This piece eerily parallels a lot of what I've been experimenting with the past few days. Singletasking. Being bored. Walking when I'm walking; brushing my teeth when I'm brushing my teeth. I'm bad at it, and often find myself doing two or three things at once when I meant to do one, but I'm finding what you found: once I stop ingesting content and ideas, my brain starts flooding with ideas, some of which are pretty good. Maybe the anti-book could be titled Just Don't Do Things. More of a directive (and a sharp response to Nike's entire marketing approach).
"Reading The Power Broker in your spare time, not because you are genuinely interested, but because you can’t bear to be the only person at your SF dinner party who hasn’t?" -- this feels like acting from a place of tension. It's what I learned from your husband as tanha (or, in my weak paraphrasing, desire attached to an outcome).
I love the idea of yin and yang ideas. It brings to mind this metaphor popularized by Google X when approaching their most ambitious projects. Imagine you’re trying to teach a monkey to juggle flaming torches while it stands on a pedestal in the town square. Two tasks are competing for your time, attention: training the monkey and building the pedestal.
The first thing to do is identify the bottleneck. It is not the pedestal; it is the monkey. Training the monkey is orders of magnitude harder than building a pedestal. I’m reading your yin book as, Don’t just build pedestals. And your yang book, you can just train monkeys.
Oh no. How do you write this after I’ve been working so hard on resting and being more balanced? I feel like you’re right, the yin book would help me more at this point. Maybe can I ask you or the commentariat for recommendations?
Evidence for your thesis: Having given up on finding my left earbud to read this, I discovered it was in my hood.
This piece eerily parallels a lot of what I've been experimenting with the past few days. Singletasking. Being bored. Walking when I'm walking; brushing my teeth when I'm brushing my teeth. I'm bad at it, and often find myself doing two or three things at once when I meant to do one, but I'm finding what you found: once I stop ingesting content and ideas, my brain starts flooding with ideas, some of which are pretty good. Maybe the anti-book could be titled Just Don't Do Things. More of a directive (and a sharp response to Nike's entire marketing approach).
"Reading The Power Broker in your spare time, not because you are genuinely interested, but because you can’t bear to be the only person at your SF dinner party who hasn’t?" -- this feels like acting from a place of tension. It's what I learned from your husband as tanha (or, in my weak paraphrasing, desire attached to an outcome).
I love the idea of yin and yang ideas. It brings to mind this metaphor popularized by Google X when approaching their most ambitious projects. Imagine you’re trying to teach a monkey to juggle flaming torches while it stands on a pedestal in the town square. Two tasks are competing for your time, attention: training the monkey and building the pedestal.
The first thing to do is identify the bottleneck. It is not the pedestal; it is the monkey. Training the monkey is orders of magnitude harder than building a pedestal. I’m reading your yin book as, Don’t just build pedestals. And your yang book, you can just train monkeys.
I like it!
I'm really looking forward to the book (and towards the anti-book!)
Oh no. How do you write this after I’ve been working so hard on resting and being more balanced? I feel like you’re right, the yin book would help me more at this point. Maybe can I ask you or the commentariat for recommendations?
How can I preorder your book?
We’re still pre-preorder, but you can sign up to be notified here! https://mailchi.mp/44578760e686/book-preorder-signup