These ideas keep me grounded as the world speeds up

Creativity, Philosophy / /

Follow the trail long enough

Margaret Atwood doesn’t begin with a master plan.

She starts her novels with something small—an image, a voice, a scene—and lets the structure emerge as she writes.

She wrote two sections of her book Surfacing five years before writing the rest. To know everything in advance, she says, would be “too much like paint-by-numbers.”

Still, many writers, especially early on, try to leap ahead—writing too quickly, aiming for clarity too soon. But that’s a trap. “Rushing through writing is like rushing through life,” Louise DeSalvo has said.

Instead of sprinting to the finish, the best work often comes from moving slowly, clue by clue. “How long are we willing to wait to develop our most singular work?” DeSalvo asks. “Or rather, how long are we willing to work? Are we stopping short of when our work begins to sing its true song? . . . If it took Matisse seven years, or Eugenides nine, why do we expect important work from ourselves in, say, a year or even two?”

She recalls how her early drafts felt “constrained and safe.” Her characters were one-dimensional, the settings vague, the story overly linear. But she kept going. “Dissatisfied though I may be, it’s essential to continue working,” she writes, “for it’s only near the end of the process that I develop my singular voice.” She admits that it isn’t until her eleventh draft that she finally knows what she’s doing with a book.

It doesn’t have to be good right away. Just get started. Let the work simmer. Let it surprise you.

Because if we give ourselves time—if we follow the trail long enough—“we, too, might create a singular, authentic, powerful work of art.”

Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method

Like Atwood, Thomas Edison didn’t start out with a grand plan.

Edison’s creation of the commercially viable lightbulb was the culmination of small discoveries. He followed those discoveries—trusting they would lead somewhere, even if he didn’t yet know where. As David McCullough often stressed, the people we read about in history had no idea how things would turn out. When we read history, we’re not reading people’s past so much as we’re reading what they were presently living.

In 1878, others were experimenting with incandescent light. “But [Edison],” Ryan Holiday writes, “was the only [person] willing to test six thousand different filaments—including one made from the beard hair of one of his men— inching closer each time to the one that would finally work.”

His success had little to do with intellect and everything to do with persistence.

“Nikola Tesla, who spent a frustrating year in Edison’s lab during the invention of the lightbulb, once sneered that if Edison needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would ‘proceed at once’ to simply ‘examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.’ Well, sometimes that’s exactly the right method…”

While others despaired, Edison worked. He wouldn’t rush. He would trust the process. And he did it all without the hindsight of knowing how things would turn out.

No one will ask how long it took

George Pocock, the builder behind the world’s finest racing shells, was, as Daniel James Brown writes, “all but born with an oar in his hand.” Boatbuilding ran in his blood—both grandfathers were competitive boatbuilders, and his father built racing shells for Eton College. George carried that legacy forward, blending deep knowledge with an unmatched devotion to craftsmanship. At the peak of his career, he was supplying racing shells to nearly every elite crew program in the country—including the University of Washington, whose team shocked the world with their win at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

What set his shells apart was the patience and care he put into them. Pocock refused to rush, remembering his father’s words: “No one will ask you how long it took to build; they will only ask who built it.”

A student in a hurry learns the slowest

This is one of my favorite anecdotes in the phenomenal book Wisdom Takes Work:

“There is a story about a samurai warrior named Banzo, who sought an education in a hurry so that he could impress his father. Told by a great teacher that mastery would take ten years, he was aghast.

‘I can’t wait that long. What if I work extra hard?’

‘OK,’ the master said. ‘Thirty years.’

‘But I will do whatever it takes to make it go faster,’ Banzo pleaded.

‘In that case,’ the master said, ‘it shall take seventy years. A student in a hurry learns the slowest.’”

Books read this month

Reading / /

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
I have eight journals and planners I use regularly. Nine if you count my commonplace book of notecards. (My wife, Courtney, likes to joke that I have to write reminders to remember to breathe.) I keep a weekly planner and notebook for work, and a personal weekly planner with a habit tracker for everything else. I keep a notebook on my writing desk and one on my nightstand. I keep a collage/travel journal and a one-line-per-day journal. And then there’s my most important journal: my morning pages journal.

So it’s no wonder a book with notebook and paper in the title grabbed my attention. What’s funny is that, according to my notes, I first started reading this book in September—of last year. I’m not sure why I stopped, but I picked it back up again this October. This book is thorough. If you want to understand where notebooks originated and how they’ve morphed into one of the best pieces of technology the world has ever known, this is the book you want to read. “Use it enough,” Allen writes, “and a notebook will change your brain.”

