Welcome to new subscribers who found their way to this newsletter through my recent article for The Ready! If you forgot who I am or why you’re subscribed, I don’t blame you since I haven’t sent a new issue in a while. As a reminder, I’m Sam. Hello. I write this newsletter about deliberate attention, personal development, organization design and the various intersections of those and adjacent ideas. Thanks for being here.
Check-In Round
A couple quick pieces of housekeeping. There’s finally a complete archive of this newsletter pulled together into one place, here. I started this thing on TinyLetter, then moved to Mailchimp, and now I’m on Substack. That meant the archives have been scattered across multiple services. Now, though, they all live in one place and are definitely worth a perusal if you’re new around here.
Connected to this idea of an archive, you can now access a Google Spreadsheet with links to every piece of content I’ve ever linked to in this newsletter. I’m planning on doing some analysis of what I’ve shared at some point but if you’re just looking for a quick way to refill your Instapaper queue, you’ll enjoy this.
Does Being Deliberate Mean Being Serious?
It’s easy to conflate “deliberate” with “serious.” I do it all the time. The fact that I haven’t written a new issue of this newsletter in months is at least partly because of that subconscious conflation I’ve been making. Being deliberate implies forethought and planning. What’s more serious than planning? Being serious implies putting a lot of thought and effort into something and putting a lot of thought and effort into something kind of implies it’s going to be really good. And if you’re only willing to share stuff that’s really good then it’s pretty easy to let that morph into perfectionism. And the next thing you know you’re staring down a multi-month dry spell of no writing. It’s a relatively short cause and effect chain from “I’m going to be more deliberate” to “I’m a perma-serious person now.”
Do these two ideas need to be conflated, though? Can you only be deliberate by being serious? I think it’s actually vital that they aren’t unnecessarily connected. If being deliberate requires seriousness then I don’t think it’s a particularly sustainable ethos for living. Nobody can be serious all the time and nobody wants to be around someone who is serious all the time. Being serious saps energy. Even for those of us who naturally adopt a more serious posture, it’s not a particularly restorative mindset.
It’s possible to be deliberate and light. Deliberate and carefree. Deliberate and willing to just sit down and hammer out an issue of a newsletter that feels far from perfect…
You can deliberately decide to play four hours of video games. You can be deliberate about eating a tub of ice cream. Literally any indulgence, vice, or morally dubious choice can be deliberately indulged. Not saying you should go out and deliberately screw over a business partner or bring some kind of harm to someone — but I’m also assuming I haven’t assembled an audience full of sociopaths (I promise I think higher of all of you than, “probably not a sociopath”).
Just something I’ve been thinking about recently as I find myself being far too serious and self-involved than I’d like. Sometimes the best thing to do when trying to live more deliberately is making the deliberate decision to be incredibly non-deliberate for a bit.
An Unreasonable Request
Periodically I like to make an “unreasonable request” with the idea being that 99% of you can’t or won’t be able to help, but there might be 1% who can — and if you don’t ask you can’t find out, right?
I’ll soon be embarking on a 4-month sabbatical (much more on that soon) and I’m starting to think through how I want to approach it. I’m interested in the advice and/or guidance of folks who have done something like this themselves. Also, if you’re aware of a weird/unique/interesting opportunity that might be fun for me to explore while I’m on sabbatical, I’d love to hear that, too! Just reply to this email and your response will land in my inbox.
For Your Attention
1. Everything Is Important
Gosh, this feels like a good alternative tagline to this newsletter (as long as “important” doesn’t equal “serious”). Love this point of view, “That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.”
2. Embrace the Grind
I’m the type of person who loves knowing how magician’s do tricks. I love how “the answer” is something really mundane and/or some kind of tedious setup. There’s a great lesson, covered in this article, about being willing to put in the “grind work” to make seemingly impressive things happen.
3. Know Thyself
Filed away under, Articulations of Why Writing Feels So Important To Me: “If the writing process offers any glimmers of enlightenment, it stems from the effort to see yourself through the eyes of the reader, to put yourself in her place and read your words as though they were the words of another. Writing is not a reflection of the self but its transmutation. The act requires externalizing the contents of one’s mind into a new form that can be seen and understood by someone else. There is no other avenue to self-knowledge.”
Closing Round
This is an article for another day (especially in light of this), but I’m on Twitter again. If you like pictures of cicadas, it’s a must follow: @samspurlin.
Until next time!