotation marks because of how often I use it) when I’m about to go into a meeting or a prolonged social event. I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing what I need and taking care of myself (and getting help from my partner). So good, in fact, most people would never know the work it often takes just to show up and be my curious, idealistic, enthusiastic self.

My friend Sara recently shared with me that she also struggles with social anxiety (she gave me permission to share) and that it’s been especially difficult during the pandemic. “I think being isolated has caused me to become more anxious, like how you feel when you haven’t called/emailed someone for so long that you feel anxious about the next interaction, and that anxiety compounds as you wait longer and longer without contact.”

I’m grateful to Sara for putting this feeling into words. For me, it’s especially true in how I’m feeling about social media, after having been mostly absent from it for several years.

It’s like “Are we okay? Are we still friends?” Except with everyone in the whole world.

David Whyte compares our journey through fear with the mythical hero Beowulf’s defeat of the diabolical swamp creature Grendel. He defeats Grendel and celebrates his victory, only to discover the next day that Grendel’s mother, a far more terrible creature, has emerged from the swamp.

“It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with, it is the mother of the thing you fear.”

I have decided it is better to be myself, to be embarrassed about it, to possibly cry in public, to possibly make others uncomfortable, than it is to hide. It is better, even, to make the commitment to being myself and showing up, even though I will go through seasons where that is possible and a source of growth for me, and seasons where I need to retreat and recover.

“However well we arrange for our self-protection beforehand, our preparations are only muttered incantations to ward off the evil eye. The solution itself lies down in the water.” —David Whyte, The Heart Aroused

The thing is, this isn’t new. I have been doing it all along—showing up, retreating, alternating seasons of growth with seasons of recovery. What’s new is that I have words for it.

Examining our narratives gives us the power of bringing not only understanding to our experience, but acceptance. It also gives us the courage to “go down in the water” and deal with the mother of all that we fear.

Recently, we updated andyet.com to share our perspective and what we’ve been making in the context of COVID-19 and the uprising we’re experiencing.

Our tagline now says “design, code, and education for people-first growth.”

I’m going to talk about what “people-first growth” means to us another time (again, I am conscious that I’ve written far too much already!), but I encourage you to think about this in the context of a quote by Rilke, and what I’ve shared with you about my own challenges:

“Winning does not tempt that one. This is how they grow: by being defeated, decisively by constantly greater beings.” —Rilke (edits mine, for gender-neutrality)

How brave we all are.

I’m excited and honored to continue this journey with you.

A Generous Orthodoxy

Fri, 29 May 2020 05:40:11 GMT

“All these years of thinking ended up like this:
in front of all this beauty,
understanding nothing.”
—Bruce Cockburn

Arbitrary Stupid Goal

Thu, 28 May 2020 05:35:49 GMT

“When they came back from vacation, they felt really good. It was easily the best vacation of their lives, and they wondered why.

My father says it was because the Wolfawitzes stopped trying to accomplish anything. They just put a carrot in front of them and decided that the carrot wasn’t that important but chasing it was.”

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

Tue, 26 May 2020 05:27:06 GMT

“The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the reach of one’s love for the place one is working in and for the things and creatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results. An adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach of love.”

The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Mon, 25 May 2020 05:22:50 GMT

“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.”

Eastern Body Western Mind

Sun, 24 May 2020 05:19:58 GMT

“We either get success or lessons. If we learn our lessons successfully, we get both.”

Conjure Women

Sat, 23 May 2020 05:17:32 GMT

“Ain’t every woman’s daughter made from the death of the mama, somehow or another?”

Our Riches

Fri, 22 May 2020 05:14:58 GMT

“They were used to waiting for orders and being told how to live. Now they decided to live as they pleased, simply, not listening to anyone, and everything was lit up, truly, as when we find the match and the lamp, and the house is illuminated, and we know at last where to reach for what we need, as when the dawn lights up a larger dwelling, and a part of the world that had been smothered by night’s mud, with its valleys, rivers, hills, and forests, is revealed in all its living joy.”

Feminism: A Key Idea for Business and Society

Mon, 11 May 2020 04:59:58 GMT

“Feminism has a plan to transform the magic circle, to embrace the interests of every living creature and to promote a vision of flourishing for the whole. Feminism is out to change the rules of the game.”

I Wonder

Sun, 10 May 2020 02:54:00 GMT

“But I find that for myself, without exception, the more I deal with the work as something that is my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is. Inspiration is cross-pollinating.”

My Pantry

Wed, 06 May 2020 02:46:53 GMT

“A familiar pantry is like being surrounded by friends who won’t let you down, within instant reach.”

The Principles of Uncertainty

Tue, 05 May 2020 02:51:09 GMT

“I tell you these stories because these things happen to everyone. It’s not about being starched or polished or cute or polite. It’s about having ears that stick out, about breaking yet another glass. It’s about seeing something for the first time and making a million mistakes and not ever getting completely discouraged.”

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Mon, 04 May 2020 02:44:35 GMT

“Albert Einstein put it best: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

City of Girls

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 02:39:05 GMT

“When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere - wherever people are living out their lives. It’s a city with a million centers.”

The Calculating Stars

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 02:37:13 GMT

“It’s hard to convince people that catastrophic weather changes are coming on a nice day.”

Killing Commendatore

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 02:23:38 GMT

“From a distance, most things look beautiful.”

Create Latitude Podcast, Ep. 19: Creative strategy and strategic creativity

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In this podcast, designer/developer Bryan Zavestoski and I chat about when to take risks, how to be strategically creative, and how to remain entrepreneurial even when being part of a larger organization.

The salmon of wisdom, systems theory, and singing

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In this episode of To Build a Swing, Adam and I are talking about the soul vs. the personality and the importance of integrating the two.

Little

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 02:19:06 GMT

“Adults, I understand, have many faults, they are not perfect—even though they have lived longer, even though they offer themselves as examples to children. They are larger, that is certain, and size has an unearned authority. But they are easily influenced, and they can be easily swayed.”

Gather the Courage

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Gather the Courage is a guided journaling project we made at &yet to help creative leaders to reflect, be encouraged, and make courageous decisions. The first one’s an exercise in groundedness. <3

“Please ring the bell and leave it at the door.”

Sat, 21 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Adam and I made a podcast! In our first episode, we talk about Covid-19 and its effects on our mental health, clarity, and ability to make decisions.

Your Bed Loves You: The Healing Power of Sleep

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 04:17:00 GMT

The Four Quartets

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 04:13:00 GMT

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(costing not less than everything)

Open

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 04:10:00 GMT

It is a small step to remember
how life led to this
moment’s hesitation.

How the door to the deeper world
opens, letting the body fall at last,
toward the few griefs it can call its own.

Oh yes, I know. Our wings catch fire
in that downward flight
and we come to earth afraid
we can never fly again.

But then we always knew
heaven would be a desperate place.
Everything you desired coming
in one fearful moment
to greet you.

Your full presence only in rest
and the love that asks nothing.
The rest where you lie down
and are no longer found at all.

The Heart Aroused

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 04:02:00 GMT

“The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears…the price of our passion and commitment involves the shattering of deep personal illusions of immunity and safety.”

The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

“If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you.”

— Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

A Wizard of Earthsea

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

“The truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.”

—Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

The Places That Scare You

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Stand Out of Our Light

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

“The main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information, as though it were some finite, quantifiable resource, but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes. In other words, the problems in Tetris arise not when you stack a brick in the wrong place (though this can contribute to problems down the line), but rather when you lose control of the ability to direct, rotate, and stack the bricks altogether.”

—James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light

Personal History

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“The fascinating thing—and the thing to remember, is that if you have enough going for you in the way of momentum and luck, everyone looks at the developing pattern on the rug whether it’s an Oriental design or the stain from the egg, and says, ‘What a beautiful rug.’ And pretty soon where telling ourselves, ‘It’s a hell of a rug we’ve made’—and even funnier, it is. But let’s always remember the stains, the unfinished work, with the total effect and the fun—my god, the fun.”

—Katharine Graham, Personal History

Against Interpretation

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”

—Susan Sontag

Net of Jewels

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“Ah, sweet mysterious, boundless feast at which we so often wander blind and bound and starving. If we could understand one thing entirely, we might understand it all.”

—Ellen Gilchrist, Net of Jewels

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“For the greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a note or chord beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed. Because life is likewise a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life.”

—Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

The Bullet Journal Method

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“Change…can backfire. Large changes trigger our fear response. The more afraid we are, the more we need to calm ourselves. Many a great productive gesture or action has resulted in an equal or greater measure of inactivity. Peaks where we believe anything is possible are followed by shadowed valleys where we think maybe nothing is.”

—Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method

Presence

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“Presence emerges when we feel personally powerful, which allows us to be acutely attuned to our most sincere selves. In this psychological state, we are able to maintain presence even in the very stressful situations that typically make us feel distracted and powerless.”

—Amy Cuddy, Presence

Walden

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“When we consider what…is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Wild

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”

—Cheryl Strayed, Wild

The Untethered Soul

Fri, 24 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“When you get clear enough, you will realize that the real problem is that there is something inside of you that can have a problem with almost anything.”

—Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion

Fri, 10 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“Looking for ways to minimize risk is a form of collusion. It is yielding to our own doubt and backing away from our own vulnerability. Risk cannot be reasoned or reassured away. A strategy that is designed to avoid risk becomes a strategy to avoid change.”
—Peter Block, The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion

Spinning Silver

Fri, 03 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones.”

—Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver

Sacred Selfishness

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“If we forsake willpower, the power-oriented approach to dealing with ourselves, we are free to turn to love and desire for motivation. Self-discipline then becomes self-commitment or self-discipleship and is energized by our desire to know and love ourselves and to experience life more fully.”

—Bud Harris, Sacred Selfishness

The Artist’s Way

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“If being an artist seems too good to be true to you, you will devise a price tag for it that strikes you as unpayable.”

—Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

My Private Property

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“…when they asked me whether I had anything else to say I told them that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world.”

—Mary Ruefle, My Private Property

The Courage to Teach

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“To chart that landscape fully, three important paths must be taken—intellectual, emotional, and spiritual—and none can be ignored. Reduce teaching to intellect, and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions, and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual, and it loses its anchor to the world. Intellect, emotion, and spirit depend on one another for wholeness.”

—Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

We are Sarah and Adam Avenir now <3

Thu, 04 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Dear friends, family, and folks we know from the Internet who have squirreled their way into our hearts,

We have a new name!

We were going to wait until the wedding celebration we’d planned for later this spring, but after much conversation, we’ve decided to change our names now and hold off on a ceremony indefinitely.

Yes, indefinitely. We officially got married on December 28th in what was initially going to be a simple legal document-signing-fest. But the night before, when we told our kids that we’d decided to get married in matching pizza pajamas that Adam’s mom made for us, Lilah (Sarah’s 12-year-old) had an idea.

As soon as everyone arrived at Adam’s parents’ house (including Sarah’s parents, via video chat), Lilah gave us all a gift—a handmade pizza pin that included a pepperoni with each of our initials; two slices joined together with an A and an S on the seam, the Brault kids on one slice and the Bray kids on the other.

As amazing as it sounded to have a second celebration with our loved ones under the stars in May, as the tasks started to pile up, our enthusiasm waned. It seemed unlikely we could (sanely) create an evening that would be as special to us as the first one.

And now, with that decision made, we are very excited to not have to wait any longer to share a name.

“So, are you going to be Sarah Brault then?”

We’ve heard that question a couple dozen times since telling people we were getting married. Some started writing “Adam and Sarah Brault” on cards and letters, just to be on the safe side.

For a while, we weren’t sure about the answer to that question. We knew we wanted to share our name, but we both had careers built on our existing names, as well as children we shared our names with. It seemed strange that one of us would make the choice to plant new last name roots (most likely Sarah) and the other wouldn’t.

And honestly, Adam’s always felt a little jealous that women are expected to change their names when they get married. He has always said “I want people to know that I am hers as much as she is mine. If I kept my name, I’m just the same old me!”

Not only that, but we are both different people today than the ones who have lived the other unique iterations of our lives, most significantly because of each other. Why couldn’t we both just change our names together?

And so we are. But what to do about choosing a name?

We wanted to choose something that would resonate with our most significant common values—possibility and freedom.

We believe our ability to learn and change and become better people than we were yesterday fills every day with new possibility. We are convinced that the best is always in front of us and that challenges are often the most significant catalysts to our growth. No matter what is going on around us, we are free to choose a new option and a new direction.

At the same time, we wanted to find a common name that would continue to connect us to our roots. We didn’t want to abandon our past; we wanted to honor it while living in the truth of our united present and future.

For Adam, this meant something that nodded to the French heritage of the name of his family (Brault), who immigrated from Quebec. for Sarah, she wanted something that felt connected to her maiden name, Havens.

