Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
We have a few new subscribers this week. Welcome aboard!
I hope you enjoy this latest edition.
Until next week,
Florian
Endurance
My high school gym teacher would have us run laps in the freezing cold first thing in the morning.
I hated it.
But what I disliked even more was the ritual he made us perform before we’d start running.
“Repeat after me”, he’d say. “Endurance is running for as long as possible, while maintaining a constant speed, without ever stopping.”
It seemed pointless. And slightly sadistic.
Fast forward twenty years. I’ve just passed mile twenty-two of the New York marathon. My legs feel like they're being devoured by a colony of fire ants. My mind feels like a nuclear reactor in full meltdown.
I start repeating the words in my head. “Endurance is running for as long as possible, while maintaining a constant speed, without ever stopping.” My mind cools down.
The point was never the definition of endurance.
The point was to give us something to focus on. A life raft to keep our minds from capsizing when the tidal wave of exhaustion would hit.
But just like good wine, some lessons need to be bottled for years to be appreciated.
Or maybe my gym teacher was just sadistic.
Weekly Wisdom
🤿 In Praise of Weirdness: “The Rescue” chronicles the saving of twelve Thai boys trapped in an underground cave. The jaw-dropping footage alone kept me on the edge of my seat when I should have been writing this newsletter. But the underlying takeaway for me was how the unusual hobby and obsession of a few people ended up being more useful than the might of an entire army.
🦉 How to Live: I’m a big fan of Derek Sivers’ writing. It’s sharp, short and punchy and it always leaves me thinking. If you’re in the mood for some light-weight rapid fire wisdom condensed in one hundred pages, “How to Live” is a great little book. One chapter’s advice is often contradicted in the following one which makes it oddly refreshing.
🎨 Time and Creativity: Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic” is my favorite book on creativity (H/t Salman for the recommendation). If you don’t have time for the book, check out this interview where she shares some of her insights on how to thread creativity in the busy fabric of our lives.
Lateral Thought
“We don’t know what is going to happen, or how, or when, and that very uncertainty is the space of hope.”
Rebecca Solnit