CxD #104
Mr. Rogers defines Heaven ❤️, Escaping Phone Prison, Shame of Overwhelm;
I went to see Won’t You Be My Neighbor for the second time with some friends who haven’t seen it yet. All of us cried. If you haven’t seen it yet, that’s a mistake that you ought to consider fixing way sooner than later. Sorry to keep repeating myself, but I know a beautiful work of human art when I see one.“Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn’t want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, “The connections we make in the course of a life—maybe that’s what heaven is, Tom. We make so many connections here on earth. Look at us—I’ve just met you, but I’m investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can’t help it.” Source
Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism, has this suggestion for us:
“Use your smartphone /only/ for the following activities: calls, text messages, maps, and audio (songs/podcasts/books). One slip to check social media, or glance at email, or look up a website, and you don’t get to mark the day as a success.
You can still do all of these online activities, but only on your laptop. When you’re away from your computer, your phone is still useful for basic operations, but it ceases to act as a crutch that helps you avoid the world around you.”
If you’re a subscriber and would like a mind-map of this essential book for decluttering your life from technology addiction, send me an email ––krzysztof@characterbydesign.org––and I’ll forward it to you.
If you’re not a subscriber, become one:
I’ve now listened to the 2hr+ podcast #343 of the Tim Ferris Show three times. Click this link above to either listen to it or to read the transcript. Seth Godin, the guest, is a brilliant teacher who focuses on helping people connect their genuine aspirations with their true audience. Here’s a sample from the conversation:
Tim Ferriss: Even looking around me right now, my luggage from recent travel seems to have exploded into piles of paper and books all around me on this table where I’m sitting, and I can’t help but feel a certain degree of – maybe it is overwhelm. A “What to do with all of this?” I’m not sure where to even begin. I was curious to know how you experience, if you do experience, overwhelm. There’s part of me that on my recent travels saw this documentary, [Won’t] You Be My Neighbor, about Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers. [Note: this references the documentary film, not the Tom Hanks movie currently in theaters]
Seth Godin: Sure. It’s beautiful.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a beautiful movie. He weighed 143 for decades, to the pound, every day, and seemed to have his life so cleanly dialed that only towards the end did you see some of the struggles that he had. But I wondered, does Seth Godin feel overwhelm? Is that something you experience?
Seth Godin: Oh, I’ve definitely felt it, and it’s super painful. I think one reason it’s so painful is because it comes with shame.
Tim Ferriss: Yes.
Seth Godin: It’s the shame of well, there are so many people who don’t have enough. There are so many people who have insufficient choices, insufficient inputs, insufficient leverage. And here I am, feeling overwhelmed, underground, deluged by this thing that I asked for. The thing is, it’s a systems problem. Because drinking from a firehose is a really bad way to get hydration. It’s a dumb choice to drink from a firehose. So what I have chosen to do to work my way out of it is not the world erect boundaries for me, but decide to erect my own boundaries. The example is, I remember the magical days when once a month, Wired magazine would show up, and Fast Company would show up. So I knew that in three hours, I could be as informed as I needed to be, just from two periodicals.
And so the world was gating the information that was coming in front of me. But now all of us are one click away from all these people who are talking about us behind our back from political machinations that we need to worry about, from environmental information, and work-related stuff. And if we don’t figure out what’s truly important to us, then we have this system breakdown because the boundary we used to rely on is gone.
Tim Ferriss: Are there other, like could you give any particular examples of boundaries you’ve created or situations of overwhelm that you’ve found your way out of or resolved in some way?
Seth Godin: Well, the most useful thing I can say, and then people don’t have to listen to the rest of the podcast, is if you can figure out how to clear out six hours of day for your life, that’s an enormous ROI. I don’t go to meetings. I don’t watch television. I don’t look at Facebook or Twitter. If you got rid of those four things, how many hours a day would be freed up? Then you can say to yourself, all right, but what did I miss? You can add back from a zero-based budgeting method which ones you’re missing. But for me, if I am challenged and forced to go to a meeting and I look around that room, and I’m imagining that those people who are just sitting there, in real time absorbing something that could’ve been summarized in a four-minute memo, that they do that three, four, five, six times a day, well, it’s no wonder they feel overwhelmed by the important work, because they’ve used up most of their day on unimportant work. And so that’s the first step.
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