Slow productivity

Creativity / /

“Don’t underestimate the amount of time professional idea-people spend thinking,” says Cal Newport. In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, he argues that we should use a craft-centric instead of a productivity-centric approach to our work. A productivity-centric approach is geared toward checking items off a to-do list; a craft-centric one involves deep thinking and deliberate practice. While the productivity-centric route is much more alluring (redesigning your website is less painful and ambiguous than, say, grappling with a new theory), it’s the craft-centric mindset where you will experience the most growth. And over time, the growth will be profound. “My working habits are simple,” Ernest Hemingway famously said, “long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”

This craft-centric approach ties in perfectly with the emerging topic of slow productivity (prompted by recent books like How to Do Nothing and Four Thousand Weeks). In this YouTube video, Cal explains the 3 elements of slow-productivity (which I wrote on a notecard and taped to my computer):

1. Do fewer things

2. Work at a natural pace

3. Obsess over quality

“If you seek tranquility, do less,” said Marcus Aurelius. “Doing what’s essential brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.”

Just that you do something

Life / /

A few weeks ago, my mom bought a frameless glass cabinet on Amazon and I offered to help assemble it. I’m not the best at putting things together, but it looked straightforward enough. Plus, the older my parents get, the more impressed they are by my capabilities. “Let’s see what we got here,” I smiled as I mimed pushing up my sleeves.

I spent the next two hours trying to interpret the instructions. Is this the rubber peg or the neoprene knob? I jumped online to find a YouTube tutorial—or at least a more helpful guide—and got nowhere. I went back to the instructions that came in the box and read them all the way through, hoping to get an idea of where to start by understanding the overall picture. Still nothing. 

I told my parents I was sorry, that I didn’t know where to begin—but Courtney would (my wife can put together anything). So, the following weekend, Court and I went to their house, determined to assemble the cabinet. She looked at the directions and admitted they were vague. But sure enough, an hour later, she had it put together. “How did you know to put that screw there to start?” I asked. “That’s the only thing I could make sense of,” she replied. “If I don’t know what the next step is, I just start doing something. Eventually, it all comes together.”

How to handle insults

Philosophy / /

Situations, circumstances, what other people say and think—these things cannot inherently affect you. You’re made no different by them. By themselves, they’re powerless. They need your interpretation to have any effect.

Ryan Holiday put it like this: if someone sends you a scathing email, but you never see it, it wouldn’t affect you, right? That’s because the power of an external thing, like an email or contentious remark, depends entirely on your awareness of it and your opinion about it.

Epictetus said that your impression of an external thing is a value judgment. So if you blame someone for being rude to you, realize you’re blaming your own judgment.

Whoa.

Epictetus also kept a sense of humor about it. If someone insulted him, he’d say, ‘Well, thank goodness they don’t know about my other faults, or they’d really have something to say!’

When a man collided with Marcus Cato (a senator of the first century BC and Stoic Philosopher, revered as the most ethically wise philosopher since Socrates) in a public bath, he apologized afterward for his insolence. Cato replied that he didn’t remember being bumped. “It is the mark of a great mind,” Seneca said, “to disregard injuries.”

This is similar to another (and perhaps better) technique Epictetus used to handle an insult: he would forget about it—because it didn’t concern him. It concerned the person who said it.

“Choose not to be harmed,” said Marcus Aurelius, “and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.”

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