Less important, but still very much on our minds, was where we wanted to be alphabetically. As a couple of longtime B’s, we didn’t want to be demoted to the end. No way were we ever going to be one of those N-Z “bring a salad to the potluck” couples. (sorry not sorry, N-Z salad-ites.)

We played with a lot of names. Adam jokingly said we should change our last name to Brazen, given the boldness of life we’d embraced. But when one name emerged as an option, we were immediately sure this was it:

Avenir.

French for “future”, the name contains our values and our outlook, the middle of Sarah’s maiden name, and Adam’s family heritage.

It is a statement to ourselves of who we are and where we’re going, grounded in the present but ever mindful that each moment we live is another step building upon step into the future.

And so, we are happy to re-introduce ourselves with our new names: Sarah and Adam Avenir.

Pleased to meet you all over again.

♥️ Sarah and Adam

Off the Clock

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

“If I live to age 83.4, I have just forty-five more times to see the flowers bloom in the spring, and I will shuffle off this mortal coil precisely as they bloom that forty-fifth time.”

—Laura Vanderkam, Off the Clock

Courageous Positioning (and why it’s hard)

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I wrote a newsletter for &yet a few weeks ago from Nashville, TN, host of my angsty teen years. We were there to attend a seminar David Baker was hosting on Advanced Positioning and Lead Generation, which ended up triggering a different kind of angst.

This is that newsletter.

Positioning angst

Positioning angst…anyone else ever experience this? It’s totally a thing. It’s when a very smart person reminds you that Doing All The Things For Everyone isn’t a strategy and you’re like “oh I know but we have super good reasons for doing it” and then you splutter around a lot and realize that your good reasons are also terrible and that committing to clear positioning is really just a very scary thing to do. And it’s like that for everybody and you’re not special. (Well, you are special but in the same way that everyone else is also special.)

The fear is real. Especially when you have a team of incredibly talented people counting on you to make decisions that will result in more and better work and not less.

At &yet, we’ve done a lot of projects over the years, ranging from the impressive to the ridiculous. It’s not only a challenge to find a throughline in all of these things, but to commit to a direction that utilizes our team’s vast range of capability, from marketing strategy to UX design to front-end development to software development. We’re a team of veterans with expertise both broad and deep.

Not only that, but philosophically, we’ve always rebelled against the idea of pigeon-holing ourselves into “just one thing”. We are curious people who incorporate what we learn across disciplines into our work. We believe being a generalist does not mean being a “master of none”. We do lots of things, and we do them well.

Lynn made these stickers, and they are awesome, and you can have one of your very own.

Despite these objections, we know not having clear positioning has cost us. Because we haven’t been clear on who we want to work with and what we want to work on, we haven’t had much control over those things. Thankfully, we’ve worked with good people and have been lucky to fill our calendar through word of mouth. But it means we take what comes rather than deciding what work we really want to be doing and going for that. Not only that, but the volume of incoming projects is just as unpredictable, leading us to gorge ourselves with work one quarter and end up starving the next.

What’s just as unfortunate though (from my perspective) is how we’ve shied away from sharing our expertise over the years. My teammates are seriously brilliant, though they’re too humble to admit it. I learn so much from them, not only from their expertise, but from who they are as people. It has always been my hope that the feeling I get being on this team could be something everyone could experience in some way. But without focus and the creative constraint of having a clear topic/perspective we want to share with people, it’s hard to keep momentum going.

But how do you commit to a direction whole-heartedly when you’re not sure if it’s the right one?

This is what we’re trying to figure out right now.

One thing David Baker mentioned when the seminar was over was the tendency to come home with a new idea and say, “Okay, team; this is what we’re doing now!”, touting all the ways the new idea is different than all those other ideas you’ve had and why this can’t possibly fail. Instead, he encouraged us to be thoughtful, move ahead slowly, and do things instead of make grand pronouncements.

We are definitely taking this to heart (which is why this post does not include grand pronouncements, despite how much I love them!). We’ve had considerable discussion about who we are, what we’re uniquely good at, what kind of work we want to be doing, and who we want to work with. We’ve written several positioning statements, and the one we have right now feels very, very close to what we’ll likely end up with.

All of that has been interesting, and I’m excited about how far we’ve come. But there’s still the knowledge that at some point, we are going to have to call it “done” and orient all of our efforts toward that end. We’re going to embark on a positioning experiment that we fully commit to publicly, and we won’t know the impact until we try.

Positioning (and re-positioning) takes courage

We’ve done this before. To the point where this gif of Gar pops up in Slack whenever anyone mentions the word “rebrand”.

It’s a bit disheartening to look at all those past attempts and ask ourselves, “Is this another one of those?” That’s one reason why the past few years, we decided to accept Doing All The Things as our mantra and tried to create repeatable systems to build our pipeline around that. We’ve dipped our toe into different specializations around projects we’ve worked on, making landing pages for them and adding them to our ever-growing list of offerings.

But without committing whole-heartedly to a direction, even if we know that direction may end up being flawed in some way, we don’t give that direction a chance. It gets lost in a sea of other potentialities, and we don’t give any one thing the energy it would need to succeed.

And so, we are going to be brave and try again. And again and again if we need to. We know we will continue to get projects the way we’ve always gotten them, through generous referrals from clients we’ve loved working with. Committing to a clear position will not change that, which helps mitigate some of the fear. And the rewards when we figure it out, both creatively and financially, are worth the risk.

Being a Highly Sensitive Entrepreneur (Part three)

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

When I was in the eighth grade, one of my teachers (who was also a self-proclaimed prophet) told me that the lesson I would need to learn in my life was “Do not strive.” This is a wild and confusing thing to say to a 12 year old, which is probably why I’ve never been able to forget it.

Adam and I joke that we are rocket ships, constantly learning and growing and changing at a rapid pace. Striving is part of our nature. But I’m also realizing that so much of that is born from a place of “not enough” ness. As I’ve gotten more grounded and accepting of who I am, the striving part of me is dying.

I know it’s ultimately a good thing, but it’s also scary. If I’m no longer striving and am increasingly content, will I slip into complacency? Will I ever accomplish the kinds of things I once accomplished because I was running away from the mediocre person I was afraid I was, trying so hard each day to be better?

I once consulted a coach who taught me the Tibetan philosophy of “basic goodness”. This is pretty much the opposite of the puritanical philosophy of “original sin” that most of western culture is rooted in. Instead of being born evil and in need of redemption, “basic goodness” says we are inherently good and are trying to get our needs met in ways that are both healthy and unhealthy for ourselves and others.

It’s interesting that so much of our work culture assumes we are naturally lazy and work-avoidant. We need more willpower! We need more accountability! We need more striving!

While it’s true that I naturally want to do what I want to do, rather than what I’m supposed to do, I’ve also learned that I naturally want to work hard and contribute in a meaningful way when my needs are met. And getting my needs met is more about removing obstacles to being the person I already am than trying harder and harder to become a better version of myself.

The interesting thing is, noticing “obstacles” requires paying attention to the negative, which is something highly sensitive people are naturally bent toward (and often criticized for).

At &yet, we use the phrase “trust your frust” (conceptualized by Adam and coined by my teammate Luke Karrys) to describe this exact thing: noticing what you’re frustrated about and letting that lead you to your next insight. My teammate Amy Lynn Taylor even designed a t-shirt with that phrase on it to give to everyone at our remote holiday party this year.

Obviously, this can be unhealthy if what we are frustrated at is ourselves. But if we embrace the philosophy that just like a plant, we will grow and flourish in the right conditions, we know that the things going on inside ourselves are all symptoms of bigger issues that we can address.

We are fundamentally good, and good for people. So when we’re not doing the things we aspire to do, we can respond compassionately with curiosity. “What is going on around and inside me that makes this hard?“ “What need of mine is not getting met here?” “How can I get my needs met in this situation?” “How can I remove the obstacles, one at a time?”

I’m so grateful for my sensitivity to things that are hard, because I can trace every bit of growth in my life back to this habit of obstacle-removal. And as I’ve learned to accept and value that part of myself, the cycle of noticing and removing those obstacles has become easier.

If “obstacle removal” sounds like a heavy and difficult task, understand that most of the time, the obstacles in our paths are subtle and nuanced. I don’t drink my water because my water bottle is empty and I’m focused on something else. I don’t get up early because it’s cold outside of my covers and I would do anything to stay warm at 6am in the winter.

Those are all small obstacles that can be removed pretty easily (fill up my water bottle when I go to the bathroom; put tomorrow’s clothes beside my bed the night before). But sometimes the obstacles are stacked on top of each other, and it’s like untangling a fine chain necklace to get through them all. But they’re still pretty small, when you look at them individually.

For example, for the past several weeks, I’ve experienced tremendous resistance while creating a spreadsheet that contains the strategic map for our organization. I realized that while the concept is good, there is a fundamental flaw in it that my brain is still trying to figure out. That flaw is a many-layered thing that includes the limitations of the tool I’m using, my lack of clarity on some of the roles involved, my aspiration that this be something everyone can use and understand and not be overwhelmed by (and how far it is from that goal at the moment).

To remove complex obstacles like this, I need to be aware of those layers and just start working out the tangles a little at a time, knowing that it will continue to be a tangled mess until suddenly, it isn’t.

Being able to visualize obstacles as something external to ourselves (versus something wrong with us) is absolutely critical to removing them. The most creative and ambitious people I know have met more obstacles than most because they are constantly putting themselves and their ideas out there. Unfortunately, the most sensitive of those people have usually internalized those obstacles as personal failures, which makes it tremendously hard to keep taking those risks without great personal cost.

When that is the case (and it’s certainly been the case with me), putting those obstacles back outside of you where they belong is a process. But it’s a worthwhile one if we want to keep doing our work year after year after year, regardless of our failure to reach our own aspirations for it, or for ourselves.

Being a Highly Sensitive Entrepreneur (Part two)

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve always valued the privilege to deeply focus on whatever I’m working on, but I’ve strived to do this while still having multiple big projects and priorities going at the same time. It isn’t that I enjoy that juggling act, but I’ve never seen another choice.

My life has always involved keeping a series of nets underneath me while I tightrope walk to the next phase of growth. This basically involves maintaining two lives, in one way or another: not letting go of my past self before I know my future self can support me.

I did this when I transitioned into entrepreneurship, moving from full time to 3/4 time to 1/2 time, working several independent contractor jobs on the side, then letting go of those jobs one by one as I added more and more freelance work.

When I decided to move from freelance to business owner and hired my first employees, I did it very gradually, taking on extra projects to make enough money to pay people while I figured out how to create systems to delegate pieces of my job, one by one.

Transitioning from small business owner to partner at a software company was much the same. I took on extra consulting jobs while putting all of my &yet salary toward helping pay for my share of the company.

And now, while I’m happy with where I am, I need to find a way to re-integrate writing and teaching in my work. Plus, Adam and I bought a local alt-monthly newspaper. Plus, between the two of us, we have 5 kids. My life is more full and wonderful and complex than it has ever been.

But I can’t work the same way I did a decade ago. I have burned out the part of me who is willing to work all hours building my business and leading employees and homeschooling three children without rest or recovery.

As I’m evolving toward a calmer version of entrepreneurship that works for me as an HSP while also allowing me to perform all the roles that are central to who I am, I am grappling with the idea of focus more than I ever have.

Prioritizing my most important project

In her book Growing Gills: How to find creative focus when you’re drowning in your daily life, prolific graphic novelist Jessica Abel talks about choosing One Project to Rule Them All; letting go of all of the “idea debt” you’re hanging on to from past obsessions and commitments, and focusing on the one thing that resonates the most right now and will take you farthest in the direction you want to go.

Man, this one is hard for me. I deeply admire and respect Jessica’s wisdom after getting to collaborate with her on a creative focus workshop 3 years ago, but it has seemed impossible to integrate this practice into my life, however valuable it may be. And Jessica acknowledges the very real pain of making these choices.

One thing that helped me even consider this as doable is realizing that I have projects in different domains, and I can choose one to focus on for each of them. A domain is a specific area of your life: your job, your creative work, and your personal life are the three Jessica uses. She acknowledges that our lives are complex, and very few people can drop every project but one. But we can focus on one project in each domain we’re responsible for.

In addition to that, her concept of “processes” as separate from “projects” is extremely helpful. Processes are things you build into your regular routine that you need to do to maintain the things you value in your life. Processes don’t count toward your One Project.

Finally, she limits project commitments to something that can be completed in 6-12 weeks or sooner. This gave me so much encouragement; I mean, how amazing would it be to complete the most important project in each domain of my life every 6-12 weeks? The impact that would make on my life would be absolutely worth the pain of saying “not right now” to everything else.

Purpose as the measuring stick for every decision

Recently, I wrote about how to collaboratively create a purpose for any project (and why this is useful). We did this for Tumbleweird at the end of last year, and it was so valuable. But it was also intense. While I want to have a clear, sharp purpose for every project I’m working on, I have been avoiding doing this as I look back on what an endeavor that was.

Now that I only have One Project I’m working on in each domain of my life, it’s much easier. I don’t have to figure out the purpose of all those other things I’m doing later. I just need to do it for the one I’m working on right now.

And really, the whole process boils down to asking a few questions and trying to make one sentence out of it; no need to make it more complicated than that. The questions that are relevant for me personally are:

Who am I making this for?
What do I want to be possible because this project exists, for both them and for me?
How do I want this project to make them feel? How do I want it to make me feel?

From there, I simply edit my answers down into one sentence that feels both aspirational and true.

I’ve written about the benefits of doing this previously, but in the context of being highly sensitive, having something that so clearly states what you’re trying to do is enormously calming. You now have a compass pointing to your true north, as well as a measuring stick for all of your decisions. You can use it to remind yourself and others why you’re making the decisions you’re making, so you can do that from a place of quiet strength and courage without having to be something you’re not.

These are things I’m still very much working on, but even the small changes I’ve made in this direction have made such a difference. I’m continually amazed at how nuanced our systems for working can become over time, and how they need to be that nuanced in order to work for our unique selves.

Being a Highly Sensitive Entrepreneur (Part one)

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

You know how you hear about a book so many times that you feel like you’ve read it, but you actually haven’t? That’s the case for me with The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron. I finally finished it, and while I’d somehow picked up most of what was in it already, it’s gotten me thinking about the different ways I handle being both an entrepreneur and highly sensitive.

Most people assume “highly sensitive” means you get your feelings hurt easily. And while that can be one way it shows up, it’s actually a collection of traits about 20% of the population people are born with:

Deep processor: Thinks about everything deeply; looks beyond the surface to what’s going on underneath
Susceptible to being overstimulated: Hits their capacity for emotional/physical/mental/social stimulation much earlier than others
Emotionally reactive/empathetic: Feels things very deeply, both personally and in perceiving the feelings and needs of others
Senses subtleties: Picks up on every nuanced thing going on around them and inside of them

I’m a big fan of personality frameworks like Myers Briggs (INFP!) and the Enneagram (Type 4 with a 5 wing maybe?), but those are often up to interpretation…I can see different sides of myself in multiple “types”.

Being highly sensitive is different. Reading this book was like seeing all the things that are going on inside me all the time laid out, piece by piece. While Aron does have a questionnaire in the beginning of the book to help determine if it applies to you, I’m pretty sure if you have this trait, you know it.

The only job I’m cut out for

I didn’t start working for myself because of my sensitivity; I started working for myself because after becoming pregnant with my first child, I needed more money and more time. I only realized later that there was a clear link between my ability to perform at a high level and my ability to create a working environment that was flexible and autonomous.

Even though entrepreneurship is high-stress in some ways, requiring risks and responsibilities far beyond the norm, those things were easy for me compared to trying to manage my mental, emotional, physical, and social energy working 8 to 5 in an office.

It’s still been challenging, though, especially as the Internet has grown from a place where I felt safe sharing ideas and projects with my fellow nerds and weirdos to a place where everybody and their literal mom is trying to get their needs met.

Pursuing calm entrepreneurship

One of my Internet heroes, Amber Case, introduced me to the concept of calm technology many years ago—technology that “rather than panicking us, would help us focus on the things that were really important to us” (as described by PARC researcher Mark Weiser back in 1995).

For the past several years, I’ve been pursuing that ideal, but on a personal level. Knowing that overstimulation is the biggest challenge to my being able to happily and consistently perform at my best, I now understand why that idea has appealed to me, and I can see several elements that have been (and will be) essential in aligning my work life in that direction.

1. Focusing on healthy root systems rather than on what’s above ground

Isn’t it interesting how when you give a plant good nourishment at the roots, the rest takes care of itself? I’m learning that work-related growth is the same way. It’s taken me a while to truly embrace this concept (and I’m still uncovering new layers of how to do this), but the more I do, the calmer, clearer, and more effective my work becomes.

At an individual level, this means optimizing my habits and rhythms rather than chasing bigger and better projects and outcomes. This has been tremendously hard for me (hello, INFP!) because I hate doing the same thing I did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. I love obsessing over new things and letting my passion for something drive me into the ground.

But you know what I love more? Being healthy. Being confident in my ability to keep working on something and making it better over time. Having a feeling of spaciousness in my life instead of the constant feeling that I should be doing more.

These are beneficial for anyone, but especially if you have HSP traits. It is incredibly overstimulating to live in a state of reactivity and pressure to perform, and that takes time to recover from. And ironically, most highly sensitive people perform the very worst when the pressure is the highest. (Which is why one of my deepest values is freedom!)

I’m also working on applying this principle on a team level. At &yet, as extremely anti-bureaucratic people, we’ve historically operated within loose guidelines rather than within systems of repeatable processes. As we’ve matured however, we’ve realized the value of those things.

Over the past 3-4 months, I’ve been facilitating the creation of an annual plan with our stewards team (what we call our partners). But instead of throwing goals at people, we’re taking the time to think through the habits and systems that will support us in executing our plan week by week, month by month, and quarter by quarter. We’re also building feedback loops to make those habits and systems better as we go.

I can’t speak for everyone, but this has lowered my anxiety significantly and made me much less reactive to the ebbs and flows of client/consulting work. I now feel free to continue focusing on where we want to go rather than getting stuck in the weeds of every problem that crops up. And whether highly sensitive or not, that’s where all of us need to be if we want to experience healthy, sustainable growth as business owners.

In his book Atomic Habits (which seems to be in the water lately…I’d definitely recommend it if you’re thinking in this direction), James Clear talks about how projects are moving goalposts that rarely bring the promised satisfaction at their completion. In contrast, habits and systems change who we are and what we’re capable of as people. Not that we shouldn’t have projects and goals, but that we have greater impact when we focus on the habits and systems that support them, rather than the outcomes themselves. I’ve read a lot about habits, but that one concept completely changed how I view them and prioritize them into my life.

Which leads me to my next point (which I’ll save for another day…this post is turning itself into a book!): maintaining a sharp purpose and priorities. I’ve already written a little about purpose, but I want to talk about it from the perspective of being highly sensitive.

(Also? Can I just say it feels so good to be writing again? Habits and systems ftw!)

A collaborative process for defining the purpose of any project

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

This fall, my partner and I bought Tumbleweird, a local free alternative paper started a few years ago by some great people who wanted to see a counter-cultural publication in our area along the lines of The Stranger in Seattle and The Portland Mercury.

[

](https://tumbleweird.org)

My co-worker Jaime did this incredible illustration for our January issue. ♥️

My role at Tumbleweird is broadly defined as “handling the people part.” Practically speaking, this means organizing the work in a way that energizes the volunteers who pour so much of themselves into publishing Tumbleweird each month. But my first order of business is more philosophical. Before we define roles and responsibilities and recruit people who are excited to do those things, we need to know why we’re doing all of it. Who are we as a community and what are we trying to accomplish?

Lately I’ve been obsessed with discovering the purpose of the projects I’m involved in. It started with an excellent book a friend of mine recommended called The Art of Gathering: How we meet and why it matters by Priya Parker. It’s about designing in-person gatherings, but I’d recommend it to anyone involved in any project with the goal of creating a specific experience for people.

I read the whole book in a matter of days, and then I went back and have been lingering on the very first chapter for months. This is the chapter about purpose. If you read nothing else in the coming year, read this chapter. It easily had the most impact on my work of anything I read in 2018 (and I read constantly).

Having a clear, sharp purpose for a project helps create intentional experiences and outcomes for everyone involved, both internally and externally. It becomes the yardstick for every decision you make. In addition to that, a clear purpose puts everyone on the same page and is incredibly motivating for people like me who want to work on things that are deeply meaningful.

Parker writes that an effective purpose is:

Unique: It takes a stand no one else is taking
Specific: It commits to doing one thing well
Disputable: It’s willing to unsettle some people

Even though Tumbleweird has always been a unique (and disputable!) publication, and I love the many ways it’s been described by people who’ve created it and worked on it, I knew we needed to take all of that background and define a clear, sharp purpose for ourselves.

But we don’t want to do that alone. Creating out loud (especially with the people you’re making your project for) is a philosophy I wrote about in the first edition of my book, Gather the People: A human approach to marketing for people who would rather make what they love than persuade people to buy it. (I’m working on the second edition now.)

This isn’t just a good marketing principle. It’s true about all collaborative efforts…when we include people from the beginning, they’re more invested in what we’re doing, and they become an essential part of shaping the work into something better than we could have envisioned on our own.

A vaguely scientific, thoroughly collaborative approach to defining the purpose of a project

Here’s how we’ve worked toward defining a clear, sharp purpose for Tumbleweird. Although Priya Parker does an excellent job making the case for doing this in The Art of Gathering, she doesn’t really explain how. Especially if you want to include other people in the process.

Creative brainstorming is a challenge with even a few people, much less the ~150 folks we’ve invited to participate so far. Luckily, Adam developed an online tool for this inspired by a system called compression planning. We were introduced to this system when volunteering with the Pasco school district’s Enterprise Week this past spring, and it completely changed the way we generate ideas.

THE BRAINSTORMING PROCESS

First, we devised a set of questions we wanted to explore.

What do we want to be different because Tumbleweird exists?
How do we want it to feel to be a contributor/reader/part of the Tumbleweird community?
What are the core principles/beliefs/values that define Tumbleweird?

Then, we sent these questions individually to past contributors and people we thought should have a voice in Tumbleweird. It was incredible reading their answers. So many people responded at length, and on a short deadline.

We took those answers and compiled them in a compression planning Trello board template that Adam devised, creating a list for each question and a card for each idea within each list. We did our best to combine ideas that were similar to make it easier, but even then we ended up with 124 ideas across the three lists, plus 51 other ideas that didn’t fall within the question categories.

We then revealed the entire Trello board to everyone we’d invited to participate. We gave each person 5 votes for each question and asked them to choose the answers that best reflected their hope for the future of Tumbleweird.

You can take a look at the Trello board by going to purpose-board.tumbleweird.org. While voting is now closed, you can see all the answers in order from most to least votes.

What we discovered in doing this is that although there were a wide range of ideas and perspectives, there was a consistent throughline. And although we used this as a data point and not any sort of decision-by-consensus, we wanted to reflect these perspectives in what we came up with.

Defining a working purpose

We’re calling it a “working” purpose because while we spent a lot of time writing it and getting feedback from our editorial board, we want to sit with it and share it with the community before considering it complete.

Tumbleweird: Positively weird. Never timid.

Tumbleweird exists to bring together a more diverse, creative, and progressive community than Eastern Washington gets credit for, in order to connect, highlight, and encourage the betterment of our area.

We do this by publishing a community-driven paper that uncovers the region’s true identity in a way that’s always positive, often irreverent, and never timid.

We serve the truly powerful: the underdogs, the misfits, the outsiders, the newcomers, those on the margins, and the ones who defy the status quo. We aren’t beholden to advertisers or authorities. Except for the almighty buttermint lobby.

(There is a whole backstory on buttermints that I will let Adam tell you one of these days.)

Our next steps

Right now, we’re working on a plan for 2019 that aligns with our purpose, as well as getting clearer on the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved. I’m looking forward to thinking through how an organization actually uses a purpose like this and actively aligns with it on a day-to-day basis, rather than having it become something that’s temporarily inspiring but then never talked about again. If you have thoughts on how you’ve done this, I would love to hear them.

A handful of gentle, potent strategies for the next phase of your growth

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

For the past year and a half, my counselor has been working with me through some hard personal stuff. I’ve experienced tremendous growth during that time, both personally and in my role as a business strategist, but I’ve been publicly very quiet as pieces of my life have gone through various stages of brokenness and healing.

While I still feel pretty fragile in terms of my capacity to share publicly, I do not feel completely myself when I’m not writing and teaching. I’m at least ready to begin with what is currently true for me, and go from there.

In case you find yourself in a place of maybe-possibly-pretty-soon-ready for growth in any area, I’d like to share a few thoughts that are helping me.

Emotional honesty as a starting point for everything

The other night I was watching May It Last, a documentary on The Avett Brothers. They have this intense emotional honesty in their lyrics that has always made me feel deeply connected to their music, even when their experiences reflect nothing of my own life.

I respect and admire their ability to do this, possibly because it is how I write when I’m at my best (and it’s the kind of writing I enjoy reading!). But for the past several years, I’ve been pushing hard against sharing writing from this place.

Maybe I am a cynical human being, but the “authenticity movement” has made me leery of sharing anything remotely navel gaze-y. It feels like everywhere I look, someone is capitalizing on vulnerability. Combine this with criticism I’ve both read and received on the negative impact of too much emotional honesty, and it’s made me consider quitting sharing my writing entirely.

The problem is, all my writing is basically navel gazing. I learn things, often connected to deeply personal experience, and I write about them as honestly as I can. There is a lot of me in everything I write, and when I try to get away from that, it sounds hollow. And for good reason—I am rejecting in myself the very thing that makes me me as a learner, writer, and teacher.

That’s why it struck me when, in the documentary, Scott Avett says that he and his brother Seth inherited a belief that the way they feel and see the world matters and that people want to hear it. Their grandfather believed it (he had to, as a pastor), and they never questioned it.

Maybe that is a privileged position to take, but it rings true. If anything matters, it is our stories. Regardless of what is going on in the world, whether telling the truth about our shared humanity is popular or not, whether there is danger in its exploitation or not, our stories matter because we as individuals matter. And sometimes knowing that you’re not alone is the thing that saves you.

At the end of the documentary, after the band has finished recording the song that took the most hard lived experience to write, Seth and Scott look emptied out, like they’ve just given everything they had into that performance. The producer walks over to them and gives them a hearty and sincere “Congratulations!” As the brothers walk out the back door to take a break, they seem distraught. “It’s weird to get congratulated for strip-mining your own soul,” Scott says. Especially for something they know will sell, and sell well.

How do we reconcile ourselves to that, when our art is our lives which is also our living? I don’t know if that question has an answer. But I can say that I’m grateful to the people who are brave enough to do it anyway, with as much integrity as they know how to give it.

At the same time, I also respect the courage it takes not to do that. Emotional honesty is a gift—often a costly one. It can take just as much bravery to refuse to share the parts of our lives that are most sacred; to save them for the people who are as invested in us as we are in them.

Removing what’s blocking me as a way of life

The thing that got me writing about this were two questions I’ve been considering. The first is, “What area of my life feels ready for growth?” The second is, “What is getting in the way?”

At this point in my life, I’m committed to self-acceptance. Growth so I can be more productive or more socially acceptable or more of whatever it feels I’m not enough of is a treadmill of sadness. And ironically, self-acceptance is the only path to true, sustainable growth that has ever worked for me.

Growth isn’t about trying to be something I’m not. It’s about developing a part of myself that has been buried underneath other parts, often for good reason. It involves integration rather than striving.

For example, because of the shifts in my personal life, the nurturing side of me has experienced a whole lot of growth. I have become an expert at nurturing myself and the people around me. At the same time, the powerful side of me has taken an observing role. This was much needed, because it had become strong at the expense of taking care of myself and others. I didn’t know how to use it in a way that was nurturing. Now that I’ve developed more of that skill, I’m ready to integrate “powerfulness” in a kinder, more grounded way.

But there are roadblocks. There are always roadblocks.

In my case, one major roadblock is that I’m not writing and teaching, two things that have always been a great source of strength for me. Within that, there are a bunch of tiny roadblocks in the way I’m thinking and approaching my life, several of which I’ve been gradually working through and are the core of this piece of writing.

It’s a gentler way of growing—noticing the things that are blocking me and addressing them, one at a time. When I focus on that rather than on striving to always become better, growth happens naturally without me having to force it.

Self-trust as a muscle I can strengthen

It’s funny that I wrote a book where the biggest takeaway for most people was “create out loud” and yet I struggle more than anyone with doing this. Because of that, I do not trust myself to follow through with any public declaration that I am now writing again. (So please, do not consider this a public declaration! My writer self will run away so fast.)

I was listening to an episode of The Needy Podcast a few weeks ago, and the host Mara Glatzel was talking about self-trust. Self-trust as a concept isn’t new to me, but what is new is practicing strengthening that muscle over time.

One of the things my partner and I talk about all the time is choosing to be in each other’s corner, no matter what—even if and when it hurts to be. That means assuming that the other person has a good reason for what they’re thinking and how they’re behaving (even if they’re not aware of it), and reflecting that back to them in how we respond.

A trusting relationship with myself as a writer would be one where instead of accusing myself of being a lazy person with no work ethic for not writing often enough, I assume I have a very good reason for not writing. As I explore and validate those reasons, I discover what I need to give myself in order to show up how I want to show up the next time. Or (more often) I discover my expectations of myself are out of alignment with what I really need, so I can adjust them.

Another self-trust strategy Mara talks about is keeping the promises we make to ourselves. I cringed when I heard this. I cherish my flexibility and freedom. But I’m slowly learning a much easier, more effective strategy for this than “Do the thing I committed to even though I do not have the capacity to do it and still take care of myself.” And that is, “Avoid making promises to myself or others that have historically proven difficult for me to follow through with.”

Part of this involves me accepting who I am, as I am. That’s an incredibly difficult thing to do. But it’s so freeing to say, “I cannot commit to this because it’s not something I’m good at. But I can commit to this other thing I’m uniquely suited for.” When we do that, not only does everything become smoother, but we start believing that we are people who can handle the things we’ve committed to.

What I’m committing to next

I am sure some of you are wondering what is next for the second edition of Gather the People (especially those of you who have pre-ordered!). I am currently emerging from an intense research phase, and I’m beginning the third re-write. Thank you so much for your patience.

While that is one longer term goal, what I’m able to commit to next specifically is something I’ve been developing as part of my research and will certainly be going into my book: I’m going to walk you through how to develop a sharp, clear purpose for whatever you’re doing (the philosophy of which is based on the first chapter in Priya Parker’s book, The Art of Gathering, which is excellent).

We’ve been doing this work in our annual planning at &yet, as well as for a local alt indie print publication that my partner and I purchased to try and keep alive (think Seattle’s The Stranger). I’m so excited to share how we’re approaching it with you.

Not everyone is as driven by meaning as I am, and that’s okay. You don’t have to be an idealistic dreamer for this to be valuable to you. But if you lack motivation or clarity on any project you’ve undertaken, or if the scope is getting out of control, or if you’re having trouble explaining it to people, or if you’re experiencing pushback or a lack of follow-through from the folks who are supposed to be helping you with it, I’m convinced a sharp, clear purpose is where to start.

Encouragement for the road

You have everything you need to do the things you want to do and grow in the way you want to grow. And you really can do it in a way that is simultaneously gentle and effective, even if you’re coming from a fragile place.

If all of that sounds ambiguous, I begin with this: What area of my life is ready for growth? And what is getting in the way?

Akata Witch

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“Here, in the new venture, the extraordinary, the magical, the wonderful, and even the strange come out of the ordinary and the familiar.”

—Ngugi wa Thiong’o

The Folded Clock

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“I’m not looking to be offended. I’m really not looking. It’s just that when I opened my eyes today, offense was all that I could see.”

—Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock

Principles

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

–Carl Jung

The Power of Full Engagement

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“Loving oneself is no easy matter…because it means loving all of oneself, including the shadow where one is inferior and socially so unacceptable. The care one gives this humiliating part is the cure…[but] the moral dimension can never be abandoned. Thus is the cure a paradox requiring two incommensurables: the moral recognition that these parts of me are burdensome and intolerable and must change, and the loving laughing acceptance which takes them just as they are, joyfully, forever.

—James Hillman

The Curse of Reading and Forgetting

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.”

—Siegfried Sassoon

from The Curse of Reading and Forgetting by Ian Crouch

A systematic approach to marketing with empathy

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Last month, I wrote that I’m doing a complete re-write of Gather the People (rather than a heavy edit). Since then, as I’ve worked with the clients who will be sharing their triumphs and failures in the new edition, I’ve realized that the philosophies in the first edition are truly only half the story.

I spent the first 6 years of my career doing the “find a need and fill it” thing. I was successful at it. I built a small team that served a hundred web design clients a year in a highly systematic, profitable way. But I was exhausted, and my work didn’t mean anything to me. I felt like a sell-out.

Gather the People was my rebellion against that earlier version of me. Instead of “find a need and fill it”, it’s “find out what you need and bring other people along with you.” I wrote it 4 years into shifting gears and making several costly false starts in that direction. It ended up being the thing that stuck, and my work on those philosophies led to my current role as partner and chief of strategy at &yet.

The hard thing about a philosophy that starts with ourselves is that there are some things you really really want to do/make/offer that end up (surprise!) being extremely hard to sell. Technically, you can do it, but it’s like pushing a boulder uphill. Eventually, no matter how much you love that boulder, it’s going to exhaust you and your resources. You’ll find yourself wishing for a boring, meaningless business that makes money and doesn’t take every drop of your energy to make it work.

As with most things in life, the real growth happens when we learn to integrate the two perspectives. It isn’t either/or. It’s both/and.

What does this have to do with empathy?

Having a deep understanding of ourselves helps us avoid meaningless work. Having a deep understanding of others helps us avoid doing work that might mean something to us, but that bleeds us out in an effort to sell it.

Empathy really is everything when it comes to both product development and business development, and there’s no shortcut to…umm…developing it. Knowing who we are and what we want and need is hard enough. Knowing who someone else is and what they want and need feels next to impossible.

My frustration with most approaches to reaching that “ideal customer” is that they not only feel disingenuous, but they’re based on guesses and false assumptions and do little to help us get to the truth. And carefully research-based tactics rarely get to the heart of things. Even the most self-aware of us barely have enough self-knowledge to articulate our wants and needs to a friend, much less a researcher (or, more likely, an online form) we’ve never met.

I’m reading a book called The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. On the surface, it’s a handbook for planning memorable events and meetings. But underneath, Priya explores how to understand people and design experiences that allow them to show up as strangers but leave connected more fully to themselves and the people around them.

I’m so inspired by her approach that I’m trying it out on our internal work at &yet and with clients. I want to know if I can design a system that allows us to empathize with both ourselves and the people we do our work for. I believe it will help us make better decisions about what to offer, who to offer it to, how to position it, how to talk about it, how to sell it, how to scale it, and how to be happy and fulfilled while we do it.

I don’t want much, do I?

Anyway, I have a request that will help me experiment with this. Are you (or do you know someone) who:

Works at a SaaS company that has an API?
Works at an enterprise company that uses a SaaS product?
Works at a design agency whose devs use React?
Works in the video game industry making story-based games?
Works for an editorial publication that commissions illustrations?

If you are, would you be up for a conversation? (These are all specific types of customers for products/services I’m helping create strategy for.) In return, we can also talk about anything you want. :)

Sarah

P.S. Oh yeah! My friend Tara Gentile had me on the What Works podcast recently. I haven’t had the nerve to listen to it, but a friend of mine says it’s “So good!” (Thank you, Guan.) :)

The Four Agreements

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“In your whole life nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself. And the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else. If someone abuses you a little more than you abuse yourself, you will probably walk away from that person. But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, you will probably stay in the relationship and tolerate it endlessly.”

—Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

Gather the People Update

Thu, 24 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

So…fun update for you.

But first I need to put on my confident zombie goddess face.

This is probably the most off-brand I will ever be. Also if you’re in southeastern Washington June 7th-9th or 14th-16th, The Tempest opens at the Uptown Theatre! Come see!

I’m not sure why I need confident zombie goddess face for this? Well, I sort of do. I’m kind of…self-conscious about my tendency to change things all the time. And if I know anything about goddesses, self-consciousness does not apply to them.

I’ve decided to do a major re-write of Gather the People before releasing it.

Why? Well, I’ve caught a vision for it that won’t let go of me, and it’s made me excited about revisiting this work. It also aligns with feedback I’ve gotten from several of you…namely that more concrete examples would be extremely helpful.

So I’m taking three different people and organizations through my approach and sharing that process in the book. I will continue to show how I’m using the principles in my own work, but you’ll also get to see examples of:

a freelance illustrator trying to grow their business
a local community group trying to build a public market
a bootstrapped startup trying to sustainably create demand for their software product

These are all actual projects that are near to my heart, run by people who are even more dear to me. I believe getting to know them and seeing how they implement these principles is going to help you see many, many possibilities for how you can gather people around your work in a way that feels good and works with who you are and the impact you want to have.

So what now?

With this new direction, I’m suddenly finding I have a lot more to say on this topic. Which is great, because after 13 years of talking about digital business strategy, I’ve had a lingering fear that I’ve said all I have to say.

But even better, I hope me sharing my thinking as I’m writing gives you more hope and vision for what is possible for you. No matter where you’re at, whether you’re just starting or whether you’ve been doing this business thing for a while, whether you feel like a raging success or a complete failure or somewhere in the middle, I’ve been there (and I’ve worked with people who have been there, or who are there.)

