Monday December 9, 2024

Big Ideas, Small Actions

Newsletters are exhausting. They’re overwrought, baldly commercial, and wholly unsustainable. (Scroll to see what a hypocrite looks like.) They’re also thriving, and 61% of consumers want promotional emails at least once a week. One of the many examples of why I’ve struggled in professional settings. My world is not the real world.

Perhaps a bigger reason is that I struggle with big ideas. Not having them — only having them. My only new ideas are big, beautiful ones that arrive fully developed and executed, and I have no idea how to reverse engineer them. It’s been a problem since I decided at 15 that I wanted to write my first novel by 16, wrote the first and last chapters in about 3 hours, and struggled fruitlessly for weeks trying to connect the dots until I gave up.

At 18, I thought a series of short stories based on visiting my friends at their various New England colleges during Winter Term would not only make a great project but evolve into a groundbreaking series of short stories in the vein of Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness. (It did not. I also still live, so that’s a plus.)

Fast-forward through a few less notable failures, and at 29, I challenged myself to write 500 words daily for an entire year just to feel like I completed something. A few cheat days withstanding, I did it, but it was so bloated with nothingness and nonsense that it felt like a waste of my one success.

I mean, shit, this week, I’ve been feeling so creatively bereft that I started a novel about having high cholesterol because it was the first original thought that made me laugh out loud in weeks. Here I am, quickly pivoting to a newsletter instead. Growth, maybe?

A hypocrite in his natural habitat: The professional headshot.

In my work life, I’ve never had patience for long, painstakingly executed projects. I can bullshit my impatience to say I’m efficient, driven, and self-motivated. But in reality, I’m inflexible, struggle with authority and bureaucracy, and am so results-oriented that I forget the value of sustainable, repeatable processes. Every company I’ve worked at has had no appetite for innovation, and I’ve quickly become unhappy doing the rote work to keep the lights on while every idea to grow, change, or do something creative is met with red tape or “conversations about priorities.”

This is at least one reason I’ve had the most success and been happiest as a freelance writer. I get assignments, I crank them out, my editor okays them, and I move on to the next thing. I like to do things once. Editors like to do things once. I’ve had great relationships with every editor I’ve ever worked with because textual types have all come to the grim realization that our line of work is in imminent peril and our one form of resistance is efficiently executing the ancient form of personality. (You’ve never met a funny AI.)

My whole goal with a newsletter was to bookend each week with a brief little brain break — no more than 500 words, and here we are… about 500 words in before it even starts. I do this. I see the rainbow; I see the pot of gold sitting there under it; but if I ever do find the path, I have to pee immediately, wander into the trees, and spend the next three weeks lost in the woods until I forget I was in them to begin with.

This Substack is as much personal development as it is creative outlet. I need to learn brevity. The value of concision. What an ironic problem. So, here’s the deal.

If you received this in your email, I automatically subscribed you. On the one hand, this indicates you mean a lot to me. On the other, it’s invasive, and I hope we can still be friends or family. If you came here through a social link, I’d love a new subscriber since subscribers are now the metric of my self-worth.

With this newsletter, you can expect a Monday and Friday brain dump, much like the format below. I’ll probably keep the same categories every week, but who knows? I do want this thing to be a really quick read so you don’t just click on it because you’re a nice person who knows how data collection works, but you actually read it and maybe gain an interest, a mantra, an idea — or a kernel of anything.

Future Mondays and Fridays will be much, much tidier.

Now to this week’s theme: Big Ideas, Small Actions.

One Song: “Not Like Us” - Kendrick Lamar

A rap beef is about as simple of an idea as it gets. Kendrick turning his with Drake into the LA unity concert while Drake sues Universal is about as big idea as it gets.

One Lyric: “I’m feeling badly/It’s not an attempt at decency” - Rilo Kiley, The Execution of All Things

My favorite song of all time conflates a toxic relationship with the literal apocalypse. Jenny Lewis is God so it makes sense.

One Image:

Adopting a puppy is a simple act that changes countless lives. Yours, the dog’s, your family members’ — pets change your relationships, ratchet your anxiety to places you didn’t know it could go, and make you wonder how much more you can do. (Like parenthood, yowzas.)

One Book: James by Percival Everett

Academia gave me a complicated relationship with fiction, so I don’t read a lot of it. This best-seller, however, takes a simple idea and executes it with surgical brilliance to explore deeply provocative themes.

One Hollywood: “Nobody Wants This”, Netflix

Rom-coms routinely do too much. “Nobody Wants This” feels practically impossible: A TV rom-com with real characters, real stakes, and meritorious of a second season.

One Person: Major Robert Anderson, US Army

This guy could play himself in the movie.

The Southern sympathizing steward of Charleston’s Fort Moultrie controversially decided to move his garrison to Fort Sumter rather than attempt to defend the dilapidated Moultrie against an increasingly threatening secessionist force. His decision rankled the ineffectual President Buchanan but electrified the incoming Lincoln, who recognized that this small act of self-preservation (and subordination) would force the South into an aggressive position, winning the antebellum PR war. Six months later, the war of Southern aggression began with the siege of Sumter.

Bonus book recommendation: The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson.

One Food: Chicken Noodle Soup

Lindsay and I love chicken noodle soup, and somewhere along the line, I started making it with farfalle (bowties) and about 3/4 of the broth recommended in any recipe. Whether it’s slow cooker or on the stove, pasta-fying a noodle soup is the best thing I’ve ever done in the kitchen.

One Place: Wompatuck State Park

Teddy Roosevelt’s National Park Service was a pretty big idea with big actions. But Massachusetts’ state park system is truly extraordinary and something I’m thankful for all the time. We take Goose to Breakheart Reservation in Saugus more these days, but Wompatuck is the state park I grew up never properly appreciating. Use your state parks, people.