🥁 Musilanguage, Time Affluence, and Career Tarot

I’m Allison Stadd, drummer turned CMO, and I write for people who want the way we work to work for us.

This issue’s soundtrack:

Happy Sunday,

Here are 11 things to jump-start your creative battery this week:

🕰️ A reminder that if your whole life were a 24-hour day, it’d be just 8AM when you turn 30: This is a great reframe for the passage of time and the meaning we ascribe to various ages. The reality is that, if you think about your lifespan as a 24-hour day, at age 30 it’s only 8AM, age 40 it’s only 10:40AM, age 50 it’s only 1:20PM, etc. You have so much time to become the person you’re meant to be.

💻 A beautiful idea from maja to share a Life Update periodically with friends, family, mentors, colleagues: 4 suggested parts:

• Where I am: what happened, what changed, what I am working on, what feels alive.

• What I am learning: what worked, what did not, what patterns I am noticing, what I am slowly understanding.

• What I am wondering: the questions I keep returning to, the decisions I am circling, the places where I feel uncertain or unfinished.

• Where help would help: the advice, introductions, examples, encouragement, reality checks, or questions that would be useful right now.

🎼 A fascinating concept called “musilanguage”: I was fascinated to discover that before music and before language, there was one mixture of the two that sounded across the savannah. That “musilanguage” then split and specialized into two different forms of communication: one for ideas, one for emotion. It’s no wonder music is such a powerful form of communication; it’s in our very blood and brains.

😃 An examination of why the more energy we focus on trying to feel happy, the harder it is to achieve: I loved this NYT interview with cognitive scientist and professor Laurie Santos, whose class on happiness is the most popular in Yale’s history. She talks about time affluence vs. time famine, the two types of happiness (hedonic and eudaimonic), and why Americans are “weirdos” when it comes to happiness.

🎤 A good reminder from Cal Newport that it’s good for your brain to share your thoughts with the public: “There’s a focusing effect that comes from performing for a crowd. When you want to impress other people, or add to the conversation in a meaningful way, your mind slips into a higher gear than what’s easily accessible in solo introspection.” — Cal Newport, Slow Productivity

⏱️ An approach to being “time rich”: Harvard professor Ashley Whillans gave a great TED talk on overcoming time poverty, i.e. feeling like you have too many things to do and not enough time. I relate so hard to this and appreciated some of her tips, like keeping a time affluence to-do list.

🏖️ A way to plan your summer intentionally: There’s something about the way Gretchen Rubin’s brain works that jibes with mine so perfectly. Here she gives us an approach and a template for mindfully designing the season, to make sure we have the summer experience we want.

🤪 A hilarious list of 10 things only a poly-professional will understand: It had me at “having an identity crisis when you have to introduce yourself.”

❤️‍🔥 A rich take from Hannah Zhang on what to do when you’re ambitious but nothing excites you: I especially love her idea of taking a side quest. And she even created a free career tarot card game to help you start figuring out what’s next.

✅ A reminder of how important it is to commit: I love this take from Ellen Hendriksen on the power of resisting how easy it is to cancel or decline.

📣 A helpful guide to sharing your point of view even when you’re afraid of being wrong: Everything Wes Kao writes is so thoughtful and clear, including this set of tactical ideas for overcoming the high performer’s anxiety of speaking up and being incorrect.

Have a fun and functional week,

Allison

P.S. Paid subscribers get access to The Workroom 🔐, a bank of juicy extras like templates, resources & discounts that I update regularly. Every tool & perk in this archive is built from almost 20 years inside some of the most high-growth, fast-paced companies in the country (Anheuser-Busch InBev, Shake Shack, Sweetgreen, Shipt, BarkBox).

Folks across 42 U.S. states and 73 countries from companies like LVMH, Unilever, Salesforce, The Atlantic, and The Home Depot are reading along. You in?

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