Play the Long Game
Hello! Recently my life has been upside down and I surprised myself with how accepting I was about all of the chaos. I no longer have an apartment and I cannot plan more than a week into the future at the moment.
If I were in the situation I’m in right now a couple of years ago, I would have made a much bigger deal about it. It’s as if the pandemic has taught me to welcome the chaos because it’s a major waste of my energy to fight it.
(by the way, I just released a new class on the history of Paris that I’m very proud of. If you’re interested, I’ll share more information about it below + a special promo code I’m only sharing with newsletter subscribers).
In light of what I’ve been experiencing recently, here are 4 thoughts/ideas/bits of inspiration on playing the long game:
I. Days are short, years are long — Most days, I don’t feel particularly productive. I don’t usually feel like I got a lot done at the end of a day and I never get all the way through my to-do list. That’s probably my fault – I tend to be unrealistic with what I can accomplish in a day.
I can end up feeling quite down when I get hung on this fact.
Bizarrely, when I take a longer-term perspective, over months or years, it’s amazing to me how much I can get done in my life. I just released my fifth online course since the pandemic began. That’s insane. I don’t fully understand how that happened.
Conclusion:
I’m capable of accomplishing less than I think in the short term, and I’m capable of accomplishing way more than I think in the long term.
II. The Compound Effect isn’t what it sounds like — I get distracted pretty easily. I’m a really slow reader. Like really slow. At least half of the time, I have no idea what I’m doing when I’m working on a creative project, nor where things are going.
I am not the image of efficiency. It takes me a long time to wake up and I take forever to floss and brush my teeth.
I’m a turtle compared to most people, and I used to have this idea that you can’t build momentum if you work slowly and methodically.
Somehow, things keep working out ok for me. A big piece, I think, is that I’ll stick with things when other people give up. I’m a year into working on my book, and it’s kicking my ass but as things stand, there is no scenario in my mind where I do not finish it.
III. Over and over, I’m running into different articles that keep pointing to the same number: 4. 4 hours. Can you do more than 4 hours of intentional, focused, creative work per day over the long term? A strong case can be made that you cannot. Most successful writers (Stephen King, Hemingway, Maya Angelou…) just did their writing in the morning. And then they were done for the day.
Ok so maybe just 4 hours a day feels like too little. Still, I’ve found that 6 hours of intentional work always beats 12 hours of shallow, broken, distracted work.
I believe strongly that we mistake quantity of time spent working with both quantity and quality of output. It just doesn’t work that way.
Observe yourself. You do most of your work in a small percent of the time that you spend working.
IV. “The average age of an author who achieves bestseller status for the first time today is 52 years.”
Play the long game. Do what you can to be sustainable with yourself — the rewards for your work take a while to reveal themselves.
+ I guess I listen to Skrillex now.
Bonus: My New Course on Paris
Paris to me is unlike any other city I’ve ever spent time in. It’s the longest I’ve ever spent in one place and that’s not an accident. There is so much depth to this place, and that’s why I’m incredibly excited to announce the release of a new class… on Paris.
Honestly, I’ve never done anything like this before.
Basically, with the help of the Bright Trip team, we’ve created a 2-hour visual history of the city and how it became what it is today. I share the history behind many of the most famous Parisian landmarks and how they tell the story of this world capital, and of France as a whole.
Whether you’re looking for resources to prepare for a trip to Paris or just want to travel there vicariously, I go way deeper here than I ever could in a YouTube video.
It is available on Bright Trip now, and because you’re a reader of this newsletter, you can use the promo code NDPARIS for a limited time to get 15% off.
If you check it out, let me know what you think!
Thanks for reading,
Nathaniel Drew
