RWL #256

Happy New Year!

Jan 01, 2022

Happy New Year from the LHH! I was going to try to write this week’s newsletter yesterday, but the river called, and I went paddling instead (pic above is from the Lamprey River in Newmarket, NH). We’ve had mild weather for the last few days - temps in the high 30’s. I hope you all had a fun and safe New Year’s Eve celebration. My eldest daughter and her boyfriend were with us. We baked calzones and ricotta cookies for our very laid-back celebration. Daughter #2’s roommate came down with COVID, so she is quarantining for the next few days to see if she gets it, too. She was supposed to join us, but instead we prepared a basket of calzones and cookies for them, and had them come pick them up. Sort of reverse Doordash. Daughter #3 is across the country visiting her boyfriend who is in the service. As the kids get older, the evening gets quieter. It might also be a function of the fact that as the kids get older, we also get older. So maybe the causality is off a bit.

I finished my daily sketch project for 2021 yesterday. For those of you don’t follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you can see my album on Flickr here: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmTm7Ua4 if you are interested. (There are a few images that I missed sticking into the album, but most of them are there.)

Something I realized about half way through the daily sketch project was that it was taking up too much time relative to its priority in my life. My original vision was that I would crank something out in 15-20 minutes each day - enough to continue to learn, but not to occupy too much space. Reality became, especially as I started to work with watercolor, more like 60-90 minutes each day. Even on days when I was not working in watercolor, it often took me 20-30 minutes just to settle on a subject - which often led to the 90 minute days, especially if I was working with watercolor. There is nothing wrong with spending an hour or more each day to develop a skill. The problem becomes if this skill is not actually a priority warranting that level of effort. When I did my personal SWOT analysis (see below), it really drove home to me that fact that I was over-investing in a skill that was not critical to a core strategic goal. I will never tell someone I am an artist. I like to draw and paint and play with visual art - but it is not a core part of my identity, nor is it a core part of my value proposition. I pushed through this exercise because it was finite, even if it was long, because I do see myself as someone who pushes through hard things. But I don’t plan to do another visual art 365 because I recognize that I have other priorities.

I keep coming back to Vanderkam’s video that I shared a few months ago about how to gain control of your free time. Time is a limited resource for all of us, even for Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world (see Listen below). Even if you have all the money in the world, you have the same amount of time as the poorest person. Musk has more choices than the rest of us, but he still has only 24 hours in a day. You have to prioritize your time if you want to accomplish anything. So this year I am thinking about that - trying to keep it closer to top of mind. I will turn 52 this year - and my sense of the infinite expanse of time is beginning to change. I have to get better at priorities. It’s not enough to be busy. It is critical to be strategic.

I wish you a happy and prosperous new year! Do try the personal SWOT analysis below. Re-watch Vanderkam’s video. Think strategically about your priorities. Make room for what is important.

Have a great week and enjoy the links!

Read

What: Personal SWOT Analysis

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13mlj11SfU49sEmbhlEfaAmExa9oTnceQ/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116556535244578085779&rtpof=true&sd=true

Why: So I am giving you a New Year’s assignment: do a personal SWOT analysis. The link above is to a slide deck I gave my seniors last semester. You should be able to download the file. For those of you not familiar, SWOT stands for “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats”, and it is a simple framework commonly used at the early stages of strategic planning for organizations. You can also apply this framework to your own life, and that is what I had my seniors do (I also did it for myself). The majority of my students took it very seriously and turned in some deeply thoughtful discussions about themselves and their hopes. I won’t be collecting your assignments, but I recommend taking an hour and trying this exercise out. New Year’s is the perfect time to do this. Let me know what you think!

What: Tynan, Sacrifice

https://tynan.com/sacrifice/

Why: Tynan (I don’t know his full name) is a blogger I have been following for a number of years. If I had to summarize the theme of his blog, I would say he focuses on living deliberately. This post covers a bunch of themes in a couple hundred words. But it resonates with me, which I guess is why I like him. He’s much more daring and unconventional than I am, but much of what he says I agree with. I recommend following his blog if you like this post.

Watch

What: TED, Protecting Twitter Users (sometimes from themselves) (9 min)

https://www.ted.com/talks/del_harvey_protecting_twitter_users_sometimes_from_themselves#t-238

Why: Del Harvey leads Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team. It’s her responsibility to figure out how to prevent abuses of the site. I wouldn’t want that job, but it’s interesting to listen to her talk about the challenges. She doesn’t even mention politics.

My wife and I talk about social media all the time. My opinion is that social media is a classic example of culturally disruptive technology. The printing press had a direct impact on the cultural landscape as the elites of the time lost control over information (think about Lady Whistledown’s impact in Bridgerton). Read any biography of Benjamin Franklin and you will learn all about the power of the press in pre-revolutionary America. I think the advent of social media has had the effect of someone upending a game board in society, and we will be dealing with it for decades as we develop new cultural controls. The vast majority of our interactions with other human beings are governed by cultural controls, not by legislated regulations from the government. Social media is so powerful a force that it is going to take decades for us to develop means of social control again. Institutional economics focuses on understanding the underlying rules that govern society and human interaction. Periodically technology disrupts the rules of society and it takes a long time to re-establish them. We’re in the early stages of establishing the rules for social media, and in re-establishing the rules of social interaction that have been affected by the disruption social media has caused. We’ll get there. But it is going to take some time. Years.

Listen

What: The Babylon Bee, Elon Musk Sits Down With The Babylon Bee (99 min)

Why: The Babylon Bee is a Christian satire site in the spirit of the Onion. Don’t let that turn you off - they are very funny, and not preachy. They poke fun at the Christian Right more than any other organization in a way that shows their own understanding of Christian culture. Until recently I did not realize they had a podcast. I started listening to this interview with a great deal of skepticism because this was the first time I have actually listened to Elon Musk speak in more than a sound bite. As you can see, it’s a long interview. They cover a wide range of topics related to Musk’s varied interests and have a bit of fun with it. There are three Bee staffers talking to Musk, and you can tell they can’t quite believe they are actually sitting there with someone so famous, and the whole thing feels a bit amateurish, but that actually makes it also feel more credible.

So Musk - I have to say I am a bit of a fan now. I could care less about Tesla, but Space X is really awesome. And his work on the neural link is pretty incredible. There’s a lot in this interview. Listen to it on 1.5x - but it is worth listening to. We need a lot more people like Musk in the US. How do we get more?

Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .

Flourishing in the World

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