A few years ago, I was hopping on a flight back home, and I was running late. So late that when I went to get my boarding pass at the kiosk, it said that I had missed the cutoff for check-in. But I decided to hoof it and see if I could make it anyway.
So I’m sprinting down the concourse, and I skid to a stop to skim the departures board and see what gate I need. But for some reason there are no flights to New York. And I'm frantically thinking: “How can there be NO flights to New York?!”
What I had forgotten was: I no longer lived in New York. In fact, I was in New York, and I was flying home to LA. There weren't any flights to New York because I was already in New York. 🙄
But that’s what happens when you’re in a rush: You get tunnel vision and forget about the big picture (I had moved across the country!) and you ignore your intuition. (It still took years after this idiotic event for it to sink in that New York was my rightful home.)
In the previous issue of this newsletter, a similar oversight happened on a much smaller scale: I included a link to an article that I thought had merit, without noticing it was in a publication with a political bent that I strongly disagree with. I didn’t realize this until a reader emailed me remarking on the strange choice. (Thank you, Joelle.)
There are a number of reasons why this happened — one being that I read most of my articles with an RSS reader that strips them of context (e.g. masthead, etc) — but the most important one is: I was in a rush.
I had a summer cold that had me moving through my workday at the speed of molasses, and then a meeting ran long, and all of the sudden, I found myself begrudgingly wrapping up the newsletter at 10pm from my sofa. I just wanted to get it done.
And because I was in a rush, I made a mistake. I ignored that little alarm sounding in the back of my mind telling me that something was a little off — and I muscled through instead. But it always bites me in the ass.
So, my apologies on the bad link in the last issue, and onto an edition that I didn’t have to rush to “print”…
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Underestimating the power of gratitude. A caring thank you note goes a long way: “The senders of the thank-you letters consistently underestimated how positive the recipients felt about receiving the letters and how surprised they were by the content. The senders also overestimated how awkward the recipients felt; and they underestimated how warm, and especially how competent, the recipients perceived them to be.”
How women are working toward equal pay. An incisive longread on equal pay, and a battle at the BBC, that exposes the gender biases we have around salary negotiations: “‘Not only did employers counter women’s already lower demands with stingier counter-offers, they responded less positively when women tried to self-promote,’ she writes. ‘Women, it turns out, cannot even exercise the same strategies for advancement that men benefit from.’”
Seeing your basic goodness. A beautiful talk from Tara Brach on why getting too caught up in self-improvement is toxic. Also available as a podcast: “The more that you’re focusing on improving yourself and being good, or are focused on how bad you are, in those moments, the more you’re going to be blocked from the one place of presence where you can actually find the freedom of basic goodness.”
What we do when we sleep. A wonderful National Geographic piece on the many splendors of sleep: “Our brains aren’t less active when we sleep, just differently active. At night, we switch from recording to editing, a change that can be measured on the molecular scale. We’re not just rotely filing our thoughts—the sleeping brain actively curates which memories to keep and which to toss.”
For more on sleep & dreams: Listen to my soothing Hurry Slowly interview with Rubin Naiman.
+ Bracing: American workers are getting ripped off.
+ Inspiring: Your art is waiting.
+ Useful: How to ask a favor.
+ Amusing: Bad news.
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Hi, I'm Jocelyn, the human behind this newsletter. I host the Hurry Slowly podcast — a new show about how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient by slowing down — write books that will help you reclaim your time, and give uncommonly useful talks.
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