Weekly Wednesday Wisdom #10

Q1 Review of 2023

Greetings fellow lovers of wisdom,

This week’s edition will be slightly different in format as it’s been about a month since my last issue of Wednesday Weekly Wisdom and demarcates my first WWW in the second quarter of 2023. As such, it will take a broader perspective.

Three months. Thirteen weeks. Ninety-one days.

Intentions, actions, and results. More poetically – seeds, roots, and fruits.

Simpler still, one could distill life into inputs & outputs, yeses and nos.

While we’re now well on our way into 2023, it is remarkable to reflect on the opening trio of January, February and March. Paradoxically, it seems both a lot and not very much has happened. This also presents an opportunity to adjust and make any necessary course corrections at a slightly larger interval than the day-to-day, week-to-week and monthly cadence. After completing my 2022 annual review, I also intend for this to make the 2023 annual review a smoother process.

Onward.

Reviewing my first few weeks’ of writing and documentation of the year, there was a preoccupation with finances and tension between commercial and creative interests, particularly with regards to writing.

If I inquire about how I spent my energy this quarter, there is both congruence and some discrepancies present.

Practically speaking, I quantify energy as time, attention, thoughts, emotions, actions, habits and money.

Looking back, my intention for the year was around exploring systems, workflow, productivity and bandwidth. My media diet has reflected that at least in part – some of this quarter’s highlights included:

• Building A Second Brain

• Ultraworking Pentathlon

• Mind Management, Not Time Management

• Winning The Week

Looking through my reading and listening history, I also see some selections on music and inner work, though I’m not sure music received adequate attention. Nonetheless, I made some casual progress on drumming and rhythm during free pockets of time at work.

I notice some discrepancies and overcommitments between some things I’ve invested financial resources into without appropriately scheduling adequate time and attentional resources, particularly around copywriting. As I tweeted earlier this year, “Don’t write cheques your calendar can’t cash.” There is more for me here to investigate. I suspect there’s emotional labor around work, worth and money to uncover and resolve.

While going through the Ultraworking Pentathlon was both valuable and affirming, I find that there was resistance to undergoing their monthly debrief and planning process, though I’m doing my best to stick with it – I suspect I spent too much time debriefing without sufficient actionability. I chalk it up to learning a new process. At the very least, it is quite thorough and provides decent data at one level of compression removed from my journal entries, though that is also why it is so time-intensive.

A theme I notice though is that my overall well-being is high to which I attribute a relatively solid morning routine engaging the whole being. Light, cold, movement, breath, stillness, spiritual practices and writing were consistently maintained, even if some aspects evolved over this past quarter.

I also made time for relating with others and socialization which consistently rate among my exceptional days.

The accomplishment I’m most proud of is maintaining this publication schedule of something once a week. I also released a song at the beginning of the year despite not promoting it. For those interested in lo-fi hip hop, here’s a link.

One thing that has emerged from this quarter is accepting the challenge to write a book before my 40th birthday. I’ll declare that here publicly for emphasis, though I first mentioned it several issues ago. It is still alive. Since then, I’ve been letting it percolate, exploring different systems and topics to get it done. In short, more writing simply has to happen. A longtime goal of mine has been to delve into dictation and is underway using Google voice typing for my morning pages. 

Balancing the creative energy to allocate to this newsletter and the book remains a challenge. I have been considering topics in my writing as experiments. As of this writing, the three contenders for book topics are spirituality, learning and music. However, a recent epiphany has revealed that learning is superordinate to the other two.

As an avid lifelong learner and educator, I often reflect on one of my “12 Favorite Problems” (a concept borrowed from Richard Feynman):

• What does the education of the future look like? 

• What do children most need to learn? 

• What if education was based around character development rather than achievement? 

One of my first spontaneous ideas when first challenged was “a manual for new humans”, curating and collating many of the practices I’ve experimented with and adopted over the years. I’ve experienced some resonance, particularly in the current froth and Pandora’s Box of artificial intelligence.

I currently sit with Aristotle’s approach around asking what is uniquely human as an initial lens of inquiry, though my influences are manifold.

I will leave it here for now and wish you a virtuous rest of your week.