This week’s best of the web: Watterson’s wisdom and Zen Pencils

Eric Johnson

This Zen Pencils cartoon won the Internet this week.

It’s a lovely tribute to Bill Watterson, the amazing and enigmatic creator of Calvin and Hobbes, and it’s a profound exhortation to live an excellent, authentic life.

Click through, read, and enjoy. And then get lost in Zen Pencils. The creator, Gavin Aung Than, is doing beautiful work, mixing cartooning with life wisdom, and he is living the story he’s telling in this Watterson tribute. He abandoned the conventional career path and is making his own way. And using his talent to help awaken possibilities in others.

More about Watterson’s Kenyon College commencement speech, on which the Zen Pencils cartoon is based, is over on Brain Pickings. I love this part about playfulness and creativity:

It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

[…]

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you’ll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you’ll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you’ll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

[…]

A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.

I’m inspired to go dig out my old Calvin and Hobbes collections and share with my daughters. And to play more.

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“Don’t aim at success.”

Eric Johnson

Farnam Street has a post today that includes this paragraph from Victor Frankl’s classic book, Man’s Search For Meaning, which I recently mentioned:

Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it. -Victor Frankl

This is non-attachment. Do the thing for the thing itself, not for some desired outcome. Get lost in the path – the journey, the way – and the destination will meet you there.

Go ahead. Make something.

Eric Johnson2 Comments

Kottke linked to science writer Robert Krulwich’s 2011 commencement speech at Berkeley Journalism School.

His message is to aspiring journalists, but it works for most anyone exploring the new world of work. Here’s the heart of his message:

“Suppose, instead of waiting for a job offer from the New Yorker, suppose next month, you go to your living room, sit down, and just do what you love to do. If you write, you write. You write a blog. If you shoot, find a friend, someone you know and like, and the two of you write a script. You make something. No one will pay you. No one will care, No one will notice, except of course you and the people you’re doing it with. But then you publish, you put it on line, which these days is totally doable, and then… you do it again.

…think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.”

Your dream job is less likely than ever to be “out there”. What if you just started making and doing and acting like who you want to be? You don’t need permission. You don’t have to wait to be discovered or to climb the ladder.

There are fewer guarantees, fewer safe careers, but so many more possibilities.

King’s dream and the magic of the moment

Eric Johnson

“Tell them about the dream, Martin!” That’s what the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, sitting up front after having just sung a couple of songs, said to Martin Luther King, Jr. as he paused briefly in the midst of the most famous speech of the past century.

Dr. King had come to the Lincoln Memorial on this day fifty years ago with a carefully prepared speech. “I have a dream” was not in the speech that he had on the paper in front of him. He had used the dream metaphor in previous speeches and sermons that year. But he was allotted only five minutes on the program this day, so he was trying to keep it short.

But Ms. Jackson’s exhortation and the dynamic of the moment, the 100,000 people gathered at Mr. Lincoln’s feet in urgent, desperate anticipation, emboldened Dr. King to go off script in the best possible way.

He connected with that audience and that moment, and his words still connect today. But if he had stuck to the prepared remarks, we would not have this gift that came from that moment.

He wasn’t “winging it”. He was improvising, using ideas and words he had used before, but mixing them on the spot and drawing them from the creative well he had cultivated throughout his work.

King was not talking at the audience. He was with them. And he could create in the moment and work with what the audience was giving and what they needed.

Remarkable leaders, speakers, and performers respond to the moment and in the moment. We should be so well prepared, so immersed in our material, that we can improvise and surprise ourselves and make something amazing that will go far beyond what we have even dreamed.

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Quantity leads to quality

Eric Johnson3 Comments

Herbert Lui has a post on Medium, Why Quantity Should be Your Priority, that fits nicely with what I’ve been learning about practice.

Don’t get too hung up initially on polishing your work to perfection. Instead, focus on cranking out as much as you can. Doing something often will lead to doing it well.

“…quantity should be a higher priority than quality, because it leads to higher quality. The shorter path to maximized quality is in maximized quantity, and executing on the feedback after each finished product.” -Herbert Lui

I’m fascinated by Shinji, who is considered the “most graceful” swimmer in the world. He didn’t start swimming regularly until he was in his late 30’s, and now the YouTube video of his swimming is the most popular swimming video on the Internet, more popular than Michael Phelps’s videos.

How did an average guy with a job and a family get so good? He practiced. A lot.

“I made it my goal to become the ‘most graceful swimmer in the world.’ Whenever I was in Japan I spent 3 to 4 hours in the endless pool, usually from 10PM to 2AM, four days a week, recording my swim, analyzing it frame by frame, finding and fixing small flaws, one by one.” -Shinji

This is a great example of deep practice, where you work to your potential, bump up against your current limits, and keep going till you improve and move to a higher level.

Here’s that most-watched swim video by Shinji, demonstrating the quality that comes from well focused quantity:

Show up and do something every day

Eric Johnson

Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, shared this story on his blog about a 15-year-old who followed an interest (not even a passion) with consistent, daily action and just a bit of audacity and had remarkable success.

You don’t have to be amazingly gifted to stand out, to make a difference. You will stand out just by showing up regularly and taking action. That’s exceptional and worth talking about because so few people actually do anything beyond talking.

Sunday morning Seneca: The fighter

Eric Johnson

From Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic:

“… no prizefighter can go with high spirits into the strife if he has never been beaten black and blue; the only contestant who can confidently enter the lists is the man who has seen his own blood, who has felt his teeth rattle beneath his opponent’s fist, who has been tripped and felt the full force of his adversary’s charge, who has been downed in body but not in spirit, one who, as often as he falls, rises again with greater defiance than ever.”

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Talent and preparation

Eric Johnson1 Comment

Farnam Street has a post today, Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour-Rule, that explores the conversation about innate talent and preparation. Is it hard work that makes the difference, or is it something you’ve just got, something you’re born with that ultimately determines achievement?

We all have differing levels of innate ability, physically and mentally, and different temperaments. But focus and drive and grit count for more than can be easily measured. Imagine the countless would-be masters throughout history, people with the talent to be world class, who didn’t put in the effort, who didn’t persevere through difficulty and failure to become remarkable at something.

If you’ve got some talent, good for you. Now, figure out how to be awesome and get to work.

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Sugar: tasty, tasty poison

Eric Johnson1 Comment

This video (h/t Diet Doctor blog) makes a very compelling case that we’ve been misled about the roots of the obesity epidemic:

Sugar and processed carbohydrates are the culprits. Demonizing dietary fat turns out to have been a mistake, though the conventional wisdom doesn’t seem to be catching up with the science quite yet.

I know, I know. Sugar tastes good. But, it has no redeeming qualities otherwise. It’s poison…tasty, tasty poison.

Up until just over four years ago I didn’t give much thought to cutting back on sugar. I drank Cokes and sweet tea and enjoyed the heck out of desserts. Vending machines were my friends.

Then, I changed my diet completely, drastically cutting back on processed foods and carbs and making sugar a rare treat. I switched to unsweetened tea gradually, going from half sweet to just a splash of sweet to all unsweetened. And I got used to it. I completely dropped soft drinks. I quit making dessert a regular expectation. I discovered the delight of super dark chocolate, which is comparatively low in sugar. A little taste of 85 percent dark chocolate became a sensory pleasure each night and satisfied my sweet tooth.

And I lost 20 pounds within a few months of making these changes and have kept the weight off for more than four years, all while actually increasing my consumption of saturated fat. Eggs for breakfast almost every morning. Plenty of butter. Coconut oil as my cooking oil of choice. Bacon. And more bacon…

Sounds delicious, but dangerous, right? At least it does according to conventional wisdom. But I just had my annual physical last week, and my lipid profile put me in the “below average risk” for heart disease. My doctor told me to keep on doing what I’ve been doing.

I’m worried that I’ve already missed the boat with my kids, though. Their sugar love is strong, and they can’t imagine happiness without it. Maybe we can focus on one area at a time, like eliminating sugary drinks for them first before moving on to the harder stuff, like candy and cookies.

It’s worth making the effort to cut the sugar you consume. The obvious sugar is, well, obvious. It’s the sneaky stuff, like the added sugar the food industry puts in almost every food-like substance that comes in a box or jar or can, that is just unfair. I avoid products that have health claims, like “Low Fat”, on the label. It’s likely that sugar was added to make up for how bad it tastes once they removed the fat. Skip that stuff and just get real food.

You’ll miss sugar at first, but your health will be a lot sweeter without it.

Flow

Eric Johnson3 Comments

I’m creating a presentation for our student staff for our annual fall kickoff event this Saturday. It’s a half-day retreat/workshop to get our team reconnected with each other and to our mission as we begin a new school year. This is easily one of my favorite work days of the year.

We’ve got our agenda set, and now I just need to finalize my opening presentation. I’ve had ideas about this for a couple of months, and I’ve dumped slides into a Keynote document throughout the summer. But I’ve only just this week begun putting it together and sorting through the ideas. I discard, rearrange, tweak, and fine tune the ideas to get to some sort of narrative flow. I want to take the audience on a journey from “Why?” to “How?” and spark action.

I borrow ideas and slides from other talks I’ve done recently. Key themes seem to pop up in my life every year, and I stick with them even across different presentations and formats and audiences.

Below is a screen shot from Keynote showing my “light table” view. I live in this view when I’m working on a presentation. It’s such a great way to see everything at once and put some order to what otherwise would be a choppy, disconnected collection of ideas. Not everything on a slide is meant to be projected. At this point in the process, I use slides like note cards.

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I had been dragging my feet on this all week, but something clicked this afternoon when I plunged in and started working on it. I got into a flow and ideas and connections started clicking. That state, when time falls away and focus is sharp, is a delight. And it’s when my best work gets done.

Flow seems to follow action rather than the other way around. Waiting for the state to somehow arrive is futile in most cases. Action does not always lead to flow, but it’s the only way I know to attempt to summon it.

Ready Player One

Eric Johnson

My more structured reading plan is off to a good start this week.

I’ve slowly been working through The Shape of Design, but my stab at getting into some fiction as well has been a hit so far. I’m enjoying Ready Player One, a science fiction adventure set in the year 2044.

It’s a clever story about a teenage underdog in a bleak American future who takes on a massive, immersive video/role-playing game created by a Steve Wozniak type genius who was obsessed with the 1980’s. The pop culture references are a blast, especially for those of us who come from the 80’s.

I’m appreciating the lightness and playfulness of this type of fiction. It’s a nice balance to the denser, more challenging books I’ve got on my list.

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Why before How

Eric Johnson5 Comments

“Why?” is the children’s question that we too often grow out of asking. I suppose kids get shushed enough or stump their elders to frustration so often that it becomes uncomfortable to keep asking it.

But we ought to ask Why regularly. Ask our bosses our elders our leaders our peers and kindred spirits.

“Why exactly do we do this or do it this way…?”
“Can you remind me again what we’re hoping to accomplish?”
“Why do we exist as an organization?”
“Why, again, are we meeting? What’s the purpose, the desired outcome?”
“What are we about?”

If it’s asked with sincerity, snark-free, the Why question just might spark a fresh perspective that clarifies everything, that cuts through the clutter and distraction.

We tend to default to How before ever even asking Why.

Peter Drucker said: “Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.”

Answering How questions is crucial to “doing things right”, but it’s Why that will make sure you’re doing the “right things”.

A genuine answer to the Why might be painful, might make the effort moot. But it would be better to abandon and redirect toward a more meaningful Why, right?

Embrace the Why like a relentless 5-year-old with a curiosity problem. Figure out the Why then follow the How to previously unimagined possibilities.

Ben Dunlap: Keep learning

Eric Johnson

This is a favorite TED Talk, Wofford College president Ben Dunlap telling stories about a remarkable individual and the joys of lifelong learning:

What a great storyteller. His accents of the various characters are delightful.

And he ends with a fitting summary and call to action:

“Live like you’re going to die tomorrow. Learn like you’re going to live forever.” -Gandhi

What I’m reading now

Eric Johnson1 Comment

I’m refining my reading habits. I’ve been dipping into too many books without finishing. I need some structure and some discipline to get the most out of what I read.

Here’s the current lineup of books* that I have been in and out of recently on my iPad mini:

I’ve downloaded samples of these books to see if I’m interested enough to purchase them:

This is a tantalizing but overwhelming list of intriguing books.

I’m going to use my lunch break for reading time. At night, it’s hard to always work reading time around my family life. My aim is to save what time I can get at night for lighter reading, like fiction, or for wisdom literature, like the works of the Stoics. An “idea book” often gets my brain too engaged, and I don’t wait to stay up late chewing on possibilities when I ought to be sleeping.

I plan to start at the top of the list above and focus on one book at a time until either I finish the book or I decide I’ve gotten all I want out of it. I will highlight key passages for later reference, and, if the book’s impact merits it, I will post what I learn from it.

*The book links are mostly to Amazon’s Kindle store, but I have most of these in my iBooks library instead. I prefer the look and interface of iBooks to Kindle, but I linked to Amazon since it’s the more common format.

Choosing your response

Eric Johnson3 Comments

Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen. -Epictetus

Between stimulus and response there is a gap. In that gap we can choose our response. This insight is from Victor Frankl’s profound little book, Man’s Search For Meaning. Frankl noticed a small number of fellow concentration camp prisoners who chose to be optimistic and encouraging in the midst of their horrifying reality. They had no control over their daily physical life, but these handful of prisoners he noticed exercised what Frankl called the “last of human freedoms”, the freedom to choose your attitude regardless of the circumstances. No one can deny you that final, ultimate freedom.

We can’t control the world and the actions of others. The weather, the traffic, the people we encounter – not in our control. We can control our own attitude and our own actions.

We all have regularly wasted too much emotion and mental energy fretting or stewing or worrying over things we can do absolutely nothing about.

What if, when I’m prone to respond with frustration or anger or anxiety, I simply chose to be curious instead.

“I wonder why that driver cut me off.”

“How interesting that it’s raining on the day of our picnic.”

“It’s fascinating that this person is angry with me. I wonder what’s at the root of their response.”

“Fascinating…” is a delightfully effective response when you’re otherwise inclined to react negatively.

We are not machines, right? No one or no thing can make you respond in a certain way. You’ve got a choice. It’s inaccurate to say “________ makes me mad.” You may choose to be mad because of ________, but it is your choice.

I know I’m choosing an unproductive response when I start feeling defensive. It’s a clear indicator I’m heading down a wrong path.

I heard someone say “Never take anything personally.” Nothing anyone does or says truly is about you, even if it seems so. Others’s actions are their own and are about them, not you.

This is not easy. We have to be mindful of how we are programmed and take control to reprogram our responses with that gap, that opportunity to choose, as the key to living a more wholehearted, mindful human life.

Fascinating.

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The audacity of youth

Eric Johnson1 Comment

Kottke (a must-follow blogger from way back when blogging was exotic) shared this post today about the age of key figures from the American Revolutionary War. Check out how old these stars of our early republic were on July 4, 1776:

Marquis de Lafayette, 18
James Monroe, 18
Gilbert Stuart, 20
Aaron Burr, 20
Alexander Hamilton, 21
Betsy Ross, 24
James Madison, 25

Incredible. I always thought of Jefferson as one of the younger founding fathers, but he was 33 at the time, an “old guy” compared to the youngsters listed above.

Yes, mastery is a product of time and deep practice. But, undoubtedly, the classical education of those in this class was much more intense than what we are accustomed to today. Certainly these people were more well versed in the classics and in philosophy and were more self-sufficient than a typical 20-year-old today. Some of these probably had put in a decade of study and life experience that would humble us now.

Yet, a 20-year-old certainly, even in that era, was not the equal of those a decade or two older in statecraft and leadership, right? Maybe those who were young were disproportionately represented in this revolutionary group because audacity and boldness and a bit of recklessness, hallmarks of youth, were just what was needed at that time in our history. Their youth probably made them more likely to be attracted to a high-risk endeavor, to a grand adventure. Older people are more risk averse. They typically have more to lose. What the younger ones lacked in experience and wisdom, they made up for, maybe, in audacity and useful foolhardiness.

Silicon Valley is filled with twenty-somethings who are drawn to a different kind of revolution. There’s a reason so many start-ups are led by people barely old enough to vote. It’s a great age to take some chances and try hard things without putting family and fortune in jeopardy. Some twenty-somethings can be afflicted with a presumptuous sense of entitlement, an impatience to wait and do the work and earn the dream over the long haul.

But points for boldness for young people. Think new thoughts. Do crazy big things that are likely to fail. Be a revolutionary while you’ve got the right stuff for it.

“Write as if you were dying.”

Eric Johnson

Brain Pickings is as prolifically wise and challenging and enlightening as any site on the internet. Hooray for it’s creator, Maria Popova! It’s worthwhile to subscribe to her free weekly email newsletter so you don’t miss out.

I found this post about Annie Dillard’s book, The Writing Life, in yesterday’s newsletter. I have the paperback version of the book, but I’ve never read it. I will remedy that now that I’ve read the book excerpts highlighted in the post.

This passage is a powerful reminder of why we create and how our mortality, and that of our audience, should inform our work:

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

[…]

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.” -Annie Dillard from The Writing Life

Wow.

Consider yourself and everyone else, for that matter, to be terminal. It is true. And living and thinking in the light of dying should add perspective and meaning that we would otherwise shut our eyes to.

I often imagine that my audience is just my two young daughters who will read this as adults, maybe after I’m gone. Thinking like that can’t help but shape my words and shame me away from pettiness and silliness.

We should not get lost in fretting over our mortality and miss out on actually living. But summoning the ultimate and embracing our impermanence are crucial to writing anything or making anything that lets us touch immortality.

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“Steal Like An Artist” is a steal today

Eric Johnson

Today I purchased the ebook version of Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist for only $1.99. Now, that’s a steal. Today may be the only day it’s that price, so jump on it tonight.

I spent just an hour reading it this afternoon and got more than halfway through. It’s a delight, filled with practical advice and genuine epiphanies. I kept highlighting passages, and I know I will go back and read it again.

It’s for anyone who makes anything. It’s for humans every where. I’ve already got some tips from it that I’m going to implement when I get to work tomorrow, like making a clear delineation between the digital and analog work spaces in my office. (Read the book.)

Kleon already inspired me to show my work earlier this year, and this book is a solid kick in the pants to dump your excuses and get busy creating.

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