Excellence Inspires Excellence

Posted on by
1

I watch the Winter Olympics, and I feel like writing.

I see the forceful, elegant, laser-focused precision of speed skaters and feel like writing.

I see the massively brave lugers hurtling just beneath the edge of disaster, one twinge or tickle away from catastrophe. I feel like writing.

Its the audacious, reckless freedom of snowboarders. The tightly-controlled strength and artistry of ice skaters. The ability of  skiers to lean in when their brains should be telling them to lean back. The relentless endurance of cross-country skiers.

It all makes me feel like writing.

The truth is this happens all the time. It happens when I watch So You Think You Can Dance. It happens when I watch The Voice. Excellence inspires excellence.

I notice excellence and I feel grateful. I am grateful not only for the performance they have shared. I am grateful to have glimpsed the thousand previous unseen performances hiding inside that one moment of public brilliance. I am grateful when I can see the shape of all those early mornings, late nights. The bruises and cuts and frustrations. The satisfactions delayed. The sacrifice of normal life to achieve something extraordinary.

And here’s the thing. You don’t have to be an Olympic athlete or a world-class dancer or an astonishing singer to feel the draw. There is something inside of you that wants expression. There is something inside that wants you to commit. There is something excellent that wants to get out.

When I watch the Winter Olympics, I am not watching only the beauty of that one, rare performance. I am watching the urgent, inspiring beauty of a lifetime commitment.

You have it. I have it. It is time for us to get started.

My Pursuit of Paperlessness

Posted on by
Reply

Earlier today, I glimpsed my paperless future. I had two documents to sign, scan and send to a colleague. Scanning documents is a pain in the ass. Filing or destroying the paper copies of those scanned documents is a pain in the ass. Dealing with paper in general, is… you guessed it, a pain in the ass.

I don’t like dealing with paper. This is probably a shocking confession coming from a librarian. After all, aren’t librarians the people charged with organizing the world’s paper? Not this guy. I have a different gift. I’m really good at find papers but not so great at filing them. My gift for search probably comes from having spent so much time in my life looking.

Don’t get upset. Paper books are still wonderful and lovely and charming and delicious and all that. I’m talking about the Other Papers. The not-wonderful, unlovely, uncharming paper that comes from spending 40-50 hours a week inside an office. I’m talking about time sheets, travel authorizations, requests for funding, subscription approval forms and any number of other administrivial paper.

I have an aversion to all of this paper. I am cultivating this aversion. I am training my team to believe I have a killer allergy to the use of paper in the workplace. Occasionally, when someone hands me a piece of paper that requires some small action on my part, I like to yell, “”It burns! It burns!” and wave the paper around like the flag of my discontent.

There is a better, more productive and mature path. I glimpsed that path today. Those two documents needed my signature but I really didn’t want to print, sign, scan, email then file.

Here’s what I did instead.

  1. Open electronic copies of the source documents (one an Excel spreadsheet; the other a Word document)
  2. Complete as much as possible onscreen.
  3. Save the document as PDFs to the Dropbox folder on my computer.
  4. Open the documents in the Dropbox app on my iPad.
  5. Push copies of those documents from the Dropbox app to the iAnnotate PDF app.
  6. Sign and date the document in iAnnotate with blue digital ink.
  7. Push a copy of each signed document back to the Dropbox app as a flattened PDF named the same as the original so that the document is updated rather than replicated.
  8.  Move to the permanent storage file on my computer.
  9. Email and done.

Okay, so I do acknowledge that typing all of this out into 9 easy steps does seem a bit more complex than just print, sign, scan and email. I promise it is a million times easier for me and I don’t have to deal with a paper copy and I don’t have to worry about document retention policies and I don’t have to worry about misfiling since it resides on my computer and will get indexed for search. The whole process takes about three minutes. The process of print, sign, scan, email, file/destory takes at least 5 minutes.

Today’s scenario started with digital source documents. I’m not always so lucky. In cases where someone hands me a paper document that needs my attention, I reach for the Scanner Pro app, which uses the iPad camera to take an image of a document and then turns that image into PDF which can be batched automatically to a designated folder in Dropbox.

Dropbox is the common thread that makes these workflows possible. I really like Dropbox, but that’s a paean for another time. Today felt like a long overdue step toward something I’ve always known was possible but hadn’t really bothered to try. It just gets better and better.

The Man in the Basement: A Few Words About Writing

Posted on by
Reply

A few words tonight just to prime the pump and remember how the engine feels when it is running. How easy it is to step aside and let days go by without writing. And yet, there is always a part of me somewhere inside that continues writing, like a man locked in a basement with only one window and a broken staircase. There is no help for him. There is no rescue. Keep throwing him food. Open the window when you can to let fresh air in. Let him continue his work undisturbed. Open the door. Give him light. Remind him there are many rooms in this house.

He will continue his writing, but maybe he will not feel so frantic when he knows that someone up there has remembered him and knows what he is doing. This makes it easier for him to believe there is a point to it. That he isn’t just a thing caught in a room that does not touch the world. Let him send his words up from time to time. Admire them. Let him know they matter. It makes no difference. He will continue writing all the same, but when the frantic verve has gone out, the words take on a better shape. He is doing the only thing he is able to do. And then, the words have a point. They connect to things.

I wrote a piece of flash fiction tonight. I expected to post it here just for fun, but I’m going to keep it safe for a while. There is a glint of something inside it I want to play with.

The man in the basement. Even when I’m not writing, he is writing. I need to protect him from despair.

Why Martin Luther King Day Matters to Everyone

Posted on by
Reply

I was 12 years old when Martin Luther King Day became a national holiday. I grew up in the American South with a lot of kind, generous but sometimes confused people. I remember feeling frustrated by my conversations with people I respect who seemed to resent the new holiday and wondered why we celebrate this one man, Martin Luther King, Jr, with a day of federal rest yet do not honor our presidents in the same way. I was frustrated then because I didn’t have the words to answer their question.

Twenty-eight years later,  I have those words.

My country is addicted to the idea of our presidents as essential leaders. Every four years, we cast our ballots in hope, whether voiced or silent, that we are electing a uniquely gifted person who can lead us (all of us) into our better future.

We expect too much of this person. We make our president too important, and, inevitably, we are disappointed when our unrealistic hopes are dashed. We are angry when our president turns out to have too small a vision or lacks the will to break those things we believe ought to be broken.

I have come to understand Martin Luther King Day as a day to reflect on leadership. Not power. Not prestige. I think about leadership, the kind Martin Luther King, Jr. showed more than 50 years ago. It is the kind showed by millions of others right now, today. We just don’t have a name for it.

Authentic leaders give people a voice. They voice the shared thoughts of people who cannot be heard. They articulate the unexpressed aspirations of people who cannot place the stuff of their own heart into words. They simplify complexity. They make the impossible seem attainable. They declare what others secretly hope to be true. They create impatience where complacency has become harmful. Authentic leaders help people recognize and overcome barriers to their own self-interest. Authentic leaders inspire action. They recognize and develop the natural energies of a shared ideal. They shape ambitions and catalyze dreams.

And then, they step aside so many hands can get to work.

There are a few presidents who exhibit these qualities, but there are many, many regular people who lead this way every day.

And so, Martin Luther King Day, for me, is not a celebration of just one man and the remarkable things he was able to achieve.  Martin Luther King Day is a call to action more than a memorial. It is a reminder that this country is still being built and the building requires many hands. We aren’t finished.

We do need good presidents. We deserve better senators and representatives. And yet, our country is not made by them. Our future does not belong to them. We make our country, every day. America is its people. This, I think, is an idea worth a federal holiday.

Enthusiasm!

Posted on by
Reply

We all have our superpowers. Some people can match pants, shirt and tie. Others can dance or tell jokes. Some people always remember exactly where they parked the car when they leave the store. Some people keep impossibly white teeth no matter how much coffee they drink.

My superpower is enthusiasm.

I have the ability to become irrationally exhuberant about things I care about and remain so long after good sense and social norms suggest I cool off.

Enthusiasm carries me through my days. Enthusiasm multiplies my projects and keeps my to-do lists from ever shortening.

