How's Your Inner Landscape?

Last month I watched a climbing film about K2, the most treacherous mountain on earth. 

K2 is the world's second-highest peak. Everest may be taller, but K2 is way harder to climb. The conditions are brutal: sheer rock faces, pounded by wind, prone to harsh blizzards that appear in minutes. 4,000 people have climbed Everest. Only 367 people have ever conquered the "King of Mountains".

Just getting to K2's basecamp brings more danger than most Americans will face in their lives. Narrow trails with loose rocks and steep drops, hour after hour. Finally, the climbers in the film arrive.

They’re greeted by emptiness. Maybe a dozen tarps and tent poles, pounded into a rocky landscape. They wait here as their bodies adjust for altitude. The entire time they’re hounded by a relentless wind, so loud that they can hardly even speak into the camera. Finally, after a week of cold and lonely suffering, they hike on.

The crew eventually reaches the summit, the triumphant highlight of the 60 minute film. But in the days after watching, my mind kept swinging back to basecamp, that desolate wasteland. I didn't feel compelled to go there. Instead, I felt like I'd glimpsed a hidden truth of life in our modern world amidst the smattering of tents.

We all have inner landscapes. An active mind is a mental metropolis. Frequent flow states create grand structures in the mind. Solitude and reflection produce depth and calm, billowing trees lining your inner boulevards. That’s the ideal.

But the ideal is rare. Thanks to endless gusts of swipes and screens, most modern minds resemble K2 basecamp: a smattering of tattered tents amidst desolate, windswept rocks. When we visit our inner selves, there's almost nothing there. As Irish poet John O'Donohue puts it, we've had an "evacuation of interiority" altogether in our modern world, but our electronic habits are so ingrained, we’ve barely noticed.

No solutions, today. Just a thought.

Puddles of Music and News

The year is 2004.

It's Monday morning. The instant I wake up, nervous energy churns through me. I leap out of bed and run downstairs. I pull on a coat, grab shoes, and walk out the garage. I'm back inside in less than a minute.

Off goes the plastic. Out comes the roll. My heart's beating, quick. I flip and fumble: A1, B1, C1....uh oh, here it comes...I dramatically pull out section D1, the Sports section of the Washington Post. I look and my heart sinks. My beloved Redskins had lost to the Baltimore Ravens. Day ruined, what a drag.

As a kid my bedtime was strict. Primetime NFL games went late, and I had to call it quits at halftime. To find out the winner, I checked the morning newspaper. Yes, a physical newspaper. It seems hopelessly antiquated in hindsight, but our family computer was slow. The internet existed, but had yet to pervade. Newspaper it was.

Quick breakfast then time for school. While we cruise in the car, I slip in a CD. NOW, Volume 3. Smash Mouth on repeat. I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed.

Today, the two indispensable elements of my 2004 are nowhere to be found. Receiving a daily paper newspaper in 2021 means you’re oldschool contrarian. Listening to CDs means you can't find Spotify (or Audius, Tidal, or YouTube).

So what happened to papers and discs? Software ate them. The internet shattered their atom-based shackles and flung their content around the globe at the speed of light, for free. Perhaps that's obvious. But take another angle: music and news melted into a puddle.

Two major media industries have liquified before our eyes. The ice cube solids of 2004 have melted into 100 million sites and songs. And temperatures keep rising. All puddles soon evaporate into gas.

Music and News aren't special; they're just early. Other fields liquify while you read these words. Education, finance, retail, politics, culture. All blocks of ice. Technology is a heat lamp that never turns off and keeps getting hotter.

What happens when these all become puddles? I’m not sure. But get ready to splash.

How Can You Eat That?

I still remember my college dining hall:

Breakfast bar. Sandwich stations. Entrees made to order. Fresh fruit, salad bar, pasta, pizza. When touring colleges, a tour guide once joked: "Your parents won't be around. You can eat pizza for every meal!"

Unfortunately, I took her literally. Once I got to college, I took full advantage of my campus meal plan. Each lunch and dinner I would grab a mix of goods, whatever they served that day. But I always, always grabbed a slice of pizza. Why not? It was endless, "free", and went well with any lunch or dinner.

Back then, I'd never heard of gluten levels. I didn't know about the "gut-brain axis". I'd never read about how your food affects your focus. Meanwhile, I was extremely well acquainted with the joys of sinking your teeth into the first bite of a slice of pepperoni. That pleasing trio of sauce, cheese, and crust.

My family ate healthy meals growing up. But in college, my healthy eating instincts vanished. I ate poorly, and unknowingly suffered the consequences (stress, fatigue, inability to focus), without making the connection. I was blind to the problem.

My roommate Mike was different. He ran triathlons in his spare time, and his diet proved it. He'd hit the salad bar while I loaded up on carbs. He loved all healthy foods; chicken, veggies and chick peas in particular. I didn't know what chick peas were.

One day, Mike called me out. As I sat down ready to scarf a slice, he looked at my greasy plate and asked simple question: "How can you eat that?" His call-out struck me. Eventually my diet improved. But here's the twist:

Information is food. The Internet is a college dining hall: endless options. Most people pile their plates high with greasy pizza each day and start shoveling. They’re blind to the problem.

See the junk for what it is. How can you read that? How can you watch that? When faced with a pleasing slice of clickbait, don't bite. Be like Mike.

You Are What You Do

"I could do all that stuff. I just don't feel like it."

Honors PreCalc, a devilishly difficult class for my humanities-wired brain. Lyndon B. Johnson's granddaughter was my teacher (actually), and toughness runs in the family. It was hard for high school. Tests and quizzes were trouble enough, but I remember hating the homework sets most of all.

Each Monday we received a pile of problems to solve for the week. These weren't quick response. From what I remember, these questions took hours to complete. Each moment struggling through polynomials and logs passed slowly, so slowly, almost excruciating.

And so, I often skipped the assignments. I would turn in something, but I wouldn't give them the attention the deserved. I'd scrawl out half-baked answers on the bus, I'd pretend-work through them at lunch, and I'd mine the back of the book for answers.

My PreCalc grade suffered thanks to poor habits. One day my mother asked me about my struggles in math class. I distinctly remember my answer: I *could* do all that work each week. I could be like my fellow grade-A students. I just don't feel like it.

My mom, rarely the tough-love type, snapped back at this one. That's meaningless. You might as well say you "could" run marathon if you felt like it. Saying you could do something is worthless. All you are is what you do.

Years later, as I've begun dipping into philosophy, this idea returned. Jean-Paul Sartre tells the story of the French student in World War II who faces a dilemma: go fight the war and leave his ailing mother, or stay with his ailing mother without contributing to the Allied cause. Professor Sartre, what should I do?

Sartre responds: The decision is fully yours, no one can decide for your, and it absolutely matters what you choose. We are the sum of our thoughts and actions. Nothing more, nothing less. No could’ves, no would’ves. Saying you had the potential, had things been just a bit different, reaches the same depths of pathetic as my math class claim.

You have absolute freedom to take action, or not. Hypotheticals don't count. What will you choose? As Sartre said, the Existentialists were seen as pessimists. But in his mind, people just couldn't stomach the "sternness of their optimism."

Choose well.

A Blip In Time

Time.

Few words evoke more emotions, for me. The ever-present mystery. We swim in time every moment of our lives, and yet we don't know what it is. Why does it move? And why forward? Why can't we pause or turn back? Call these questions silly. But zoom in close and they astonish. At every moment, each action, each breath, each flicker of thought instantly slips from happening to happened. Permanent. Frozen. All you've done, all you'll ever do. It all echoes through eternity, forever, the instant Now becomes then.

My mind plumbs here often. Time as relative. Time as predetermined. Time as bridge between identity and consciousness. Time as paradox: precious as Bitcoin, treated like a gum wrapper. As long as life lets me, I'll never stop pondering this four-letter marvel.

That's why today is strange. Today the system glitched. The whole country leapt forward an hour. Our clocks skipped a cycle, all because some senators 100 years ago said so. At this, no one blinks.

But look closer. Today's your best chance to sneak a glance at time's arbitrariness, time's fluidity, time's wild mystery. 5 o'clock is 5 o'clock, except for twice a year, when suddenly it's not.

Daylight Savings is deja-vu. A brief what was that? and then carry on. A quick splash of the fundamental weirdness of reality, followed by a yawn and some breakfast, and then yet another Sunday.

But on this Daylight Savings, let's give the fabric of reality her due. May we use that missing hour to ponder time as a concept. Physicist Carlo Rovelli calls time the fog you watch from a mountaintop. From the summit you see distinct puffs, what's the problem? But trek back down and things get screwy. Crisp cloud becomes soupy mist as you close in. Soon you doubt if the cloud exists at all.

Carlo means entropy and Planck Lengths and quantum foam. I'll leave the physics to him. But quiet moments and focused thoughts melt the cloud for me, too.

Leaving the Harbor

Here we go. Are you ready? Grab a rail and hold on tight!

