Howdy! I don’t quite know what this is, but I'm pretty excited to figure it out.
The plan (to the extent you can call this a plan) is to use this space as a much-needed sandbox to investigate, interrogate, and generally explore some ideas that have latched onto my brain and up to this point have refused to let go. I’ve hit the limit of what I can make sense of on my own so I’m hoping the structure of committing to a semi-regular newsletter and the possibility of dialogue stemming from what I share helps me push these ill-formed ideas into something more cohesive.
And what are those ideas that are bouncing around my head? Some mix of:
Attention (what it is and why it’s so precious and why we’re all so bad at using it)
Positive psychology (the science of all the good parts of being a human)
Organization design (how do organizations function best?)
Personal development (how do people function best?)
Entropy (why it’s the driving force of basically everything)
Minimalism (the cultural phenomenon and how it’s about more than just not having a lot of stuff)
Essentialism (saying no to everything that isn’t essential)
Personal productivity
Meaningful work
I’m able to explore most of my org design ideas on The Ready’s newsletter, which I happen to write, but I’ve slowly been accumulating a list of things I want to write about that don’t feel like they fit with it.
At the end of the day, I’m interested in what it means to be deliberate about everything (hence the name of this here newsletter). I worry that the ability to be deliberate is rather systematically being quashed by our modern technological and cultural ecosystems and I want to explore what I think about that alongside other folks who find that interesting.
As far as the logistics of this newsletter go — here’s what I’m thinking:
I’ll send one every time I’ve accumulated enough stuff to make it interesting. That probably won’t be weekly but it’ll probably (hopefully) be more frequent than monthly.
It’ll consist of some sort of original writing related to something I’ve been thinking about and then I’ll share 3-5 links of things I've read/watched/listened to recently that I think fit into the theme of The Deliberate.
If people respond to anything I’ve written I’ll incorporate that into the writing, too (with your permission, of course).
And all of this is subject to change, of course :)
My Writing Elsewhere
Let’s start with three articles I’ve recently published on Medium. First, I finally took a stab at getting my ideas about entropy and organization design into writing. These ideas have been hanging out in some amorphous state basically since I withdrew from my PhD program. It feels good to finally have them out and I’m excited to keep pushing this line of thinking.
Next, I took a look at 2018 and some of the key lessons I’m extracting from the year. This newsletter was actually conceived while writing this article.
Finally, here’s a look at my 2019 yearly theme which I’m calling The Year of The Deliberate.
Oh, and I revamped SamSpurlin.com. It’s a real work of art.
The Deliberate Elsewhere
Tiago Forte is one of my favorite personal development thinkers and his latest article is a pretty great deep dive into personal knowledge management systems and tagging. Key takeaway — think about tagging the status, usage, or context of a piece of information rather than it’s contents.
Shuhari is a mental model for the phases of mastery that comes out of the practice of aikido. It comes from quite the different intellectual and theoretical model than the Dreyfus Model but it makes me happy to see some conceptual overlap.
This Twitter thread (which is actually just an excerpt from this article) is straight fire. I didn’t expect to have my understanding of learning fundamentally shifted by an article about professional body painting, but hey, the Internet can be a weird and wonderful place.
That’s it for this issue of The Deliberate. I truly appreciate the handful of you who have already signed up for this thing based solely on what you already know about me. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, or feedback. I’m also continuing with my nearly daily open office hour and I’m always happy to chat.
Until next time,
Sam Spurlin