How To Be Caring by Shantideva
I picked this up this month at Changing Hands bookstore as part of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, and loved it. I also bought and read How to Have Willpower. Some of my favorites from this series are: How to Have a Life: An Ancient Guide to Using Our Time Wisely, How to Do the Right Thing, How to be Content, How to Give, and How to Be Free.

Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T. Phillips
I came across this while browsing the shelves at Goodwill and decided to give it a shot. Wow, this book is good. It’s fairly short, but it manages to touch on some of the most important qualities that made Lincoln such a force: his relentless self-education, his strong sense of right and wrong, his ability to put the right people in the right positions, his gift of finding common ground with just about everyone, his otherworldly humility, and his sense of humor even in the most dire situations. There’s a reason he’s regarded not only as the best president we’ve had, but as one of the best men to have ever lived, period.

The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
A good friend of mine recommended this, and one of my biggest takeaways—and this is something I’ve been thinking about—is the idea that we have two selves within us. One is anxious and controlling and judgmental, and the other is intuitive and natural and creates without fear. We have to let the second self take over, quieting the mind so we can perform at our best. Relaxed concentration—that’s the key. Not trying so hard. As Ray Bradbury warns in Zen in the Art of Writing (a classic), “Those who try hardest scare it [the Muse] off into the woods. Those who turn their backs and saunter along, whistling softly between their teeth, hear it treading quietly behind them, lured by a carefully acquired disdain.”

History Matters by David McCullough
Wow, what a gem! I bought this book because I love McCullough’s writing and was pleasantly surprised to find that much of it is about his writing. After his passing in 2022, his daughter and research assistant found and organized some of his best essays and speeches, including some that had never been published. It’s a beautiful book; the inside covers feature paintings McCullough himself created. I got something from almost every page.

Do the work, and let destiny take care of the rest

Life, Philosophy / /

“There are a million different versions, this is mine.”

For the first few years of his career, White Lotus star Walton Goggins would walk into auditions asking himself, What do these people want from me? “And I can tell you it brought me a lot of pain. A lot of pain,” he says.

But everything changed when he flipped the question. Instead of trying to deliver what he thought they wanted, he started asking himself what he thought the role needed. He thought, “You know what? I’m just gonna come from my heart, and this is my version of it. There are a million different versions of it. And if this is not the version they’re buying, at least I can live with myself at the end of the day. And I can walk away without expecting this job, you know? And that’s really where I found my salvation.”

It’s one of the hardest things to do: to pour your heart into something without thinking about the outcome.

But it’s how the best work gets made.

One of the most brilliant physicists to ever live had his biggest breakthrough when he realized the same thing:

“I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.”

After four intense years working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Richard Feynman accepted a teaching position at Cornell. Top universities were competing for him, offering higher salaries and prestige. Albert Einstein himself wrote, inviting Feynman to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

But despite the remarkable offers, he couldn’t accept. The years at Los Alamos had drained him. He was exhausted, uninterested in research, and couldn’t write more than two sentences on a scientific problem without losing focus. “They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas…”

Then he had a thought. The expectations attached to these offers were absurd—impossible to live up to. And because they were impossible, he realized, he had no responsibility to live up to them!

“It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.”

At Cornell, he decided to return to what had always drawn him to physics in the first place: fun. From now on, he would only work on problems that entertained him. “Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything . . . I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”

Within a week, he was working on a “fun” project, one a colleague questioned for its lack of importance. “‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind that I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.”

This project of “no importance” led him to win the Nobel Prize.

Literally, who cares?

Before she became a household name, Elizabeth Gilbert had no connections in the publishing world. She knew full well that her writing might never make money. “It might never work,” she remembers thinking. “It didn’t matter. No way was I going to give up on my work simply because it wasn’t ‘working.’ That wasn’t the point of it.”

She understood that the reward couldn’t be external—it had to come “from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it.” It had to come from the heart. It had to be fun.

“You might spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end—except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness. And that should be more than enough for anyone to say that they lived a rich and splendid life.”

That kind of devotion changes everything. Work of any kind can be discouraging when we’re thinking about the results. With creative work, the doubt can grow louder—the fear that we have nothing new to say, that everything’s been done before.

But as Elizabeth Gilbert says, who cares? Literally, who cares? There’s nothing new. What is new is yourperspective and passion and the stories you tell. There are a million different versions; this is yours.

She once said she can’t understand how people can create something beautiful and then hide it for fear of being criticized. “She advises writers to send their work to agents ‘as much as possible,’” Louise DeSalvo writes. “And when the rejection letters come back, to ‘take a deep breath and try again.’”

Because it’s the writer’s job to complete the work; it’s the agent’s and editor’s job to decide whether the work is good enough to be published.

It’s your job to give your version, to have fun, to pursue the thing that lights you up. It’s your job “to write your little heart out,” Gilbert insists, “and let destiny take care of the rest.”

Books read this month

Reading / /

Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus
I had never heard of Charlie Kirk and, after the intense reactions from all sides of the political spectrum when he was tragically murdered, I needed a way to understand what was happening. So I read this 900-page biography about another guy I had never heard of—Bill Buckley, considered the father of conservatism. (Ryan Holiday recommended this. How does he always recommend the best books?) Before I read this book, I watched videos of Kirk’s debates and immersed myself in his social media posts and ideas. The more I watched, the more confused—and concerned—I became. How the hell was this guy so popular? More to the point, how could so many people agree with what he said? And how could a guy with millions of followers be so reckless (and reckless is a generous word) with what he said? “It should be legal to burn a rainbow or BLM flag in public,” reads one of his Instagram posts. He wasn’t trying to unite people. He debated topics not to get to the truth, but to win arguments. His game was to state his opinion—no matter how trivial or misleading or biased—and defend it at all costs. There was no nuance or concessions. It’s a tale as old as rhetoricians. While today we would call someone like this a demagogue, in ancient Greece he would have been considered a professional debater or sophist—people whom ethical philosophers like Socrates and Epictetus repeatedly warned against. Kirk’s playbook was almost identical to Bill Buckley’s, who spent most of his career looking for the next thing to argue against. Anyway, what I didn’t expect as I worked my way through the book was to find Buckley so likable. Buckley—who, near the end of his life, finally admitted that he was wrong about the Civil Rights Act, that federal intervention was necessary—was a complex guy. He seemed to be a good friend to everyone he knew, even the people he disagreed with. His social circle included gay men, and in the late ’80s, his wife, Pat, raised millions of dollars for AIDS research. In many ways, how he actually felt—at least, how he lived his life and treated others—wasn’t the same as what he claimed publicly. But then he wouldn’t have much of a platform, would he? It’s why we can’t fall for every smooth talker, why we have to keep thinking for ourselves, why we must stay on guard against dangerous rhetoric. Because not every confident voice is interested in getting to the truth.

American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback by Seth Wickersham
I love watching football, and this book on quarterbacking—what the position entails (it’s wild how much goes into advancing a football down a field), what it costs to be great, and what happens when you finally get there—is fascinating. It’s a look into the lives of some of the best QBs to ever play, like John Elway, Peyton Manning, and Warren Moon, as well as newcomers like Caleb Williams and Bo Nix. Really entertaining.

Upstream by Mary Oliver
This is a meditation on literature and what it means to her, what it means to live a creative life. I loved it, especially how she talks about absentmindedness being fine—being a good thing even. It reminds me of the saying: if you’re on top of everything, you’re probably not on top of anything. “It is six A.M., and I am working,” she writes. “I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written.”

Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday
I’m still working my way through it, but so far it’s his best book in the virtue series. This is the review I wrote on Amazon: Ryan Holiday’s books are the only ones I preorder without question. Not because he’s written like 16 best-sellers, but because what he says is always timely, timeless, important, and practical. And he’s always right. Not just in his arguments, but more importantly in what he chooses to talk about in the first place. It’s like he has a filter that takes his every experience and thought and turns it into something meaningful and educational. If you’re on the fence about buying this book—a book about wisdom no less by one of the wisest thinkers on the planet—you’re probably not very familiar with his work.

Deide, then follow the thread

Creativity, Life / /

“Once you make a choice, possibilities you haven’t yet imagined will reveal themselves.”

When D.H. Lawrence set off for Sardinia, his mind was already made up: he would write Sea and Sardinia.

He began the moment he arrived. No second-guessing, no circling around the question of whether Sardinia was the “right” subject. He simply wrote—what he saw, where he wandered, who he met. As Louise DeSalvo points out, there was no hesitation between decision and action. “It was never ‘Is writing a book about Sardinia the right thing to do?’ Instead, it was, ‘I’ll go to Sardinia and write about it.’”

This stunned DeSalvo. How much of her own energy had been wasted in indecision? She decided to practice deciding—and urged her students to do the same. “I’ve seen students waste precious writing time because they can’t decide to write about, say, their mother or their father; they want to wait until the subject seems right. I tell them, ‘Just choose. Once you make a choice, possibilities you haven’t yet imagined will reveal themselves.’”

Follow the thread

Elizabeth Gilbert was searching for a big idea for her next book.

She was waiting for inspiration to strike—goosebumps, butterflies, that unmistakable creative spark. But nothing came.

She asked herself, Is there anything you’re even a little bit interested in?

Well… maybe gardening. But only because she had just moved and was toying with the idea of planting a backyard garden—something that had never interested her before. “I didn’t desperately want a garden, understand. . . . I just thought a garden would be nice.”

