Newsletter No. 5

CJ Chilvers and I emailed back and forth briefly. I have been reading CJ’s newsletter for many years. I find newsletters to be an engaging medium, partly because the subscriber has made a tacit choice in subscribing, and partly because the writer knows their’s audience’s intention and wants to make it count.

CJ send me a link to Mike Crittenden’s blog post about writing 5x more but 5x less. This advice was poignant. I tend to write on and on, tackling evermore large topics. Nothing wrong in writing longer text. However, unelss you write full-time, you produce long articles infrequently. Writing infrequently prevents formation of the habit of writing and sharing.

Austin Kleon further makes this point in his book Show Your Work. Writing longer means you show less work.

Another benefit of writing shorter — the brevity invariably leave gaps in the idea. These gaps are essential in growing ideas. Itay Talgam makes this case in his book The Ignorant Maestro and also in this very popular TED Talk on Leadership.

With this I posted five articles last week. This is a new habit for me and one I am hoping to stick with all year.

2021 In Review

Here I got into what worked and what didn’t last year. 2021 was a challenging but illuminating year.

Books I Read in December

I list the books I read in December. I had 10 days off from work which allowed me to finish six books, one of which was 530 pages excluding index and notes!

My Reading Habit

I have started reading more and this post explains how I am trying to do this. I am hoping this is a habit that will grow and morph this year. Just last week I finished two books but I lost harmony between reading and understanding.

Fleeting Notes

I go into the first step of understanding when I read books. Understanding gives meaning. Or else reading regresses into watching mindless TV.

Literature Notes

This is the second step of understanding. Writing Literature Notes is like re-reading the important parts of the book well enough to be able to explain it to someone!

I am traveling for work next week. This will be a good chance to practice reading in a very distracting and noisy environment of airport gates and airplanes. If I can be successful in reading on a plane, I will treat myself to a pair of noise-cancelling headphones!

Literature Notes

I talked about Fleeting Notes earlier.

Next step is Literature Notes.

This is like a book report but not exactly.

Literature notes are brief paragraphs on the ideas that caught my attention as I read a non-fiction book. I’ve already captured these ideas in Fleeting Notes. Now is the time to understand them.

I open up the notepad with fleeting notes, and the book, and start writing literature notes. The key here is I must write in my own words.

Sometimes I supplement my literature notes with a scan of the text from the book showing it in quotations. This is an easy reference for complex ideas. I can always grab the book from the shelf. I use the scan text feature on my iPhone.

The idea here is for me to revisit all relevant ideas from the book in one place and in my own words. This is understanding. Learning comes from understanding, not the other way around.

I grant it, this is more work on top of reading. Cal Newport is right — he claims on his podcast that this method requires a lot of time. To me, writing literature notes on a non-fiction book feels like completion. If I just read a book and put it on the shelf, I feel that I am leaving something incomplete in the process of reading.

Literature Notes is neither about speed or efficiency. I am probably not going to turn these notes into academic papers or published books like Niklas Luhmann did and many others do. Literature Notes to me is about depth. It is putting down roots into ideas and cultivating them.

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

Fleeting Notes

If I am going to devote a lot of time reading a book, I want to remember what caught my attention. This is my way to honoring the attention I give, by capturing ideas in the book that provide an attachment-point for my attention.

Attention comes from the latin word Tenere which means to stretch and make tense (via Matt Crawford The World Beyond Your Head).

So I take notes as I read.

• I read with a notepad and pencil by my side
• I mark the books with a pencil — underline or double vertical lines in the margin
• This is key — I don’t mark sections that don’t interest me and only mark those ideas make my eyes go wide. My job is not to write a book summary, but to distill those ideas that provide a robust-enough attachment point.
• I note the page number on a note pad and the name of the idea, just a few words
• Sometimes I will quickly jot down a connecting thought or story that surfaced so I can explore it later

Once I finish reading, I will use the Fleeting Notes as a prompt to write Literature Notes, more on this another day.

