Substack’s hottest newsletter has it all— Writing Updates, Virtuous Living, Improving Organizations, Maximizing Luck, Attention-Fracturing Bioweapons, and Book Recommendations
A Mindful Miscellany, #7
Source
Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.
Writing Updates
The Infernal Tower: In the trenches! Deep down, on my hands and knees, plumber butt exposed to the cold, dark air, throwing wrenches over my shoulder, and muttering under my breath (Editor’s Note—we know that’s not the sort of visual you come to this newsletter for, and we apologize. We will work to keep such occurrences minimized in the future). It’s coalescing, that’s about all the fidelity I have right now. I feel good though—I have a story that works, I can see it coming together. It will go out into the world in 2023, by hook or by crook.
Story Grid Guild: This month I entered year two of the Story Grid Guild with a cohort of pipe-hitting writers and editors. I’ve been mostly pleased with it so far—I’ve learned a ton and improved immensely over the last year through theoretical grounding, deliberate practice, and group discussions. It’s great to be a part of a collection of people who all want to up our writing game. We’re writing some scenes this semester after analyzing and breaking down Christopher Nolan’s 2006 movie “The Prestige.”
Watched, Read, and Recommended
After Socrates— “Socrates was a Soldier. Plato was a Wrestler.” This is how Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke begins his new YouTube series. It’s difficult to overstate what he’s doing—Vervaeke is synthesizing an immense amount of ancient philosophical goodness—Greco Roman traditions, Early Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and some other bits I’m likely leaving out. Then, he’s weaving those timeless strands together with the most up to date research in psychology and cognitive science. One of his goals is to shine a light on what he calls an “Ecology of Practices”—a constellation of activities humans can bring into their lives in order to foster a sense of meaning, contentment, and ultimately eudamonia, or flourishing (Things like Yoga, Tai Chi, Meditation, Contemplation, Martial Arts, Breathwork, and Circling to name a few.). I think what is most promising about his work is that if he can stick the landing, Kerri Strug style (or if you’re an older vintage, Mary Lou Retton), his work will have relevance and applicability whether you consider yourself part of a faith tradition, or if you’re in the agnostic/atheist/spiritual but not religious camp.
Geoff Marlow—Making Sense of Sensemaking. Geoff is an insightful, experienced practitioner in improving organizational effectiveness- this presentation is a nice introduction to his work. Here’s the blurb for the linked video:
“Human communities are inherently adaptive – unless rigidly constrained, which is precisely what Western organizations have been designed to be for more than a century. Rigid constraints proved adequately fit for purpose for the many decades when the world was relatively stable and predictable. Organizations designed in this way are now buckling as they seek unattainable stability and predictability in an ever more VUCA world. To thrive in the future, organizations require cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, where sense making, decision making & action taking are tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organization. This requires a much clearer understanding of the role of sense making, and how it can be coupled most effectively to decision making and action taking. Creating such a future-fit culture is the primary responsibility of senior executives, whose role is no longer making decisions, but creating conditions – in which good decisions get made, implemented, and iterated as part of everyday business as usual throughout the organization.”
On Luck (From the Lindy Weekend Reads Newsletter): The older I get, the more I respect the role of luck, Lady Fortuna, chance- however you want to think about it. Nassim Taleb, the super snarky author of Antifragile and Black Swan among other works, says “Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel, or a private jet.” This isn’t to say that we should give up on our own agency, but this article offers some insights into just what we’re talking about when we talk about luck—and also how to increase our probability of luck finding us.
Tik Tok as a Chinese Bioweapon: One of my primary soapboxes/axes to grind is the systemic degradation of our attentional faculties, brought on by smart phones and social media. Gurwinder Bhogal makes the case that Tik Tok is a form of warfare emanating from China against the West. Even if that is not their overt aim, the net result may be the same. My teenage daughter is on Tik Tok, and I have to resist every one of my Clint Eastwood in Gran Turino “Get off my lawn” instincts when it comes to the platform.
Insect Collapse— One of my goals with this newsletter is to throw a little more Signal, and less Noise into the world. Ultimately you, the readers will decide if I am successful with that aim. My hope is in the years to come more people will be able to take more of a systems-thinking type lens to things and realize just how interconnected everything really is. Everything is related in a web of mutuality and potentiality. That sounds super woo woo, even to me as I write it, but it doesn’t detract from the truth of what it points toward. Now, we can debate all day right— some species are going to go extinct because of the churn of the ecological process, whether humans are involved or not. But when Captain Kirk went to space, he wept. We have to figure out how to get more humans to take the “View From Above” that Marcus Aurelius recommends in Meditations.
Fiction: Scorpion by Christian Cantrell. I don’t remember how I found this book, but it is a bona fide thing of beauty. I am legitimately jealous of some of the character descriptions in it, and the world building is outstanding as well. If you like your thrillers with brilliantly drawn characters, a realistic near future vibe and some hot quantum physics on the side, you should check this out. Here’s a particularly good bit:
“Back then, Quinn and her husband, James Claiborne, were textbook nine-to-five spies. They commuted together from the subdued and affluent suburbs of Potomac Falls, Virginia, where every structure that wasn’t a mall was a data center; where weekend barbecues were staged by couples who had been reduced to birthday sex and who, when you asked them what they did for a living, replied simply that they “worked for the government” – a euphemism for “you don’t have sufficient clearance to know how I spend my days, but if I wanted, I could pull up chats of your wife flirting with ex-boyfriends on Facebook and then your marriage would be every bit as loveless as mine. Nice to meet you too.” Most conversations were redirected toward the constant antics of overprivileged, hyperactive, social-media-obsessed children, impassioned prognostication around whatever sports were in season, the work being done by dubious, sporadic, and incompetent contractors on one’s egregiously overpriced single family colonial (made all the more infuriating by the dogmatic regime of the HOA), whatever shows everyone was watching that you weren’t because how do people have so much time to watch so much TV?, and, surreptitiously, whoever’s weight had noticeably fluctuated, preferably increased since they last gathered.”
Lisa Cron— At the recommendation of one of my amazing editors, I just inhaled all three of Lisa Cron’s books on storytelling. They were, to a one, amazing. The first two are geared more towards fiction writers, but her third, Story or Die, is designed for anyone that wants to tell a compelling story. If you’re an entrepreneur, C-suite type, or you do any sort of public speaking, it would be worth a gander. I will pump out a summary in the next month or so. Here's a link to a TED talk Cron gave a few years ago.
Until next time, whatever you’re doing, do it well.