For those of you who have pre-ordered, I’ve already talked to you about all of this…thank you for being so flexible and supportive! For everyone else, pre-orders are still open, but the delivery date is vaguer than ever.

To close, I want to send you away with my zombie goddess blessing:

Honor, riches, every blessing
Long continuance and increasing
Hourly joys be still upon you
Juno sings her blessings on you

(Literally 90% of my lines in the play, slightly adjusted for context.)

<3, Sarah

Emergent Strategy

Thu, 10 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“What is easy is sustainable. Birds coast when they can.”

—Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy

Madness, Rack, and Honey

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“The impulse toward order is born of fear and desire, and the impulse toward chaos is born of the same. The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott believed artists were people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”

—Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey

Original Self

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“Being present to the life that presses upon us does not mean simply being alert and full of consciousness. Surrendering to a daydream or a memory may be a way of being engaged with the present. Drifting into reverie might bring use to the full immediacy of the moment, which may be properly focused on invisible things. Turned inward, we might be completely present, and conversely, being wide awake to life might be a distraction and, to the soul, a kind of sleep.”

—Thomas Moore, Original Self

Words Are My Matter

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“They may be right. Maybe all writing, even literature, is not an end in itself but a means to an end other than itself. But I couldn’t write stories or poetry if I thought the true and central value of my work was in a message it carried, or in providing information or reassurance, offering wisdom, giving hope. Vast and noble as those goals are, they would decisively limit the scope of the work; they would interfere with its natural growth and cut it off from the mystery which is the deepest source of the vitality of art.”

—Ursula Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

Belonging

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“We ache to have our absence from the circle of belonging noticed. It poisons us from the inside out. Though we try to stay busy, the hidden loneliness underneath is rarely assuaged. Given the first breath of silence, there is an upwelling of alienation so great that it threatens to swallow us whole. No matter how much we accumulate or accomplish, the pang of unbelonging continues to pierce from within.

And so we treat our lives like a project for improvement, attempting to become useful, admired, impervious or savvy. We work at cutting off any unwieldiness that may be preventing us from fitting in. But as this ‘self-development’ encroaches upon our inner wilderness, our dreams and our connection to the holy suffers. As we harness every last resource in service to the unconscious longing to belong, we feel less and less at home.”

—Toko-Pa Turner, Belonging

Mating in Captivity

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness. One does not exist without the other. With too much distance, there can be no connection. But too much merging eradicates the separateness of two distinct individuals. Then there is nothing more to transcend, no bridge to walk on, no one to visit on the other side, no other internal world to enter.”

—Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity

I Am Brian Wilson

Wed, 27 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“People used to write about how I seemed stiff. Then they started writing about how I had stage fright. It’s a weird phrase, ‘stage fright.’ I wasn’t afraid of the stage. I was afraid of all the eyes watching me, and of the lights, and of the chance that I might disappoint everyone. There were so many expectations that I could figure out in the studio, but they were different onstage. A good audience is like a wave that you ride on top of. It’s a great feeling. But a crowd can also feel the other way around, like a wave that’s on top of you.”

—Brian Wilson, I Am Brian Wilson

The River is Famous to the Fish

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines.

famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

Calm

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“To love another person isn’t only to admire their strengths and see what’s great about them. It should also involve nursing and protecting them in their less impressive moments. To ask for a hug is not simply to request a physical embrace. It has a bigger meaning as an admission that one is not coping and as a plea for protection and support. A hug is a symbol of what we are missing in our hypercompetitive, individualistic culture: a positive admission of our dependence and fragility.

—The School of Life

Managing Ourselves

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

““Those who want to create life must also embrace it and be reborn from within. Those whom I call true anarchists no longer deceive themselves; they have been able to remold themselves through the experience of a deep existential crisis; they can act in the way which their most secret nature demands.”

—Gustav Landauer

For the Time Being

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself—in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love—and multiply it by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.

—Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

Braving the Wilderness

Sun, 12 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate our value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.”

—Brene Brown, Braving the Wilderness

Love After Love

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self, Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

—Derek Walcott

Oh, Not Because Happiness Exists

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Oh, not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss. But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. …Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? Not the art of looking, which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing. The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness, and the long experience of love,—just what is wholly unsayable.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Ninth Duino Elegy

Creativity

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Suffering is not bad; it helps you very much. Do you know a novel about happiness? Or a film about happy people? We are a perverse race, only suffering interests us.”

—Gyorgy Faludy

On Confidence

Sun, 27 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“The way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness. We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we will be idiots again in the future—and that’s OK. There aren’t any other available options for human beings.”

—The School of Life

Deep Play

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“There are moments on the brink, when you can give yourself to a lover, or not; give in to self-doubt, uncertainty, and admonishment, or not; dive into a different culture, or not; set sail for the unknown, or not; walk out onto a stage, or not. A moment only a few seconds long, when your future hangs in the balance, poised above a chasm. It is a crossroads. Resist then, and there is no returning to the known world. If you turn back, there is only what might have been. Above that invisible crossroads are inscribed the words: Give up your will, all who travel here.”

—Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

The Courage to Create

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“A choice confronts us. Shall we, as we feel our foundations shaking, withdraw in anxiety and panic? Frightened by the loss of our familiar mooring places, shall we become paralyzed and cover our inaction with apathy? If we do those things, we will have surrendered our chance to participate in the forming of the future. We will have forfeited the distinctive characteristic of human beings—namely, to influence our evolution through our own awareness. We will have capitulated to the blind juggernaut of history and lost the chance to mold the future into a society more equitable and humane.”

—Rollo May, The Courage to Create

Two Part Invention

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Perhaps the most important thing I learned is that the artist is not separate from the work and therefore cannot judge it. Some nights Miss Le Gallienne would come drooping back to the dressing room. ‘I gave a terrible performance this evening. I couldn’t get the audience to respond to a thing.’ Almost invariably when people came backstage after such a declaration, an old friend would cry out enthusiastically, ‘Eva, that was the best performance I’ve ever seen you give. You were superb.’

On other evenings she would come bounding in. ‘Oh, it went well tonight! I had them eating out of the palm of my hand!”‘ Almost invariably Thelma, the stage manager, who was an old friend from the Civic Repertory Days, would knock on the door, poke her head in, and ask anxiously, ‘LeG, are you all right?’

We do not know and cannot tell when the spirit is with us. Great talent or small, it makes no difference. We are caught within our own skins, our own sensibilities; we never know if our technique has been adequate to the vision.”

—Madeleine L’Engle, Two Part Invention

A Religion of One’s Own

Sun, 06 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“When you’re religious in a deep way, you sense the sacred in things—a faint and mysterious pulse. Both in the world and in yourself you catch sight of the numinous, a hint of something more than human.”

—Thomas Moore, A Religion of One’s Own

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“You can’t make people use streets they have no reason to use. You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch.”

—Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

A Room of One’s Own

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle.”

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Small Wire

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web, as doth the vine, twiggy and wooden, hold up grapes like eyeballs, as many angels dance on the head of a pin. God does not need too much wire to keep Him there, just a thin vein, with blood pushing back and forth in it, and some love. As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love. So if you have only a thin wire, God does not mind. He will enter your hands as easily as ten cents used to bring forth a Coke.

—Anne Sexton

There’s a Mystery There

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“We say ‘far away’; the Zulu people have a word for that which means ‘There where someone cries out: O mother, I am lost.’”

—Martin Buber, I and Thou

The Gift of Change

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“We will be given every opportunity to lean through joy, and when we deny ourselves that, we will learn through pain. But we will learn.”

—Marianne Williamson, The Gift of Change

Care of the Soul

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Having banished art to the museum, we fail to give it a place in ordinary life. One of the most effective forms of repression is to give a thing excessive honor.”

—Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

The Dance of Intimacy

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Intimacy means that we can be who we are in a relationship, and allow the other person to do the same. ‘Being who we are’ requires that we can talk openly about things that are important to us, that we take a clear position on where we stand on important emotional issues, and that we clarify the limits of what is acceptable and tolerable to us in a relationship. ‘Allowing the other person to do the same’ means that we can stay emotionally connected to that other party who thinks, feels, and believes differently without needing to change, convince, or fix the other.

An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.”

—Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Intimacy

The Garden Party

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Why does one feel so different at night? Why is it so exciting to be awake when everybody else is asleep? Late—it is very late! And yet every moment you feel more and more wakeful, as though you were slowly, almost with every breath, waking up into a new, wonderful, far more thrilling and exciting world than the daylight one.”

—Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party

Romancing the Ordinary

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”

—Katherine Mansfield

The final shadow

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The final shadow may close my eyes, carry me off from white of day, unchaining my soul at the hour of its anxious obsequious desire. but it will not leave the memory of that other shore where it once burned, for my fire can swim me through the frigid water, regardless of the strictures of law. A soul which once imprisoned an entire God, veins that brought fuel to such flames, marrow that so gloriously burned: they’ll leave this body, but not its cares; ash they’ll be, yet still aware; they will be dust, but dust in love.

The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.

The mind has to do with meaning. But what’s the meaning of a flower? What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? We are so focused on doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value—the rapture that is associated with being alive—is what it’s all about.

The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. My friend Heinrich Zimmer years ago used to say, ‘The best things can’t be told.’”

—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers

Wide Awake: A heavy sleeper’s guide to getting up in the morning

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

A heavy sleeper’s guide to getting up in the morning

My problem with waking up started 17 years ago. I wish I could explain it to you in a way that doesn’t make me sound insecure and sensitive beyond all imagination, but I can’t. When I try, it takes three thousand words and lots of angst, and it’s not really what I want to write about anyway. So I’ll just give you the facts:

17 years ago, I was a junior in high school, and I’d just gotten my first car
I had Coach Jim for my AP U.S. History class at 8am
One day, I woke up late and was late for class
Coach was irritated and sarcastically cut me down in front of everyone. I started crying in that way that you do when you’re desperately trying not to cry.
After that, every day was a battle against getting up in the morning
Most of the time, I lost
I ended up missing 37 days of school that semester. Being late or missing class required a note, and I didn’t want to forge my parents’ signature (although I did a few times). Most of those 37 days were spent hiding under the school stairs, trying to catch up on the work I’d missed and imagining that everyone hated me.
I told no one, not even my boyfriend (who I was serious about and eventually married; we later divorced, but that’s another story)
I went from making straight As since kindergarten to failing all but one of my classes
I’ve struggled with waking up in the mornings ever since

I hate telling that story. It’s hard to remember myself as the girl who hid under the stairs for 37 days because a teacher yelled at her for being late. (This is also why Facebook makes me anxious; I’m afraid all those people still think of me as the girl who hid under the stairs.) But my point in telling it is this:

If I can start waking up early every morning, anyone can.

Today is the 17th day I’ve woken up at 7am (which is early for me). Here’s how I’m doing it.

One. I realized getting up wasn’t really the issue.

More than a month ago, I told my friend Brooke how waking up was a constant struggle for me. (We recorded our conversation in a podcast.) I didn’t think much of it after that.

A few weeks later, I had a talk with my dad about it, and he mentioned it sounded like I might be depressed. Since I wasn’t crying every day or planning to die, that label hadn’t occurred to me. It got me thinking.

I was sleeping 10 hours or more every night, and I was still tired. (I had been doing this for 17 years.) I never wanted to get up and start the day. I avoided leaving the house. I avoided seeing my friends (I preferred calling this “being an introvert”). I skipped meals (I usually only ate snacks during the day until my partner made us dinner at night). I didn’t want to do anything that involved physical movement.

So…depression? Maybe. With that revelation, I did what I always do — I searched for a book about it. I read a lot of them (the one that changed things for me was this one — highly recommended, not just for depression-sufferers), and I started to make changes in my life.

This doesn’t mean you have to be struggling with depression or mental illness if you want to be able to wake up in the morning. And it doesn’t mean that waking up in the morning solves the problem of depression (or even that any book will solve the problem of depression).

What it really means is that often, the problem isn’t the problem, but it’s a symptom of a bigger problem. We need to ask ourselves: What is the problem, really? Is it waking up in the morning, or is it something else? How can we deal with that, first?

Two. I made a commitment for five days in a row.

I didn’t start to wake up early by deciding to wake up early. I started by committing to help out at a summer camp for a week. The camp started at 9am every morning, and I had to be there by 8:45. (Many people have jobs that provide this structure, but because I am self-employed, I do not.)

When the week of summer camp was over, it still wasn’t easy for me to get up on my own, so I made another week’s worth of commitments with my early bird friends, meeting them at the library or the beach or the museum.

After two weeks, I don’t need the commitments anymore. I am easily getting up on my own, even before my alarm goes off.

Three. I used my phone addiction for good.

