Making Art in a Noisy World

Hey y’all,

I enjoyed this hour-long chat with Panio Gianopoulos of Author Insider. The topic — “Making Art in a Noisy World” — could’ve been a subtitle for my book Keep Going.

Here are 10 highlights from our conversation, in case you don’t have time to watch:

1. Try a “bookends” approach to your day.

I start and end my day without looking at my phone. In the morning, I don’t look at my phone until I’ve had breakfast and written in my diary. In the evening, I plug my phone in on the kitchen counter and head off to bed with a book.

(This is very similar to literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf’s bookends approach to reading.)

I believe that if you try this approach you will get addicted to how it makes you feel and you’ll want to spend less and less time on your phone.

2. More search, less feed.

You’ll notice they call them social media “feeds.” We’re like pigs being fattened at the trough.

You want to try to be more like a pig out in the wild — go foraging!

One way to do this is to go to the search box more often. (I used to do this with the “People You Follow” search on Twitter, although it doesn’t work quite as well these days.)

But basically: More search, less feed. (See also: pushing and pulling.)

3. “Everybody knows.”

Everybody knows how bad social media is for us. We don’t need to litigate it anymore. The question is: What are you going to do about it?

My friend Alan wrote about this a while back:

[O]ur problem is not a lack of knowledge; it’s a deficiency of will and a malformation of desire. St. Augustine explained it all to us 1600 years ago: My actions are determined by my will, and my will is driven by what I love.

Which brings me to the next point:

4. You can’t just run away from things, you need to have something to run to.

A thought from my friend Mark Larson:

Advice on leaving (your place of birth, social media platforms, etc.): Make sure you’re running toward something, and not just away from something!

As Netsuke Sōseki writes in Kusamakura, “It would be of no use to move into a land of mosquitoes, when you got sick of the country of fleas.”

5. Figure out what your daily little unit of work is and do it every day.

Make something small every day. Those little bits and pieces stack up over time.

This is one reason a 30-day challenge can be so powerful. If you can build a habit over a month, you can keep it going indefinitely.

One thing I’ve been wrong about in the past: this kind of work is not just additive, it can be exponential. It works more like compound interest, or the way a cactus grows. Slowly, and then explosively. (See: “Sleep, creep, leap.”)

6. What’s the miniature one-armed version of what you do?

The holidays are coming up, and it can be difficult to sustain a holiday practice: