What I've Learned So Far

The other day I was talking to a like-minded friend about why we like to work out. (For “like-minded,” read “frazzled by the thousand tasks at hand.”)

She got at the heart of it when she said, in so many words, that both of us enjoy the methodical, non-thinking routines of fitness. You plan what you’re going to do, and then you can stop all of your intellectualizing while you go into the gym and do the work.

Just so.

For one more wrinkle on the appeal exerted by weightlifting’s methodical nature, I’d point you to this article from the Tried & True Fitness blog:

The Magic of Training

Here’s the moral of the story:

In the outside world, “impossible” is usually a permanent condition. But in the gym, under the bar, impossible is only a temporary situation. What’s impossible today can be accomplished with ease four days later. 

Read the whole post.

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(Photo by Brian L. Romig, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

Oh, to spend my days in an old library like this one . . .

My academic life has taken me to some great libraries: the St. Andrews rare books section, the Harry Ransom Center, the Bodleian (at least for one day), the Butler, and that bibliographic holy of holies at Union Theological Seminary.

I still read voluminously, seemingly all day every day, but as I look back at the record of my reading for the year — and the past few years — it’s clear to me that I’ve let my online intake of words overwhelm my printed-book intake of words.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to make my living as an online writer, and I’m well aware of the trove of good stuff available online. But I also know that most of the very best stuff I’ve ever read has come in book form, and that I do my best thinking about what I read when the computer is turned off. Besides all that, it would seem to make eminent sense to up my intake of books if I want to up my output of books.

So, an early resolution for 2010, one that I’ve already started on: read more books.

How about you? How’s your book reading these days?

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Related post by Austin Kleon: MY READING YEAR, 2009.
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(Image from Hannah Swithinbank, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

I do a fair amount of speaking, and friends sometimes ask me for advice on how to speak better. Sometime I’ll write more on that topic, but for starters, here are three books worth reading:

1. Dale Carnegie, The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking — A fundamental text from one of the all-time leaders in the field. Carnegie trained thousands of businesspeople to be competent speakers, and his advice here can help anyone getting started on the road of public speaking.

2. Richard C. Borden, Public Speaking As Listeners Like It! — This book is worth finding in your library or elsewhere even though it’s been out of print for a long time. I dug it up after Guy Kawasaki recommended it (can’t remember where), and I was glad I did. It’s full of pithy, on-point advice that’s just as relevant today as when the book was written decades ago. (My favorite: the magic of using “For instance . . .”)

3. Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen — This is a new-school title to complement the two old-school books above. Reynolds, who also has a great blog on this subject, has done a lot of deep thinking about how modern PowerPoint-driven presentations can be much better. He’s a clear writer who keeps the audience’s interests firmly in mind.

Now, what would you add to this list?

If you would, please note that I’ve started writing for the “Life Balance” blog at the CareOne site. Among other topics, I’ve recently praised the virtues of the humble push-up and its friends, and shared my best tips on finding a healthy lunch in cubicle-land.

CareOne specializes in helping people cope with excess debt, so if you’d like to read more about topics in that vein, be sure to check out the other blogs on the CareOne site as well.

As always, I’d love to get your feedback on my writing, so please feel free to share it, either in the Life Balance comment threads or right here.

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(Photo by Ed Yourdon, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

I like a sweet as much as anybody. I have my other vices, too. And all sorts of activities are worthy when taken in small doses.

But how much indulgence do you let yourself get away with? I’m not just talking about what you eat, but the whole of your life. Do you let yourself run into the embrace of your vices unchecked? Do you insist on indulging your destructive appetites, even though you say you want change in your life?

Lately I’ve been working to interrupt my habits of overindulgence. It’s the easiest thing in the world for me to say “I work really hard, so I deserve this” or “Yeah, I know what I said, but I can afford to let that go” — whether or not it’s true.

It’s better to take a hard dose of reality around the question “Is this beneficial?”

Sure, we can leave some slack in the system. Plenty of us rebel if we try to follow a new behavior in lockstep, especially if that behavior makes us feel deprived. But we should be honest with ourselves about what’s fruitful and unfruitful in our lives, especially in the areas where we know we overindulge. It takes life-shaping honesty to change those habits.

Again, it’s not just about food, although in the holiday season it’s never a bad idea to remind ourselves of our long-term goals for our bodies. It’s broader than that. What I’m really talking about is rooting out laziness and cowardice in ourselves, and using unflinching honesty as the tool.

No one can do it for you. You have to confront the variance between what you say you want and what you actually do in the direction of what you want.

• If you say you want to lose weight but you drink soda all day, you’re indulging yourself — and lying to yourself — and you need to stop it. Period. Stop making excuses.
• If you say you’re tired of your job, tired of being underpaid or underchallenged, tired of not pursuing your dreams — yet you indulge the same old habits that have kept you stuck in place — you’ve got to cut it out. It’s time to stretch yourself, and the fact that the stretching stings is a sign that it’s working, not that you should stop.
• To turn the lens back on myself: I if say I want to write books, yet I let days go by when I flake off about writing, then I’m full of it. Writing books takes a lot of stubborn, focused work. Indulging my habits of laziness just won’t get it done, and it’s idle to think that they could — or, more to the point, that it’s okay to indulge those habits.