There are two problems with waking up in the morning. The first is remembering that you want to do this when you’re groggy and full of hatred for the world (my usual morning state). The second is staying awake.

To solve both of these problems, I decided to use my iPhone for something it is quite good at — distracting me from my feelings and sucking me into its hyperlinked depths.

At 7am, I hit the snooze button, but instead of using it to get more sleep (which only makes me sleepier), I use it as a timer to tell me when app-checking time is over. (There’s only one thing worse than sleeping late when you meant to get up early, and that is using all of your awake time drowning in status updates.)

Four. I made best friends with the sun.

After I’m done with my 9 minutes of app-checking, I delete my apps and officially get out of bed. But I don’t get in the shower right away. Instead, I throw on my robe, go outside, and write.

Getting half an hour of sunshine in the mornings has made all the difference in adjusting my body clock from night owl to early bird. It also makes me happier and gives me more energy, and all I have to do is walk out the door.

Five. I made mornings fun.

I decided to wake up early enough to give me time to have the morning of my dreams. For me, this means having time to read and write and eat breakfast…all before anyone else gets up.

Luckily, I don’t have to drive to work, and everyone in my family likes to sleep late, so 7am is early enough to make those things happen for me.

In an ideal world, I would be including exercise in my morning routine, but I haven’t yet attained exercise enlightenment. One thing at a time. My goal right now is to wake up consistently, and making mornings fun keeps me doing it every single day.

Six. I said yes to an early bed time and no to naps.

I thought going to bed early would be the hardest part, but it happened naturally once I started waking up at 7am every day. I actually enjoy getting to say “I’m going to bed everybody!” at 10:00 and then reading for an hour before falling asleep. The real hard part was avoiding naps.

For the first week, my body craved naps. At first, I gave in to the craving. It was so all-consuming, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else but take a nap at 2:30 in the afternoon. But when I did, I wasn’t at all tired at night. I stayed up to my usual 1 or 2am, which resulted in looks of pure evil being shot at my alarm clock the next day (fyi: looks of pure evil is the Sarah-equivalent of a dozen f-bombs; it’s about as bad as it gets).

To fix this problem, I started going out in the sunshine whenever I got a craving for a nap. I also drank a glass of water. If that didn’t work, I called someone on the phone. By the end of the first week, I had no more nap cravings.

Seven. Yes, I even woke up early on the weekends.

I thought this would be hard, but 17 days in, it’s turning out to be the best part. My weekends are like a wide open plain, and I am like a gazelle, prancing in the fields. Or something like that.

Early morning weekends have changed my life. I get to go to the farmer’s market before they run out of corn on the cob, for one thing. For another, I don’t wake up Monday morning regretting the fact that I spent my whole weekend in my pajamas on the couch.

Eight. I made these changes slooooooowly.

Week one, the only thing I did was get up and go outside at 7am. In my bathrobe, even. And no naps.

Week two, I added waking up immediately rather than letting myself snooze.

It’s week three now, and I’m dealing with something not related to getting up in the mornings at all, which is my habit of ruminating. (Ruminating is that thing where you think about something over and over in your mind. I do this a lot.)

When I notice myself ruminating, I do something to distract myself from it, like read a book or watch a movie. I let myself ruminate once a day, in the mornings, in my journal. The rest of the time, I don’t worry about a thing. Or at least that’s the goal I’m working toward.

I still don’t get dressed first thing in the morning. I still don’t take showers until noon most days. But I can tackle these another day, another week. Right now, I’m getting up at 7am every day. That is victory enough for me.

I’m so much happier as an early bird

And it’s not because early birds catch the worm, or anything like that. It’s because sleeping late is a deeply-rooted trigger that makes me feel bad about myself. It has all sorts of negative feelings attached to it, which drag on to the rest of my day.

When I was a little girl, I woke up bounding out of bed, ready to start the day. By waking up early, I’m getting closer to that little girl. Since that’s pretty much the goal of my adult life, I’ll take it.

In the spirit of POSSE, this was also published at:

Medium

How to write your first draft in six days (a play in eleven acts)

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Act one: Get laid off

If that’s not possible, make some other kind of drastic/heroic/insane move that will make step number two possible.

Act two: Experience a rush of adrenaline that causes your temporarily addled brain to decide to write a book in three weeks

Books are just lots of words. You know lots of words. Perfect.

Act three: Announce it to everyone you know

Don’t worry if your friends and family look at you like you’re nuts. This is a good idea. Believe it.

Act four: Outline your book with zealous pride

Remember that time you wrote yourself into a deep dark hole and couldn’t write your way out of it? Not this time, my friend. You are going to know where this thing is going, and you’re going to like it.

Act five: Make best friends with Scrivener

Beware of the manual. Don’t even look at it this behemoth. You don’t need to know how to set up a manuscript that your eighth grade English teacher would be proud of. You just need to write. (But maybe figure out how to use those little cards. They’re kind of awesome.)

Act six: Delude yourself into thinking that you’re not writing for as long as possible

This isn’t writing! This is filling out tiny cards with tiny sentences and then putting them together like a puzzle. This is a puzzle! Pay no attention to the word count at the bottom of your screen.

Act seven: After three days of non-stop “puzzle time”, realize that you are writing lots of words and watch your progress slow to a trickle

Do not panic. This is totally on purpose. Part of the plan.

Act eight: Keep writing, even though you know this is going to take the rest of your life, and you will never finish, not ever

This is your life now. A lonely laptop-based existence where you only get up for food, water, and the relief of your bodily functions. Yes you can shut the door, small tiny humans who I vaguely remember are my children. Thank you for anticipating my needs.

Act nine: Cheat. Be a cheater and cut out half of the chapters you were going to write just so you can get finished with the first draft faster.

Remind yourself that simplicity is holiness. You are doing everyone a favor, really. You need a clean, sparse manuscript from which to grow that second draft. It says so in all the books.

Act ten: See the finish line. Immediately fall on your metaphorical knees in happiness and disbelief, and proceed to drag yourself towards it by the strength of your finger muscles alone.

It doesn’t matter if it’s already midnight and there are those four sections left. Cut that broken one off, you don’t need it. Ignore the blood.

Act eleven: Congratulations, you have a first draft.

Remember, delirium is only a problem if you can’t write about it later. You, my friend, have proven once and for always, that you can.

Digitizing my brain: How I manage my energy, my creativity, and my time

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 00:00:00 GMT

It’s almost New Years! And even though I say I won’t make a big deal out of New Years and its promise to make me into a brighter, shinier version of myself, I always do. Because let’s be honest, planning for the future is the most fun in the world.

One of the areas I re-visited this year was my approach to collecting tasks, ideas, projects, and all the other stuff that floats around in my brain and needs dealing with on a daily basis. The biggest change I made was moving from a paper system to a digital one (I use the Getting Things Done method, which gets onerous when you’re dealing with lists and lists of mostly crossed out tasks). Adam mentioned loving OmniFocus, so I checked it out and agreed — it’s really great.

Several people have asked how I manage to work at &yet, homeschool my 3 kids, and work on other projects (I’ll be sharing a new one very soon that I’ve been working on with a friend for the past year). This is a big part of it. The tool doesn’t really matter, as long as you enjoy using it and it’s simple to maintain.

Getting Things Done: The 7 basic steps

If you’re not familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (GTD for short), it’s an approach to managing all the tasks and projects that come up in your life. It’s rigorous to get started and requires 10 to 15 minutes of daily maintenance, but the relief and freedom from feeling like you should be doing other things is worth it. (And, as the title suggests, you also get a lot of things done, without the mental and emotional angst that often comes with creative projects.)

Even if you know the ins-and-outs of GTD, it’s worth it to start fresh as you begin a new year or migrate to a new tool. For the system to work, you have to trust that it contains every task or project you want or need to do. Starting from the beginning every once in a while is a great way to make sure that’s happening.

To get started:

Choose an inbox

I’ve chosen OmniFocus, but as I mentioned, I have also successfully used a physical notebook (using the Bullet Journal approach) and the Things app.

Inside your inbox, make a list of every task or project that you’ve committed to or that you need or want to do

This could be anything, from planning a vacation to conducting a product launch to taking out the trash. Doesn’t matter if it’s business or personal, important or unimportant, urgent or not. Just be sure to get it all out. Even after you do this, you’ll probably still spend the next day or two adding new tasks that you forgot about.

From that list, make a list of projects

A project is anything that has more than one task associated with it. (“Clean the kitchen” would be a project, since it involves lots of different tasks.)

In OmniFocus, you can simply drag any item from your inbox into the Projects section to turn it into a project. This makes it really easy to see what’s left.

Assign every remaining item in your inbox to a project until your inbox is empty

Some tasks may not have a “project”, but I put them in a project anyway (like “Maintenance”) to get them out of my inbox.

For each project, write down the very next step(s) that need to be done to make progress on that project

Next steps are literally the very next specific step you need to take. So if you need to call the vet, but you don’t have the vet’s phone number, your next step would be “Google vet’s phone number”. If you need to decide on a book title, your next step might be “Make a list of possible book titles”.

Ideally, every next step for each project would be this specific and actionable. This takes care of one of the biggest sources of procrastination, because there is no ambiguity in what you need to do.

By the way, you don’t need to add all the steps for every project. (For complex projects, you may not even know what all of them are yet.) Start with the very next step or two; you can add more steps when you need to.

Get into the habit of adding new tasks and projects to your inbox throughout the day

Don’t be perfect with this — just put a note in your inbox every time you commit to something or have an idea to do something. You’ll take care of it when you process your inbox that day.

Decide on a time for processing your inbox daily

Processing your inbox involves simply repeating these steps every day (though it will be much faster because nearly everything is already in your inbox; it takes me 10-15 minutes). This is the last thing I do before I quit work for the day, which not only gives me a nice stopping point, but also gives me a smooth start to the next day.

Using GTD to manage energy instead of time

Getting Things Done isn’t a time management system; you can use it with any approach. I used to use it with my 90-minute workday when I was self-employed.

The approach I use now is a hodge-podge of many things I’ve learned, including concepts in Jim Loehr’s book The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. One of Loehr’s premises is that after 90 minutes of focused work, we need to take a break for rest and renewal before starting a focused task again. There are two ways I use GTD to help me with this.

Giving my next steps energy-related contexts

One basic step I didn’t mention is applying contexts to each of your next steps. (A context is a tag or label you can use to group tasks together.) David Allen recommended a “home” context for any steps that needed to be done at home. “Office” for any that needed to be done at work. “Phone” for any phone calls. “Computer” for computer-based work. “Errand” for anything you needed to do while you were out. Etc.

I used to use contexts in this way and found them a waste of time. We work differently now. We have our phones and laptops with us nearly all the time. For many of us, our lives are not cleanly split between personal time and work time.

Because I haven’t been giving my next steps a context, I always had trouble choosing what to do in any given moment, and GTD became overwhelming to keep up with (there were so many tasks that I never did, simply because there were too many to choose from). That’s why contexts are so useful. They allow you to narrow down your tasks to whatever is appropriate for the context you find yourself in.

Then I discovered this video by Sven Fechner at OmniFocus, which elegantly fixed that problem for me. Instead of using contexts based on place, I started using them based on how much energy they took. Now I have three main contexts. “Short dashes” are tasks that don’t require much time or energy. “Full focus” are tasks I can do when I’m ready to sit down and focus on a task. And “Rest and Renewal” is for when I’ve just spent a chunk of time in “Full focus” mode, and I need to re-energize.

I also have a few other contexts that are not energy-related, such as “Out and about” for things I can do while I’m running around town. “Waiting” for when I need something else to happen before I can do something. And “Someday/Maybe” for tasks and projects that sound like a good idea, but I haven’t committed to.

(Note: if you decide to add contexts to your workflow, you’ll need to add that to your maintenance list each day. Having the “waiting” context makes this easier for me. Instead of needing to go through every action in every project every day, I just process my inbox and then look at all of the things in the “waiting” context to see if there are tasks that I am no longer waiting on and can apply a new context to. Once a week, I go through every single project and next step, but there’s no reason to do that on a daily basis.)

Filling up my “rest and renewal” context

This is a simple step, but it has been so effective for me in managing my energy. I simply make a list of tasks that make me feel re-energized. A few of my favorite things currently on this list:

Read Make Your Mark: The Creative’s Guide to Building a Business with Impact
Play Settlers of Catan
Play MarioKart with my family
Watch “Gilmore Girls” on Netflix
Listen to the Relevant podcast
Put on my shoes and take a walk
Make toast/drink blood orange soda
Read the next interview on The Great Discontent
Play Lily Looking Through on Steam
Watch SimplicityBliss OmniFocus videos
Lay out pieces to make garland to hang in the living room

I try to be as specific as possible, making them just as actionable as my regular tasks (otherwise, there are some things on here that my eyes will skip over because they’re too vague — like “make garland to hang in the living room”).