I find this incredibly helpful when I pick up the book after a few days break — a quick refresher of the ideas that caught my eye.

Writing by hand is found to increase retention in a study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer in 2014.

How do you read non-fiction?

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

My Reading Habit

Cal Newport says on his podcast that he reads 5 to 6 books a month by making reading his default activity.

Cal has three kids, teaches in Georgetown and runs a growing media empire! He still manages 5 to 6 books a month — this adds up to 60 to 72 books a year!

Cal said look at your phone’s Screen-Time report, so I did. I was using my phone 2 to 3 hours a day. That is almost 20 hours a week! A part time job of looking at my phone on top of a full-time job on my computer.

If you ask people, they will say they want to read more but can’t find the time. I found some time to read one book a month. So I decided to make more time.

Here is what I did:

• Deleted all social media apps
• Deleted YouTube app, signed out of YouTube on my browser
• Put the TV in the house where it is not too comfortable to watch it for long
• Read in the morning before the world wakes up — I read between 6 AM and 7:30 AM
• Make reading intentional by taking Fleeting Notes and Literature Notes
• Made reading my default activity as I wait between tasks — so I may get 30 mins during lunch, 15 mins while dinner is cooking and maybe another 30 mins before bedtime

One last but important technique on reading more is to add variety. I sorted my unread books into four stacks.

1. Easy Fiction — less than 300 pages, easy to read. Leguin, Grace Paley, Ian McEwan are in this stack.
2. Short and Hard (fiction or non-fiction) — less than 300 pages, academic or classics where the language or subject matter make it harder to read. Virginia Wolf, Jane Jacobs, Michael Oakeshott are on this stack.
3. Short and Easy Non-Fiction — these are less than 300 pages and are typically not written by academic types, so the language is easy.
4. Long or Hard Non-Fiction — these are over 300 pages, typically 500 or more pages. Zuboff, Dalio, Ian McGilcrist and Nassim Nicholas Taleb are in this stack

I alternate between each stack. When one stack makes me think hard, another replenishes my brain. When one book takes over two weeks to read, I finish another in a few days.

I finished four books in October, five in November and six in December. The variety surely helped. Removing the habit of phone and TV helped the most!

Books I read in December

I surprised myself as I finished my sixth book at 10:30 PM on December 31st. Never had I finished these many books in one month, ever!

Here are the books I finished reading in December:

• The Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulburg
• The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford
• The Color Master by Aimee Bender
• Hamlet’s Blackberry by William Powers
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
• Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

I had started a few of these books before December which helped push the number to six. I always enter a new month with one or two books already started. Capturing the month when I finished books is a good enough metric.

But this is also the trap, the fascination of the numerical metric, the high-score! Six is better than four which is better than one! If all my books were in the genre of Stulburg’s Groundedness then I could have read 10 books easy. This is because the concepts and ideas among similar books are more familiar, and thus faster to absorb.

For example: Two books I have read in 2021 referenced Natasha Dow Schüll’s book, Addiction by Design. This makes the material familiar and thus faster to absorb as I re-read it.

I am turning my focus from hitting a number of books to getting a variety in my diet of books. I have given myself a rough guideline of 1 book a week or 4 a month. However, I have detailed guidelines on adding variety to the books I read.

How do you add variety to your reading list?

2021 in Review

2021 was a year of extremes. It was the second year of living in the COVID pandemic. My wife and I are fatigued by how restricted our movements are. On the other hand, living at home more than not has encouraged me to form insights that I am not sure I would have gained had there not been a pandemic.

