The past couple months I’ve set all of my screens to black-and-white: My phone, laptop, tablet, watch, and even the screen in my car.
I haven’t yet looked into the neuroscience behind this, but it feels like it’s triggering far less dopamine than usual. I feel more in-control of my attention. Surprisingly, I’ve noticed I can more easily motivate myself to do simple tasks away from screens, such as clean or wash dishes.
This would make sense because, as Dr. Robert Lustig told us, our dopamine receptors habituate: The more you release, the more you need for a similar effect (until your receptors are shot).
I don’t that often need to temporarily switch the colors back on. I can do basic video and graphics editing just fine in black-and-white, and can quickly check the colors before I finalize.
There’s also a slider to change how strong the black-and-white filter is. I changed the filter for my car’s screen to just under full power, so I can better discern colors on maps.
Every time I switch colors back on, I am shocked how bright they are. It feels similar to tasting the sugar-laden foods all around us after a period without sweets, or exiting a matinee on a sunny day.
In fact, if you search for “dopamine colors,” you’ll see there are lots of articles cheerily guiding designers to use highly-saturated colors to hook users on their interfaces.
If we look at the hues that can be reproduced on a screen, they extend way beyond what can be reproduced with, say, CMYK offset printing.
The only hues in the CMYK color-space that come close to matching the RGB color space (screens) are the pure inks: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow.
As this diagram shows, we’re actually able to perceive hues well beyond even the RGB color space, especially the greens and blues – you know, the actual natural world.
One thing I’ve noticed after two months in black-and-white is that flowers and birds seem brighter and more beautiful. It’s always a good thing when the real world is more interesting than your screen.
I will never again keep my screens in full color.
Book:Amish Society (Amazon) is about the fascinating community that is intentional about technology.
Cool: This is the only sensible design for a Kindle cover (Amazon) and it’s strangely hard to find.
The first version of the idea that comes to us is the last version we would ever be capable of building.
In The Heart to Start, I called this The Fortress Fallacy. We immediately think of a fortress, despite the fact we don’t even have experience building a cottage.
Dreaming big is good, except when it presents a vision so intimidating you do nothing at all.
I keep a spreadsheet of ideas I’m considering building, and I’ve found a powerful way of evaluating those ideas is what I call the Fortress/Cottage Test.
Two columns are dedicated to different versions of the idea. In the first column, I briefly describe the advanced version of the idea. (This is almost always the form in which the idea first comes to me.) That’s the fortress.
In the second column, I describe the most basic version of the idea I can think of. That’s the cottage.
So your columns might look like this:
🏰 A seven-book fantasy series, set in an underwater world.
🏠 A 2,000-word fantasy short story, set in an underwater world.
🏰 An app that keeps various list components you can mix and match to build packing lists for trips.
🏠 A text file with various copy-and-pasteable components I can mix and match to build packing lists for my trips.
🏰 A YouTube channel featuring tours and reviews of restaurants in Chicago.
🏠 A reel featuring a tour and review of my friend’s restaurant, in Chicago.
I find that thinking of the cottage leads me down a trail of just enough cognitive effort to get me going.
If I stop at the fortress, I’m just looking at the peak of one mountain from the peak of another. Thinking of the cottage takes a little effort, but then concrete and achievable steps stretch out in front of me.
Book:A Night to Remember (Amazon) is a detailed account of the sinking of the Titanic.
Cool:BigMailer helps you send emails for cheap through Amazon SES (and have control over your deliverability!)
If you think of your work as a process of stacking bricks, you have some of the equation figured out.
We tend to dream up castles in the sky, and they’re rarely achieved by carving straight from the side of a mountain. More often, they’re assembled one small work at a time, building into a bigger vision.
The trouble with stacking bricks is it assumes you have a workable plan. If you just keep stacking, it will come tumbling down.
More likely you’re collecting bricks. You stack along the way and put up a little wall here and there, notice it’s getting wobbly, then backtrack and start over.
So don’t just stack the bricks – make the bricks. Through that iterative process you’ll build some strange structures.
But once in a while, through the forces of affinity that hold this universe together, you’ll end up looking like brilliant architect.
Aphorism: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.” —Marshall McLuhan
It’s my birthday today and I’m not getting younger. So the thing I experience at the end of every book is stronger than ever.
I was having dinner with a friend also writing a book, and he told me, “If I was in an accident tonight, as I was dying in the ER, I would feel very distraught over not finishing.”
This sounds crazy because you’d expect him to think of his wife and kids. But I understood completely.
The other day, I scheduled a blog post to go out a few months from now. It shares my entire unrevised manuscript.
I don’t plan on dying. But if I do, this post will go live and the world will at least have my book. (If all goes well, hopefully I won’t forget to un-schedule it.)
Scheduling that post has brought me an inordinate amount of inner peace. Because the same desire for significance that motivates us to embark on work that matters makes the final stretch of any masterpiece the most harrowing: You’re in the odd position of feeling you’ve done your life’s work, while also wanting to live long enough to see how it goes.
So the closer you get to the finish, the more you stand to lose.
Yes, it’s supposed to feel that heavy.
Aphorism: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” —Montaigne
Cool: Someone will get rich hacking together an AI-camera and water jets to make a consumer-grade Squirrel soaker 9000
If you’re running a race, you need only put one foot in front of the other, and you will cross the finish line.
As you get closer, you may even sprint. You know how far to go and how much you’ve got in the tank.
But the finish line of a creative project is different.
The desire to express attracts, while the fear of judgement repels
The desire to be done reels you in, while the fear of the unknown resists
The desire to accomplish pulls, while the fear of failure pushes
The desire for excellence is a beacon, the pursuit of perfection a barrier
The finish line is like an ex that texts at 2 a.m., then freaks out about what a mistake last night was.
