The driveway moment: When a report or interview really works, you can tell and we can tell. We can, because the story hits the top of the most emailed list at NPR.org. You can tell, because the story keeps you pinned in your car, in a parking lot, in your driveway, or at the side of the road—as you wait to hear how the story will end. In letters and emails, listeners named these occurrences “driveway moments,” and say they look forward to them, even when it means being late for work or dinner. So that’s your goal: make some driveway moments.
I’m finally heading into NPR’s book, Sound Reporting, and this big of context included by Kernis in the Foreword got me thinking…
What are you doing so that you even know when you’ve put out a “driveway moment?”
It doesn’t matter at all if we feel it’s a driveway moment. It matters if our listeners think so. Are you paying attention to your listeners? Do you have multiple ways for them to connect back to you?
I do think about “driveway moments” when creating episodes. It’s difficult however, given the way that I create my work; They have to simply happen. If one wants to create them, that requires planning, work and editing.
For me, when I encounter a listener (virtually or in real life) the only question I ask them is…
Has any episode grabbed you? …any particular moment or image?
I wrote this book with the following question in mind: If the ancient Stoics had taken it upon themselves to write a guidebook for twenty-first-century individuals—a book that would tell us how to have a good life—what might that book have looked like? The pages that follow are my answer to this question.
There are a lot of books and ideas that get put forward when talking about Stoicism. This book is the best place to start. I wish I had found it much closer to when it was written in 2009. I wish it had been written 30 years sooner, and that I’d found it back then.
The Stoics’ interest in logic is a natural consequence of their belief that man’s distinguishing feature is his rationality. Logic is, after all, the study of the proper use of reasoning.
Ibid p33
[…] when the Stoics counsel us to live each day as if it were our last, their goal is not to change our activities but to change our state of mind as we carry out those activities. In particular, they don’t want us to stop thinking about or planning for tomorrow; instead they want us, as we think about and plan for tomorrow, to remember to appreciate today.
Ibid p71
[W]hen Stoics contemplate their own death, it si not because they long for death but because they want to get the most out of life. As we have seen, someone who thinks he will live forever si far more likely to waste his days than someone who fully understands that his days are numbered, and one way to gain this understanding is periodically to contemplate his own death.
After reading the first “book” in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, I’m inspired to define, for me specifically: What is “the work?”
In a specific moment, on a specific day, when I feel that odd uneasiness, I will not try to identify the specific form Resistance is taking. Instead as Pressfield mentions on page 12:
[…] We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others.
Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
As a real example of my own experience, Resistance’s compass guides me towards watching sci-fi entertainment (“a harmless relaxation,” I think after working in my yard for hours). So the opposite would be to… organize and streamline my writing environment and processes so tomorrow I can write more easily! No. My hiding in preparation and perfection is just another form of Resistance.
The best way for me is to look at all the possible things I could do, rather than follow Resistance’s compass. Then boil that down to a list of positive, actionable, directions in which I can sit down and work.
In a specific moment, on a specific day, when I feel that odd uneasiness, I can glance at my list and simply do a bit of The Work.
To defeat Resistance I can simply sit down, and do a little bit of any of the following…
do guest outreach for podcasting
write the next issue of 7 for Sunday
write the next Open + Curious article
write new blog posts
ɕ
PS: I’ve listed “do guest outreach” because—for me—once I do that consistently for a few weeks, all the rest of the podcasting process follows automatically.
Friend and fellow podcaster Angie Flynn-McIver published a book, Before You Say Anything, in 2021…
Your intention should be something that really lights you up. You need to feel it in your chest, in your gut. It is the verb that connects you to your audience, the umbilical cord that takes your energy to them and brings theirs back to you. Intention is action.
Little Box of Quotes — For those who don’t know: The quote at the top is now included in my collection, which I call the Little Box of Quotes — number 1,471 to be exact. There’s a daily email available with just exactly one quote, and nothing more. For several years it was also a daily podcast which to more than 1,000 episodes (still available wherever you listen). All free, just because I like to create things that make the world a better place.