With a slight hint of ableism and a dash of first-world-problems, here are things that worked well and some that didn’t:

Things that I struggled with:

1. Project Dog — We adopted Ruby, the calmest and quietest 5 year old dog from the Humane Society in April. Turned out she dealt with anxiety, panic attacks, never lived indoors, and was in poor dental health. She possibly had attention-deficit-disorder type symptoms that made it impossible for her to learn obedience.
2. Burnout — we skipped vacation in the Spring and Summer. Work was high because everyone wants to ship commerce now. Our Project Dog was a lot of work. Summer was exceedingly hot and humid. I got increasingly irritable till my wife insisted we take time off.
3. Delta variant, and then Omicron — when it felt safer to start going out and seeing friends, the Delta variant broke out and we retreated back into our shells. It has been frustrating to see masks disappear almost everywhere outside a doctor’s office. My wife and I tend to be the only masked people at stores.
4. Immunocompromised — We found out earlier this year that my wife is immunocompromised. This makes it extra hard for us as the variants come out while people get more and more relaxed about masking up!
5. No Podcasting — I had hopes and dreams to write, record, edit and publish 6 episodes this year. I think I posted one. Everything I mentioned above sucked all willpower to be creative.

Things that worked well:

1. Realizing the power of taking time off — this has to be on the top of the list. We took a vacation after I was already feeling burned out. It helped to get away. Just getting away, no internet, several books and hiking trails near by.
2. Refining Perspective — By August I was claiming the whole year 2021 was a bust. By September I started realizing it was only the Summer that was tough. I used this insight to start logging my thoughts daily so I can question my own ideas, especially the big-bad ones like “2021 sucks”! Now I have a plan for 2022 thanks to this insight.
3. Books, books, books — I started reading a lot more, enough to push through an inertia of sorts and gain momentum in reading. I went from a book a month to 6 books in December! I started taking detailed notes but in a way that I have not taken before. I should expand on that another day.
4. Metacognition — this puts a name to the thing I have been pursuing. The idea of metacognition — thinking about my own thinking, finding out that my love for truth is bigger than my love for what I already know — this feels like a core value and I am glad I discovered it. Now I know its name.
5. Internet Sabbath — I switch off internet use on Saturdays allowing only texts and phone calls on my phone. The effects flow into the weekdays. This has significantly curtailed the amount of YouTube and Internet-TV shows I used to binge. Probably 2 hours or more every day! Gone!!
6. High-Quality Relaxation — With TV gone, I found a few ways to have a high-quality relaxation. Walking our dog with my wife is one. Taking a drive in the evening and listening to a podcast is another. There was a time I felt passively watching TV was all I could do at the end of a workday. What a waste!

Newsletter No. 4

This is a tough newsletter to write. My goal with this newsletter was to write regularly about what I have read or written lately. It was a gentle push to tally up the effort I was putting towards growing and expanding my world-view. Unfortunately the high-brow world-view stuff has taken a back seat.

My focus has shifted — using a camera metaphor — from a wide angle lens to a telephoto zoom. Our new dog, Ruby has pulled all our focus and energy towards her. She needs a lot of attention to learn to be a family dog. My wife and I are making up for the five years Ruby spent being the “yard dog” in someone else’s house. Ruby is having to catch up very late in her life on how to be a member of the family. It seems all she knew was how to be an accessory to someone’s carport.

Ruby seems to have missed critical socialization with people during her puppy years. Dogs will naturally respond to body language but to be a family member they must first learn the bond to people. Desperate for help, and not wanting to wait for our session with a local trainer, my wife and I spent two and a half hours on Zoom with Glenn Massie, a wonderful trainer from California. I found him on Youtube and his technique stood out among hundreds of other trainers. With Glenn’s advice, we started teaching Ruby to learn to look at our eyes and ask for permission. Ruby is smart and she is learning quickly. This is encouraging on one had but I can’t forget that we are teaching our five year old dog what she should have been taught when she was less than 12 weeks old.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi said for optimal experience, to achieve a state of flow, one must find a challenge that is just a little higher than one’s ability. If the challenge is too high or too low then it leads to poor experience. I know reading books would lead to a state of flow for me — I would gradually learn more, then improve my skill, then pick up a harder book and so on. But dog training is the opposite, especially for a neglected dog like Ruby. The challenge is far too high and my skill is far too low. Worst of all, unlike a difficult book, I can’t just put Ruby away and wait for my skills to get better.