As the finish line pulls, so it pushes. Unlike in the pursuit of histrionic lovers, though, it’s worth it to persevere through this strange force field.
Book:Open (Amazon) is tennis champion Andre Agassi’s memoir of the paradoxical pain of excellence.
If you’ve ever done something you didn’t feel like doing, or not done something you felt like doing, you already know something about finishing projects.
Finishing projects is unnatural. The world changes constantly and so nothing stays still. The creative process requires an open mind, yet finishing requires a closed one.
But we do many things that go against our instincts.
Maybe you’ve wanted to snap at a colleague, partner, or child, but didn’t
Maybe you’ve been attracted to someone besides your spouse and didn’t act
Maybe you didn’t have just one beer because you knew you’d keep going
Maybe you went to the gym when you didn’t feel like it
To finish is absurd and illogical. As George Carlin said, “Art doesn’t have a finish line.”
But it’s something you do because you value it. When you have a value, you will act in ways that don’t make immediate sense. That’s how an equation works out when one variable has more value than expected.
Finishing is something you choose despite your instincts and impulses. Like exercise, sobriety, non-violence, and monogamy, it’s unnatural, often inconvenient, and entirely up to you.
Aphorism: “To Finish requires a heart of steel. You have to make decisions all the time, and I am finding difficulties where I thought there would be none. The only way I can keep up this life is to go to bed early and do nothing whatsoever outside my work, and I am sustained in my resolution to give up every pleasure, and most of all that of seeing the people I love, only by the hope of carrying the work through to completion. I think it will kill me.” —Eugène Delacroix
Unless you make a change, years will pass and your project still won’t be done.
If you were going to have a baby, or even guests from out of town, you’d change some things. Set up a room, reduce other commitments, etc.
Your life is a glass of water, and all our glasses are full-full, to the brim full. When something new comes into life, something else has to go.
You might feel, Well I’ve had this project in my life so long. With enough time, it will surely be done.
You’ve had this project in your life, but to bring in the finished project, you must make room. You do that the same way you make room for anything else. Set aside time on your schedule, set up a spot for it to live, cancel other plans for a season, and make space to rest and adjust.
Your glass is full-full, and for the finished project to fit-fit, some of that water must overflow.
Aphorism: “Subtracting your dependence on some of the things you take for granted increases your independence.” —Twyla Tharp
Cool:Fatebook is my tool of choice for making and tracking predictions about my goals and business.
The last 10% demands different energy than the first 90%.
As I have been finishing my book, I have entered a mode I call “devastating focus.” I want as much of my thoughts and actions to be centered toward one goal as possible.
Some things I do to switch to devastating focus:
Don’t watch movies or TV
Don’t listen to music
Bored? Ask myself, What can bring this project forward?
Still bored? Default entertainment: read.
All devices set to black and white
Social life cut by 80%
I keep a stack of index cards at my writing spot. If I feel resistance, I repeatedly write reminds to myself, “There is only this. There is only this. Other ideas can wait. There is only this.”
Switching to devastating focus is uncomfortable at first, but day by day it becomes easier, even natural and gratifying. It’s effectively self-hypnosis.
Bringing a project into the world requires entering a new version of reality before it even exists. If you merely press on the boundary with your finger, it will barely yield. Devastating focus condenses that point of contact into a needle that punctures the current reality.
Book:How a Little Becomes a Lot (Amazon) is former heroin addict Eric Zimmer’s guide to making small changes towards a meaningful life.
There’s no getting around it: Long-term projects are difficult.
I have never met an author who didn’t say writing a book felt in some form like torture.
As I have approached the finish line of my own book, I’ve definitely spent hours of my mornings, staring at the ceiling, wondering how I could get up and do it again. Another day alone in a room, wrestling with my thoughts.
When the reward for the day’s work is months or years off, I remind myself of this passage from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations:
In the morning, when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being…. Do you exist…to take your pleasure, and not at all for action and exertion? Do you not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their separate parts of the universe?
Even if you love what you do, there will be moments you don’t. Even if the work is gratifying, that gratification may dangling too far away to see.
Book:The Book of Elon (Amazon) is Eric Jorgenson’s compilation of the guiding philosophies of Mr. Musk.
Cool: Robin Greenfield is spending one year foraging 100% of his food.
Best, David P.S. The Preview Edition of Finish What Matters is available for a couple more days.
There’s a generally accepted belief that two hours is all the more writing you can expect to do in a day.
Just a quick perusal of Daily Rituals shows Carl Jung, B. F. Skinner, and Martin Amis amongst many who found that to be a solid day’s work. Hemingway would talk about conserving his “juice,” and allowing the “well” to fill back up.
Don’t get me wrong, if you can get two hours, that’s spectacular, but I no longer believe that’s all a person is capable of.
John McPhee was one of the first anomalies I noticed. I remember reading somewhere that he was writing like seven hours a day.
But I’ve since learned that his “writing” involved taking notes, printing things out, cutting them up, and pasting elements together.
Now that I’m in the last 10% of my book, my days are looking a lot like that – free-writing, taking notes, editing, speaking aloud.
I don’t think it’s a 1-to-1 relationship in terms of effort and output. Like spending eight hours a day probably isn’t four times as productive as two, but when you want a high amount of quality in a short amount of time, it seems to be worth it.
As long as you’re mindful of what mental state you’re in, and what your energy and interest allow for in the moment, you may be able to write all day.
Aphorism: “Hardly any sentence, in public, comes out of my mouth unless I’ve written it down once before.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson
