Social media occasionally makes us feel like astronomers: passive witnesses in a world beyond our control.
But the world is never out of our influence.
We have the power to empathise; to invent; to care; to remember; to inspire. It is all up to us. Our participation, or lack thereof, shapes the future.
The ocean is large but we are the drops that create it.
The funny thing about light is that despite being bright itself, it also brightens up anything it touches. Overnight, light can transform a dark forest into a starry wilderness; a cold city into a warm district; a starving plant into a blooming flower.
It’s no wonder that Jesus tells Christians that they are the light of the world and to shine it upon others. Light cuts through darkness like nothing else.
Light doesn’t have to mean photons, but can be something generally beautiful; an exquisite sky, a delightful book, or a dog happily wagging its tail. Without fail, I find that if I put myself in light’s way, I get brightened up myself.
As the farmer Thomas Mitchell put it:
“As If we are to cultivate the art of living, we should cultivate the art of extracting sweetness and comfort out of everything, as the bee goes from flower to flower in search of honey.”
From Michaela Coel’s acceptance speech at the 73rd Emmy Awards:
“Write the tale that scares you. That makes you feel uncertain. That isn’t comfortable. I dare you. In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible — for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success — do not be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while and see what comes to you in the silence.”
Silence is the space for new opportunities to burst forth. Just as one does not disgrace rests in music, or sleep in athletes, one should never criticise the quiet, secluded moments in one’s journey, for these periods are catalysts for growth.
Back to the bliss station.
The point of the first draft isn’t to create anything good.
It’s to put as much as possible down; to vomit your thoughts onto a page. If it’s messy or unglamorous, you’re on the right track.
The good work begins on the second edit, and the third, and the fourth, until you end up with something decent. That means the first draft really isn’t that important. The faster you get it over and done with, the better.
When I first started writing, I would get overwhelmed at the blank text editor. My hands would freeze up, for fear of writing something appalling. But the more I’ve written, the more I realise that the faster I burn through the first draft, the faster better work comes.
As Neil Gaiman said in his Masterclass:
“Write down everything that happens in the story, and then in your second draft make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.”
Our first ideas are often undeveloped, naive and simplistic. But luckily, they are not the end product – we can make them better.
These initial thoughts are merely catalysts for refinement. We’ll examine them, see the flaws within, and go through the phases of denial, panic and regret. But then, a second idea will emerge, and this will be infinitely better than the first one.
The point of capturing thoughts isn’t to share them with the world. It’s to turn them into something worth sharing.
James Baldwin: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”
Dani Shapiro: “Books saved my life. In the quiet of a summer afternoon spent in a hammock, of a winter night spent sneaking under the covers with a flashlight, dawned the awanress, slow but unmistakable, that I was not alone. That I was not insane. That my heart was not so very different from everyone else’s. Books made me feel less ashamed. Less weird. They connected me deeply to my own humanity.”
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie: “Books let us know we’re not the center of the universe; the universe has many centers.”
Perhaps the greatest gift a book can bring is empathy: the gift that broadens our horizons, that lets us know that we are not alone.
It is a most extraordinary gift.
Despite being minimally neurotic, being productive is still essential to my life as a writer, reader and student. After some thought, and consulting Ali Abdaal’s twitter thread on his top productivity tips, here are some tips on productivity and time management that I wish I’d known when I was younger.
1. We own all of our time: If you are playing games or doomscrolling, there is no excuse to say “I don’t have enough time”. We are all in control of our time and how to prioritise it.
2. The daily highlight: Write one thing that you must get done each day and prioritise it: everything else becomes secondary.
3. Eat the frog: When you sit down to work, get the most difficult task done first. This will make all the other tasks seem trivial in comparison.
4. To-do lists: The reason things fall through the cracks is often because we have not written it down. Physically planning things is more convincing than simply telling yourself you will do it.
5. Parkinson’s law: Work expands to fill the time we allocate to it. If you give yourself the whole day to finish one lecture, you will inevitably use all that time. But if you give yourself one hour in the morning, you will somehow manage to squeeze it in then. Leverage artificial deadlines.
6. The choice to be satisfied (the most important). If you are a highly neurotic productivity nerd, it is easy to beat yourself up at the end of the day, telling yourself that you could have done more. Instead, you could be satisfied with what you did get done, and be grateful simply for being alive.
Anything, no matter how primitive it is.
Then improve it.
Then write something else.
Repeat this until you have enough.
Then post it.
After writing more than 215 posts over three years, I’ve found that there’s really no such thing as writer’s block – there’s only a fear of bad writing. But if you do enough bad writing, good writing will eventually show up.
Along the way, you’ll meet some kindred souls, clarify your thinking and re-examine your point of view.
It all begins by just writing something.
The spotlight effect is a psychological phenomenon where people overestimate how much others notice one’s own appearance or behaviour. Depending on your interpretation, this can be sad, since we like to think of ourselves as important, but it can also be liberating.
The spotlight effect means that you may succeed or you may fail. But, for the most part, nobody cares one way or the other.
This is good. The world is big and you are small, which means you can chase your dreams with little worry for what people think.
We are all the heroes of our own stories.
There is perhaps only one universal truth – one that exists outside of race, religion or sex – we will all eventually die. But despite this grim premise, memento mori, latin for remember you must die, is rarely used as a fearmongering tool, but often ironically intertwined with memento vivere, or remember to live.
For the stoics, a life guided by death was critical for cultivating clarity in life. As Seneca urged in Moral Letters to Lucilius: “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day…The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”
One exercise for living a life guided by memento mori is the Eulogy Exercise. Essentially, it has three questions:
1. If you were killed tomorrow, what would someone write as a eulogy for the life you have lived?
2. If, for the next 40 years you lived a life full of the qualities that you valued, and became the person you wanted to be, what would somebody write for your eulogy then?
3. If there is a difference, what stands in the way of your life moving towards closer to eulogy #2?
We all live with a dissonance between the person we are today and the person we could be if we dared strongly enough. This exercise clarifies this degree of dissonance, acting as spiritual windscreen wipers of sorts, and simultaneously challenges us to be better. It is designed to be uncomfortable, for as Alain de Botton wrote, “In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.”
Yet simultaneously, the eulogy exercise is quietly encouraging, for the nudging question slowly but inevitably arises:
What is it worth to live a life like your second eulogy?