Have you cruised on a boat? How did it start? Probably in the harbor. Once you're all aboard, the engine revs and the boat starts to move. But you start slowly. You're just in the harbor, you can't go full throttle.

The first few moments you cruise at a crawl, past boats and docks. As you get closer to open water, your speed picks up. The motor's hum lifts from a trundle to a purr. A little louder, a little more kick. You feel the boat rock for the first time. Just a little sway, left to right, enough to catch your attention. Woah.

A bit more speed. Breeze hits your face. Hair starts to splay. Your heart adds a beat. Now we're moving.

Here it comes, the break wall. The thick row of rocks looms like a starting gun. Past that line lays the open ocean. No more speed limits, time to fly. The engine revs. You're closing in. Really moving, boat rocking, hair flying, wind bustling. Here we go. Are you ready? Grab a rail and hold on tight!

That's us, right now. Mankind, worldwide. For scores of centuries we trundled through the harbor. The world changed slowly, like a faint breeze we barely felt. History boasts of revolutions in agriculture and industry. But these happened across dozens of lifetimes, not within one. Societal upheaval arrived over thousands of years, then hundreds. Now, things are different. The Information Age unfolds in months, not millennia.

110 billion lives have been lived. We're the lucky few (billion) who get to leave the harbor. What's it like on the open ocean? What's our top speed? And what happens after that? Can we handle the swells, stomach the sway, and hold tight enough when the the chop gets heavy?

Nobody knows. Are you ready? Here we go. Grab a rail and hold on tight!...!...!...!...!...!

Hey Did You Hear?

Hey did you hear?

About the wife and the husband and the talk show host? And the banjo player? The tall Twitch streamer? Or the British TV star who said some things, or maybe not? Did they stop by and chat with your amygdala this week?

Questions, all questions. No answers, just questions.

How'd you first hear? Who let you know? A colleague, a headline, a dinging slab of glass? Who wanted you to know? And why? Do they know you? Do they care? Did you help them keep pace, tell the boss, tell the team?

Did you dive in deep? Or just glimpse on a scroll? Did you want to stay clear, but couldn't say no?

What did your grandparents' parents think about, in early-mid March, ten decades ago? Did they live on a farm, a city, in town? Were their thoughts close or distant? Did they fret or feel grateful? What would it feel like to sit in their mind? How does a test pilot feel in a rickshaw?

Who will you tell, in one year, or three? Will you still bring it up? Will you remember at all?

How did great grandma feel as she aged? Did time slow down, or did it go quick? Did she feel she'd had plenty, or did she wish for more? Did she live in the past or stay fixed ahead? When did she leave? Where is she now?

What about next week, who's up next? When will you hear? Who will you tell?

When do you laugh? What makes you calm? What do you hope for, what song makes you fly? Who do you love? And who loves you back? What gives you Flow while muting your fears? What exactly, in this sliver of time and space, soars your spirit and skips your heart and makes you foolishly thrilled for the future?

Hey did you hear?

Head Self, Heart Self

There are two of me. I'm split down the middle.

First, there’s Head Self: awash in the optimal. Focus tips. Feedback Loops. Founder mentality. Growth hacks and lead gen and max value but make it efficient, scale to the moon and don't forget to delight the customer all along the way.

Most days this is me. Head Self hangs out in familiar spots: Zoom screens, cal invites, Notion tables, action items. Details to manage, decisions to make. Meetings to run, value to trade, products to build, people to thank, replies to send. Always replies to send.

When schedules gets busy I'm all Head Self.  From wake up to wind down it's work, work, work. I love my job dearly. But I get winded. Sometimes Head Self needs a breather.

Enter Heart Self.

Heart Self wonders. Heart Self ponders. Heart Self loves language, and finds certain sentences so stunningly beautiful that a flood of feeling swells inside, and it's not clear how to respond.

Heart Self hates browser tabs. My Heart Self would rather be in books, among the greats, tumbling through ideas. Heart Self flees the neon lights of culture, and prefers the candlelit world of the soul. Heart Self seeks solitude. Heart Self is fascinated by death but never wants to die.

I'm thankful for Head Self. My life rests on a foundation Head Self built. Great Heads across time created the remarkable world of today: DoorDash and airplanes and Freemium SaaS business models. Without Head Self we'd still be brawling with sharp sticks in the wilderness.

But when I read the right novels, when I stare down the Pleiades, when I'm lost in late-night conversation with people I love, the head melts away. On the best nights, I glimpse of the eternal, and for a moment, all becomes clear.

