Expeditions On False Trails In 1926, the great psychoanalyst and writer Marion Milner made herself the subject of an experiment to determine what actually made her happy. The method was simply to go about her life as usual, pay a little closer attention to the moments and experiences in which she felt particularly happy, record [ ] The post SIX at 6: False Trails, Wasted Efforts, Ruling Things…
Like It’s The First Time A few months ago, I went to a comedy show that I later learned was one stop on a world tour of more than a hundred performances. It struck me as one of the job’s less obvious challenges: performing the same material with the same energy, the same animation, the [ ] The post SIX at 6: Like It’s The First Time, Everything’s Just Bricklaying, Trying To Have the Time of Your…
Accept The Initial Agitation Every morning when I sit down to read and then when I sit down to write, I say to myself, “Accept the initial agitation.” When you try to focus, Dr. Andrew Huberman explains, “the brain circuits that turn on first are of the stress system.” Meaning that when you try to lean [ ] The post SIX at 6: The Initial Agitation, The Essence of Mastery, Starting With Shit, The…
“The Point” A little while back, I overheard someone talking about the many things they’d decided against doing because they didn’t see “the point” in doing them. They’d thought about starting a YouTube channel, but as they saw it, YouTubers just game an algorithm to get subscribers, and they didn’t really see the point in [ ] The post SIX at 6: “The Point,” What The World Doesn’t Need, Wasting…
Going Through The Trouble In 1959, Bob Dylan played his first-ever gig at a coffee house called the Ten O’Clock Scholar in Minnesota. At one point, a woman pulled the owner of the Scholar aside. “Make him stop singing,” she said. “He’s driving all the customers out of this place.” For years, versions of this [ ] The post SIX at 6: Going Through The Trouble, Possessors Of Mysterious Secrets, A…
Get It Cooking Nearly forty years into her career, Toni Morrison was asked how her writing routine had evolved over the years. “Well,” she said, “I learned over the last eight or nine books how to use my time better.” Early on, her tendency was to put off starting, feeling she needed to have the entire [ ] The post SIX at 6: Getting Things Cooking, Going To The Frontier of Confusion, Making…
The Fantasy Of An Unconstrained Life Out to eat a little while back, I overheard a woman at the table behind me say that she had decided she wasn’t going to have children because there was just so much she wanted to do. She was with three friends—another girl and two guys, who all looked [ ] The post SIX at 6: An Unconstrained Life, Withdrawing From The World, Spinning Off The Planet, Cutting…
Things Going As Planned Versus Things Going Well The historian Ada Palmer points out that one of the most recurring patterns of change and progress is that things often don’t go the way people planned or imagined. In the early days of the Renaissance, for example, the Italian poet Petrarch helped recover ancient texts, hoping [ ] The post SIX at 6: Things Going Well, Castles In The Air, The Broken…
The Way In Which One Puts Oneself Together In The Cross of Redemption, James Baldwin defines identity as “the way in which one puts oneself together.” As we move through life, he writes, we haphazardly cobble together an identity, piece by piece, and then at some point, we forget that we did this. We forget that [ ] The post SIX at 6: Putting Ourselves Together, Not Knowing Who You Are, Mistaking…
Mental Jiu-Jitsu Moves On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for John Hammond, the record producer who’d signed Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes. “I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen wrote, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself.” “I thought, [ ] The post SIX at 6: Mental Moves, Funny-Stupid…