#133 - 2024: a year in preview
Writing like cooking, learning like playing, and being helpful
These are three ideas I’m carrying over to the new year.
Being helpful
I recently had a breakthrough thought. I was thinking about how I could be better at football.
Earlier this year, I made a return to football after a hiatus of 15 months. Before that, all through my adult life until 2021, I had been physically active. I did long-distance running (full and half marathons), played 50 weeks a year, used to be a gym rat for several years.
So when I found myself short of breath during a football tournament in October 2021, I put it down to an earlier bout of COVID. Then it happened again, and again. A visit to the cardiologist followed by a stress test on the treadmill and some bloodwork in the lab revealed I was genetically predisposed to high cholesterol and to problems that came with it. My diet and lifestyle had to change.
I won’t say that I took the opportunity to redesign my life because I did not. I languished. Being physically active had been part of my identity and here I had been asked to stay away from doing the things that gave me joy, that I had taken for granted. I went through an ego death. It was not until the second half of 2022 that I mustered the discipline to mount a get-back-to-the-field project.
Back to my light-bulb moment. I thought if I could be available to my teammates when they had the ball on the field, they would appreciate it. I would present an extra option for them to consider. And if I could be free—that is, shake players off me—I might just raise myself to the top of their charts. I could make myself the best available option for my teammates. Always finding someone to pass to, they would make fewer mistakes. They would have an easier, better game.
To be able to always be available for my teammates, I had to be fit. I needed to have the legs to cover all that ground. So, now my fitness had a clear goal: get fit enough to be helpful. It was/is instantly energizing.
I have now started looking at other fields of play through the same lens. I want to take this attitude of being helpful to my roles as a parent, as a husband, and as a colleague. Maybe helpful is vague for you—I get it. The idea came to me, as I’ve recounted here, from the football field. I don’t assume the same field of play to matter to you. So, how about becoming easy to live with or easy to work with? What can you do to make the lives of those around you at work or at home better?
People don’t just believe in reciprocity. They practice it. Being helpful to someone at a time of their need induces them to be there for you when you need them. So, if I’m there for my friends and family and colleagues, my own life may transform because of my attitude.
Writing like cooking
Cooking is a funny business. You take a bunch of raw ingredients and put them through a sequence of steps that transforms not just them but the ensemble that you make of them. And then you feed others what you’ve made and the slate is wiped clean at once. There’s no proof or record of what you just did. To achieve the same effect, you have to do it all over again.
Such alchemy, yet so momentary.
Still yet – food touches hearts like few other things in life. Our fondest memories, our widest smiles, our deepest gratitude are sometimes tethered to what was once on the plate.
I started writing in 2021 when I was going through a tough time at work. I felt out of my depth and that forced me to pick up new skills and that got me writing as I thought the best way to pin down what I learn was by trying to put it down in words. I also told myself that I was writing and publishing the same to get feedback and get better. I said the same to a mentor. When I whinged to him that I wasn’t getting the volume or depth of feedback that I wanted, he challenged my story. He said I didn’t want feedback.
It took me a long time to realize he was right. It took me a while to grasp that my writing was the opposite of cooking. I was producing something for posterity and because it would be there for good I wanted it to not be tarnished in any way. So, I sought the gentlest of receptions. Social media (LinkedIn) became a self-image haven for me.
My mentor suggested that I wrote for validation. Optimizing for validation means sacrificing a look in the mirror.
When you write for the attention of those who pick up raffle tickets at a supermarket, you fight for validation from the many and concern from a few. Those people don’t expect their lives to be changed because of this raffle ticket they (barely consciously) bought and you don’t care about changing their lives either. You just want them to snatch that ticket you’re waving in their faces so that you can say you’ve sold these many tickets. You can see your name up on the numbers board, get a kick out of it.
You see? The opposite of cooking.
Writing as cooking, on the other hand, is about intent. That intent lends meaning. I write – I’ll remind myself in the coming year and more – to express myself. Self-expression leads to self-discovery. You cannot find what you haven’t manifested. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the process of learning and writing. More on that below.
Learning like playing
Some big ideas I have dipped my toes into this year: regression to the mean, tackling the hardest part first (or the more colorful, monkeys and pedestals), meta-learning (learning how to learn), framing, design of business, exploring versus exploiting, thinking about money (mental accounting), quitting (or thinking in opportunity costs).
A pattern I noticed earlier this year is that I stopped being curious about a topic once I had written about it and published it. The act of putting my thoughts out put a tourniquet on my thinking. Hitting publish became the finish line in the race to learn. And I’ve had many finish lines to aim at—this newsletter has popped in your inbox more than 55 times this year.
An accompanying symptom to this goal-oriented process was stress. I found myself worrying about the next issue. Now, it is completely reasonable to be under-confident at the beginning of the process – for the kind of writing I do. But to tether my ambition to putting this newsletter out every week or showing up regularly on social media made learning feel like a job.
Luckily, sometime mid-year, I discovered the autobiographical writings of Josh Waitzkin, polymath and lifelong learner, and I found the curation of Michael Simmons (here and here for starters).
Michael Simmon traced these two paths.
Like most, I found myself on a path like this:
Goal ➡️ Strategy ➡️ Discipline (push) ➡️ Success ➡️ Do what you actually love
Like only a few, I want to stay close to this path:
Do what you love ➡️ Devotion (pull) across time ➡️ Skill + Body of work ➡️ Success
If you notice, our first and most energizing loves in life, whatever that may be, follow the second path. They have us in their palms like little children. I won’t belabor the point here. Instead, I’ll let you in on something I look at on my wall every day.
These are three ideas I’m taking with me to the new year (and beyond). What are yours? Wish you happiness in the coming year. See you in 2024 👋