For me, fully internalizing this one powerful piece of inspiring profanity has been transformative. But I still find that returning regularly to the well makes all this work even better. So I downloaded both of the Goggins’s audiobooks and worked through them in little chunks on my morning walks over the period of a month. Then I moved on to Peter Attia’s Outlive, and Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership.
I really do know what I should be doing. (I have no idea if you, or anyone else, does too.) But I can tell you that even though I know… it’s still tough to do the soul-crushing work. I’ve not read any of the books above—although Outlive is on my to-read pile.
Taking notes on the books I read was a great start, but it wasn’t enough. It did me no good to leave those notes sitting in a software program like a musty filing cabinet in the basement, never to see the light of day again.
I realized if I wanted to benefit from my reading, I needed to engage with the books I read on a much deeper level. I needed to make something out of them. Otherwise, I would continue to passively consume information with no lasting memory of what I learned.
Has anyone noticed that’s what I’m attempting to do with all my blogging and writing? Shirley, that’s obvious. (It’s not obvious, and don’t call me Shirley.)
I’ve always deeply loved movies. I was raised (on hose water and neglect) in the era when going to a movie was special. Remember when you had to use the phone (with a rotary dial, mounted on the wall) to call the theatre and listen to a looooong recording detailing what was playing and when? I could tell you so so so many stories about going to the movies. In more recent issues of 7 for Sunday, I’m feeling less inclined to stomp down the inside-joke movie references. If you find them even half as enjoyable to read, as I do to write them, then we’re both better off. I’m pretty sure that my recalling and retelling of all those stories about and around movies makes the entire movie experience more fun; yes the experience during the movie, but also all the stuff around it too.
No, I’ve not lost my own plot. Forte’s point about how to benefit from what one reads is the same thing. If you want to hold on to whatever it was that you’ve gotten from a book… you have to integrate it with the rest of your ongoing, lived experience. You have to go around telling the story of who gave you the book, what the book means to you in the context of your entire life, and what you think your interlocutor might get from it (like this, this, this, this, this, this or… you get my point.)
And as soon as you realize that’s fun for movies, and great for books, you should wonder if it could be a super-power for self-improvement if you could share the contents of your mind, with yourself, in that same fashion. Two suggestions: Start journaling immediately after reading this issue of 7 for Sunday, so you can then begin in a year, to regularly review your journals.
‘Dagon’ has all the elements of a classic Lovecraft tale. Here, as in many of his later works – including ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (written in 1926), The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927), and At the Mountains of Madness (1931) – optimistic endeavours for knowledge, even the simple act of seeing what’s on the other side of a hill, are thwarted by incomprehensible terrors and a horrifyingly arbitrary cosmic order. These revelations shatter the minds of Lovecraft’s truth-seeking characters, including doctors, archaeologists, lost sailors, metaphysicians and scientists of all kinds.
Some people must think that reading a bunch of Lovecraft’s work was time I wasted. I loved it. I didn’t find it scary (I’m not sure I’ve ever found any book scary. Movies, on the other hand, can scare the hell out of me.) But I deeply enjoyed Lovecraft… and yet I could never quite express why. After reading Woodward’s thoughts I’m thinking I enjoyed the experience—being myself one of those “doctors, archaeologists, lost sailors, metaphysicians and scientists of all kinds”—of seeing people like me get the hell scared out of them.
During rare, spontaneous moments, experiences of very special quality and great import emerge from the depths of the human brain. To each person, these awakenings seem awesomely new. What they convey is not. It is the simplest, oldest wisdom in the world. The message is that ultimate meaning is to be found in this present moment, infusing our everyday lives, here and now. But one can’t predict such major peaks of enlightenment. Their insight-wisdom is next to impossible to describe. Even so, these fragile events inspired our major religions in ways that still shape our cultural development.
