Hello to all and a happy New Year to YOU!
I’m back and am full of the New Years spirit. Which means I’m full of new resolutions to create, share, and maybe even send this darn newsletter on a consistent basis.
Typically, I like to follow along in the usual commentary around New Years resolutions. They’re stupid, overdone, and ineffective. If you want to change something about yourself, why do you need to wait for the New Year?
I laugh at all the people setting unrealistic goals publicly and wait to shame them in 2 months when they inevitably fail and give up.
A little secret that I like to keep though is that I actually really like the New year…resolutions and all!
I like that there’s a whole entire season where it’s okay to bite off more than you can chew, challenge yourself , and seek improvement…No questions asked.
But this year felt a little more special. The spirit of self improvement got me thinking, and really that’s all you can ask for, to be inspired to think more.
2020 gave me the opportunity and the platforms to write and create things that other people who aren’t my wife and my mom will read.
15 year old Ben would have been ecstatic about this.
But I’ve lost my ambition to share my ideas. In reality I’ve become completely uncomfortable with it and it’s kept me from publishing far too many times.
So to 2020, I want to thank you for what you’ve given me, but in 2021 I want to continue on this pattern of growth by embracing the uncomfortable.
“Sharing thoughts until it becomes less uncomfortable.”
I’m not going to put too many restrictions around this because the way I pursue this is bound to change over the next year, but I’ve been posting short threads containing some of my thoughts daily on Twitter. you can find them here:
The goal is to make daily publishing/sharing a non negotiable part of my day and subsequently better understand myself and my intentions in the process.
Lets get into this weeks essays.
Consider The Latte
Creativity and the art of insightful consumption
A latte is built with 3 components.
Foam, milk, and at the bottom you have your driving force, espresso.
9 months ago I stumbled upon a community of creators and writers online through Twitter. This community showed me the possibility of allowing myself to pursue creative interests publicly, even if I didn't have hundreds of thousands of people watching. What mattered was that I had a voice and I was allowed to share it with the world.
So that's exactly what I started to do. I built a blog and a newsletter and started shipping original pieces of my own writing for the world to consume at their pleasure.
I was ecstatic.
But through exploration within this online community that I held so close to my heart, I realized I had missed an early step in the online creator process. You have to "brand yourself."
Everybody had a niche or a certain expertise on a subject. Something that they can put in their twitter bio that says "hey this is what I believe and this is why you should trust the things I say."
It makes enough logical marketing sense, but to me this was terrifying.
I wanted to write about anything and everything and I was excited to do so! Why would the internet take away my optionality?
Disgruntled, I realized this was a battle I would soon lose. So I agreed to swallow my pride and compress my personal brand down to a few key subjects only to expand later on. This brought me to my second roadblock.
I was an expert on nothing.
I had no formal training in the subjects I was talking about, I had no reason other people should trust the words I was saying, and I had no real credibility. I was, dare I say, an imposter.
All that excitement and motivation I had to share my voice vanished. I couldn't get myself to write anything because, "what do I have to say that's credible and hasn't already been said?"
So I turned back to my beloved twitter community for some quality Q&A.
A lot of them encouraged me that a niche was the last thing in the world I should be worried about as a creator. Just make the things that you want to make and your "brand" will fall into place naturally.
(This advice is excellent and if anyone reading this is struggling with the "niche" question I recommend it with everything. I'd like to thank Jamie Russo, Cullin McGrath, Damian Kosciolek, and Steven Kneiser for conversations on this (idk if any of you will read this but thank you!)).
But even after following this advice I still was plagued by post dramatic niche pursuit and didn't know what to write about. All of that "anything and everything" that I wanted to write about was gone.
I had to build it back up again.
I turned to one of my favorite past times: Reading (this is where we circle back to latte's, I promise).
Books, articles, essays, short stories - I went into full on consumption mode.
I wanted to find inspiration and direction for my own thoughts through exploration of the thoughts of others.
But a good piece of writing is like a latte.
The foam is the attention grabbing value of the piece. This gets you excited and makes you feel like you get the gist of the whole thing....But really you just read the title.
The milk is the form. The structure, language, and devices the author uses to communicate their ideas.
The espresso, the grand-daddy of them all, is the big picture wisdom that the piece provides.
When I resolved to find things to write about through means of consumption, I quickly realized that all I was doing was mindlessly walking through all this content, skimming the foam off the top of all these lattes and trying to store them in some master foam keeping note system for later use in my own work.
It got me nowhere.
I was seeking to build pieces of writing off the foundation of the foam and not off of insightful ideas.
The reason most people drink coffee is for the caffeine (don't get me started on the decaf drinkers). They sweeten it up with the other components of the latte, but the thing that brings them to the latte in the first place is the energy it provides. The big picture ideas
So what am I doing building off of the literal "fluff?" Why am I not pursuing the big picture espresso of these books that I am reading?
Convenience.
The things I’m drawn to consume are filled with as much relatable, easily applicable, and instructional knowledge as possible without having to get down to the actual "why" behind it.
Understanding an author's true intentions, whether it be through non-fiction or literature, can be a head spinning process. I've found that giving yourself room to expand on the thought before forcing yourself to compress and find that "true meaning" works far better than just thinking really hard about the text.