Enthusiasm is why I am known to sing or whistle as I move about a room.

Enthusiasm is the explanation for the soundtrack always playing in my head.

Enthusiasm keeps me positive and helps me focus on tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Enthusiasm protects me from disappointment and shields me, when necessary, from self-doubt.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about my enthusiasm. Some find my relentlessly positive outlook off-putting. Some find it grating and naive. I am sorry for them. The things in this life that are worth doing are worth doing with exhuberance and steadfast resolve.

I am not, as some might say, a dilettante. I am an explorer, hoping never to face exhaustion, never to run past the pale of curiosity. The world is exceedingly, unendingly interesting if one has only the energy and the patience and the unflagging resolve to pay attention, acknowledge and appreciate.

The world does not always require genius or brilliance or even, at times, much intelligence. What the world wants most is commitment, an honest investment. What the world requires is enthusiasm.

No Peaking: Writerly Advice

Posted on by
2

I just wrote 365 words that I want very much to show you. They are the first 365 words of the second draft of a short piece I finished a few weeks ago. I’m not going to post them.

I finished that first piece, set it aside for a week and then returned to it, eager to mark and strike, chop and blend. I had planned to highlight all the good bits green, all the broken bits red and all the stuff that felt out of place or did not grab my throat yellow. I did this and expected then to simply replace the red bits with better words, move the yellow parts where they belonged and keep the green bits in place as buttress for the entire thing. That’s called editing.

I struggled. There were plenty of green bits and a great deal of yellow. Not as much red in the thing as I had feared. Try as I might, I could not wrestle those words into a coherent draft. There was the dim shape of story in it but the shape was broken by gulfs of narrative silence I had not at first seen.

When I was writing that first draft, the story felt like a line pulling me through. Sometimes the line hitched. Sometimes it dragged. But the writing felt like a line.

When I read that first draft, I noticed only the disunity. Why did he do that? Where did those people in the other paragraph come from? Is this guy wearing any clothes? The questions were maddening, and I had no answers.

I stopped. I let it sit another week.

And now, I am drawn back to that story. This time I am writing again from scratch without rereading the previous draft. I am working from my memory of what happens and building the situation with brand new words.

The second draft is starting over with a bigger germ. The idea is there but is unhindered by the scaffolding I built around the first draft.

All of this is to say, that writing is iterative. I forget this sometimes.When we read published works, we see ideas beautifully laced with all seams closed tight. We relish the exuberance of polished phrase and well-made paragraphs stacked neatly, methodically with a mason’s grace.

When we write, it is very different. It is messy. It is fractured. It is incomplete. We write anyway. We turn again to the germ of our original thought and find that it has grown better and stronger from the accretion of all those earlier words. We sweep all of those earlier words away and start again with a better sense of the line that drew us through the first time.

Writing, like painting, is iterative. You lay down an idea. You layer an idea over that. You layer another idea over that and another and another and another.

No one will ever see the brilliant words that went before these. They will disappear into the sediment of thought. But the loam of each layer gets richer.

Only after I have done this several times will I dare to make comparison. Only then will I dissect, marking the green, red and yellow bits. And then, I will write one more draft, pulling together the best pieces of each in the best possible order.

I want to show you these new 365 words, but I’m not going to show them now. You can’t fall in love too quickly. You never know which of your precious darlings you are going to need to kill and bury in the loam. Keep those words to yourself until they are ready.

Don’t share your early drafts until you fully own them. No peaking.

 

 

You Have to Eat. You Have to Read.

Posted on by
Reply

There are a few inescapable requirements for life. You have to eat. You have to drink. You have to breathe. You have to read.

Just as the body needs food, water and oxygen to sustain the basic biological functions of life, the mind needs words, images and ideas to keep itself humming in a productive, coherent manner. This is especially true for people who want to write.

Time is precious. We constantly make choices about what’s valuable to us in the way we spend our time. I often find myself caught between two conflicting but complimentary urges: the urge to spend my time reading and the urge to spend my time writing. I can’t spend equal time with both and so, in general, I find myself doing one at the exclusion of the other.

Stephen King offers a lot of really generous, useful advice to writers in his book On Writing. This, in particular, has stayed with me: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

He’s right, of course. The art of writing is primarily an act of digestion. We have to eat to live. We have to read to write.

Looking back, I am astonished to find I only read 7 books in 2013. I read a lot of other stuff, too. Lots of articles, blog posts and miscellaneous stuff. That other stuff matters, but the truth is books are the best diet. You can’t write books, if you don’t read books.

I know this is true. I write well when I read well. And so, in place of a new year’s resolution, which I abhor, I am undertaking a project. I am going to read 20 books in 2014. I am also going to write as much as I can. I’m going to stop thinking about the two activities as competing joys. They are two sides of the same act. The eating and the energy. The inhale and the exhale. The words you receive and the words you share.

Here’s what I read in 2013:

Robert’s bookshelf: read

Cryptonomicon
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
Welcome to the Monkey House
Player Piano
Nine Horses
A Year of Writing Dangerously: 365 Days of Inspiration and Encouragement
A Feast for Crows



Robert’s favorite books »

Share book reviews and ratings with Robert, and even join a book club on Goodreads.

My Nerd Quest for an Automated Daily Journal

Posted on by
Reply

Be warned! This post is about to get really nerdy. If you know me and have built a mental model of me as a cool, relaxed, not-at-all nerdy person, you should stop reading. This post is going to ruin things for both of us.

I like to keep track of things. I like to make lists of things that don’t matter much to most people. I make lists of the books I read. I manage lists that count the number of times I have listened to songs in music library. I actually track the number of tweets I send each month along with the number of followers and people I follow because you can create interesting ratio games with that information.

I also like to keep track of how I spend my time. Ever since I was 8, I’ve had this idea that my future biographers (Don’t laugh. It could happen.) would need an accurate accounting of my life to use as raw data for their analysis of my accomplishments and how daily events correlate to my creative success.

I’m not talking about a diary or journal. I have one of those. I’m talking about an accurate, daily accountant-style ledger of what I did with my day. It isn’t a narrative of thoughts, ideas or insights. It is a list of things I did, places I went and when I did them. The details aren’t very exciting. I do pretty much the same stuff every day. But I love to look back at what I was doing one, two or more years ago on this very day and see what memories are sparked or how events compare. More often than not, I find that the events are very similar and that my life is more or less locked into a pattern of routine places and things. I often look back to find that I ate at the same restaurant, shopped at the same store or did the same errands exactly one year before and one year before that. That kind of redundancy is both reassuring and frightening.

I used to keep all this in paper records. I had a notebook and kept my daily log on lined notebook paper, filling in the progression of daily details from memory at the end of each day. The paper log was limited because it grew unwieldy and was very difficult to search. As the log grew, it took more and more time to page through to visit the past. Worse, my memory was imperfect and I found myself skipping details on entries or getting things out of order. I knew I needed to automate.

I wanted a daily event log that I could carry with me and update in real time with automatic time stamps securely affixed to each event.

Enter Momento. Momento is an iPhone app that allows quick, easy entries of short moments as you move through the day. The daily view allows easy editing with a calendar view for quick time travel possibilities. Momento integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and other RSS feeds (like this blog) so I could keep a record of all my post activities along with my daily events. I kept up with this for a few months in late 2012/early 2013 and then stopped because I didn’t like the redundancy of getting the same posts from mutliple social sites and also didn’t particularly care about link posts. I just wanted to sync original posts that somehow documented my state of mind at a time.

A few weeks ago, I tried Kennedy, another iPhone app, which lets you post easily by tapping the screen and making an entry. Text you add is supplemented by location, weather and a headline from the national and world news. The developers are striving for a tool that ties personal experience to larger world news to create a richer context. The name comes from the famous question, “Where were you when you found out Kennedy was shot?” The problem with the Kennedy app  became readily apparent. The app is very easy to update but gives you entries like: “”Grey evening in Oak Ridge. Dinner at Aubrey’s. Four dead in Manila airport shooting” or “Drizzley afternoon in Oak Ridge. Christmas party with cousins. Turkish ministers’ son charged.”

