3 Days Before The Dawn Of 2019
Creative Sparks: #22
As we wind down for the festive season; exchanging gifts and feasting, I’m reminded not everyone has the privilege to enjoy “the most wonderful time of the year”.
People are lonely out there, and sometimes a kind word, a reminder that they are still seen and heard would make all the difference to them.
Some of my finds worth sharing over the last 2–3 weeks:
1. Cold Discovery by Drew Austin, Real Life Mag.
An eye-opening essay on how the shift towards “watching Netflix”, not shows or “listening to Spotify” rather than songs is changing our relationship with the two mediums. In its physical form, covers were essential to discovery and categorizing new songs or books; now algorithms do the work for you.
Remembering the feeling of stumbling upon an unexpected new find; how much of this experience is now governed by computers versus generated ‘naturally’ by old-fashioned exploration?
2. Online Courses May Not Be as Valuable as You Hope by Alex Barker, Entrepreneur
As I wrote in a previous article, I’ve fallen time and time again for the mindset that “I need to spend time learning before I can start taking action”.
I’ve also been guilty of spending money on courses in the past ‘just because it was on sale’.
Bummer.
Barker lays it down clearly:
“Never believe you must master a subject with a course before taking action. Every master starts as an apprentice, and their first creation never looks perfect. But by mimicking a master over time, the creations begin to look more like the master’s. If you don’t take that first step, you will bog yourself down with unnecessary information and waste valuable time.”
Instead of hoarding skills and knowledge ‘for later use’ (which we know may never come), Barker advocates Action-Based Learning; focusing your learning on things that are “absolutely necessary” to complete a task.
Online courses are still useful, but use them in a way where you take action first, learn as you go.
3. Digital Readers Deserve Better, Abby Farson Pratt — Medium
“We come to screens distracted — and actively looking for more distractions. This is at the fundamental core of how the internet was made. Hyperlinks are meant to spirit us away, to provide an alternate route, to get us to stop what we’re doing and go elsewhere.”
As writers, we’re told people have short attention spans and skim your carefully written words. Some may not even make it to the end of your article.
Is it possible to resurrect deep, focused reading for the screen?
The answer is yes.
Details like typesetting, margins, and line spacing matter.
4. Oliver Sacks on How Our Hobbies Can Kill Us — The Polymath Project — Medium by Charles Chu
“Hobbies are wonderful things, but be careful lest they try to replace the irreplaceable–to supplant love with sex, friendship with fantasy, and meaning with madness.”
Where is the fine line between a hobby being an activity that enriches our life or it whether it becomes a path to obsessive self-destruction?
Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has some insights on this topic. I certainly did not know he was such a prolific weightlifter!
5. Your to-do app is like a credit card, Ben Whiting
“Did you know you have a credit card for your time, and it can be equally devastating?
I appreciate the use of the metaphor of the credit card for a tool I use every day to orientate my day — my to-do list. Gave me a new way to think about time.
When paying in cash, we count out the bills by hand. We feel them with our fingers but also at a deeper level. When paying by check, we write out the cost by hand — not once but twice, in numbers and words. Again, our whole body engages with the transaction, and we can feel different costs.
Digital to-do apps create the same disconnect. Each task looks like every other task — a string of text in a list, each one the same size, shape, and color.
6. In Defense of the Cash Gift — Buy Yourself — Medium by Zander Nethercutt
Confession 1: This Christmas, I love receiving gift vouchers and cash gifts. Why? Because I have the agency to decide what I want to spend it on.
But people often think giving vouchers is lazy gift-giving.
To the uninitiated, receiving vouchers can reek of “I don’t know what to get you so I got you these vouchers to let you decide how you’re going to spend it”.
But I disagree.
Compared to getting something you never wanted, forcing a smile and being eternally grateful for that moment of gift exchange, isn’t it better to get the flexibility to spend it on something you REALLY want?
Food for thought.
7. Detailing the Thoughtfulness of Rupi Kaur’s Poetry — Through The Window — Medium by Leo Borgelin
Confession 2, I am not a Rupi Kaur fan.
I find her work too reminiscent of the “Instagram poet” aesthetic; words chopped together and a bit too pandering to the self-help / self-empowerment message popular on Instagram.
Yet, the impact she has made on the Instagram community to promote poetry as an art form cannot be denied. Call it contradictory feelings, if you may.
In here, Leo Borgelin has penned a thoughtful piece analyzing some choice pieces of hers, bringing some much-needed nuance and texture to her work.
Books I’m Reading:
I just finished Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World’s Worst Nuclear Disaster by Andrew Leatherbarrow.
What started out as a labor of love turned into an incredible five-year journey of research and fact-finding to uncover what really happened during the Chernobyl disaster.
I’m learning about the perils of nuclear power (yet nuclear power is still safer than conventional hydroelectricity or coal-based power if wielded safely) and how people responded (or did not respond) in the wake of the incident all the way back in 1986.
Quote that made me think:
“They say the only way to learn is to get your hands dirty and make mistakes. But biographies let you cheat. Books let us live inside others, fail where they fail, and grow where they grow.”
Every 2 weeks (3 weeks this time round, oops), I curate some of the articles and thoughts I find around the internet along with some of the things I’m up to. Want to get more of this in your inbox? Follow this publication/read previous editions here.
