Sweet Bites
January 26, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with some thought-provoking finds to send you off into the weekend with.
This week we explored the concepts of effort, practice, and results as it relates to fate, our January theme. Below are the Monday Meditations and Wednesday Wisdom for the week:
Any of the below bites resonate? Hit the reply button and let me know.
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🧵 Process
We’re often so focused on results that we forget to be present within the process. This week I wrote a Notes thread (Substack’s version of Twitter) exploring this issue.
You can read the thread by clicking below and follow me here for future posts like it.
💡 Reframe
Cal Newport, author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Deep Work and many others, offers the following advice for accomplishing our goals: expand your time horizon.
“So one of the big ideas in my slow productivity philosophy is that you should shift your focus, your time scale in which you're focusing, away from days and weeks and towards months and years. That is, instead of asking what did I accomplish over the last few days or weeks you say what did I accomplish over the last six months, over the last two years. That is a really cool scale to produce big things because you can produce things at a very human pace. ”
Check out the rest of the video below and his advice on how to accomplish big projects through small daily increments.
📖 Story
Before Steve Martin was a household name with films like Plains, Trains, and Automobiles, The Jerk, and Three Amigos, he was a stand-up struggling to hone his craft and find his footing in the world of comedy.
Spending years devoted to the craft of stand-up comedy, he told himself if he didn’t find success and “make it” by his early 20s, he’d hang up his hat.
His birthday came and went. He decided he’d give himself a bit more time.
Birthday after birthday came and went and rather than quit, he continued on in pursuit of the craft, working to better hone his jokes and acts.
This is what we talk about when we say “extend your time horizon.” We often forget that things often take longer than we expect. That’s why I always say it takes what it takes.
By extending our time horizon, we give ourselves runway to perfect our skill/craft and not hold ourselves to constant disappointment if not met in the condensed timeframe we think we can complete it in. As Martin states:
“I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.”
In reflecting on his career as a comic and on what kept him pushing on, he wrote: