Your best ideas should be somewhat durable. When I first read David Heinemeier Hansson’s “Work on your best idea” post, it felt like a clarion call to get off my ass and do something new. Surely there must be a large gap between where you need to be, today, and where you are? Right? Wrong. While not every day provides the Bacchanalian pleasures I dream about, they are situated within a risk/reward framework that I have created for myself. I have made commitments for my family, my employer, and my friends. While many of those commitments are mundane and repetitive, they are constraints I gladly accept. Sometimes the truly valuable work is a continuation of what you’re doing, and while it’s not sexy to say it that way, I think that’s a valid interpretation of the post too.
Author: Eric Franklin
Human being being human. Seattle-based, Redding-forged. Lover of big books and people who get in over their heads.
Weekend Provocations
Kevin Kelly is a god-damned treasure: I started highlighting my favorites and the whole page was going yellow.
Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.
Kevin Kelly, 68 bits of Unsolicited Advice
COVID-19 – the return of Wave 1: It appears nearly certain that the US is opening back up for business without heeding the guidance from leading scientists at the CDC. I’m trying to figure out what that will likely mean for my family and business, but I expect it’s not a positive…
Organized crime in antiquities: It’s shocking to me that a criminal enterprise of this scale, trading in rare and precious artifacts, can be disrupted with 19,000 archeological artifacts recovered. How long have these networks been in place and how many artifacts have they stolen from the enjoyment of broader society?
Bitcoin buffoons: The worst part about investing in Bitcoin (I have a small position) is being lumped in with the rest of the Bitcoiners. Do a search on Twitter for Bitcoin and sample the livestream of poorly reasoned (and frequently poorly spelled) drivel that is there. I’m hopeful that the silent major holders are a more cerebral lot.
“Happy thoughts” recommendation: If you’d like a little creative multi-media inspiration each week, I enjoy Austin Kleon’s newsletter (sign up here). He’s frequently a twisty trip down random memory lane.
The value of painting yourself into a corner
Years ago, when I ran The Puget News (RIP), a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in a while, gave me a wonderful compliment during a conversation we were having. He said something to the effect of, “You’ve been writing a lot recently, haven’t you? It shows. You’re speaking beautifully and gushing with ideas.” His words were spoken without a hint of irony and is something I think about quite often, not just because it was a gracious thing to say, but because there are so many times that I struggle to articulate a coherent thought.
Building a place on the internet to call home and then writing to a schedule is a challenge, but one worthy of throwing yourself against. It’s especially worthwhile if your goal isn’t notoriety, but clarity of thought.
One of the personal principles I try to live by is: “if you can’t write it or draw it, you don’t know it.” While it won’t always be pretty, this place is my attempt to live by that principle.
Weekly Recommendation Roundup – Things that make you go, hmmm
Books
Algebra of Happiness, by Scott Galloway
This is the type of book we should all strive to write and leave to our children, it’s a highly personal distillation of Galloway’s life experiences for his students at NYU (and more importantly, his own children). If you do not like his self-absorbed presentation in his other mediums, you probably won’t like this either, but I find Scott entertaining, pithy, and refreshing in his directness. Chock full of things I wish I knew when I was 20.
Web
The Case for First-Brain Memory, by Tasshin
This post is a refreshingly through investigation of when it makes sense to memorize something, and when it doesn’t. I was blown away watching LeBron James recall a particular a series of plays after a game. It goes to show you that world-class athleticism is never purely physical.
Podcasts
The Portal is one of my new favorites for in-depth long-form interviews with people that have truly unique viewpoints on the world. The first three episodes all contain dangerous thoughts and mental models, but this one with Werner Herzog sparked my curiosity so much that I paid a transcription service to provide me the text. I knew very little about Werner Herzog prior to this interview, but he’s clearly one of the most creative forces in film. To hear him describe the challenges that he and his artists endure is a testament to uncompromising vision.
I first became aware of Werner Herzog when I was 16 and just entering the University of Pennsylvania and a friend of mine said, ‘You’ve got to see this movie, Fitzcarraldo.’
‘I said, what is Fitzcarraldo?’
He says, ‘if nothing else, it’s a story about a man so possessed by an idée fixe, that he drags a boat over a mountain in the jungle in order to somehow build an opera house.’ The whole thing sounded incredibly mad, and in fact, what was so interesting about this film was that the director actually had to do, in real life, with the crazy fictional character did inside of the story line.
Eric Weinstein
Movie
Fitzcarraldo, by Werner Herzog
You can’t listen to the podcast recommended above and NOT immediately want to go see this movie. The imagery and vision are haunting me weeks later—as do the ethical questions that the making of the money engender. I’m definitely going to be following up with the “making of” film.
Quote I’m thinking about…
Join my new movement—The Spongy Front
As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting. However once he actually kills someone, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because only they give meaning to his tragic misdeed. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.
Yuval Noah Harari, “Homo Deus”
Can we agree that it’s one thing to be anti-fascist and another to be Antifa? or Iron Front? There’s been a bit of a firestorm in the Pacific Northwest due to our local MLS supporter clubs in Portland and Seattle flying the Iron Front flag at games. In Seattle, representatives of the team compounded the problem by initially ham-fisting their request not to use the symbol — equating it politically to Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.
Oops. That argument lacked a little…nuance.
Now I’m no fan of the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. In fact, you could call me “anti-” those things and I’d be fine with it; but I think it’s perfectly justifiable to also be uncomfortable with the adoption of symbols and tactics from historical paramilitary groups (e.g. Iron Front). These symbols have power because they pull from complicated legacies that are impossible. Nobody today has the full context of that symbol and group, and everyone reads into it with their own self-righteous response.
My personal belief is that heightening direct opposition to groups like the Proud Boys creates a sense of legitimacy for them and increases its appeal. These guys are trying to stand out and to draw a response—successfully as it turns out. The way to defuse the situation is to NOT draw attention to it and treat them as you would anybody else—have a pint, listen with compassion, and call out their BS as if they were a crazy family member you HAVE TO TOLERATE. They have to find out that there is nobody to fight, nobody windmill to tilt at; they’re just…wrong.
Vocal coach reacting to Pearl Jam’s “Black”
This makes me happy, so it goes here.
There is no single song or music video I have listened to (or watched, for that matter) more than this one. RVA’s joy at discovering the vocal stylings and passionate performance of Eddie Vedder is incredibly fun to watch.
And if you’d like a chaser, her analysis of Tool’s “Sober” is also entertaining.
“Enter the Note-taker”, Bruce Lee
I loved this piece about Bruce Lee over on the ever-excellent Brain Pickings website. Did you know that Bruce Lee carried a notebook everywhere? Obviously, he’s exactly like me… just way more athletic and accomplished… and probably better at note-taking… but we both CARRY notebooks everywhere.
When you repeatedly see that successful people are the ones who curate what they think and how they think about it, you start to see why putting pen to paper can be so important. Check out this bit from the post:
When [the studio] tried to cut all the philosophy out of Enter the Dragon because they wanted a vacantly entertaining action movie, Lee refused to go on set for two weeks, insisting that the kung-fu and the philosophy were inextricably entwined, each the vehicle for the other. Hollywood eventually had to relent and it was precisely the philosophical dimension that rendered the movie — just before the release of which Lee met his untimely death — a cultural icon and a beacon of racial empowerment associated with the Black Power movement, later acquired by the Library of Congress as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” artifact.
Bruce Lee’s Never-Before-Seen Writings on Willpower, Emotion, Reason, Memory, Imagination, and Confidence
Lee was comfortable enough with his own values to take a stand for it. A martial artist trying to break into Hollywood who had the presence of mind to say “I want success but on my terms.” This sort of strength comes from a deep understanding of values and motives, something which is frequently uncovered through exploratory writing.
Another element of the post that I found fascinating, is how Bruce seemed to filter his ideas over time, strengthening those that provided the most value, and turning many of them into daily meditations and personal commitments. He captured tons of small details but clearly also took the time to revisit and refine things that he saw as important. This is key element of note-taking systems.
Beyond capture is curation and ultimately creation. Bruce Lee embodied this process in many areas of his life. I strongly recommend clicking on over to the actual post to see exclusive photos the notebooks and letters from the Bruce Lee archive.
Daily creation
“It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.”
“What Mad Pursuit,” by Francis Crick
“Quick and dirty” is far better than “never and perfect.” Once you have something down, your mind begins a dialog with what you’ve started and it will hunt until it reaches some resolution.
Create every damn day. You’ll feel better.
Productivity Hack: Spark to Liner Connection
As part of the Building a Second Brain course from Tiago Forte, he recommended a web highlighting app called Liner. I’m really enjoying this tool. As I read web articles, I can highlight and annotate it and all that markup for the page gets saved into Liner. I can then export them into Evernote with a single click at my convenience.
What I’ve been playing with today is the “Create Link” feature of Spark—a great Mac email client. I receive a bunch of fantastic email newsletters each week and I struggle to get through them all. Now, when I see something interesting I’d like to hold on to—a quote or concept— I just click “Create Link,” pop over to my browser and insert the URL (it’s automatically added to your clipboard when you create it), and then use the Liner browser plugins to highlight or annotate the passages that are interesting to me. Voila! A nice little hack for getting bits of your email when you need it.
Eric Frankl.in 