Bird Mail 018
Looking for more ways to use these glorious Canadian stock photos in the New Year.
-
For a long time I thought New Year’s Resolutions were a bit silly and generally a recipe for disappointment. I do still believe that you don’t need a new year to give you the permission to make a change to your life, however there is something special about the changing of the calendar that does lend some momentum. For New Year’s Resolutions, I tend to focus more on building systems to get to my resolution or goal. As James Clear points out, “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” Building new habits or routines is critical to keeping your resolution, but if you’re attempting to build a brand new set of routines—maybe based on the morning of the hottest new thought leader—you must remember The Morning Routines We Idolize Are Often From People Divorced From Reality, or to paraphrase Patrick Rothfuss, be careful comparing someone’s on stage with your backstage. With this in mind, focus on being kind to yourself as you build your new habits, routines, or systems to live up to those New Year’s Resolutions. A single day failure in your system does not lead to a failed year or resolution if you pick back up again tomorrow. Put simply: be kind, keep going.
If you’re looking to add a new skill or interest in the new year, might I recommend keeping them hobbies, not side hustles. Cultivating an entirely unrelated hobby is a great way to nourish your mind, relax, and learn, but modern competition culture, it’s easy to get caught in the trap that you need to monetize your hobby or be the best at it right away.
I am often asked by friends and fans why I don’t compete in races or triathlons. My answer is that I’m not trying to “win” my hobby. If I’m being honest, I’m really not even interested in getting much better at them, my goal is mainly to just do more of them…The only purpose is the process. It’s so easy to forget that.
Having wide-ranging hobbies exposes you to new ideas and perspectives, to the adjacent possible in you interests and fields of work, which can help you in all areas of your life. Should you be resolved to make a bigger change professionally or along the lines of your vocation, I’ve been turning over lots of highlights from the essay The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius which pairs nicely with this note—from the previous cited McHale—that Good Things Are Hard and Have High Failure Rates, We Should Still Try. No matter what you’ve resolved to do in the new year I would love to talk with you about what you’re trying to accomplish and noodle on any systems that might help you get there. Best of luck!
-
Whenever I see a headline on the internet with the word “snowflake” in it, I’m immediately suspicious. However My Semester With the Snowflakes, written by a retired Navy SEAL who just finished his Freshman year at Yale, hooked me and subverted my expectations.
-
There are few people on the internet better at tying together disparate ideas across time, literature, and philosophy than Maria Popova. She weaves Kepler’s work in science, and as the writer of the first work of true science fiction, into our constantly evolving understanding of science. The Brain Picking’s Newsletter is definitely worth subscribing to, even if you don’t read them all. I always learn something new from Maria.
-
Things worth believing in: The Plain Text Project. After bouncing back and forth to different apps and tools to keep my notes—to write Bird Mail, organize my thoughts, keep silly running lists, etc.—I have returned to Plain Text. I love the simplicity of it and the timelessness of the tool. There are few tools that make plain text more powerful, namely Markdown and Task Paper but at the heart of it, any text editor and an organization system that make sense to you will work.
-
Bird introduced me to Tim Kreider a few years ago with his essay collection We Learn Nothing, and his biting observations stuck with me. Your Life Is Not a Story is a fantastic essay from last month with too many choice quotes to include here, so I’ll pick one.
…more and more I’m simply interested in seeing how everyone else’s choices turned out, what became of us all — my own small sample of results in the uncontrolled experiment that is life. I like it, for purely selfish, spectatorial reasons, whenever people do the less conventional, less expected thing in life, the same way I enjoy certain friends who aren’t necessarily “nice” people, because they’re like characters in a book who reliably make any scene they’re in more interesting.
Your friend,
Bruce
As always, if you think someone you know would enjoy Bird Mail, forward it their way! If you come across anything you think other Bird Mail readers should see, send it my way.
If you were forwarded this email and want to sign up for the next Bird Mail you can go here.