Assembling 2021's List of Blogs

One of the things about following bloggers for a long time is that they start to feel like friends, even if you’ve never met or communicated with them. Some you stick with for years through thick and thin, some come into your life at just the right time, and some fade out of your life and are missed. 

Every year I compile a list of blogs that I find meaningful, and with the current dominance of social media platforms I find the art of independent publishing and curation more important than ever. In a year rocked by incessant politics and propaganda, I've shied away from political blogs except in cases of writers who make a point of going well beyond what the media covers in order to uncover the deep undercurrents of a story. 

The rise of newsletters is also blurring the lines, so for the first time I’ll be lumping together blogs and newsletters in my annual list. In cases of bloggers who also write newsletters, I generally go with the blog and mention the newsletter in the description if it’s particularly noteworthy. In other cases - especially with those (like me) who have started using Basecamp’s Hey World - I’m not entirely sure if what I’m reading is a blog or a newsletter. So lumping them together makes sense. 

I’ll be releasing the annual list on Thursday morning, so stay tuned! 

(Image courtesy of RetroSupply on Unsplash)

My Best Productivity Advice Is Different Than I Thought It Would Be

A while back, one of my adult students asked me about productivity books I would recommend if I could pick only two. I thought this would be relatively easy answer for me, and I chose the two books in no time. However, it took several days for me to actually formulate my answer, as their question precipitated a fair amount of thinking about exactly what productivity is and why it’s important, and what its costs are. So when I finally answered, I did indeed recommend two books, but with a lot of caveats about the flipside of productivity and why it’s more about balance than anything.

The first book that I recommend to a lot of people is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The GTD method at its heart comprises five steps:

1. Capture - collect all the stuff that is on your mind

2. Clarify - process stuff so you understand what they mean

3. Organize - put stuff into the appropriate places in your system

4. Reflect - review your system

5. Engage - do the appropriate things

In addition to these five steps, the GTD system guides you through a mental framework in order to understand what your project commitments are, areas of focus in your life, and a snapshot of your goals all the way from short-term up to lifelong horizons. With GTD, you’ll be able to collect all the relevant stuff, be able to process it, act on it appropriately, and have a strong view of where everything fits in with your life.

I’ve used the GTD system for the most part since 2007 and have noticed a substantive improvement in my material quality of life, mental focus, and overall direction in life. The only problem with using GTD is that it requires a lot of infrastructure and planning, which often gets in the way of the immediate action that is needed in order to bring projects to fruition.

Another book that I recommend is Mark Forster’s Secrets of Productive People: 50 Techniques To Get Things Done. Rather than trumpeting an over-arching system, Mark presents a toolkit of easy time and idea management concepts that can be quickly applied. Unlike GTD, there is no overhead of a huge system to maintain, and the emphasis is on starting things throughout the day rather than spending a lot of time building a system. On the importance of strong low-level systems (Chapter 18):

For major productive work you literally need to grow your brain so that it is capable of it.

This requires serious development of systems and routines so that they become so well practice that you don’t have to think about them. The more routines you develop to the stage at which you don’t have to think about them, the more your time will be freed up for creative activity. There is only one way to get these routines established in your life - only one way to get your brain to adapt to them. That is repetitive activity in the form of continued practice. This results in actual changes to the brain.

But the techniques you can get from these two great books isn’t the whole story.

Productivity can easily become a sucker’s game, where you can be led to believe that more work is better work. That is simply not the case and can lead to anxiety, especially if you work in the creative industries. Anne-Laure Le Cunff in her article about mindful productivity advocates for a more sustainable approach:

Mindful productivity can be defined as being consciously present in what you’re doing, while you’re doing it, in conjunction with managing your mental and emotional states. Mindful productivity is about calmly acknowledging and accepting your feelings and thoughts while engaged in work or creative activities. It’s a way to give us new perspectives on work, life, the creation process; helping us enjoy the work and better understand ourselves. Besides helping with focus, mindful productivity also helps us notice signs of anxiety or stress at work earlier and better deal with them.

Some of the techniques that Anne-Laure suggests include watching your thoughts and emotions, getting back into the flow, singletasking, cultivating your curiosity, and developing a growth mindset.

Another problem with taking productivity advice too seriously is overthinking and over-planning projects. Annie Mueller’s Is having a plan helpful? Not always looks at how the glorification and commercialization of planning tools is too often counterproductive towards the work that we actually want to get done:

The truth is that planning can be harmful to our productivity and efficacy and even enjoyment in life. 

Plans lead us to unrealistic expectations. We don’t know how long things will take, and instead of referencing our experiences, we believe our planned estimates. Then our plan doesn’t work, and everything falls apart. 

Plans can keep us from doing our best. Research shows that making a backup plan — what you’ll do in case things don’t work out — leads to poor performance. 

Plans can reduce our creativity. Over-planning — a common tendency among those who plan in order to combat anxiety— is the antithesis of the creative flexibility shared by successful entrepreneurs.

Annie’s approach emphasizes situational awareness and mindfulness in place of wasting time on plans that don’t always reflect the reality of a changing situation:

There are good plans and bad plans. Good plans are effective schedules and strategies for doing things that matter to you. 

Bad plans, on the other hand, make simple things complex and require more time and energy than is justified for the end result.

But this entire productivity enterprise might be ill-conceived. Anne Helen Petersen article on the diminishing returns of productivity culture puts the entire field’s mindset in a very harsh light:

There’s something great about this dude with so much confidence in his approach to life that he doesn’t have to dress up what he gives him self-worth (“completing and doing things”) and his addiction to it. Productivity is what gets him off. Everyone else just doesn’t understand the thrill of completing things on a regular basis.

There is a danger in becoming too productive. You become a worker bee. You cease to become mindful of the value of what you’re doing and risk cutting yourself off from the entirety of the human experience you need to have throughout life:

This is the dystopian reality of productivity culture. Its mandate is never “You figured out how to do my tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.” It is always: “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiency, so you must now do more tasks.” Sometimes, if you’re a Wall Street investment banker, you can complete infinitely more tasks until you have so much money that you don’t even need it anymore — you’re productive for the thrill of it, but also because you don’t know how else to gauge your own self-worth. 

But the people who help that banker in his quest, whether his explicit support staff (assistants) or his implicit one (office cleaners, house cleaners, food delivery people) often have a very different relationship to productivity. It’s not pleasurable or addictive. It’s just denying the most human parts of yourself in order to survive the economic moment. 

At this point, we’ve embraced so many new technologies, with so many accompanying mandates to increase our work load — but with so little attention to why, and to what end. To contribute to a stock price that benefits a select few? To check the boxes on our to do list? To spend so much time at our computers that our bodies physically ache?

I think I’ve discovered this the hard way and have moved on to a more sustainable approach. I take naps on a regular basis. I prioritize the work that I genuinely want to do, but leave empty time for exercise, reading, or just plain fallow time. Saying no is my default response to much that arrives at my desk; I declined five board positions that came my way this year. I take every Sunday off in order to rest and recuperate - this is from the guy who worked over 100 days in a row at the start of the pandemic.

(Image courtesy of Amanda Dalbjörn on Unsplash)

Reading a Lot Can Be Bad or Good, Depending on What You Read

During the last US election cycle and its aftermath, I remember being glued to news sites, reading the latest updates from multiple sources, and becoming an armchair expert on election projections, voting nuances, and the vagaries of the US justice system. My head was spinning and I felt horrible. Going on social media was a nightmare watching everyone’s collective meltdowns. My moods were affected and I wasn’t able to concentrate the way I usually could. Many of us felt this way.

Similarly, after the January 6 terrorist attack on the US capitol, I once again gorged myself on news outlets, with a similar outcome. There finally came a time when I finally had to distance myself from reading or watching news.

The times when I’ve stepped away from media and spent my time reading books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been characterized by much better moods, more sound mental health, lots of ideas and connections between ideas, and the cultivating of good habits not just related to reading.

Why is it that dealing with two types of media can have such a different psychological result? Information triage is a challenge, and can be overwhelming when dealing with news at difficult times. But why is it that the same level of information saturation can be rewarding when dealing with knowledge acquisition?

Daniel Kahneman, Andrew Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser explore why humans are so bad at decision-making and identifying information in Noise: How to Overcome the High, Hidden Costs of Inconsistent Decision Making. It turns out that when people are confronted with a large amount of information, they fall victim to both noise and bias when trying to understand and make decisions from it:

When people consider errors in judgment and decision making, they most likely think of social biases like the stereotyping of minorities or of cognitive biases such as overconfidence and unfounded optimism. The useless variability that we call noise is a different type of error. To appreciate the distinction, think of your bathroom scale. We would say that the scale is biased if its readings are generally either too high or too low. If your weight appears to depend on where you happen to place your feet, the scale is noisy. A scale that consistently underestimates true weight by exactly four pounds is seriously biased but free of noise. A scale that gives two different readings when you step on it twice is noisy. Many errors of measurement arise from a combination of bias and noise. Most inexpensive bathroom scales are somewhat biased and quite noisy.

What happens when you fall victim to both bias and noise when reading the news multiple times, every day? Here’s Nassim Taleb in Antifragile (p. 126) :

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio. And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sales at your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to .5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker. 

Overdoing media consumption can also cause late-night eating binges and distort our sense of time, not to mention political radicalization. Fortunately, you can go on an information diet, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff provides some useful steps on how to break the cycle.

Reading lots of books can provide the opposite effect and fuel our knowledge, creativity, and passion about a subject. And there are lots of ideas on how to make this happen.

Morgan Housel’s strategy is to start lots of books, but having a strong filter so you only finish the ones that are genuinely good, and resonate with you:

Years ago I heard Charlie Munger say “Most books I don’t read past the first chapter. I’m not burdened by bad books,” and it stuck with me. Reading is a chore if you insist on finishing every book you begin, because the majority of books are either a) adequately summarized in the introduction, b) not for you, or c) not for anyone. Grinding your way to the last page of these books – a habit likely formed early in school – can turn reading into the equivalent of a 10-hour work meeting where nothing gets done and everyone is bored. And once you see reading through that lens, your willingness to pick up another book wanes.

Which, of course, is tragic. “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them,” said Mark Twain. Every smart person I know is a voracious reader who also says “every smart person I know is a voracious reader.” There are so few exceptions to this rule it’s astounding. College tuition at $25,000 a year comes out to roughly $100 per lecture. Good books – sometimes written by the same professor – can be purchased for fifteen bucks and can offer multiple times as much life-changing insight.

The conflict between these two – most books don’t need to be read to the end, but some books can change your life – means you need two things to get a lot out of reading: Lots of inputs and a strong filter.

Tyler Cowen’s advice is similar:

The best way to read quickly is to read lots.  And lots.  And to have started a long time ago.  Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book.  Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all.  

Note that when you add up the time costs of reading lots, quick readers don’t consume information as efficiently as you might think.  They’ve chosen a path with high upfront costs and low marginal costs.  "It took me 44 years to read this book" is not a bad answer to many questions about reading speed.

And when you’ve read a large amount of books in a short time, you start to make connections between ideas. It’s as if the noise and bias that are so problematic with reading news can actually become advantageous when reading books. I’ve already posted this quote from Alan Jacobs in a previous article, but it bears repeating again because of its relevance:

When you approach the text from the past on its own terms and for its own sake, it becomes a kind of white noise in relation to present concerns. Your attention to the long ago and far away makes the tumult and the shouting die, the captains and the kings depart. (Allusion alert!) It’s when the current environment lies outside the scope of your attention, when you neither seek nor expect any connection to it, that you make room for random resonances to form.

And when they do form, you begin to discern the really key features of your moment more clearly. An image begins to appear where there had been formlessness. Useless and pernicious statements start to recede into the background as you perceive them for what they are. The salient and the helpful points move to the forefront of your attention.

If you can apply the dense, interconnected, and contradictory information from the books you read to the situation of your life, patterns and purposes can begin to emerge. You still get brainwashed in a way, but with great ideas that you can apply to everyday life, and improve yourself in mindful ways. The process that starts with beginning lots of books and finishing only the good ones continues with forming parallels between new ideas you’ve come into contact with, and then using this information to improve your life. Better yet, use these connections between information to create something and give something back to the vast information ecosystem.

I used to set reading goals for every year, but never completed them. I reserve the right to go through periods where I devour books voraciously or where I savour them slowly over time. You can find a list of books I’ve read so far in 2021 here.

