Book Club 15 - Looking Back to Connect the Dots
The following was originally published for Patrons on January 19th, 2024. Get caught up at your own pace by joining at the "Post Parisian" level or above!
There’s been a lot on this week and my reading has slowed as a result (also because I wasn’t lying when I said the book I’m reading is taking me a lot longer to get through - it’s like 60% fluff which drives me INSANE). Despite the fact that it feels perpetually padded, there have been some great quotes that hit me just right and keep me reading. To the point that I screenshot and shared a few with Jeff, and read another to Paul at lunch.
In the pursuit of embracing uncertainty, this passage captures both the great promise and wild threat inherent in believing so fully in one’s self.
The promise is that you are the only you and that by focusing on fully expressing yourself, you can do and be what no one else can. If you pursue what interests you most, follow your curiosities, do what lights you up, you are on the path to making the greatest impact on the world you could ever manage. There’s no need to look anywhere else. You need only trust yourself.
But there’s the threat. There is no set path before you, and the journey into the darkness will be hard. No one else can guide you or tell you what makes a right decision. Do you trust yourself when the world beyond is nothing if uncertain? There’s no false comfort of career paths and corporate ladders here - no adults in the room and no gurus with missing answers - even if those are tools that help for a while, following your own path will eventually diverge from anyone else’s. Learning to trust in yourself, then, becomes a vital exercise.
“The gain” isn’t meant in gym bro terms here, but as a mindset difference between living in “the gap” and “the gain.” The gap being the space where you measure your life against what could or should be instead of appreciating what is. That’s living in the gain, when you look at the gains you’ve made and recognize that, while you may not be where you imagined, and you may not know what’s coming next, you’re doing well compared to where you were yesterday, last month, last year, or last decade. It’s a form of grounding melded with gratitude.
The exercise that’s useful here can be extrapolated from the Steve Jobs quote about not being able to see and connect any dots in the future, but being able to connect the dots looking backwards. If we take the time to look back at where we were, what we’ve gone through, and how that’s changed us and brought us to where we are, we can see more clearly just how much we’ve already accomplished. We can learn to trust ourselves. We can handle hard things. We are on an upward trajectory over time, even if we have no idea where that trajectory is taking us.
It’s time to trust that whatever comes next, we’ll be capable of handling it. Even more, that trusting our innate desires and abilities will lead us into arenas we’d never imagined and a life that we were made to live.
This Week’s Haul
I sent this video to Jeff this week because I knew he’d love it, and maybe you will too. It’s a perspective on creative process called “The Cult of Done” which essentially pushes against perfectionism and overvaluing ‘the thing’ when the real value of creating is the change it generates within us and whomever sees our art.
I love a good video essay or YouTube documentary, partially because how niche and weird they can get. This deep dive into the origins of a ubiquitous gif was so well done that despite seeing some of the seams, I couldn’t help but watch through to the end.
Part of the reason I love stuff like that is because it helps me to wind down after finishing work. Watching anything ‘serious,’ news-related (including all of the YouTubers quitting or reactions to those videos - never mind international conflicts), or even just a great story (not YouTube but I watched Punch Drunk Love for the first time this week and WOW, not at all what I expected) can leave me in my usual alert-can’t-sleep state for a bit too long. Interesting-yet-unimportant content like comedic tech news or a deep dive documentary is often a great way to learn something while also letting my brain slowly switch off in the evening.
I’ll watch the serious stuff at lunch =)
How about you? Find anything good this week?