#MundaneLife
What it lacks in ergonomics it makes up for in access to fresh air.
Trying Harder Isn't a Strategy
Many of the personal development intentions I’ve seen people adopt, or I have adopted in my own life, are deceivingly simple. Eat better. Lose weight. Get up early and work on a meaningful project. Since we can describe the intention in sometimes as little as one or two words, we’re tricked into thinking we understand what it takes to actually do the thing. We’re used to thinking of the shortest path between two points as the straight line. The straightest line between where you are now and where you want to be seems to be, “Well, I’ll just try harder.”
We summon up some motivation and we apply that motivation, usually successfully, directly at the intention. Motivation is a powerful, yet ephemeral, force. When you have it it seems like you can do anything and that it will always be available. But motivation is fickle and it will abandon you. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but at some point it will leave.
Once motivation exists the picture it becomes obvious why “try harder” isn’t going to cut it.
I’ve had much more success using that burst of motivation that often accompanies a personal development intention in a more indirect way. Instead of throwing that energy directly at the intention, throw it at building scaffolding and systems around the intention.
For example, this morning writing routine I’ve been trying to build. I know there are a handful of things that will help me actually sit down and write from 7:00-8:00 AM. Here’s a handful of those writing-adjacent things: making sure my coffee is ready to go the night before so it’s as easy as possible to get it going in the morning, making sure I’ve written down a couple of possible starting points for the following morning’s writing the night before, making sure my nice headphones are charged and ready to go, making sure my iPad is charged and ready to go, making sure my desktop computer monitor is off the night before so I’m unlikely to be distracted by it when I sit down to write, making a decision to try to build an association between writing and a specific type of music and having it ready to go the second I sit down, making sure my phone isn’t on my desk when I sit down to write... I think you get the picture. These are the types of things that a.) I actually have control over, b.) are mostly self-sustaining once they are set up (meaning I don’t need recurring feelings of motivation to actually do them), and c.) have a direct relationship to the probability I’ll actually do the hard intention I actually care about.
To practice this, try using a simple template like the one I use for my weekly(ish) personal experiments. By taking 10-15 minutes to think through the questions, particularly the one about identifying scaffolding, I think you’ll have a much better time actually making the changes you desire.
Did You Miss an Issue?
I heard from a couple folks who didn't receive the last issue, #43: Creating Routine, and it was hiding in their Spam or Junk folder for some reason. So, if it seems like you've gone longer than a week in seeing this newsletter you might want to see if that happened to you, too. Sorry about that!
What Has My Attention
Fields of Work, your favorite podcast about work and brothers, marches ever onwards. This week Max got some important work done around the farm and I do a crash course on the idea of an operating rhythm, why a team should have one, and what a good default version of one might look like. As always, the best way to listen is in your podcast player of choice but you can also listen to it on the website.
I’m including this article mostly because I’m so impressed with the level of thinking and curiosity from Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe. One could reasonably expect a CEO to be deeply familiar with their company’s domain space but have little of substance to say in areas far afield from it. It’s apparent that Patrick has thought and learned deeply about a lot of things that are far outside Stripe’s domain and, honestly, it would make me feel pretty good about my company if I worked for Stripe.
Craig Mod should be writing The Deliberate, not me. The man is the patron saint of everything I’m trying to do here and he does it so well. This essay, Looking Closely is Everything, is basically the thesis of this entire endeavor. “What’s wild about focused attention is that the act of observation is implicitly timeless. A little dose of time travel. To look closely you must be present. And the more present you are, the more you move outside the boundaries of time.”
For fun, I’m also going to try to do a better job surfacing old pieces of writing from the SamSpurlin.com just to see how my thinking has changed over time. So, let’s start with the first article from all the way back in November of 2009: The Role of Self-Discipline in Self-Development. I was really into no nonsense titles back then, apparently. Re-reading it I’m struck by how much my thinking has developed since then. Sure, I still think self-discipline is important and worth developing, but much of this article smacks of the “just try harder” mindset I decried in the intro to this newsletter. I like to think that over 10 years of “failing” with the self-discipline-centric approach to personal development has resulted in some more nuanced — and helpful — ways of thinking. Also, I hope I never use the word “stud” in an article ever again.
An Unreasonable Request
I’m going to steal an idea from The Monday Morning Meeting newsletter from my friend Matt Homann at Filament. He has been including an “unreasonable requests” section each week. The basic idea is that if you never ask for help then you’ll never get help. Anyway, let’s try it out:
I’m looking for opportunities to write for venues other than my own website and The Ready’s publication. I want to start building a portfolio of writing that involves getting through some kind of gatekeeper other than my own sense of what is good. So, if you’re aware of a venue that might be interested in some writing I would greatly appreciate being put in touch. Thank you!
Until next time,
Sam