Meditations on Seeing the World Around You
Jun 17, 2020
Seth Godin was on the Tim Ferriss Podcast, twice in fact, and has distilled years of hard-earned wisdom into easily-digestible nuggets.
Here are some of the highlights around making a blog.
"The daily blog...it's one of the top 5 career decisions I've ever made."
"I don't need anyone's permission. I don't need to go out and promote it. I don't use any analytics. I don't have comments. It's just: this is what I noticed today and I thought I'd share it with you."
"Everyone should blog, even if it's not under their own name, every single day. If you are in public, making predictions and noticing things, your life gets better, because you will find a discipline that can't help but benefit you. If you want to do it in a diary, that's fine, but the problem with diaries is because they're private you can start hiding. Are you able, every day, to say one thing that's new that you can stand behind?"
I love the idea of simply doing something, without anyone’s permission, because you want to, without pressure to please or entertain or enlighten.
It’s just here, this is something I noticed today.
I’ve made this commitment to blog every day for 30 days for at least 15 minutes. It is incredible what you can accomplish in 15 minutes.
But perhaps the more incredible thing is the effect it starts to have on your awareness of the world around you.
I’ve started noticing things. Little things. Sometimes they make it into a blog post, but often they don’t. They are little things in the world, but there is some wisdom there waiting to be had. Here are a few:
I noticed the basil I planted in my garden has started growing new sprouts
I noticed that in the evening, the sunset hits my bed at just the right angle to illuminate the whole thing, as if to say “Don’t worry, I’m preparing this for you.”
I noticed the new bike lanes added to the road in front of my building. They are supposedly temporary, but within 2 days, the traffic congestion has diminished and people have learned to cope with reduced lanes.
I noticed the shear volume of people playing outside, walking, and being present in the neighbourhood last night. It’s amazing what nice weather, 2 months of quarantine and social distancing, and a big open space to do to a community.
I noticed that people in the park prefer to sit under the trees around the edges rather than in the middle of the field. I’m sure some park designer has thought long and hard about this, but why not put more trees in the middle? Would that make the center of the park more desirable? People playing ultimate or soccer prefer the open space, but it is not used nearly as widely as the slightly-inclined, shaded edges around the perimeter.
I noticed that I have been identifying thoughts passing through my head that are “blog worthy”, as if they are pieces of sushi on a conveyor belt passing my table at an automated sushi bar in Tokyo. If I like the look of one, I grab it off the conveyor and put it on my table, saving it for posting to the blog later.
I noticed how easily I can be distracted throughout the day. This is something I need to work on. It’s not just about laser focus - sometimes distractions are welcome! - but rather about what I am being distracted by. I would rather be disrupted by the urge to go for a run than by a cute cat video
Perhaps all this noticing will yield something more productive in the future.
HT: Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, CJ Chilvers