Hi Friends-
With two weeks to steep, I've got a primo collection of links for you this issue. Plus, a question to ask yourself: “Who are you without the doing?”
Someone asked me this question about four years ago, and my head almost exploded in incomprehension (over-achiever that I am). This past weekend I reconnected with her, and again she asked me: “Who are you without the doing?”
And I found that in the hundreds and hundreds of days since that first asking, I'd actually gotten quite a bit closer to an answer. I won't tell you what it was, but if you find this question perplexing and/or uncomfortable, the first link — a talk from Tara Brach — might help you open up some new territory...
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Human doing to human being. The meditation teacher Tara Brach kept coming up in conversations with friends so I finally looked her up and — wow. This talk about our addiction to doing, and how to unravel it, is an absolute marvel. The rare combination of something that’s wise, funny, and useful. Here’s the podcast version, and here’s the video. 50 minutes well spent.
In praise of extreme moderation. A lovely piece on finding the balance between doing nothing and doing too much: “Wherever you look, whatever you do, performance has gone extreme, often policed by a tracking app or a competitive peer (sometimes masquerading as a friend). Moderation, in any form, is seen as nothing but amateurism, the habit of a slacker who won’t commit 10,000 hours of practice to master something.”
What’s even scarcer than attention is intention. A smart take from Daniel Pink on content and how we consume it: “Consumers are now, often unconsciously, sorting every media product — from podcasts to magazine stories to video — into three categories: intentional, interstitial, and invisible. The implications of these changes are huge, especially for the people who create what we watch.”
The financial state of visual artists today. The Creative Independent published a thoughtful survey about how artists are making money (and not making money): “Respondents who spent 3 or more hours per week posting to social media or otherwise marketing their own work felt less financially stable, [while] those who spent 1-2 hours per week promoting their work shared the median stability ranking of 5.”
+ The new iPhone settings for limiting distractions.
+ “What we’re after is the world’s taste and time.”
+ Why you should ditch Chrome.
+ Artists need pockets.
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SHOUT-OUTS:
Much appreciation to: Julie Meerschwam and NextDraft for link ideas.
The photographs are from: Elsa Bleda and her lovely series “Morning Walks.”
You can support this newsletter by: Tweeting about it, or leaving a review for my podcast Hurry Slowly on iTunes.
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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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