Greetings everyone,
I am quickly whipping this one up — but I always get it done. Delivery = reliability.
I hope you enjoy it!
Clouds are thoughts without words.
—Mark Strand (1934-2014)
✏️ On Load Management
I stop my watch and check my time — another slow pace. The past week hasn’t been good. Despite feeling stronger and setting a distance PR only a week before, everything feels tougher this week. The weight feels heavier, the runs feel longer, the legs feel weaker. It’s not a physiological problem — I’m in good shape. It’s mental: I am burnt out.
I’ve learned this week the importance of load management. Top athletes often get this treatment: being rested for games at the end of the season when playoffs are clinched or sitting out the 4th quarter of a blowout. But load management is equally as important in mental endeavours as physical ones. The mind is strong: it can work hard, in the hands of a worthy wielder, longer than most realize. Especially in youth, this is a quality that should be taken advantage of. But there will come a time, even in the most persevering of thinkers, when the brain says, “Enough!”. Getting to this point often manifests in the inability to focus, a lack of motivation, or even sickness. It is the all-to-familiar burnout. It doesn’t have to end this way though. If you know how to load manage.
The 20% Paradox states that people usually take on 20% more work than they can handle sustainably. If you’re like me, you are probably doing 1 too many things, leading to low-grade stress and anxiety around work that eventually catches up to you. I think that, if I want to achieve my long-term goals, load management is going to be pretty important. That means making time for things outside of work — health, relationships, and leisure. It means saying no to potentially lucrative work if it pushes me past my limits for too long. It means spending the time and money to destress after a long season of work. Load management looks different for everyone but the goal is the same — to be able to sustain high-quality output over an indefinite amount of time. The mind can only take so much weight — learning how much you can handle on a daily basis, when you have the energy to push for more, and when you need to pull back and give your brain a rest is a life skill that will literally pay dividends in the future. Load management of your mental bandwidth is key to long-term success.
// What can you do to load manage your mental bandwidth better?
Do you need to let some things go? Start giving yourself weekends again? For me, both are true.
Via Media — the middle road.
💡 Food for Thought
Ambition that leaves time for nothing and no one is unhealthy ambition.
🔗 Sunday Best
On Poetry In General
By William Hazlitt. If this doesn’t make you want to start reading poetry I don’t know what will.
Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape, can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. It is not a mere frivolous accomplishment (as some persons have been led to imagine), the trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours -- it has been the study and delight of mankind in all ages.
How to Live on 24 Hours A Day
The OG Productivity Book by Arnold Bennett. I devoured this book in 2 days.
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.
Ep. 250: In Defense of Thinking
The Deep Qs Podcast with Cal Newport. Deep work and productivity guru.
The art of thinking – plain, old fashioned, hard concentration on useful ideas – is rapidly vanishing as our culture recasts humans as the custodians and recipients of digital computation. In this episode, Cal explains why this is a problem and what we should do in response.
Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
Thanks for coming!
AT