Head Self moves the world. But Heart Self makes the movement worthwhile.

The Clubhouse Paradox

Last night I glimpsed the future. I also saw the distant past.

Evening, just before bed. Jump on Clubhouse. Decide to try my luck with "7th Layer of Hell", a comedy gameshow room. I love good standup, but my Clubhouse time has been more NFT than lol so far. That changed last night.

Alone in a dark apartment, I couldn't stop laughing. Full-blown, funniest-person-you-know, laugh-out-loud type laughter. This is rare. Hilarious YouTube clips rarely draw more than a chuckle when I'm watching alone. Not last night.

One by one, contestants tossed out their best Dad joke. These would bomb. That's when Clubhouse magic kicked in: the moment the joke ended, the ~40 other contestants instantly started roasting the joke-giver, based solely on their picture. Delightful chaos ensued. Roasts were flying like a t-shirt toss on gameday. The jokes were all over the place: direct hits, kinda-sortas, total duds. But the audio-only format allowed for a blizzard of one-liners like I've never heard before.

Most rounds lasted 60 seconds, then on to the next. Then came Emilio. This guy had been the class clown all night. The room was ready. After his Dad joke, the Emilio zingers started flying and didn't stop. Roasts rained in, Emilio clapped back. I couldn't stop laughing. Clever jokes, silly jokes, out-of-left-field jokes. Emilio loves jorts. Emilio sings Christmas carols year-round. Emilio puts potato chips in a bowl before he eats them.

Last night, I glimpsed the future. This endless spray of jokes is an entirely new form of funny: crowd-sourced comedy, in its full messy glory. The night was only possible thanks to Clubhouse, an entirely new category of human interaction. New tools produce exciting new possibilities.

Last night I also saw the distant past. In five years the same 7th Layer of Hell clip will feel like a crackly Jack Benny broadcast from 1933. The pace of change that's coming will astonish us all. Just imagine what virtual formats will exist in 2026, 2035, and 2050.

That's the Clubhouse Paradox: we're watching a new medium emerge at lightspeed pace. Innovative rooms crop up that we’ve never seen before. It's breathtaking. And yet, it's just fuzzy FM compared to what's next.

The Tool Within You

We hear about them constantly.

The newest tool, the latest app. Have you heard? Seamless, frictionless, scalable, real-time. It's simple, just sign up here, click there, and you're off! Building, creating, sharing.

The pace of new software is breathtaking. We're undergoing the greatest tool revolution in human history, and it's all happening in an afternoon. Rocks into tomahawks took us millions of years. Trendy new apps can reach millions within a few months. New software leaps up forward as a species. It's worth celebrating.

Each new tool brings more optimization. A little better, a little faster, a little easier. As residents of the Twittersphere, we focus untold time and energy searching for that next tool-based tweak that will make all the difference.

Ready for the twist? You already have the best tool of all. It's with you, right now. You can use it to build, create, and share. It's free and easy. The only drawback? It's hard to see. It hides in plain site, undiscovered and under-used.

Language.

That's it?! Yes. Language is the tool. But only when used a certain way.

See, we mostly use words to describe the world. The chair is red. The soup is hot. Reality exists, and words help us describe reality.

No, no, no. Words are not merely descriptive. Words are generative. Reality is far more infinite than our 3 pounds of neurons can fathom. The words we use each day lasso some fraction of the infinite and make it real. What you focus on expands. What you don't focus on doesn't exist, in a way. At least for you.

Every word that leaves your lips, thumbs, or fingertips shapes your reality, whether or not you realize it. Every situation can be viewed from endless perspectives; with language, you decide how you'll view it.

We must be careful of the words we toss around carelessly. I'm bad with names. It's just one of those weeks. 2021 is the WORST! If you say so. But before we complain or self-criticize, we'd do well to remember the beautiful words of Erich Heller:

"Be careful of how you view the world; it is that way."

Just Stand Up

Remember Gulliver?

You probably picture Gulliver as a giant, lying on his back, tied down by string. After traveling the world, Lemeul Gulliver arrives in the land of Lillyput. He's exhausted, so he makes a small clearing and knocks out. Upon waking he finds himself prisoner to thousands of Lillyputians. Those tiny natives spent the night tying poor Gulliver down with little ropes. By themselves, each Lilly was as threatening as a fruit fly. Given time, teamwork, and twine, they're able to ensnare England's greatest explorer.

Think of it! Mighty Gulliver, celebrated world traveler, trapped by a bunch of Lillys.