The best way I know how to learn is to read a book. I have bought several so far. Dog Vinci Code by John Rogerson seem to be the best book of the lot. But it does not cover our special case. I tried a leash-walking exercise the other day and left entirely frustrated. Sights and smells are so much more enticing to Ruby than wanting to please me. I just finished reading Simone Mueller’s Hunting Together. It uses a dog’s natural desire to be a predator to train them to stalk and retrieve treats. The concepts seem well suited to Ruby who is an American Foxhound. Perhaps an experienced trainer can help us with this modality.

At the end of the day what we want for Ruby is to be a happy dog who gets to have a family, preferably us, and gets to do a lot of dog things that her American Foxhound ancestry is naturally predisposed to do. We want her to be happy and comfortable in our home, sleep in all our comfy beds and couches and go for long walks and stop for lots of smells. We don’t want her to chew on furniture or electrical cords (which she does), and therefore have to live in a crate when we can’t supervise her closely.

I’d be lying if I said my normal has not been disrupted yet. I miss my mornings from 6 am to 7:30 am when I would sit quietly in my reading chair with my coffee and read or write. My morning is now replaced by being pulled around the neighborhood through the Florida summer’s humidity by an overly excited dog who it also appears is a morning person. In spite of this I have to imagine Ruby’s normal was also completely disrupted. From what she knew as a home albeit a neglected kennel under a carport, to a loud and impersonal animal shelter to a less loud but still impersonal kennel at the humane society, then in the back of a car for a long drive to a place indoors where all the smells are new and unfamiliar.

I can find perspective, empathy and compassion for Ruby when it is the afternoon and Ruby is sleeping. But I lose my patience after the first five minutes of incessant leash pulling at 6:30 AM which I am surprised has not yet popped my shoulder out of its socket. She can be a sweet girl. She is playful and often flops down and presents her belly to us for pets and scratches. We give her lots of praises when she is being very good. In little ways Ruby is starting to see our home as her own.

What’s next? Training for us and for her. Hopefully lots of it for us. We attended a webinar by Susanne Clothier and it was all about building a relationship with your dog. I have already read several books. Now I have to give my mind the free rein to blend it all together and make mental connections.

Because my days start and end with managing our new dog which is work, and the middle parts of the day are actual work in my office, I am often left with little mental energy to think and learn. I am still unable to find quiet time during the day to let my mind wander, to write for the joy of writing or read for the joy of reading. I would like to finish editing the podcast and record another one. So I started raking the backyard. I filled up seventeen bags with dry oak leaves from the two live-oak trees in our small backyard. Then I dug up old bricks that lined a long-gone flower bed and made neat rectangular holes. I bought some topsoil to fill those up. I bought a thatching rake to dethatch the yard. I am going to scatter grass seeds and water them. The manual work is a good outlet for frustration. I am a little less complaining and more patient on days when Ruby has been especially difficult while I have deadlines piling up in the office.

While Ruby settles into her new schedule, and she is settling down some during the daytime, I am hoping to settle into my own new schedule. Perhaps a morning walk followed by a shower. Then some coffee and reading or writing? Then dive into office work for the next 8 to 10 hours. Then some manual labor in the yard — leaves always need raking and shrubs always need pruning. Dinner and shower and bed. Let’s see if that works.

Newsletter No. 3

I finshed reading Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer. I kept looking for Leguin’s “Rhythm” in the book but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It felt like my mind’s eye was trying to focus on a fuzzy shape that never fully revealed itself.

I started reading Grace Paley, another author recommended by Leguin. The writing has that intoxicating quality that is so rare. It is literature like this that inspires the vocation of writing in me.