Every update felt weird and super depressing. I moved on to Heyday.

Heyday is a location-based journal iPhone app that uses GPS to automatically tag every location at which you stop. You can add entries directly. The app also sweeps up pictures from your camera roll and organizes them into an interesting collage of daily images to supplement the text and geotag entries. It is a good concept but failed quickly. The constant GPS ran down my battery. I felt like my phone was spying on me and, worse, not spying very well. When I stopped at a red light for a full minute, it registered a visit to The Sun Tan Shop. The false tags would be humorous years from now. I’m sure but my future biographers would be perplexed by my suddenly erratic and eclectic habits.

I’m back to Momento. I use Foursquare to check-in and just ignore the duplicate posts from other social platforms. You can filter those out, anyway.

Okay. So there it is. I’m a nerd. I keep detailed records of things nobody cares about and I stress out about the best way to get it done, keep it accurate and make it searchable.

I feel like I’m in good company. After all, isn’t this what Captain Jean-Luc Picard does at the end of each Star Trek: Next Generation episode? Actually, that’s pretty much what I’m after. A voice recorder that transcribes my life for the future benefit of star fleet. There are surely mysteries that can be solved, interstellar crises averted, if only future generations have access to the tremendously dull, repetitive data of my everyday life.

It isn’t a journal. Its a daily inventory of people, places and things. So, I”m wondering, does anybody else keep a daily account like this? Am I really that weird? I mean, I can’t be that weird. People are developing apps for this. That makes me pretty much normal. This is pretty normal behavior. Right?

January 1, 2014: This is Not the Post You Are Looking For

Posted on by
3

Today is New Year’s Day. You are probably expecting someone to post the secret recipe for life. This is not the post you are looking for.

I don’t have any answers. If anything, 2013 brought me more questions. Last year was a difficult year, and this year will be more difficult still. People I love are sick. I’m going to lose some of them this year.

I continue working with groundlessness and gratitude. Groundlessness has become my code-book for life. It is my faith, if you want to call it that. Some Buddhists call groundlessness “impermanence”. That is a good word for it, though the term tends to emphasize the impermanence of our lives. Most spiritual practice, it seems to me, overemphasizes the fact of our eventual deaths. In this focus, impermanence narrows to the unpleasant surprise of our own mortality. Most spiritual practice, it seems to me, makes too big a deal of death. By focusing too much on the ultimate unpleasantness, we miss a more important truth. Our daily lives are impermanent. Our minutes and hours are in constant change. Our understandings are always confounded. Our expectations dashed.

This is not a cause for sorrow or anxiety. Despair is the wrong response. When working with groundlessness, I remind myself, I must also work with gratitude. When you have given up expectation that things should be a certain way and you are working with gratitude, you are teaching yourself to pay attention. You are letting go of an invented narrative about The Way Things Should Be and are able to notice things as they really are. Gratitude is the habit of noticing the specifics. Gratitude is about paying attention.

I am not prepared to make any New Year’s resolutions. I intend to continue working with groundlessness and gratitude. I intend for my life to develop around this one theme: pay attention.

I’m not good at paying attention. It is, for me, very much a practice. Things always go wrong. They don’t go the way I intend for them to go. I am working to remind myself that the problem isn’t with Things, the problem is with my Plan for Things. Things don’t happen the way we expect or the way we believe we need them to happen. And still, we can be grateful.

And so, as I face another year of uncertainty and almost certain losses, my wish for myself is my wish for you as well. May you be faced with every obstacle and surprised by unexpected challenges and yet remain grounded in your acceptance of groundlessness and may you grow large with gratitude for things the way they really are rather than confused and frustrated with desire for things the way they ought to be.

We Write the Things We Need to Read

Posted on by
Reply

Another 1300 words this morning on a 3800 word story, which I still don’t really understand. The story has taken a strange shape. There is a kind of allegorical logic emerging. Now there are two men walking. And now they are talking about things they can’t remember.

Sometimes we write because there is a story that doesn’t yet exist which we desperately need to read.