Hi again (it’s been a while),

I hope you’ve had a lovely summer.

First, a small update: I’ve decided to adapt the format of these newsletters to reflect an approach I think will make their creation and consumption more enjoyable. Double win right there.

Each newsletter will begin with a small text – my thoughts and reflections on a specific topic. And now you’ll find the sources for inspiration/food for thought down below, along with the music recommendations & bonus links.

With that said – you can expect these newsletters to come with more regularity again – I’ve created systems to bring them to life more consistently, and thank goodness, I’ve been missing doing this!

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The problem: Output. I’m not interested in becoming a robot, but I am interested in improving my ability to make great things and in doing a better job of bringing my projects to life.

So I think a lot about the resource challenges that we all face: the limit in our time (24 hours a day), as well as limits to the amount of energy we can tap into (as well as all the other demands of life!).

For me, the window into doing good work is actually quite narrow: a day of work can be truly quite successful if I am super focused and energized to do what I set out to for 3-4 hours. I can only do great, creative work for perhaps a few hours a day, at best. This is because “great work” requires focus, time, and a lot of brain juice.

I define “great work” as anything that I look back on in the future and don’t immediately want to chuck in the trash. A solid building block in the pantheon I’m creating over the course of my career.

The solution I keep running into: In what seems like my ongoing quest to figure out how to live the most fully, I’ve revisited the subject of creative output with fascination. And there’s a recurring pattern I’m noticing: great work is almost always reliant on rest.

Rest, when done right, is like a superpower. It’s counterintuitive because we think that to get ahead we’re supposed to be putting in 10-12 hour days but that just doesn’t work when you’re required to do higher-level thinking. And the world is moving more and more in that direction.

From personal experience, you’ll go much further cultivating and capitalizing on those small windows where good work is actually done.

And how do you make those windows bigger? It’s a variety of things, but I keep returning to the idea of learning how to rest effectively.

If this is sounding ridiculously obvious, it is, but we also live in a world that seems to discourage rest. And there lies the problem — it is one thing to know this on a theoretical level and another to know how to do it and actually do it.

This is an idea I’ll return to in future newsletters. But for now, I’ll just say this: many of the most prolific people in history were champions at rest. Charles Darwin. Albert Einstein. Winston Churchill. I’m beginning to see why.

I. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, in his book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, on how taking an identity as a “worker” is a trap:

“If your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist.”

II. New Conquerors of The Useless — The Role Of Achieving Nothing in a World Obsessed with Doing Everything → Interesting article outlining the mistake so many of us accidentally make.

III. How to Reinvent Yourself in 2022 (for people feeling worn out) → I made this piece at the beginning of the year and it feels relevant to the topic of this newsletter.