Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
~Henry Miller
A small thought:
It's easy for people to get tripped up on perfection. The rise of social media has only made that worse. Few things are more effective at making one feel "lesser" than an endless scroll through perfectly curated photos. It's the same with writing. We only get the polished end product. What we don't see are all the previous edits or the trash can full of discarded ideas.
That quest for an ideal product is well-intentioned but can be regressive. It’s easy to become so concerned with doing your best that you wind up shipping something inferior, or worse—never finishing at all.
Endless tweaking and "optimizing" are gateways to paralytic indecision.
It feels counterintuitive (and a little cheap), but try re-framing your focus on simply enjoying what you're doing-and even crashing through it recklessly once in a while.
I've found that doing so often results in higher quality work than what would've happened otherwise.
The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of AI
By Jason Fagone for The San Francisco Chronicle
"He wondered: By speaking to Jessica as if she were alive again, could he engineer a moment of catharsis that had eluded him for eight years? Could this trick actually heal his grief?"
“I F**ked Up”: How a pilot crashed a full passenger jet into the bay (and didn’t lose his job).
By Andrew Chamings for SFGate.com
A language barrier between Captain Asoh, who spoke little English, and his American copilot, Joseph Hazen, was also partially to blame, as the pair attempted to use a new instrument landing system for the first time. But at the NTSB investigation, Asoh chose not to blame any of those factors or make any excuses.
When asked what went wrong, he simply replied, “As you Americans say … I f--ked up.”
Who Will Cut Out Hair When We’re Gone?
By Drew Austin for Kneeling Bus
The concept of “watching TV,” meanwhile, has been decoupled from the physical object we still call a television. What’s so special about having one fewer screen in your house than everyone else? I don’t own a TV yet I waste more time on the internet than I ever could have wasted on cable channel surfing (although the intervening moments of productivity help to disguise that). Not owning a smartphone, on the other hand—that would actually be a statement.
The Hazards of Multi-Switching
by Evelyn Chong for Minimalism Life
While it seems to be a thing of the past, happiness is now most often equated with a slower lifestyle, a calmer state of being, where we can completely switch off. Could the decline of our attention span finally be a wake-up call to the importance of a slower life?
A Day Out at Glastonbury Festival
By Reuben Salsa for The Riff
Sunday was good fun. We had finally come down and everything was less technicolor and more chilled. Rocket Al had shagged a girlfriend of a dealer who had stolen his stash and was hiding out in Al’s tent. By the third day, everybody was a little feral. The stench had risen and no matter how many drugs you took, the acrid smell of unwashed bodies was overpowering. There was also a heatwave on. It felt like a scene out of an apocalyptic movie with bodies everywhere. Best roll another doobie and ride that shit out.
Two for the road:
1. Watch the elegant flow of a sheep herd from the sky
By Lior Patel for Aeon
2. Watch: Inside an Insanely Detailed Lego Model of the World’s Largest Passenger Plane—With 40,000 Pieces
By Rachel Cormack for The Robb Report
Thanks for being here,
Kevin—
P.S. Looking for newsletters better tailored to your interests? Check out The Sample. I’m still having a lot of fun with it, and think you will too.