At first, Gulliver panics. The bindings pinch his wrists and ankles. His mind starts to race: How did I let this happen? What's wrong with me? What's coming next? Gulliver looks at his tiny captors with despair. They laugh with glee.

But Gulliver keeps looking. As he stares at the pesky Lillys, he sees them as they really are: tiny, weak, irrelevant. And suddenly, Gulliver starts to move. First he lifts his feet. The strings begin to break. Up go his arms, then his legs. Snap snap snap go the strings. Gulliver stands up. He leaves Lillyput and never looks back. A world of adventure awaits.

What does this have to do with us?

We are Gulliver. The world of adventure is life in the Age of Abundance: free distribution, billions of people connected across the globe, waiting to hear our ideas. Lillys are fears, tying us down with pesky thoughts: I'm no good, at least not yet. Maybe tomorrow.

The more we think about being creative, the more we bind ourselves to the ground. Clarity comes from action, not thought. Every time you hit publish, a string snaps. The Lillys scatter. Soon you'll be up on your feet, ready to explore the world.

Next time you feel stuck, remember Gulliver. Just stand up.

Ode to It

I first found It – IT – at 16.

It is imprinted on me, and always will be. A warm burst that rises and fades, but never quite leaves.

11th-grade me started on page 80. Slacker? Maybe, but better than skipping the whole assignment. And somewhere after pp. 80 I found my way to It: a passage describing a woman’s laugh. But not a normal laugh. The great, glittering sincerity when a woman laughs from the depths of her being. That laughter which cannot be faked, which wells out naturally like a gurgling brook, like the jonquils (jonquils?) of spring, that laughter you only hear a few times in life, that spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being...I was stunned. I read, and re-read, and re-read it again. Who knew words could carry such a feeling?

I took a break from It in college. Or at least, I looked elsewhere, away from books, toward drinking and bars. And there were glimpses, sure, but often those glimpses made me anxious, cloudy, and unquenchably thirsty the next morning. Not It. Not as pure as before. Except for on occasion, on lonely library all-nighters, I would google "All the King's Men woman's laugh quote", and suddenly feel better.

After college I returned to books. First I found Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. And just typing those words brings It welling back up inside me. That sepia-toned cover. The memoirs of a young kid who becomes a man while traveling the world chasing shorelines. William Finnegan found It inside crashing blue curls. I found It in the language he used to describe them: glimpses of the infinite, confusions of youth,  a mind on fire after a killer 6am set. Certain paragraphs ended so perfectly, so sweetly, I didn't know how to respond. I would pause, stare at the words, look up from the page, make the noise people make at fancy restaurants. What else do you do when you rediscover It?

After tasting It again, I wanted more. And so I read. And read.

Not every books had It. At first, most didn't. They had other things, valuable things: Habit and Grit and Commit. But not It.

So I read some more. And every fifth or sixth book I would get a good feeling. The first few pages would hint at It, or rhyme with It. The glimpses pulled me along, leaning me into the words, and suddenly, boom. It, in Its full glory. And again, I wasn't sure what to do. Pause. Savor. Ponder. Appreciate. Smile one of those smiles where you're trying not to smile, but you can't help yourself, and the smile erupts anyways, even happier than the first smile would have been.

What did I feel in those moments? Disbelief, I think, at the power of language. The way a series of words could be strung together in such a particular way to knock me over with a freight train of IT.

Finally, I found an answer. Or at least an indicator, a way to point to my future self and say "Hey, look, remember when you found It? Right here, this phrase, this metaphor, this stamp of genius as the chapter ended." A symbol I use to light the way through the dark on my second pass. The backwards checkmark.

Whenever I read, I mark up my books. Underlines, sideways lines, checks for the good stuff, stars and page numbers for the really good stuff. But when I find It? A backwards check, always a backwards check. When I re-read a book, or just flip through, I know exactly where to stop and savor.

Certain books flow with so much It, I feel emotional talking about them. So I don't. Or, at least, I dial way, way down before I try to share how I feel. I think I'm over-calibrated on It. Or maybe saying so just makes me feel good. Probably both.

Certain books, certain moments: reading Anam Cara on the beach as the sun was setting. The seashore is a theater of fluency. It disentangles the netted mind. Many of our words today are of the fast-food spiritual variety. We've had an evacuation of interiority. The neon lights of culture leave no room for the candlelit world of the soul. It!

Anthony Doerr: What mazes there are in this world, none more complicated than the human brain, one wet kilogram within which spin universes. It!

Virginia Woolf: What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. And perhaps it never would come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck in the dark. It, It, It!