I can generally manage 8 to 10 hours of vocational reading and writing work after doing 40 to 50 hours of work-work. But last week was particularly busy at work. By 5 PM on Friday I counted sixty hours of critical pricing work and deadlines throughout the week. About 20 of those were deep-work hours in 90 minute stretches with no distractions and no email. For those who haven’t tried deep-work, it is like High-Intensity-Interval-Training compared to regular work which is like a walk on a treadmill while watching HGTV. Anyway, nothing other than work-work got done last week.

I did post a new podcast episode from my new podcast studio last Sunday. Thanks for subscribing if you listened to it! Recording is so much easier now that I have my own space. Most of the editing knowledge came back to me, largely because my past self left my future self notes in easy to find text files right inside the Podcast folder. Good job past Abhishek!

Unfortunately, new blog posts might be a little delayed in the next few weeks, but hopefully not much longer. We adopted a dog yesterday from the Humane Society. We named her Ruby. She is three, she had five puppies recently and her previous people surrendered her. We don’t know why those people surrendered this dog. She is sweet. All we know is her old people didn’t teach her any discipline. So she is an anxious mess in our home, possibly living indoors for the first time. To top it all, my wife and I are used to being parents to timid and well adjusted dogs. Just like Ruby, we also find ourselves in uncharted waters.

I am going to walk her for a good hour early in the mornings. Cesar Milan says this is the best thing you can do with your dog. But 6 AM to 7:30 AM is the time I usually block for deep reading and writing. I am not sure where the deep reading and writing block will move to yet. There is a good chance walks with Ruby will lead to clearer thinking. Who knows.

Right now Ruby is anxious and she needs walks. And a lot of love. And we all could use a lot of discipline.

Newsletter No. 2

Rhythm and cadence have occupied my mind this month. I am trying to pay attention to the rhythm in various things such as literature, how I do creative work, and how I like to take breaks. By paying attention to the natural rhythms I am trying to build a new rhythm of sorts.

Rational thinking, which dominates my brain, wants to set the metronome first and then cast the rhythm. I certainly tried to do so with this newsletter last weekend. I set the metronome to a weekly cadence — which I failed to do last week. I should have probably set the metronome after the rhythm has set.

Staying with the metaphor a bit longer… setting the metronome first would work only if I was trying to play someone else's music. What I am trying to do is find my own tune in exploring thoughts, ideas and skills. But nothing I am doing is new: blogging, podcasting, reading and thinking. Others do it more and better. It feels easier to imitate.

I see other creative people who I admire produce so much work and it makes me think I can do it too. But I need to remember that I spend 40 to 50 hours a week doing my day-job which is also creative and very analytical and takes a lot of mental energy. It also pays the bills. I can not share a large majority of the work I do in my day-job because we are under strict NDAs with our clients. So it seems that the work I can share is small and slow.

I don't want this to be an excuse. So I have started a time-block Plan from 6 AM to 6 PM for both, my professional job and my personal creative work. It is a challenging schedule but I deviated from it on only a few days in the last two weeks. By all measures it is working.

Here is the stuff I have written in the last two weeks:

Van Neistat

I discovered Van Neistat's new youtube channel. It reminds me of one of my favorite short movies on YouTube called 10 Bullets. Read the post here

Fiction and Non Fiction

I've been reading too much non fiction and discovered a hunger for fiction, like I was starved of something essential. I tried to explore that idea. I have to admit, my writing is not great in this one. As I read it now, it feels like I wrote before the idea had fully crystalized. Read the post here

Rhythm

I explore another rendition of the Rhythm thought with which I opened this letter. This time I hit up the writings of Ursula Le Guin. Read the post here

On the podcast front I am nearly finished writing the copy of my next episode. I am also close to having my recording studio set up so I don’t have to juggle the home computer that my wife also uses for her work. I should post the episode soon. You can find it listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and Stitcher. Search for "Sighthound Studio" on Google Podcast, or directly use RSS in your podcast app.