The Fundamentals
October 30, 2024
3-Item Status
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey
Listening: U R Mine by Kaeto
Quick Notes
Voting: Just one more reminder, since this is the last newsletter before the upcoming Nov 5 election—if you’re in the US, you can find your local voting stuff here: vote.org
New Project: I’ve just published the first piece (a little intro post) on a new project called Writing & Such—which is a newsletter that’s exactly what it sounds like. You can read that initial post here, and consider subscribing if you’re into writing, reading, and other such things.
New Work: My new piece over at Some Thoughts About is about robotaxis, this week’s Let’s Know Things is on politics and podcasts, and yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was about visual clutter.
Question: This week’s question is about end-of-year planning.
(If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status and/or Quick Notes about what’s happening in your life.)
The Fundamentals
When I’m trying to learn something new—anything really, from physical skills to a functional understanding of an unfamiliar subject—much of my initial effort is focused on identifying the fundamentals.
This sounds like a simple enough process, but often the things that seem like the fundamentals are actually not: they’re basic aspects of the knowledge or know-how we want to learn, but they’re not foundational to our future pursuit of these things.
If I want to learn about design, then, I might be given some instruction on how to use Photoshop (and similar applications) and how to sketch out believable illustrations before committing them to a more usable (probably digital) format.
But the fundamentals of design are (arguably) actually things like composition, movement, visual hierarchy, and color theory; stuff you’ll tend to learn along the way, but not necessarily things that will be prioritized from the get-go, because looking at paintings and photography and gig posters to try to grok why they’re so pleasant to look at and easy to understand doesn’t feel like design—if you’re just starting out, making cool stuff in Photoshop feels like design.
I’m in the process of learning ballet right now, and a whole lot of my experience with ballet, thus far, has revolved around exercises and drills. I’ve been doing the same movements over and over, learning new stretches, and slowly figuring out how to move my body in unfamiliar but aesthetically optimized ways so that, moving forward, even more impressive feats can be accomplished.
What I’m coming to realize, though, now that I’m a few months into this practice, is that while these efforts gesture at the fundamentals (and definitely help prepare a would-be dancer to grasp said fundamentals when they’re eventually introduced), at a more essential level things like balance, coordination, and proprioception (a sense of where one’s body is in space) are a lot more core to a beginning dancer’s hoped-for growth than any individual exercise or routine.
This isn’t to say those exercises and routines are unimportant: it’s a good idea to learn to use the tools of our trade (like Photoshop), as these are skills we’ll lean upon daily for as long as we continue to perform this work (or do these dances).
But it’s important to understand the difference between a hammer and the knowledge of how to use that hammer appropriately (and which helps us recognize when we might be better served using a screwdriver).
Looking for and assiduously working to achieve/accumulate these sorts of underlying skills sets and bodies of knowledge can help us leverage the tools we acquire more skillfully, while also granting us the capacity to use other sorts of related tools, when warranted.
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Interesting Links
The Incredible Story Behind the First Transistor Radio
Imagine if your boss called a meeting in May to announce that he’s committing 10 percent of the company’s revenue to the development of a brand-new mass-market consumer product, made with a not-yet-ready-for-mass-production component. Oh, and he wants it on store shelves in less than six months, in time for the holiday shopping season. Ambitious, yes. Kind of nuts, also yes.
But that’s pretty much what Pat Haggerty, vice president of Texas Instruments, did in 1954.
Considered one of the eight essential features of Chinese spatial organization, the paifang 牌坊 or pailou 牌樓 descended from the sacred or ceremonial torana, arriving from India along with Buddhism via the Silk Road during the middle of the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE). In China, pailou traditionally served a similar commemorative purpose to that in India: separating sacred from profane, or honoring high-status individuals, families, scholars, or widows. The paifang performed functional placemarking, for instance demarcating the boundaries between districts in Beijing.
Technology has transformed how we spend, study, live, eat — even how we sleep. And for the 6.75 billion people around the world who consider themselves religious, technology is also changing their faith. How people worship, pray, and commune with the divine is transforming from Seoul to Lagos.