Because in reality, none of us actually understands how our minds work. We only know that sometimes, our minds do some pretty amazing things. It would be great (we, I hope, all think) if I could tweak my mind to do that a little more often.
But what really made Vinge the father of the Singularity was his fiction. His 1981 novella “True Names” created many of the tropes about artificial intelligence and virtual worlds that have now become standard. It’s such a tour de force that top computer scientists felt compelled to write a series of essays exploring its ideas, and it’s often considered the founding work of the entire cyberpunk genre.
I have always loved book stores. All types. All sizes. All manner of [dis]organization. When I was young, each store represented a hoard of tomes I could not even dream of possessing. How many books would I have bought? …how much money do you have? Literally. The books I did have then became valuable to me. They were precious because I had chosen them for purchase with various allotments I received; Or they were gifted to me making them both surprising and precious. To this day: Mmmmmmmm, bookstores.
Each store has its own way of embracing you, embracing the reader, and creating a sense of the universe expanding. For anybody curious and interested in printed matter, the more bookstores you go into, the more you’ll realize how many different ways there are to be curious. That helps us set a foundation to be more knowledgeable about the world we inhabit. The practical and the sheer joy of it.
In more recent years, resources have become available. These days, each time I wander into a bookstore I think: Once—just once—I’m going to clear the rest of my day, and spend it all here in this bookstore, and I’m going to buy every single book that i want. Just to see what that feels like.
I recently heard a conversation between Brian Koppelman and Steven Pressfield (circa 2019 in Koppelman’s podcast, The Moment) where Pressfield mentioned a few great things for creatives to remember: Being a professional has nothing to do with getting paid. Resistance is real, it’s myself, and is waiting for me to invite it to stop me. The Muse is real.
The muse really does reward me for being found working. I’ve learned, no matter the work, the muse approves when finding me ready with pen and paper close. But if the muse taps me and I fail to treat the gift appropriately—if I think, “I’ll remember that. I don’t need to write that down.”—then I hear the muse scoff, “we shall see.” We shall see if I remember. And we shall see if the muse waits a bit longer before checking on me again.
That, of course, was the reason for the pen all along: it’s a physical reminder that you are not reading merely to consume the words of others passively, but that you have an obligation to respond.
I’m realizing that books themselves also need room to sprawl. If I keep them shelved upright, or even more simply stacked flat, they still seem to be squished into submission. When I am able to lay a few of them out, with some room for them to wave their invisible tendrils, they seem to taunt me: go ahead, pick me up! If there’s a tablet or some writing scraps at hand, or garish sticky notes for flagging pages, then it begins to feel like its own room with unfolding conversations. In the end, it’s almost a composition just having the books lying about.
Have you ever looked at your own writing and wondered: What author’s work might it resemble? And if you haven’t, I hope I didn’t just break writing for you.
All I can remember of these once indispensable arts is the intense boredom by which the practice of them was accompanied. Even today the sight of Dr. Smith’s Shorter Latin Dictionary, or of Liddell’s and Scott’s Greek Lexicon, has power to recall that ancient ennui. What dreary hours I have spent frantically turning those pages in search of a word for “cow” that could be scanned as a dactyl, or to make sure that my memory of the irregular verbs and the Greek accents was not at fault! I hate to think of all that wasted time. And yet, in view of the fact that most human beings are destined to pass most of their lives at jobs in which it is impossible for them to take the slightest interest, this old-fashioned training with the dictionary may have been extremely salutary. At least it taught one to know and expect the worst of life. Whereas the pupil in a progressive school, where everything is made to seem entertaining and significant, lives in a fool’s paradise. As a preparation for life, not as it ought to be, but as it actually is, the horrors of Greek grammar and the systematic idiocy of Latin verses were perfectly appropriate. On the other hand, it must be admitted that they tended to leave their victims with a quite irrational distaste for poor dear Dr. Smith.
Lest you think that’s an overly long quote, I’ll point out it’s still only about half of the paragraph. Huxley can really unspool a sentence. Some of the writing in that book—Huxley’s, omg no not Smith’s dictionary—are overwrought. But some of them have a delicious tinkling of structure and grammar with an occasional punctuation of solid snark.
Vincent Thibault joins Craig to discuss the dance between movement and mindfulness, and the balance of effort and ease in training Art du Déplacement.
You don’t have to pretend that you’re in top shape. If you’re not in top shape that very day you just do what you can. You can be yourself and the whole notion of ease is actually very profound, and that’s where my personal training connects with meditation […] One of the first things we learn with Buddhist Meditation is to be friends with yourself. I don’t want to confuse the whole discussion and mix our metaphors here, but there’s this notion of learning to be friends with your own mind, and that can translate into the way you approach movement and any kind of training.
~ Vincent Thibault 35:55
Vincent, a dedicated Buddhist practitioner, engages with Craig in a dynamic conversation encompassing spiritual insights merged with movement philosophy. They discuss the balance between effort and ease within training, stressing the importance of adapting to personal circumstances over time. They touch on Buddhist teachings in the context of physical discipline, emphasizing mindfulness, authentic connection, and embracing change as core tenets of their practice.
[Connection] also means that you could be connected to the people who have been practicing this before you. Whether you’ve learned from the Yamakasi or somebody else, you can acknowledge that. You can appreciate what you’ve received from them. And there’s also connection with the people who will come after you. Because—sorry to deliver the news—but you won’t be there forever and you won’t be coaching forever if you’re a coach. And you won’t be moving in the same way forever, and you don’t know when you’re going to see it.
~ Vincent Thibault 37:30
Throughout their exchange, Vincent and Craig explore the nuances of effort in training, highlighting the significance of finding ease alongside dedication. They go into the broader concept of ‘connection,’ extending beyond physicality to encompass energy levels, environment, and a respectful acknowledgment of both predecessors and successors in the discipline.
They discuss how cultivating internal ease can transcend into disciplined practices, fostering mindfulness and self-acceptance. Vincent underlines the necessity of adaptation, advocating for working with present circumstances rather than fixating on an idealized version of practice.
Takeaways
Effort and Ease — Emphasizing the balance between effort and ease in training, stressing the importance of finding fulfillment in the process rather than solely fixating on results.
Connection Beyond Physicality — The notion of connection expands to encompass various dimensions, including relationships with training partners, acknowledgment of predecessors, and a connection to one’s own energy levels and environment.
Adaptation as Vital — The conversation underscores the significance of adapting to circumstances, encouraging practitioners to work with their current situation rather than against it.
Integration of Buddhist Philosophy — Buddhist principles blend with movement philosophy, highlighting mindfulness, authenticity, and self-acceptance as integral components of disciplined practice.
Authenticity in Practice — Being authentic with oneself and others in training is emphasized, encouraging individuals to be genuine about their abilities, limitations, and present state of being.
Resources
Parkour & Art du déplacement: Lessons in practical wisdom – Leçons de sagesse pratique — Vincent Thibault’s 2015 book discussed in the podcast. The book contains both the French and English text. Don’t confuse it with the similarly named, but completely different book, “Parkour and the Art du déplacement: Strength, Dignity, Community”, published in 2014.
Carrefours Azure (French-language site) — Vincent’s book publishing company founded in 2016. Fiction and nonfiction. A small publishing house with an innovative and ecological model: books are printed on demand, in Quebec or in France depending on the customer’s shipping address (no pulping, minimal transportation). For every book sold directly on Carrefours azur’s website, a percentage is given back to a green initiative or a humanitarian cause.
Vincent Thibault (French-language site) — Vincent’s personal web site.
Study inspired by… — A series of blog posts, circa 2015, written by Craig, mentioned in this podcast.
