I’m giving the keynote speech at a conference for college students Friday night in Boston. 

It’s easy to think of the effort of giving a speech as the 30-60 minutes it takes to stand and deliver the talk. But, for me at least, I spend many hours mulling ideas, putting the structure together, designing slides, and rehearsing.

Here’s my office whiteboard from earlier this week when I was trying to make sense of all the ideas I was considering for this keynote: 

And here’s a screenshot from today of the slide sorter view in the Keynote app as I neared completion of my slide design:

I’m not satisfied yet. I’ve rehearsed it out loud twice, and I like where it’s heading. But it hasn’t completely clicked yet. 

I’m afraid I’m trying to include too much, and I’m inclined to cut as much as a third of it when I review it again on the flight up tomorrow. 

This is a lot of effort for 45 minutes in front of an audience, and there are no guarantees my presentation will be well received. 

I do get absorbed in the best way, though, when I plunge into preparing for a new talk.

Much like signing up to run in a race weeks from now focuses your commitment to your fitness, committing to give a speech focuses your mind on ideas. My brain has been in a more aware and alert mode, scanning for relevant information and making connections and discoveries I otherwise would have passed by. 

Regardless of how the actual speech is received by the audience, the time spent in preparation has been a worthwhile commitment of my time and my creative energy. 

Certainty kills the fun. 

Not-knowing provides the necessary tension for drama and suspense and a reason to keep turning the page, to keep leaping into the fray each day. 

Having the answers is boring. 

Having more questions is more fun. 

Merlin Mann linked to this comment the late author David Foster Wallace made in 1996(!):

“’Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die.” –David Foster Wallace

Prescient.

If what you regularly pump into your consciousness is processed pap prodding you to passiveness—numbing, mindless, turn-off-your-brain-and-scroll-Facebook-or-binge-on-Netflix passiveness—you will die indeed.

Not physical death—though sedentary leads to cemetery quicker—but that kind of junk diet for your mind certainly will kill off some of what makes you an authentic, free-range human being.

Your brain needs to be challenged regularly. You need to more regularly inhabit your physical body and be aware that you are alive—right here, right now.

Read something with substance, something challenging. Be with other humans, really with them. Engage in conversations that provoke and cause pause. Make something. Try expressing yourself more often. Do hard things. Take risks. Inhabit your senses more fully and more intentionally. Go primal. Go back to the basics of what shaped us into the incredible creatures we became.

Live while you can.

This is my only magazine subscription.

It’s not available in a digital version.

This is it. Paper and ink.

It’s a delight to hold and to look through and to smell.

As powerful as the internet is for the spread of ideas, I’m sure that most of what makes a splash online now won’t have much of a shelf life. Because, well, you can’t put it on a shelf.

My kids won’t grow up with nostalgia for a blog post they read once or keep a favorite old viral video on a loop in their living rooms.

Tangible things will endure, though. Especially beautiful ones that spark joy.

Even this delightful little magazine reminds me of the joy of great things.

I keep fretting over the best way to organize the thousands of digital photos I have.

The solution, though, is to print them, to make the best ones into photo books that will someday grace the shelves of my future grandchildren’s homes.

Things are just things. But there is real beauty in the grace of great things, offscreen, in your hands and literally in your life.

Want a better life? 

Be a better person. 

Religious violence has a long and terrible history.

From Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari:

“In the 300 years from the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.”

And he adds this for perspective:

“On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. … More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.”

Harari’s book is an epic survey of the history of humans on earth. It’s filled with sobering details like this along with a hopeful perspective on how far we have come.

From Neil Gaiman’s masterful 2012 “Make Good Art” commencement address:

Do the stuff that only you can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

The things I’ve done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about…

That vulnerable feeling—as if you’re opening yourself too much, exposing more than feels safe—is worth the risk.

The best things—love, art, any act of authentic creation or wholehearted kindness—come from that place which seems so fragile but which is actually your singular source of strength.

“Caution is the devil” said William Blake. The resistance within is powerful.

It takes courage. If there was no fear, courage would be pointless. Fear gives you the opportunity to craft a better version of yourself.

Steer into the fear if that’s what it takes to bring out what is best in you, to produce the kind of love and beauty that only you—the one and only you—can ever make.

This article makes a compelling case for why electric cars will dominate sooner than you might think.

Tesla will do for electric cars what’s Apple did for smartphones:

Gas stations are not massively profitable businesses [4]. When 10% of the vehicles on the road are electric many of them will go out of business. This will immediately make driving a gasoline powered car more inconvenient. When that happens even more gasoline car owners will be convinced to switch and so on. Rapidly a tipping point will be reached, at which point finding a convenient gas station will be nearly impossible [5] and owning a gasoline powered car will positively suck. Then, there will be a rush to electric cars not seen since, well, the rush to buy smartphones.

Today I shared this old Seth Godin post with my staff. It’s about open conversations where authentic dialogue is encouraged. Here’s the hook:

A guy walks into a shop that sells ties. He’s opened the conversation by walking in.

Salesman says, “can I help you?”

The conversation is now closed. The prospect can politely say, “no thanks, just looking.”

Consider the alternative: “That’s a [insert adjective here] tie you’re wearing, sir. Where did you buy it?”

Conversation is now open. Attention has been paid, a rapport can be built. They can talk about ties. And good taste.

A guest told me yesterday our students offered the best experience of any campus tour she’s been on. I could have been happy with just that, thanked her, and moved on.

But I responded, “Why?”

“Why was ours the best? What did we do that you appreciated, that made our tour stand out?”

And then we had a good conversation, and I learned something from her insight.

I’m a bit of an introvert, and I’m a little too content too often with getting easy outs for conversation.

But meaningful conversations are rare and valuable and can make a day worthwhile like few other activities can. And they offer a chance to learn and grow. And, even better, they let you truly see and acknowledge others in the most primal, human way.

My wife is great at asking conversation-opening questions of our daughters. She’s not content with hearing they’ve had a good day. She wants to know exactly what was good about it and what were the highlights and lowlights and the best stories.

Avoid simple yes/no questions and cliched greetings. Safe and boring and superficial.

Make an art of opening conversations and sparking genuine connection and understanding.

Consider what life was like 100 years ago.

World War I was engulfing Europe. It was the first “modern” war, and it was ultimately tragically pointless and horrifying. (Go listen to the epic podcast series, Blueprint for Armageddon, in Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History.)

The U.S. population in 1915 was one-third what it is now. The world population was one-fourth what it is now.

Women in the U.S. did not have the right to vote. Racial segregation was entrenched in the south. The Civil Rights Act was almost fifty years away.

There were few rights for workers and not much of a safety net for anyone for health care or retirement.

Air travel was for daredevils. Space travel was just a sci-fi dream. More vehicles were powered by animals than by engines. Radio was the chief source of home entertainment, and silent films were the only option at theaters.

If you had a time machine and brought someone from 1915 to 2015, imagine how astounded they would be by our world—our technology and medicine; the discoveries about the universe that have shown us just how incomprehensibly massive it is and how small we are; and how far we have progressed in human rights in a century.

And how are we worse off now compared to then? There was no obesity epidemic, no addiction to electronic devices, and no chance for nuclear disaster. I’m sure there are many ways life was better a century ago, but I wouldn’t want to swap places with that generation.

Now, imagine you could go in a time machine to the year 2115. How backwards might our current generation look one hundred years from now? What have we got completely wrong? How inhumane and small-minded will we look to our great-grandchildren? What assumptions are we taking for granted now that will seem laughable in the very near future?

We can’t assume a positive trajectory of progress. There is certainly a chance that we could very well end up going backwards and falling into another “dark ages” if we survive for another century, but let’s be optimistic.

How can taking the long view open us to possibilities and ways of thinking that make an even brighter future more likely? What would be an ideal world in 2115, and what can we do in 2015 to point in that direction?

That idea of yours that seems daring right now, or a little too farfetched to take seriously, might just seem so obvious a generation from now. It’s the crazy ones who craft the future the rest of us can’t even imagine. 

Dream big. Dream far. 

Today I took my daughters to the swimming pool for the first time this year. It was a warm, sunny afternoon, and they were so eager to swim after such a long time away from the water.

And it was a delight. That first plunge into a cool pool is such a sensory pleasure. Time stands still. You feel your body, momentarily weightless. Your skin tingles. Your inner compass spins. Your physical presence comes alive after a long hiatus of being bound to just the ground.

We played silly games in the pool and stretched our limbs and soaked in just a bit of sunshine.

And we smiled. My kids were smiling and laughing and actually enjoying each other with a freedom I haven’t seen in a while. Disconnected from screens, with nothing but water and their bodies, they played and wearied themselves the old-fashioned way. With movement.

Our bodies are too often just the vehicle for our minds. We are so busy thinking, mostly about things not truly worth thinking about, that we rarely feel even the weight of our bodies, much less the subtle interactions of our senses.

But jump into the water and you will rediscover that you are more than just a worry-fillled mind.

I need more movement, more mindful movement at least. To feel the ground under my bare feet, to actually taste and smell the food I eat, to float and splash and play.

Physical play, I think, is our default state. Being a dad has returned me to real play, and I need more of it. Swimming and freeze tag and tickle fights. Movement. Touch. Laughter. This is real life. Not passive staring at screens and sitting. So much sitting.

Take off your shoes and jump into real life this spring.

My ten-year-old and I walked the dog together last night. She was a chatterbox. Get her away from books and Netflix and conversation flows from her.

She changes topics pretty quickly. It’s a stream-of-consciousness kind of flow.

At one point she said, “Dad, what did you nerd out on when you were a kid?”

Me: “What do you mean by ‘nerd out’?”

Her: “You know. Like I’m reading those books about Egyptian mythology right now, and I get really into everything about it.”

And she does. Thanks to the Kane Chronicles books by Rick Riordan, my daughter is now well versed on all the Egyptian deities and their stories and is eager to share what she’s been learning in great detail.

This conversation was a proud moment for me, that she recognizes that “nerding out” is a thing and that she delights in it.

I told her that when I was her age I nerded out reading biographies and obsessing over NASA and astronauts. And I reminded her that, as cool as she knows I am, I’m still nerding out about a lot of things, like Apple and books and great gear.

I hope she will continue to embrace delightful obsessions all her life. Nerding out is really just following your curiosity and your joys and caring deeply.

Follow your bliss, no matter if anyone thinks it’s nerdy. It doesn’t matter if what you nerd out over will make you any money or win applause or approval or likes on Instagram. Pursue those things that bring you joy for their own sake, without any attachment to some external reward.

Oliver Burkeman has a great post this week on embracing discomfort. If you’re waiting for the right feeling to get busy, you are not truly free. If you need to be excited before you take action, you are no action hero:

It’s eye-opening to think of excitement this way: not as the thing we should all seek in life, but as a mildly embarrassing affliction that’s as likely to distract you from what matters as guide you towards it. “The only way to really deal with the problem of excitement,” Krech writes, “is to stop becoming dependent on it”: it’s after excitement fades that you discover what you’re made of. This needn’t mean resigning yourself to a relationship or job you hate; it just means not relying on excitement, or the avoidance of discomfort, to decide what to do next. Life (to paraphrase the Buddha) is inherently unsatisfactory. And that’s liberating: you never have to wonder if the path you’re on will lead to unbroken thrills and zero frustrations, because you can be certain it won’t.

What if you didn’t wait to get excited about that thing you want to do, or to feel like doing the work you know needs to be done to be the person you want to be? To be the hero of your own life takes action, whether you feel like taking action or not.

As Chuck Close says, “Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

“To be able to do what needs doing, whether or not you feel like it, is pretty close to a superpower.” –Oliver Burkeman