(If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.)
Question
Today’s question is about end-of-year planning.
Consider answering in the comments (via the button below) or hitting “reply” to answer via email. Here’s the question:
Do you have a “making plans for the new year” routine? And if so, when do you start, what does it entail, and how well does it work for you?
I usually get pretty deep into my new year’s planning by November, but the past several years I’ve gotten a head-start sometime in the Fall (I registered the domain and laid out the base-level groundwork for How To Turn 39 in early October of last year, for instance).
My usual routine is to start taking stock of what’s working and what’s not, to write down how I’d like things to look a year in the future—in the sense of work I’d like to be doing, but also how I’d like to feel, what I’d like my routine to be like, and so on—and then I start making plans (and taking action, when possible) toward those ambitions.
It’s generally not much more complicated than that, though sometimes this involves doing some research and scouting around for better alternatives to things that aren’t working for me, presently, which can at times become its own sub-adventure.
Outro
I started working on a new book (weirdly on schedule with last year’s book-envisioning-and-planning process) recently. This one’s substantially different than last year’s effort (science fiction!), but I do wonder if there’s some larger lesson in the fact that I find myself pining for the (at times plodding, soul-crushing) experience of longer-form publishing at such a regular, annual cadence.
Also, as I mentioned above, I’ve added a few new writing projects to my schedule, recently, including the still-new Some Thoughts About and the even newer (first post published today!) Writing & Such.
Both of these projects are meant to be more cadence-liberated than my existing routine (no set publishing dates), which is nice in that I’ll be able to experiment with them, but without any of that effort mucking up my current work schedule (which I finally got where I want it earlier this year).
I’m taking a little roadtrip to Minneapolis next week, and I’ll be on the road by the time the next newsletter goes out, but I should have a normal edition scheduled and ready go to before I leave.
Also, there’s a bonus essay going out for paid newsletter subscribers on Nov 1, if you’re keen to give that a read and are in the position to support my work for the cost of a cup of coffee each month :)
What’s on your agenda for November? Any big plans for the holidays? Drop me a message and tell me about it, and/or take a moment to introduce yourself—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
Hello! As I get older, I appreciate more and more the power of planning for the upcoming new year. I start in November and finish before the last week of December. I fill out the same forms year after year. I settled on Making the Most Of Your Creative Talents. The forms ask you to reflect on the current year and what you discovered, accomplished, created, etc. From there you decide what you want your new year to look like and commit to checking in and when throughout the upcoming year. I have added Letter to my future self milestones to remind myself to check in. The letters have been a gift to myself, how I see myself in 1-3-6 to 12 months from now. I paste them in my iCal and forget about them until I arrive at that date. I find these very motivational if I saw myself say 10 pounds lighter or finished a project by that date. If I am not where I envisioned myself to be from the past, then I make plans to get there. Look to the past to plan the future and look to the future to motivate from the past. Thanks for sharing your planning process. Fun to read.
For the last several years, I've created my own personal planner to start with November, the month of my birth. That allows me to have a line of transition that's personal while also engaging with other collective lines of transition like New Years Eve/New Years Day, the government fiscal year, and the academic year. With the planner, I have the chance to revisit/remix/refresh the way I'm breaking down my to-dos and what I'm logging/noting. It is a diary/planner and the custom layout that I've designed also allows me to have an overview of the month below the turning pages of each week. I like being able to move in or out of various levels of zoom, and having a physical planner removes me from the distraction machine when I'm setting up my intended meetings, tasks, and goals for the week. My spouse and I also keep a shared physical calendar of the entire year on which we can put things we know well in advance (conferences/travel/etc) so that I can understand when peak periods of activity may be for one or both of us, and use that context in simplifying decision making at the quarter or monthly level. The visual nature of both the planner and the wall calendar is also great in supporting and promoting reflection. How often I've experienced a "wow, all that was just in the past x weeks/months" - its also a reminder that no matter how much we feel like there is so much to do, there is also way more that we've done than we may easily recall.