Using GTD as a learner and writer

I love to learn new things and am constantly reading books and listening to talks. I’m also a writer, which means that new insights end up as writing material. But I often get to a point where I don’t want to read anything or watch anything, because I’ve learned so much that I haven’t implemented. What is the point of learning something new if it’s just going to fall right out of my brain in the next couple of days?

Long, long ago in a galaxy not so unlike this one, Behance used to make a tool called Action Method. It is now defunct, but I’ve carried the main concept with me ever since — capture everything with a bias toward action. If you hear a great concept in a talk, capture it. If you read a great quote, capture it. If one of your teammates asks you to do something, capture it. If someone says they’re going to do something, ask them if they captured it (I’ll admit, I haven’t quite gotten to the level of mastery where I bug people about this yet. But I am not above it.)

Evernote is excellent for capturing information, but there is no bias toward action. You can capture and organize things all day long, but you’ll need to take an extra step if you want to put anything on your to-do list. Which is fine, except most of the time you’ll skip that step and the new insight you gleaned will pass you by just like all the rest. There are two ways I use GTD to fix this problem.

Creating an “idea garden” project

Any time I have an idea or read a quote I like or read about a concept that resonates with me or hear something interesting or inspiring, I put it in my inbox, just like I do tasks and projects. Most of the time, I’ll also jot down a note about what it meant for me personally. Those notes are often even more valuable than the ideas themselves, because they help me remember what I was thinking about at the time, and why it seemed relevant.

Later when I’m processing my inbox, I’ll either turn that idea into a task (often with a “Someday/Maybe” context if I haven’t decided to do it yet) and/or put it in my “Idea Garden”.

Not only does this give me a quick and comprehensive place to turn to when I’m trying to remember insights that I had, it also helps me assimilate new knowledge, because I’ve written down the information in my own words.

Creating a “reminders” context

I believe one of the most important projects of our lifetimes is to become the best version of ourselves. If we were all committed to a lifetime of becoming the best version of us, I imagine most of the societal problems we face would disappear. It’s also completely in our power.

To remind me of the things I need to do (or stop doing) to become that person, I’ve added a “Reminders” context. Reminders can be grand insights or simple habits that will help me live a life that’s truer and more meaningful to who I really am. Most of the reminders on my list now simply have to do with managing my day better (since I just got finished reading Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind). Here are a few of them:

Write before breakfast
Go off-grid for full focus tasks
I may not get the hang of this right away. I’m going to make mistakes, and that’s okay.
Ask for help when I get stuck. Don’t try to figure it out on my own.
Rest after 90 minutes of working on a full focus task
Don’t check email/social media in-between tasks. Put on superhero cape instead and notice one valuable thing in that experience.
Take an actual lunch break, and walk the dog while I’m at it
Don’t sabotage myself. Don’t be afraid of being a person who knows what she’s doing.

Each of these reminders has a story and purpose behind it, which I remember simply by glancing at these words. I also have my notes for another reminder about why I’m doing it. For example, on the “Don’t sabotage myself” reminder, I’ve written this quote from Seth Godin:

“These people sabotage themselves because the alternative is to put themselves into the world as someone who knows what they are doing…which means tomorrow you also have to know what you are doing, and you have just signed up for a lifetime of knowing what you are doing.

…This is what you hide from — the noise in your head that says you are not good enough, that says it is not perfect, that says it could have been better.”

The 3 most important things to remember

My systems are always growing and changing with time, but here are three things I’ve learned over the years that make Getting Things Done work for me:

Capture everything. If you don’t, you won’t trust the system, and your brain will continue to waste its brilliance remembering all those large and small tasks that are running around in your subconscious. You also won’t experience the profound relief and freedom of feeling like everything is taken care of, or will be.
Give every step a useful context. If you don’t, you will waste too much time and energy choosing between tasks to make it worth it. You also won’t get the benefit of separating your mental and emotional angst from your projects by being able to look at each step as a stand-alone task.
Spend 10-15 minutes a day processing your inbox. If you don’t, your system will become outdated, and you’ll stop using it and will avoid starting again.

The great thing about GTD is it can be used with any approach to your day — whether you schedule time for everything on a calendar or use the don’t break the chain method or Pomodoro or a sticky note or a daily planner for prioritizing. Because it’s got such a cult following, there are tons of articles and hacks on how to customize it for your own use, but I’d recommend just getting started and making up your own tweaks as you go.

(If you’d like to chime in, please say hi on Twitter! I don’t have comments open because it’s yet another thing I have to check, but I love talking to folks there. :)

Why I’ve stopped trying to build good habits

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMT

I love to work on the areas of my life that are not quite what I know they could be. If I had to pick a hobby, personal growth would be it. A few things I’m currently working on:

I want to learn to use social media in a healthy way, even if I have to give it up to do so
I want to start Writing again (Writing is not the same as filling up a notebook every month; writing plus effort = Writing)
I want to become a morning person, at least slightly
I want to learn how to enjoy myself when I’m not working (a hazard of doing what you love is that you don’t know what to do when you need to take a break)
I want to have people over more often and not be stressed about it
I want to get out of my house more
I want to be myself, regardless of what other people think
I want to be better at helping my kids use and stretch their talents and imagination

(There’s more – so much more – but it’s going to start getting embarrassing soon.)

I don’t see this as focusing on my faults. I am enough, and all that. But I love thinking about what is possible. I don’t have to stay stuck.

The way that I usually start toward a goal is by making a lot of lists, usually involving regular tasks that I then try to turn into habits. For example, I’ve tried getting in the habit of waking up at a certain time every day. Not even an incredibly early time…just a consistent time.

The problem is, I am terrible at making new habits. I think I exhausted my life’s supply of willpower somewhere in the first seven years of business ownership. I have very little left.

Although habits are supposed to eventually become automatic behaviors, I never get to that stage. Even when I’ve done a task regularly for a long time, I still have to use my negligible amount of willpower to make myself do it. (I think those people who say that it takes 28 days to form a habit are lying to us, banking on the assumption that barely anyone makes it that far.)

But I’ve found a way around this. No more habit-building for me. I want to use my willpower to make change that actually has a chance of sticking.

Quit something Thursdays

Have you heard of Bob Goff, the guy who quits something every Thursday? (He also wrote this really great book and does a lot of other wonderful things.) I used to think “Wow, that’s awesome for Bob, but how does he do that? I’d love to quit something every week, but pretty soon I would have nothing left.”

Then I started reading a sort of cheesy, rambly, but very awesome book by Matthew Kelly called The Rhythm of Life (found on Oyster). In it, he talked about addiction. He said that any behavior that you don’t have mastery over is an addiction that is affecting the rest of your life, whether you realize it or not. He said that if you can’t imagine yourself giving something up for 28 days, you’re addicted to it.

“Whether a bird is held by a chain or a thread, still it cannot fly,” quoth San Juan de la Cruz. And so I made a list of my addictions.

Sleeping late
Maintaining my online identity
Staying home
Staying up late
People-pleasing
Achievement and recognition
Staying busy
Productivity
Self-sufficiency
Gilmore Girls

(For real on that last one. FOR REAL. I’ve watched almost five seasons in the past six weeks.)

I realized that most, if not all, of these things are closely related to my personal goals. To use social media in a healthy way, I need to break my addiction to upholding my online identity. To become a morning person, I need to break my addiction to staying up late and sleeping in. To get out of my house more, I need to break my addiction to staying home.

That’s when I decided that perhaps quitting things is easier to do than adding more things to my already packed plate. Perhaps if I’m not good at adding more tasks to my life, I can take away some and achieve the same result.

Last Thursday, I quit checking social media. I’m not saying goodbye, I just don’t check it anymore. I have my chosen notifications emailed to me. I may be breaking the rules of “being present”, but I can’t handle my social media liquor. I’ve tried for years. In less than a week, this one little thing has made a profound difference in my emotional state.

This Thursday, I’m quitting Gilmore Girls. Well, not completely; I’m going to watch one episode a week, like God and Warner Brothers intended. (Now I’m going to have to find something else to do with that 15 hours a week…and maybe stop wishing that I lived in Stars Hollow.)

I don’t know what I’ll quit after that, but I’m thinking sleep deprivation is a possibility – I could stop forcing myself to wake up when I haven’t had enough sleep. I may stop spending large portions of the day without human contact. I could stop wearing pajamas past a certain hour. I could give up checking email first thing. I could give up checking my team’s chat room after I’m done working for the day.

The great thing is, I don’t have to quit forever…just until those things no longer have a hold over me. I will quit them until they are no longer limiting my experience, and then at that point, I probably won’t have to think about them at all (except for social media; I suspect my addiction to it is akin to alcoholism – I may never be able to imbibe without going off the deep end).

I think there was a time in my life when it was easier to start adding more things to my life, but this is not one of them. But quitting things? Based on my results so far, quitting things is something I plan on getting verycomfortable with.

The soul-grasping magic of life

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 00:00:00 GMT

When I was a kid, I loved playing role-playing games. (Still do.) I love that you can be whoever you want to be…that you can explore the world around you and open any door. Even your nosy neighbor with the weird striped lawn wouldn’t bat her wrinkly eye if you walked right in and started jumping on the bed or smashing the flowerpots looking for gold coins.

You can walk up to anyone and say hello without any social anxiety whatsoever; they’ll even reward your gregariousness by telling you a secret that will aid you in your quest.

You can have purple hair. A name like “Esmerelda”. You can be a mage or an archer or a master of hand-to-hand combat. And tomorrow, you can change your mind completely and start over as “Jane” or “Jim” or even “Sarah of the Alps”.

Social media used to feel that way for me. The internet felt more anonymous in those early days before it was called “social media”. None of my real-life friends had any idea that I had this alternate online life, and they weren’t particularly interested. The anonymity gave it a level of safety…I could just be myself, without the social masks we all use in face-to-face interactions. There was a certain level of self-consciousness that I just didn’t have to deal with.

Every new website was a new door to open with interesting treasures to rummage through. Every new avatar was a person I had at least one thing in common with — we were online while everyone else was not.

The internet has changed so much, and for the most part, I am glad. It’s wonderful to have access to all of these tools and information that we never had before. I love being able to download the world’s greatest books and literature and be able to take classes on pretty much any topic from my living room. I love knowing what my friends are up to, and that there is no longer this clear separation between “internet friends” and “friends in real life”.

But I do miss those early days. I miss feeling like I was a part of something special, and that perhaps I myself was special…that I belonged to a world that most regular people weren’t a part of, and that I had some level of skill in navigating it. When we talk about “how to do social media” and “how to have your ideas go viral” and all of these tactical things, I remember the internet when it was a relatively small nation of a handful of weird and wonderful folks, and I wish an impossible wish that those days would come back for a visit, if not to stay for a while.

The internet has lost some of its original magic for me, even as it has gained so much in terms of practicality and usefulness. There are so many people (including all of those friends who used to wonder why I loved the internet so much), and our social masks have taken an interesting role as we curate the best parts of our lives for everyone to see. There is so much information and so much to do that it feels like another job just managing all of it.

Today as I was sitting in my car in the university parking lot, I had this weird moment of being amazed by my steering wheel. My little hands were resting on this hefty grey pleather circle, and I felt alive.

I looked out at the many buildings that made up the school, and I realized that I could walk through any of those doors and interact with any of the objects in them. I looked out at the people walking by with their different faces and bodies, and I realized I could say hello to any of those people, and who knows what would happen? I could take my little car and drive to a new land, have an adventure. I could sit in a tavern or a coffee shop or an amusement park and I could have a whole array of different experiences, with my entire body — not just eyes burning through a screen.

Experiences lose their magic when they become ubiquitous. When we have too much of something, it doesn’t feel special anymore. Too much screen time, too much hunching over computer keys, too much trying to be aware of what’s going on around me so I can tweet about it.

But before the internet, I wonder if real life had lost its magic, just a little bit. If we were so used to the physical objects in our lives that we just didn’t notice how perfectly delightful it all is.

I read a quote by William James the other day. He wrote:

“It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given.”

Perhaps too much of the internet is a good thing. Perhaps it allows the physical world we inhabit to feel more like the soul-grasping magic that it really is. And vice versa.

What to do when you’re stuck with a blank page

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 GMT

“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going…I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence and then go on from there.”

- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose says that she used to hear this, “and I’ve nodded my head, not wanting to admit that I honestly had no idea what in the world Hemingway was talking about.”

Which is funny to me, because in my Tour de Bliss course on content strategy, we begin writing by asking ourselves each morning, “What is the most true right now?” Several of my students start out just as confused as Prose (and some never figure out exactly what I mean by it, try as I might to explain).