I'm not too sure about the details of all this and I definitely don't have any objective "how to" on how to find the espresso of any given story. But I do know I have a big picture understanding now of its existence. I'm on a pursuit to discover it in as many scenarios as possible.
A Book Challenge? In This Climate?
I recently discovered Tommy Collison's Great Books Program and was immediately inspired to bite off my own version of the challenge.
But, for once, the new year had me cautious of setting new goals.
This is an especially weird revelation for myself because typically, I'm an annual victim to overestimating my ability to hold a New Years Resolution.
It doesn't help that I'm also what I consider to be a "social goal setter." The new year always sweeps me off my feet with the excitement of a fresh start and the smell of self improvement thick in the air. I tend to bite off more than I can chew...
But there's a little voice in my ear that I've only recently started to notice that is showing me all of the projects and challenges that I've taken on in the past and never finished.
In light of my latest revolution to better understand myself and my intentions before I act, I wrote a short reflection piece on why I should, or shouldn't pursue a book challenge in 2021.
If nothing else it will give you a peek at my approach to reading, and if you're looking to light a little fire under your own desire to read more, it might bring some inspiration.
Recently, reading has left me uninspired.
I still read consistently, but I rarely ever finish a book. I also rarely get excited to read anymore which I’ve found plays a huge role in my big picture thinking.
I've managed to track this error back to the fault of the books that I've been choosing to read.
Not enough variety, perspective, and they all fall under the genre of what I like to call, "instructional knowledge."
Instructional knowledge is expressed from the author in black and white context. A step by step blueprint on how to get from one level to the next.
A lot of "self-help" books fall into this category.
There's nothing wrong with this kind of information, it just wasn't scratching my itch.
I felt stuck reading these types of books because at first they seem deeply relatable. But I realized in order to satisfy that itch I needed components of a two part equation that these types of books were only supplying half of.
The other half comes from Wisdom knowledge.
Wisdom to me is knowledge that has been stored, reflected upon, and implemented into your life to be implemented in future decision making.
Wisdom knowledge can be found anywhere but I find that when the text you're reading is written on a less relatable platform, you're forced to actively seek those big picture lessons and ideas that make up wisdom.
Thus makes up my equation
Intellectual Satisfaction = Instruction + Wisdom
I had been shoving instructional books down my own throat for years now but have been severely lacking wisdom.
My resolution: Read more books written by dead people.
Tommy's program seemed to fit perfectly into what I wanted. A curated list of books written long, long ago!
Alas, reading is hard, I'm not very good at it and it's something I've always struggled to keep up consistent motivation for. If I were to bite off this challenge with true intentions of sticking with it, I had to ask myself if my desire to embark on this intellectual journey were legitimate, or if I had fallen fate to the excitement of "the next project syndrome."
So I made a list:
I want to read more books.
I want to read more books written by dead people.
I want to strengthen my ideas with material that has withstood the test of time.
I often don't know where to start with this problem
I struggle to read consistently.
I strive under competition and public goal setting.
I have a lot on my plate already.
I've been trying to figure out how to create consistency in other struggling aspects of my life already.
This year, I want to build habits of resilience and consistency and up to this moment, reading a long ass list of really difficult books has not been apart of the plan.
Reading in general has though...This plan just looks a little different
I want to use resilience and consistency to strengthen the insight of my thoughts and ideas. I plan of pursuing this practice publicly through a consistent publishing schedule, but in order to find those ideas in the first place I have to nurture my brain through reading.
So I'm going to pursue this...Less as a challenge to finish this list.
More of a challenge to just read.
"I’m ignoring an outcome and focusing more on the process."
I'm going to make a few tweaks to the list Mr. Collison has thrown together. Mainly because I work best when I read a variety of different kinds of books at the same time. And in light of my equation for satisfaction, I need to make sure I balance my intellectual consumption.
The rough structure is to at any given time be reading..
One heavier philosophical text,
One new-agey self-help book
One fiction/historical/biography
I'm starting out the year with a few of my own personal additions, Joseph Campbells "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," a re-read of James Clear's "Atomic Habits," and David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest."
If you're interested in seeing my adjusted list I have it up for grabs in a Notion template here.
I've only adjusted the first year and have resolved to allow myself to adjust it throughout the process
https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1345434840091521025/CL-4VNEm?format=jpg&name=small
he goal with this challenge is to get incrementally a little bit better everyday. My bar is starting out pretty low so I'm going to try and not take myself too seriously and just have some fun while reading these books.
To conclude…
The Length of this weeks letter was steep so if you made it this far I thank you genuinely for having patience with me. To send you all off I’ll show you a few final images of a design project I recently completed in Adobe Illustrator. The piece was a Christmas present for my mom and it’s the front door to my childhood home. Incredibly fun project that holds a special place in my heart.
All of the graphics included in this weeks letter are my own. I really like making things right now and am looking for an excuse to do more design work. If you have any interest in working with me I encourage you to reply to this email or contact me on Twitter here.
Thank you so much for reading!
You're easy to read Ben, I like that. I relate with you on the reading and resolutions parts! My brother is part of a Sherlock Holmes mini book club with his friends that meets for an hour via zoom every week, and it's been very successful as far as consistently meeting but not holding its members to rigid expectations, because of life. Idk, maybe you could do something like that? Peace and love from Brewerton, go Bills!