New Year, New Opportunities for Growth!

Elgin Davis

Published in

Winter Hearth Studios

7 min readJun 27, 2019

Volume 1, Issue 1: New Year, New Opportunities for Growth

What’s New This Week

This is an exciting week, as it’s the first official weekly newsletter for the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook. There’s plenty of content here, so feel free to just take what you need.

Listen

Photo from pitchfork.com

Charlotte Day Wilson is an up-and-coming artist from Toronto whose music paints more than your average picture. Her artistic process is driven by her real, raw human experiences, and not derived from any fad or trend. The song “Funeral” from her 2018 EP Stone Woman is actually the song I played on repeat that allowed me to process and create the Medium-featured piece A Hope Undone which itself is, as you may have noted, about a funeral. The song opens,

“I went to a funeral, so I could feel something. Don’t know what I’m living for, if I don’t feel nothing.”

Take a moment to just imagine the state of mind, the emotions, and the experiences (really stretching those empathy muscles today!) that must have all been present and mixing together for someone to create a work of art, dripping with such raw emotion as this piece. Check out her full interview with The FADER and the rest of her EP Stone Woman, and look out for her soulful music on Spotify or Apple Music in the near future.

Learn

Photo from hurryslowly.co

This week’s insights come from the thought-provoking podcast Hurry Slowly, hosted by bestselling author Jocelyn K. Glei. Hurry Slowly explores how we can be more productive, creative, and resilient through the simple act of slowing down. In this week’s letter I want to highlight the episode entitled “Conversation Isn’t Always About Talking”, where Glei discusses the key ingredients of a great conversation with Fanny Auger, the founder of the School of Life in Paris and the author of the book Trêve de Bavardages.

There is tons of wisdom in this episode, but the idea that struck me most profoundly was the idea that conversation is an art. It is a craft that, like every other craft or skill, must be developed with time and intentional, diligent practice. This idea really challenged me to reconsider how often my own conversations happen so naturally and without deep thought, and how much of another person’s experiences and life story I fail to tap into and learn from by asking surface-level questions or opting to talk about myself instead.

This is a subtly powerful episode that I definitely recommend and, being about 8 episodes into Hurry Slowly so far, I would 9.5/10 recommend you check it out on whatever podcast app you use to improve yourself in 2019 (I use Castbox if you’re looking for suggestions).

Level Up

Photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash

This week’s level up section comes from a personal observation in redesigning my rhythm of life — my system of existence, if you will. One of the best things that I have found in terms of leveling up my productivity, attention span, and overall control over stress, is silence.

There are many different things that come to mind when we each think of silence. For some people, sitting out by a lake, watching the water slowly make its way from the center to the grassy shore may be their visual representation of silence. For others, silence may be that 40 seconds of staring at the phone after you’ve just sent a risky “I like you…” text to your longtime crush (we’ve all been there, right?). By silence, I mean a space free of distractions, free of things fighting for our attention, and free to explore life detached from the small, glowing boxes that most of us have grown to depend on.

For the past week, I have silenced my phone’s notifications from 9am to 5:15pm every weekday, and my change in focus, attention, stress level, and general mood has been so radically shifted that I can’t recommend it enough. Sure, leave on the ringer for calls in case someone needs to reach you, but in most situations, that text message, the notification of that Instagram like, and the Facebook tag can wait. Only in this silence can your mind be truly restored to the quiet, tranquil state where we secretly long to be.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Fireside Spotlight

For this week’s Fireside Spotlight, I would like to feature a book I read recently called “Art & Fear — Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking”, by David Bayles and Ted Orland. The book explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn’t get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artist to give up along the way.

Image Continuum Press, 2001

Among the things that I learned from this book is the idea that we are all artists — just to varying degrees and with varying levels of effort. We are all born with the capacity to create, though what we choose to do with that capacity may differ greatly from individual to individual. As we saw above, conversation is an art. Listening is an art. Living is an art. And as is the case with all art, mistakes are a necessary part of the development process.

Those who really succeed are those who practice relentlessly, even when their work is not spectacular, learning and growing more competent with each engagement until they develop a command of that skill. They are not afraid to make mistakes and are likely much less self-conscious about these mistakes than others, and given a supportive and nurturing environment (or an iron will and unbreakable determination), “the sky’s the limit” is even too small to describe their potential.

They live in a growth mindset, understanding that any skill can be learned, and that the perceived advantages of innate talent can always be overcome by diligent effort and focused, intentional learning. Overall, the ideas presented in this book teach us precisely the mindset that we need to truly Live An Epic Story.

It’s A Wrap

This week’s newsletter has been awesome both to experience for myself and to write just for you! There were so many great things I learned this week that I hope have inspired you to both live and tell your life’s epic story. Between learning to feel deeper emotion in our connection with artists, to fighting for our own attention, and from developing listening as a tool for better conversation to leaving fear at the door when you’re ready to learn something new, we’ve just scratched the surface.

Walk It, Talk it

Thanks again for joining us this week in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! In the words of Dale Carnegie, “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” How can you apply the ideas in this newsletter to your life? How can you use it to gain power in living a more epic story? Talk to your friends and family this week about something you found interesting in the newsletter.

This weekly newsletter is a labor of love, so if you enjoy reading it each week, please share it with your friends to assist us in reaching our goal of helping the world engage more deeply with the human experience :)

Your Greatest Chapter Awaits

Until next time,
Elgin

(Originally Posted January 29, 2019)

Have feedback? Content you want to see or share? Just want to talk?

Feel free to drop an email to winterhearthstudios@gmail.com to get in touch with me, I’d love to hear from you!

Hey, I’m Elgin, and I love to create. I’m the creator of Winter Hearth Studios and the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, a space where we explore the depths of the human experience, discovering the keys to crafting a better life and inspiring you to Live An Epic Story.
I’m currently a 4th year student at Harvard University studying computer science and design, and in my free time I love to travel, draw, and pursue bold, exciting adventures.