I don’t think I knew that Hemingway asked this question first, unless it was lurking in my subconscious…I’m actually not sure when I first started asking it myself and began using it as a basis for what to write. But I understand what he means. He is talking about experiential truth. Not something that you learned to be true, but something you found to be true.

In the context of fiction, it might be something you witnessed or experienced, physically, spiritually, emotionally…something that resounds delightedly (or horrifyingly) true. This evening, for example, I thought of my late grandmother and how ironic it is that she raised 9 kids on a farm in the valley and couldn’t cook. To this day, my dad is ambivalent about food.

This is the beginning of a fantastic story because it is true. What comes next is the writer’s favorite answer to that honest question. What would family life be like if you had no grocery store around the corner and had to eat through your beloved mama’s terrible way with livestock? How would your dad feel about it, after working as a sharecropper all day? How would he react, and how would each of the children respond, individually and as a group?

In the context of non-fiction, truth is easier to understand, but still people ask — how do you know what is the most true? Or as Hemingway would put it, what is “the truest sentence”? For me, this is always the thing that incites the most passion in me. I feel it because I have experienced it, not like I experience a cup of coffee, but like I experience a shift in perspective. The room gets bigger. I am changed.

In the end, Prose gives up on the idea of sentences being “true” — she says what he really means is that they are beautiful, which is no less hard to define. But I think she’s wrong. A sentence can be true, even if it’s not factually correct. That is what makes the reader go “YES!” Truth is common more often than it isn’t…that’s what keeps me writing. And that’s why it’s the best place I know to begin.

My 90-minute workday

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMT

They say that when you’re your own boss, you’ve got the worst boss in the world. It’s true. To myself, I am like the Attila the Hun of bosses. (To others…well, I won’t put words in their mouths. But I imagine Attila the Hun wouldn’t be the one they’d compare me to. I’m probably more of an Annie Oakley.)

The culture is the easiest thing to blame. We say that we value slowing down and appreciating life, but our actions indicate otherwise. Exhaustion is modern-day martyrdom. We puff our chests as we admit that we worked 62 hours last week with nothing but a camelbak of coffee and a good attitude. That’s responsibility. That’s work ethic. Hiyah!

After six years of owning my own business and marveling at my own vast production capacity, I became aware of the onset of a strange disease. Not workaholism, though that could have been the cause. No, this was much worse. Suddenly, I was unable to do anything required of me. Once I committed to a project…once I was obligated to do it, I could no longer muster the energy. And it did not go away.

It’s like the motivation part of my brain became a rebellious teenager. This wouldn’t have been too much of a problem since I have a good amount of control over my days, but suddenly my brain started tricking me into thinking that everything was an obligation. Excited about my website re-design? Oh, well as soon as I start planning for it, now I have to do it. Want to re-invent my digital program? Well, forget it. The minute it comes out of my mouth, I feel obligated. I couldn’t even plan on baking cookies with my kids…I’d always just say “we’ll see”, and hope that the motivation part of my brain wouldn’t freak out on me and make it seem like an unalterable chore.

Instead of completely shutting down (which I’ve tried before…it doesn’t help), I embarked on a workflow soul-searching mission. I put aside my culturally engrained definitions of productivity and responsibility in an attempt to find true freedom in my work life. And this is what I’ve come up with.

Type Z

All my life, I’ve identified with the Type A personality. I’m a doer. I feel good when I get things done. It’s exhilarating. I don’t understand people like my husband who can sit and watch TV for hours. An hour a week is pretty much my limit, and it better be Tivoed, because I have no patience for commercials. (Wow, I must be a total thrill ride to be around.)

But it’s not just doing “stuff”. It’s using my time for things that matter. I will spend hours whiling away an afternoon with a friend, because I see the value in meaningful relationships. Spending time on that counts as “doing” for me because at the end of the day, relationships matter more than anything else. I read a ton, which is also not technically “doing”, but I value being a well-read person. And also, I love it. So it’s productive for me.

So I never questioned my Type A-ness. (A-ness…haha…I’m also five years old.) But one day, I started thinking about my natural gifts and abilities, and I realized that with all the enjoyment productivity brings me, it is really really hard for me to be a responsible person. I’ve always had trouble forcing myself to do things like wake up in the morning and go to work (when I did the 8 to 5 thing). Or go to church on the weekend, which I resist interminably (even though my faith is important to me, church apparently isn’t, or I bet I would go more often).

I heard someone say once that “I guess I’m just not one of those job people you hear so much about,” and I knew that was me. As much as I love the idea of schedules and task lists and action steps, I have never been good at putting them into practice. I do it for maybe two days, and then I feel like a caged monkey. But I do love projects. I love to dream something up and then bring it to life. I even love big, giant, toothy projects (digital nation-building, anyone?). I do not get overwhelmed. I get inspired and I can conquer the world.

So then it occurred to me. Maybe I’m not a Type A after all. And I’m definitely not a Type B (whatever that is, but I’m guessing it’s the opposite of Type A). I’m going to make up my own type. I am a Type Z. And maybe I’m the only person in the world who’s a Type Z, but that’s okay. Now that I know that I’m a Type Z, I will never go back to my old ways of scheduling and task mastering and whip wielding, because I know it will backfire (even if it takes six years of self-flagellation to do so).

But I needed something to replace the whip. So I did what any self-respecting former Type A would do. I made a list.

I am happiest in my work when…

I have loads of freedom to do whatever I want to do.
I am not avoiding or procrastinating on anything.
I have a time limit for things that feel like an obligation.
I know everything that is on my plate, and I know it is all digestible.
I get to dive deep into the projects I choose to take on.
I know what the very next thing I need to do is.
My goal is to maintain enthusiasm and momentum, rather than put unnecessary pressure and deadlines on myself.
I don’t spend much time in meetings, but I do spend time building real relationships.
I’m not worried about keeping up with my email inbox or my social media accounts.
I’m not doing things because other people want me to; I’m doing them because I want to do them.
I know when I’m “done” and can stop work for the day without feeling guilty.
“Done” is easily attainable.

For kicks, I took a look at how my current Attila the Hun style of self-management was attempting to get me to that place of work bliss.

Attila likes me to…

Schedule meetings within a day or two of when people want to have them, with a maximum of 3 meetings a day. (I was spending like 2-3 hours a day in meetings. And I’m an introvert!)
Respond to all email right away.
Schedule milestones within an inch of my life, because Attila hates when people have to wait on me for stuff that she feels “should” take less time.
Schedule blocks of time for specific projects, so that it is immediately apparent to me that I have no free time whatsoever.
Schedule my fun time and my social media time and my reading time and my family time, so my life feels like one big giant chore (but at least I’ll get to have fun time…).
Cram all of my work into normal work hours so that I can have a clear separation between work life and home life (which sounds like a good thing, except for all the unnecessary pressure and long monotonous stretches of work)
Work 8 hours a day. At least. Because if I’m not, then Attila’s pet guilt monster is going to chew me up and spit me out.
It was suddenly very clear why the motivation section of my brain was rebelling. I sucked as my own boss. I needed to fire Attila.

Enter Glenda the Good Fairy

Glenda is my new boss. She’s a lot prettier, which you think wouldn’t matter. But remember when you were a kid and you got the ugly Attila the Hun teacher? It matters. A lot.

Glenda is very flexible. She lets me try things, and when something loses its effectiveness, I can figure out why, and then try something else.

First things first: Getting everything out of my head

The first thing Glenda instructed me to do was to write down every project that I was currently committed to, both in work and life. (I imagine Glenda learned this from David Allen.) It really is the most blissful feeling in the world to be able to see every single project written down, and to know…these are the things I am committed to. I do not have to commit to anything else. I will think long and hard before I add anything to this list. And if I start feeling guilty about not committing to something, I will look at my project list and say, “I am doing enough.”

I use Things for iPad to keep track of all of my projects. It’s fun, and it works well for my kind of system. But I imagine anything would work, even just a plain notebook with one sheet of paper for each project.

The main (and pretty much only) principle: Getting to “done” as quickly as possible

The system I developed is very, very simple. The object of the game is to get the “work” (i.e. the stuff that I have to do) finished as quickly as possible. And then I’m free to do whatever I want.

The first thing I do every day is spend one hour on my projects that have time-sensitive expectations. Namely, projects that I’m committed to with other people. I came to the one hour number because a long time ago, I discovered that you can get a lot done in 15 focused minutes. I had four time-sensitive projects going on at the time. 4 projects times 15 minutes…voila, that’s where the hour came from.

Usually, it goes like this. I set my timer for 15 minutes, and I start working on the project that is farthest away from me (meaning: I haven’t worked on it in the longest amount of time). When the timer goes off, I’m free to move on to the project that’s the next farthest away. OR (and this is what usually happens), I’m free to keep working on the first project if I’m feeling in the flow. I keep doing that until I’ve done four 15 minute sessions. And then I’m done with my time-sensitive projects for the day.

After that, I spend 30 minutes on my non-time-sensitive projects. I set my timer and start the one that’s farthest away from me. When it goes off, I set it one more time and either keep working on that project (if I’m feeling good and excited about it), or move on to the next one.

And then I’m done. DONE.

It is the best feeling in the world. In an hour and a half, I give myself permission to completely stop working if I want to. And I am more productive than I’ve ever been in my entire life.

But wait, how do you actually get anything done that way?

You’d be surprised at how much I get done in that hour and a half. I usually beat all of my deadlines (although I’ve stopped setting deadlines…now that I trust myself to fulfill my commitments without them, I don’t need them anymore). If I do happen to have something that needs to get done that very day, then I already have momentum on it, so it’s not stressful to get it finished. And usually, by that time I have most of it done already.

It took a little time for my brain to de-compress from its hyper-stressed, hyper-whip-cracking state. For a week and a half, I only worked for 90 minutes a day. When I was done for the day, I didn’t want to do anything else even remotely resembling work.

Then something magical happened. I got my mojo back. I started loving my job again. Since I don’t treat it like work, it doesn’t feel like work. Side bonus: I no longer waste time obsessively checking email or social media. Since I’m not resisting my work, there’s no reason to procrastinate. Hence, I’m more productive, and I feel like the luckiest person in the world, because I only work 90 minutes a day. (When all’s said and done, I’m usually working on projects for 6-9 hours a day, but that’s because I am so excited about what I’m doing.)

Other principles that I try to remember

First, I have to follow my own rules. When I’m done, I’m really done. I’m not just tricking myself into thinking I’m done. I get to truly do whatever I want. A lot of times, I will want to work on a project that I got juiced up about during my “work” time. Other times, I’ll just want to read or watch some interesting video or maybe even wash dishes or make cupcakes. Whatever it is, I do it. Glenda says it’s good for my future creative/productive self, and I believe her.

During my free time (which is most of the time now), sometimes I get so juiced up about a project that I’ll work too long on it. I’ll start to drift and not be as focused. I know this is happening when I start checking Facebook or Twitter or email while I’m working. At this point, it’s time to stop, even if I don’t want to stop. Otherwise, I’ll get burned out, which is possible even when you’re thrilled to be working on something.

At the end of each day, I try to update my project list and write down the very next step that needs to happen on each one. That way, it’s even easier for me to start my 15-minute sessions the next day. But if I don’t, it’s no big deal. My system’s easy enough that it doesn’t rely on me keeping my project list perfectly up-to-date.

I try to limit email checking to once or twice a day, but I’m not a Nazi about it. I find that when I’ve got the stuff I have to do out of the way, email checking (and everything else for that matter) comes naturally. I don’t have to schedule it in (or out). But if checking too often becomes a habit, then I just notice it and put limits on myself to twice a day at the most.

Social media is another thing that comes naturally when I’m “done” so quickly each day. I only do it when I really want to, and only after I’m done with the “work”. Which is surprisingly more frequent when I’m not trying to fit it into an already crammed schedule.

I have admittedly completely changed my business model in order to accommodate doing fewer projects more deeply; and that was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I imagine that if you have more projects with tighter deadlines, then you may need to make room for more time every day for “work”. But if you’re interested in trying this out, don’t automatically assume that that’s the case. Just try it and adjust as necessary. (You may not even need that extra half hour to work on your personal, non-deadline-driven projects…it’s really only necessary if you’re avoiding the work).

All hail, the Type Z! (Z’s?)

Now, this may not work for anyone else in the world. Like I said, it is very possible that I am the only Type Z on the entire planet. I think the reason it works for me is that I really do love my work, and I have a lot of control over when and how it happens. But that control didn’t just happen. I created it. And it was hard. But I did it. So can anyone.

If you have any questions, I’d love to hear them in the comments. I’m also interested in hearing about your workflow…if you feel inspired to write or make something out of what works for you, please share or link to it in the comments. Maybe you’re a Type Q? Or Y?