I find more It in old writing. Words were more forceful back then, before screens drained words of their power. Emerson is my personal King of the It. His essay Nature brims with It. His biography overflows. Self-Reliance is packed with such beauty, I can't figure out what to do about it, except tell people, yell at people, "Look, look! Can't you see It?"

Figuring by Maria Popova's is so densely packed with It, I have yet to finish. I dropped more backwards checks in two chapters than I did my first two years of reading.

My top place to look is novels and memoirs. That's where It hides.

And just what is It? I don't know. That's why it's called It. All I can do is point: a spark of delight you feel in your body. A burst of Yes that strikes you suddenly and never leaves you, even if you forget the exact words. You know It when you see It.

It doesn't have to come from books. Others find It in movies, math, musical riffs, and about 73,000 other places.

But language does It for me.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Below you'll find my personal collection of candles. They look best with the neon off.

• Notes from the End of Everything by Robert Pantano

• Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

• On The Road by Jack Kerouac

• The Razor’s Edge by William Somerset Maugham

• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

• Anam Cara by John O’Donohue

• A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin

• All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

• Figuring by Maria Popova

• Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

• Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
  

• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

• Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The Return by Hisham Matar

• My Antonia by Willa Cather

• All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

• Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson

• The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
  

• What if This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky

• Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse

• Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

• God’s Debris by Scott Adams

• T. Roosevelt: An Autobiography by T. Roosevelt

• Walden by Henry David Thoreau

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

• Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

My Daily War with Abundance

I wake up each morning to an antique.

You may be familiar. They were popular from the 1950s to the early aughts. They started analog, moved to digital, and eventually were gobbled by software, like so much else.

I slap my physical alarm clock each morning and pull myself out of bed. (You know a product category has been devoured by software when we start putting the word "physical" in front of it. Physical clock, physical flashlight, physical battery).

Why do I use a physical alarm clock, like a card-carrying AARP member? It's one of countless strategies I've employed in the ongoing war for my mind.

My personal mind war has raged for eleven years. I remember clearly where it first began: the family desktop computer, after school, junior year of high school. After running track my sophomore spring, I almost joined the cross country team the next fall. But I didn't. Instead, I climbed aboard a digital hamster wheel and started running in place. And eleven years later, I've yet to stop.

Here's what would happen: school got out at 2:10pm. I took the bus home, grabbed a snack, and sat down at the family desktop. Like a magnet, my hand was drawn to the mouse and keyboard of that clunky old Dell. Open a new browser. "SportsIllustrated.com". Enter. Scroll to the lefthand side. SI Hot Clicks. Click.

And so it began. My ongoing battle with Wasted Time.

Since I didn't play a sport that fall, I had little to occupy my afternoons. Sure, I had homework and dinner with the family. But I couldn't drive yet. I barely texted back then. And we had a rule: no TV on school nights. So instead, I dove into the internet.

S.I. Hot Clicks will be familiar to plenty of 20-something-year-old guys (or girls) in the US. It's not as dirty as it sounds. A daily rundown of sports articles, sports rumors, sports gossip, with some video clips thrown in for kicks. Foul ball splashes into Astros fan's beer. Did that Ball State punt seriously go BACKWARDS? Look what Derek Jeter said about dating Minka Kelly. Plus a picture of a beautiful actress or model thrown in at the end. Just those links. Day after day after day.

I couldn't get enough of it.

Each day I couldn't wait for the tasty digital candies that awaited on the family computer. Almost no one had iPhones way back in 2009. I had to wait til I was on the ol' desktop to see The gold suit Knowshown Moreno wore to the NFL draft and Rondo's SICK spin move and dish in the lane.

S.I. Hot Clicks was click bait before click bait was cool. As best I can tell, it's the original sports links aggregator of any consequence on the Internet. Its one-man creator, Jimmy Traina, basically invented the industry. You see plenty of poor man's imitations nowadays (Bleacher Report, USAToday FTW, whatever FoxSports is doing these days). But Hot Clicks started it all.

Both for the industry, and for me. I read Hot Clicks for less than two years, til the end of high school. When another site bought Jimmy out, Hot Clicks tanked. But as the local candy joint closed, a double-decker Candy Heaven opened down the block: The Rest of the Internet. I can chart my past 11 years of life by which furnaces have torched the most hours:

• 2009-2010: S.I. Hot Clicks

• 2010-2012: Yahoo News, Reddit, RealClearPolitics

• 2012-2014: Facebook, DC Sports Bog

• 2015-2017: Deadspin.com, WashingtonPost.com, DC Sports Bog

• 2017: Politico.com

• 2018: CNN.com, ESPN.com, Reddit

• 2019: RealClearPolitics, Deadspin (scab version, smh)

• 2020: CNN, ESPN, Twitter

From 2009 - 2017, I recorded my daily activities on paper monthly calendars. Not for planning...only in hindsight. I like to know what happened. Whenever I wasted time on the internet, I would write a big WT with a circle around it. Wasted Time. I would be terrified to know how many thousands of hours melted into oblivion while I browsed the latest headlines.

The timing of my personal War with Abundance seems especially hard: Facebook and iPhones arrived my freshman year of high school, Snapchat showed up my freshman year of college. Then again, anyone younger than me has the battles stacked even harder against them.

The War of Wasted Time hasn't been a one-sided fight. I've scrapped to rescue my time back, trying new tactics each year. Some of them work! I've been off Facebook for five years. I never made an Insta in the first place. I gave up Yahoo News for lent in 2012 and never returned. I gave quit CNN, ESPN, and Reddit cold-turkey on January 1st 2019, and I haven't been back on Reddit since. I even bought that alarm clock to reduce phone time.

You could draw parallels to smoking in the US. My high school years were the 1950s: delightful drinks of nicotine, unaware of the consequences. College was the 60s and 70s: I knew I had a problem, but I didn't (or couldn't) stop. Gobs and gobs of wasted time. 1980s, post college, some respectable improvements. 90s and 2000s, past few years, cleaned my act up quite a bit. This year, smoking rates are down to quite low. But 25% percent of the country still smokes, or whatever the number may be. Can I ever bring the quitters down to 0? Or even 5%?

Some important caveats: I love the Internet. I'm foolishly excited by this mundane miracle hiding in our pockets. I've given speeches about it, I've talked my friends' ears off about it, I even went on a podcast this week where our entire conversation beamed with wild enthusiasm for the Internet's potential. The Internet has expanded my mind, carved me a new career path, and catapulted me into the world of ideas.

But it hasn't been cheap. Thoreau tells us that "the cost of anything is the amount of life you exchange for that thing." I'll never know the exact bill for these past 11 years, but I know it's steep. I better find a discount in the future.

Books Read in Solitude

These are the books I read during my 10 days of pure solitude:

• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

• A Coney Island for the Mind by Lawrence Ferenghetti

• My Antonia by Willa Cather

• Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

• Walking by Henry David Thoreau

• Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

• Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein

• As One Is by Jiddhu Krishnamurti

• The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer

• Siddartha by Herman Hesse

• Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Building a Second Brain Capstone Project

Building a Second Brain Capstone Project memo

This memo outlines the BASB Capstone Project that students will complete for Cohort 10 of Building a Second Brain. It was originally written for our internal team, but in the spirit of “working with the garage door open”, I’ve decided to share it here.

Overview

Each student will be asked to complete a capstone project of their choosing. Each student will have flexibility when choosing their project topic, but all projects should be 1) creative, 2) challenging (slightly beyond their current abilities), 3) something that impacts others, 4) something that can be shared publicly with others, 5) something they couldn’t complete with their current skills, resources, and system of organization. 

Purpose 

Building a Second Brain students build systems for personal knowledge management. But we don’t create Second Brains merely for the sake of being organized. A Second Brain is meant to be used for some type of productive output. A Second Brain serves as a foundational platform from which creative work occurs. 

In past cohorts, students have asked questions about hypothetical scenarios involving their Second Brains -- how would the system work if some hypothetical circumstance arose? Oftentimes these abstract questions are difficult to answer because they’re too theoretical.

Capstone projects will make those hypothetical scenarios concrete. Each student will select some type of creative project that they’ll use their Second Brain to complete. This project will be the channel through which their new note-taking system is tested. Rather than asking about hypothetical scenarios, all questions will be filtered through the lens of their project. Projects will serve as a real-time “stress test” of their new note-taking system. Projects will also encourage students to stay engaged with BASB through the end of the course. Projects will serve as a forcing function to build a Second Brain system that actually works. To complete the project, they’ll have to capture and organize information, distill it into knowledge, then use that knowledge for creative work.  

There’s no reason to collect information and develop knowledge for its own sake. Knowledge must be used to have an impact on your life, and in the lives of others. Tiago shared the definition of knowledge transfer as “the process through which one person is affected by the experience of another.” The BASB capstone project will ensure that students’ Second Brains are being used to create an impact in the world, beyond the confines of their digital note-taking system. 