It’s not okay. At some point (now? yesterday? last year?) your indulgence went from a minor vice to a great big dream-wrecking lie.

Enough already. Cast off your indulgence and get to work.

Who’s with me?

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(Photo by chotda, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

A couple of friends pinged me in the past 24 hours to either (a) congratulate me on striking out on my own as a full-time freelancer, or (b) ask whether I’d been laid off.

No.

I’m happy as a clam in my work at Hoover’s, and in fact I’m having as much fun as I have at any time in my 9+ years with the company. We have ambitious plans for our social media efforts in 2010, and it’s gratifying that my bosses at Hoover’s have given me so much room to run in the social-media area.

One little part of our plans for 2010 is to land me more speaking gigs in front of business groups. To help with my shameless mercenary self-promotion prospecting in this vein, a while back I added a “Public Speaker” heading to my LinkedIn profile, to go along with the “Freelance Magazine Writer” heading that had been there for ages. The basic idea was to give more LinkedIn users a heading to search against when they’re looking for a speaker, and to give my LinkedIn contacts a specific heading if they ever wanted to write an endorsement for me as a speaker. (Hint, hint.)

A-a-anyway, even though I haven’t touched either of those “self-employed” job headings for a while, somehow LinkedIn’s technology decided to tell my contacts that I’m now “Self-Employed” in the grander sense.

But no. Happily collecting a salary from my current employer — and hope to do so for many years to come.

My friend Kyle Flaherty started me down the track of thinking about my sports allegiances when he wrote a post about allegiances on Big Papelbon. Given the title of that blog — and all the talking about the Sox that I’ve done with Kyle, Aaron, Bryan, Adam, Jim, and the rest of the BigP crew — I thought it would be appropriate to launch my series on sports allegiances by talking about the Sox themselves. How does a guy from Texas end up as a devoted Red Sox fan, before the team ever made it back to the World Series?

As it happens, I wrote an essay on exactly that subject late in 2002. It appeared in the “Hot Stove” (i.e. winter) 2003 issue of Elysian Fields Quarterly. And now, for the first time outside the pages of EFQ, I present it to you.

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For Whom to Root

Stick with me for a second — the baseball part’s coming. If you live someplace like Austin, where I live, it’s hard not to notice the ill effects of our country’s rootless culture. Sure, Austin still has its music clubs and rib joints and swimming holes (for as long as they don’t turn toxic), but then there are the endless chain stores, suburban housing tracts, traffic jams, and highway construction projects. And Austin doesn’t even have it bad compared to, say, Silicon Valley. For better and for worse, our culture makes it easy to pick up stakes: ESPN and HBO go everywhere, every place has basically the same malls and supermarkets and gas stations, and one Chili’s or Costco or AutoZone is much like another.

We accustom ourselves to this rootlessness as we move around, Read the rest of this entry »

“To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings — it’s all a miracle.  I have adopted the technique of living life miracle to miracle.”

–Arthur Rubinstein.

Taking a cue from my friend Mack Collier, I’m upping my game in December. Here are three key ambitions:

1. Better blogging. What with travel, the press of work duties, and whatnot over the past few months, I haven’t blogged as much here or on my professional blog as I’d like. So, I’m giving myself the challenge of writing 100 blog posts — across all blogs — during December.

So far, so good. Early this morning I put up a little item at BigPapelbon about the Patriots’ crushing loss to the Saints last night. Later, I gave myself a pat on the back at my work blog for being named a speaker at SXSW 2010. Add the earlier post here and this one . . . and I have a mere 96 to go. (I promise I won’t make too many of them posts keeping track of my number of posts.)

2. Better fitness. If you’ve been reading my workout updates, you’ll know that November was a good month for me on the bench press. Unfortunately, it was a bad month for leg workouts — I did only two heavy leg sessions and one moderate one, when I should have done about half a dozen heavy sessions. My cardio work also left a lot to be desired.

The big challenge I’m taking on this month is to get through the holidays in better shape than when I started. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

3. Less paper. Paper is my absinthe. That stack of papers that has been my constant companion for years? This month, I’m whittling it down to what fits in a single notebook. Mark it down.

What about you? What are YOUR ambitions for December?
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(Image by Wally Gobetz, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

What with being a wordsmith maven obsessive, and all.

US lawyer charged over $1bn Ponzi fraud scheme

A former lawyer based in South Florida has been charged with operating a $1bn (£603m) investment fraud scheme. . . .

So . . . what does it take to become a “former” lawyer? Disbarment? Stopped practicing? Took up another profession? Renounced the law?
Since the source is the BBC, maybe this is a case of being divided by a common language, but I can’t recall a lawyer ever being described this way. You become a lawyer, you’re “a lawyer” even after you stop practicing. It’s like describing Gerald Ford as “from Michigan.” Didn’t matter that he was born in Nebraska, didn’t matter where he lived later in life — he was always “from Michigan.”

Thoughts, gentle wordfolk?