The urge to plant a garden was small. “It barely had a pulse. But I didn’t ignore it. Instead, I followed that small clue of curiosity and I planted some things.”

Little by little, her curiosity grew. She traced the origin of her irises and learned they were native to Syria. Interesting. And she realized it wasn’t the gardening itself that pulled her in, but the stories behind the plants.

The more she followed this thread, the more doors opened. The right books appeared. The right people showed up. “For instance,” she writes, “the expert whose advice I needed to seek about the history of mosses lived—it turned out—only a few minutes from my grandfather’s house in rural upstate New York.” And tucked away in an old book she’d inherited from her great-grandfather was exactly what she needed: “a vivid historic character, worthy of embellishing into a novel.”

And just like that, a faint spark grew into a path she had to follow—one that carried her around the world.

“Three years of research and travel and investigation later, I finally sat down to begin writing The Signature of All Things—a novel about a fictional family of nineteenth-century botanical explorers.” It was a novel she never saw coming. “It had started with nearly nothing. I did not leap into that book with my hair on fire; I inched toward it, clue by clue. But by the time I looked up from my scavenger hunt and began to write, I was completely consumed with passion about nineteenth-century botanical exploration.”

Sometimes you just gotta start…

In When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead, Jerry Weintraub, Frank Sinatra’s manager, recalls how Frank would sink into deep lows and stay there.

One morning, Jerry got a call from Frank. He was down. He’d spent the night brooding on the roof, worn out by the grind. “The same thing, every day and night, going down to that same theater and singing the same songs to the same crowds, ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ ‘Chicago,’ I just don’t care.”

Jerry flew to Vegas that very day. When they met on the rooftop, Frank opened up—drink in one hand, cigarette in the other—saying maybe he just needed a rest.

“It’s not a rest you need,” Jerry said. “It’s a new hill to climb.”

Jerry understood Frank’s nature. He thrived when he had something to push against—an impossible task, a critic to silence. “You’re bored,” Jerry told him. “You need a challenge.”

“All right,” Frank replied. “What do you have in mind?”

Jerry told him he had a great idea—but he’d need a few days to work it out.

“No, no, what is it?” Frank pressed. “You’ve got to tell me.”

“Look, I really do have a great idea, but I need a few days.”

“Of course,” Jerry writes, “I did not have a great idea. I had no idea at all, but I knew that Frank needed a great idea less than he needed the prospect of a great idea, the promise of an event that would lift him out of his funk.”

Frank wouldn’t let him off the hook. “Tell me, Jerry. You’ve got to tell me.”

“So,” as Jerry tells it, “I started talking, improvising…

‘We’re going to do Madison Square Garden,’ I said.

‘Yeah, so what? We’ve done Madison Square Garden before. What’s so great about that?’

‘Now wait, Frank, hold on, let me tell you how we’re going to do it…’

I kicked my voice up a notch, going into full ringmaster mode.

‘…We’re going to do it live, Frank! Live!’

‘Yeah, so what? We’re live every night. That’s show business.’

‘Yes, but we’re never live like this,’ I said, ‘on every television in America and all across the world.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah…’

And now that I had gotten the thread I was gone.

‘And let’s do it in the center of the Garden,’ I told him, ‘on the floor, in a boxing ring.’

‘A boxing ring? What are you talking about?’

‘I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. You’re the heavyweight champion of the world, Frank. You hold every belt in the world of entertainment. The number-one singer in the world. No challengers, no one even close. So let’s do it in a ring, and make it like a heavyweight title fight, and invite all the people who go to heavyweight title fights, because they’re your fans. And let’s get Howard Cosell to be the announcer. Yeah, wow, I can hear it!’

‘Hear what, Jerry? What can you hear?’

‘I can hear Howard Cosell. He’s ringside, his hand over his ear, announcing it as you come down the aisle, climb through the ropes and into the ring: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, live from Madison Square Garden. Jerry Weintraub presents Sinatra, The Main Event.’

‘And here’s the best part,’ I told Frank. ‘No rehearsals.’

‘No rehearsals.’

‘No rehearsals. You just get there on the night of the show and sing your songs, and do your thing, as fresh and spontaneous as can be—like a heavyweight title fight. Frank Sinatra Live!’”

“The Main Event” became one of the era’s most iconic concerts—Sinatra, in a boxing ring, at the heart of his city, telling his life story in song. And it all started on the rooftop of Caesars—with Sinatra lost in a fog of despair, and Jerry “talking and talking.”

“Maybe this is an old Bronx thing,” Jerry reflects. “You just have to open your mouth and start talking. I can’t tell you how many jams I’ve gotten out of by talking, seeing where the words would take me. ‘What are we going to do about it? Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do about it…’ And I open my mouth and see what happens.” He made decisions and followed where they led.

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