Areas of Focus 

Capstone project areas will fall under three general categories:

1. Creative projects

2. Work-related projects

3. Personal life projects

While all capstone projects will involve creativity, creative projects will be focused on producing creative work that will be shared publicly. These projects will be an expression of a personal area of interest, and can come in different forms and mediums. Examples of creative projects include: 

• Write a long-form essay 

• Start a blog 

• Start a website

• Start an email newsletter

• Make a video (film or animated)

• Record a podcast (or podcast episode)

• Conduct an interview 

• Create a work of art (painting, drawing, sculpting, etc)

• Create an online course 

• Develop a software program or app

• Create a Github portfolio

• Develop an animation 

• Hold a fundraiser 

• Prepare and give a speech 

• Create a unique data visualization

Work-related projects include any creative initiatives that contribute to your professional life. Examples include: 

• Start a company newsletter

• Plan a team event (virtual, for now)

• Organize a customer-facing event 

• Prepare a sales presentation 

• Foster virtual community among a team or company

• Create a company WFH manual 

• Complete an industry-specific project 

• Create a company best-practices guide

• Design a training program  

• Develop an internal software application 

• Film a commercial

• Compile a knowledge base (ex: for internal company systems)

• Write and publish a personal career vision/roadmap

• Launch a coaching business

• Create a job search toolkit (resume, informational interviews, cover letters)

Personal life projects will include any project relating to your personal life, likely involving family and friends, but which aren’t meant to be shared with a public audience. Examples include: 

• Create a gift 

• Plan an event (wedding, family reunion)

• Write and share a family newsletter 

• Complete a creative household project 

• Compile your family’s ancestry  

• Write a family history 

• Organize a book club 

• Organize and direct a play (for kids)

• Create a family cookbook 

• Design a language learning plan 

• Create a family budget plan

• Remodel your home

Project Guidelines

We should present the capstone project within the larger context of a project-based approach to work (whether that’s creative work, professional work, or personal work). Most people have ambitious goals that they never act on. These goals amount to feel-good wishes, always perfect in the imagination, but rarely put into action. The best way to produce impactful work is through an iterative, project-based approach. The project is a fundamental unit of work in the information age. We should explain this philosophy to students, so they understand why the capstone project is important, and so they’re encouraged to continue working on projects after the cohort ends.  

Students should think of their projects as a probe into an area of interest. Projects help you see what it’s like to work on something in a limited fashion. If the project goes well, you can always double down and continue working in that direction. If it doesn’t go well, you can pivot and work on something else. Each project is an experiment with a fast feedback loop.

To arrive at the proper scope for a project, we can ask students to envision a big-picture goal they hope to achieve. Then, they should scale down to about 1/10th of that ultimate vision. That’s the appropriate scope for their project. Completing a successful capstone project will give students momentum toward achieving their ultimate goal. 

Potential challenges

Students might have trouble choosing a project. Everyone will have until the second week to choose their capstone project. If students are having trouble deciding what to work on, they can refer to our list of suggested projects, talk with their alumni mentor, or ask for project idea feedback on Circle. We could also hold a project brainstorming session in breakout rooms either during or directly after the first Friday office hours on April 10th. They should also trust their intuition -- most people will have some sort of project they’ve been meaning to start, but haven’t yet. It’s easier to focus on a pre-existing area of interest, rather than trying to start on an entirely new path (although this rule won’t apply to everyone). 

Students might feel overwhelmed working on their project. It’s important that students aren’t choosing projects that are too broad to complete within five weeks. Projects should be challenging, but also manageable enough to finish by the first week of May. Alumni mentors should be trained on how to help students select a project, so they can give guidance on project topics and scope. 

Students might focus too much on their project, at the expense of the BASB curriculum.  The capstone project is important, but students still need to focus on developing their Second Brain system. The Second Brain is the foundation upon which all future projects will be based. An ineffective Second Brain will undermine future work, so it’s important for students to develop their PARA system, note-taking instincts, information capture habits, progressive summarization abilities, and just-in-time project management ability. While returning students may focus more of their energy on the capstone project, mentors should make sure that new students develop a solid BASB foundation.

Students might get discouraged when they see other project ideas. BASB attracts a high-caliber group of students. People will work on impressive projects. We should emphasize that everyone is taking this course at a different place in their life -- we have PHDs and high-level executives, but also college students or people in their early twenties. We should explain that everyone’s project will be different, there’s no right way to complete the capstone project, and your project should serve you, and where you currently find yourself in your life. Comparison is the thief of joy.