I recently cracked open Listening: Interviews, 1970-1989 by Jonathan Cott. The Introduction alone knocked one of my socks off; I leapt out of my reading chair to search the Internet hoping the Introduction might be published publicly so I could share it. Alas, instead I found this:
There ought to be a word in English that describes the nearly uncontrollable urge to leap out of a reading chair, race to find a friend, and press the book you are reading urgently into their hands. When they politely agree to take a look, you say no, no, you have to read this right now. Let me hold your coffee.
Which—thank you W. Scott Olsen!—is an altogether different thing, which knocked my other sock off. I took a few moments to noodle it and didn’t have any good ideas. Then I asked Chat-GPT (v3.5 if you’re keeping score)…
Make up a new english word which describes the nearly uncontrollable urge to leap out of a reading chair, race to find a friend, and press the book you are reading urgently into their hands. When they politely agree to take a look, you say no, no, you have to read this right now while I hold your coffee.
How about “bibliofervor”? It combines “biblio,” relating to books or reading, with “fervor,” conveying intense passion or enthusiasm. This word captures the strong, almost irresistible impulse to share a captivating book with a friend, urging them to read it immediately, even going as far as offering to hold their coffee just so they can dive into the story right away. It’s that delightful moment when a book is so enthralling that you can’t help but share it with someone else in real-time.
Oi! That is a superlative answer. NEW WORD: Bibliofervor :)
I recall a little sign which was sometimes spotted on desks, back in the before-times when everyone had a desk and papers and ring-binders and books and a telephone that also sat upon that desk. The sign was: “A messy desk is a sign of genius.” (And sometimes it said, “…of a creative mind.” )
I’ve had a lot of desks. In every case, I’ve always swerved repeatedly between messy and organized. I get to a point where—sometimes with a literal scream—I stop working and reorganize everything. For a long time, I hoped that one day I would manage to be just comfortable enough, with just the right amount of clutter and chaos, to be able to reach a steady state.
One detail that drives me bonkers is in the digital realm, computers are perfectly organized. I use a tool (called Reeder) to manage a read-this-later collection. It’s a big collection often reaching 500 different things marked as possibly interesting. (Some are interesting enough to spend a few minutes on, some are interesting enough to spend hours on.) Sometimes I’ll randomly shuffle things in a digital list. But sometimes… the list is just ordered the way you assemble it. And you can look at the list in forward or reverse order. This gets to me. If it’s a big list, neither forwards or backwards is best. So instead, I do both: I read the item off one end (the thing that’s been in the list longest) and then the other (the newest), and I just alternate in a reading session.
Perhaps this seems like a silly or trivial thing to point out. But there’s a bigger lesson: Where do I have some specific structure (organization, ordering, etc.) that I didn’t actually intend? …is that structure holding me back or keeping me from experiencing something I’d prefer?
Learning to distinguish the map versus the territory is an essential step. It’s critical to learn what a map is, and what maps are good for, in order to proceed with one’s life. Maps enable me to see and do things otherwise impossible; maps reveal unknown unknowns. Maps can also frustrate me endlessly. Sometimes I don’t want to have an opinion; I don’t want to spend the energy to have an opinion. I don’t care how I get from here to there. Just. Tell. Me. how to get there. And of course nothing in this paragraph has to do with literal maps of the world— I’m not talking about cartography nor driving directions.
On closer examination, it turns out there are many things wrong with it. Thousand True Fans is a hollow philosophy. It is Chicken Soup for the Digital Creator’s Soul, ultimately devoid of any real nutritional value.
Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans is a map, before it there was another map, The Cluetrain Manifesto, and there were others. When you find a new-to-you map it opens your mind to new possibilities. I would assume the first children’s books I encountered were astounding, but wouldn’t have the same effect today. (I’m not denigrating either of those works; I’m not suggesting they are “children’s books”.)
But I do get frustrated. I see a terrific map, and then I want to make a terrific next “move”. That’s not how maps work, Craig. You look at the map, then you take the next small step informed by everything you know, including the new perspective from the new map. You write one sentence (for example, on a page soliciting support for your work) and that’s informed by all the maps you’ve previously seen. Big picture. Little steps.