(Image courtesy of John Michael Thomson on Unsplash)

Musicians: How to Get Lucky in a Pandemic (or Any Time)

Whenever I watch career talks by musicians, they almost always mention how the moment when they got their first break was almost entirely through luck. Being in the right place when someone walked into the room, singing for the right person at the right time, random encounters at concerts and auditions that lead to future projects, having just the right person in their network who notices them were all reliable ways to get opportunities. My lucky break was in 1994 when I arrived in Vancouver with no work but at just the right time, and got my first staff pianist position at the Vancouver Academy of Music because there were so few qualified collaborative pianists in the area who knew both the operatic and string repertoire.

But we’re in a pandemic now. Live music is shuttered. Almost no one on the continent makes a living as a performer. Until the majority of people can be vaccinated, most musical instruction is now online. Some professions are thriving (such as online teaching and administration), but some have been obliterated for the time being. How can we create the conditions for musical success at such a time when the ground is constantly shifting under our feet and nothing is certain?

One way is to increase the number of unexpected opportunities that present themselves to us. I don’t mean pure luck, but maximizing the conditions that allow us to be aware of new opportunities which might present themselves to us and not others. Articles from Wealest and Mind Cafe mention the types of luck that arise from preparation, taking the initiative, and keeping an eye open to opportunity. For a deeper look at this subject, read Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.

Here are some ways that musicians can cultivate these types of probabilities:

1. Take care of your mental health. Developing awareness of our mental health is an ongoing process, and at a difficult time is everything. Once we’re in a better place, then we can develop a clearer awareness of what lies around us.

A few days ago I had a chance to catch up with singer, pianist, and mental health student Kristine Dandavino, who talks about why mental health is so critically important for musicians:

My two cents. Self-care should be taught in music schools. I think you teach that, in a way, to your students, how to practice smart rather than harder. There are a lot of people complaining that there is no "free help" out there. That is just plain false. I can find mental health care for almost anyone at low cost, or no cost. A lot of people, I will sound harsh, just do not want to go get help. There is a lot of stigma to mental health. I have found, that some artists believe that it part of making [it]. We must suffer to be an artist. Which is not correct. Anyhow, I wrote something positive and as "short" as I could. The most important thing that I always convey to clients is that there is no cure to mental health issues but, there is a better way. Similar to diabetes or asthma. There is no cure but, asthma can be managed. Music and poetry were created in the concentration camp. Isn't that even worse than what we are going through now? It is all about mindset. But, I am preaching to the choir.

2. Be able to move quickly on ideas, projects, and opportunities. One of the advantages of being an individual or startup organization is that you can create things without the friction and bureaucracy that one finds with larger organizations. Making the shift to online-only lessons last spring (and back to a hybrid model in the fall, then back to online-only lessons again this month) and writing an e-book in 30 days are ways that you can create and execute projects quickly in order to gain personal competitive advantage. These fast moves then open up opportunities.

3. Treat everything as a challenge. Whether you’re optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between, seeing everything that comes your way as a challenge rather than something you can’t control can create the mindset that allows you to see a wider range of possibilities, and the breaks that come with them. Carlos Castaneda, from The Wheel of Time:

The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.

4. Create a continuing series and share it as widely as possible. One of the largest untapped growth areas in the arts is in the area of developing a continuing series. Whether it be a YouTube channel, blog, podcast, or regular livestream, there is already a captive audience for your potential idea, and the people that you reach through these initiatives can create long-term relationships in the profession. Creating these types of content can have far greater reach, and will last much longer than your outpourings on social media.

For a prime example of a successful series that started during the pandemic, look no further than Abe Hunter’s The Lied Society Round Table, a podcast that started on a dime in April 2020 and has expanded to become a continuing series that features some of the top minds in the art song world.

5. Create something online that can be later converted to an in-person initiative. Creating something online is an inexpensive way to develop an audience. More difficult is how to transfer that initiative to in-person events once the pandemic fades into memory. But the fans, captive market, and relationships you build with an online initiative is a starting point towards in-person opportunities in the After Times when most of us are vaccinated and concert life begins its inexorable return to normality (whatever that might look like).

6. Meet new people in your profession and become a valued colleague to them. In the Before Times, going to concerts, workshops, auditions, and parties were only some of the ways that you could meet new people in the profession and develop connections that could lead to work. Since most professional events are operating online-only this year, this is one of the toughest nuts to crack. Many people are doubling down on pre-existing relationships, and it is much harder than ever before to break into the profession. If you can find a community in which to develop new professional relationships online, you’ll be able to expand your circle at a time when many are deciding not to.

7. Find a way to connect people. If you can become a connector that allows people to reach each other, that can give your work even stronger leverage. Gone are the random meetings in the musical field that allowed new professional relationships to continually blossom. Create a way to replicate those relationships online and you will fill a major need.

8. Find a way to help people. If you’re one of the people whose work was relatively unaffected by the pandemic or actually benefitted from it, don’t just sit on your butt. Help people! Mentor them, and spread the word about the ideas and practices that are allowing you to carry on at this time. It’s important that we care about the profession as a whole and the people who work in it, not just ourselves.

9. Share the activities of those in your network to become known as a positive force. When I first started the Collaborative Piano Blog in 2005, I intended it to be a personal website that tracked my own activities. But everything changed when I decided to make the blog about not just me, but the entire collaborative piano profession. This allowed it to become a hub for knowledge and resources over the coming years and created innumerable opportunities for others.

10. Leverage all of the above in order to create an income stream, even if it’s a related one. For all the attention that my work on the Collaborative Piano Blog brought me, I never made more than about $100 a month, even when the site was littered with ads and I was pushing products on it. The breakthrough for me was when I realized that I could advertise myself on the blog in order to get private piano students, which was infinitely more profitable. This led to my studio operating at capacity for the last 10 years.

In other words, I learned how to give something away in order to sell something else that was more profitable. Creating a blog that reached thousands of people created the audience that allowed a very small subset of people who needed a piano teacher to find me. More importantly, the resources I built also enabled a lot of other people to find what they were looking for, even if that path led away from my own offerings. All this happened only after a huge investment of time on my part with preparation, research, writing, and acquired skills.

What did you have to put into place to get your lucky breaks during the pandemic? Leave your story in the comments.

(Photo by Dustin Humes on Unsplash)

Is Digital Interaction Remaking Our Psychological Spaces?

Part of the challenge of living in the third decade of the 21st century is learning to adapt to the digital social algorithm. Whether dealing with information triage, working through era-defining moments, learning the relationship between past and present, or navigating radical uncertainty, our personal lives are wrapped up within a global pandemic and the deep immersion into digital life that allows us to continue in the absence of in-person social interaction.

But what are these digital spaces doing to our brains? Aaron Z. Lewis is curating The Digital Sensorium, a project that looks at how people are being changed by their online environment:

Thirty years into the digital age, it’s safe to say the internet isn’t just an external environment that we travel through or a “public space” that we stroll around in. It’s fully entangled with our nervous systems now, and it has re-shaped our minds in ways that aren’t always easy or comfortable to articulate. This process became even more apparent during 2020 — a year in which screens swallowed the last remaining bits of our “offline” culture and daily lives. I don’t think we’ll be able to create the sort of digital publics that the New_Public festival is aiming towards until we’ve adequately taken stock of what happens within us when we live with the technologies we’ve built.

Here are some excerpts from the early submissions to his digital hotline:

My physical body no longer feels like the “center of gravity” of my identity… my sense of presence is forever fractured and distributed all over the place. I close my eyes and imagine all the screens that are displaying my content at this very moment, I wonder about the total number of pixels I currently occupy, I feel like I am nowhere and also everywhere. After a while, the exoskeleton I wear online doesn’t really feel like a true expression of my inner self. It’s so much work to keep it up to date, but I basically don’t have a choice because that’s where I do most of my socializing nowadays. To be honest, my internet friends are the only people who really understand what I’m about — everyone else is stuck with a shallow, incomplete version of me.

Another entry:

I just feel like it’s becoming really hard to live in the Now. Like, the other day, I went to send a text to a friend that I haven’t talked to in a while. I was expecting a blank canvas, but instead our thread was polluted by an awkward conversation we had 4 years ago. I’m strung out across time, haunted by the ghosts of my old messages, statuses, photos, videos. Another weird thing about social media is that when you change your profile pic, it also changes the profile pic on all your old posts. It’s super jarring to see something I wrote a long time ago right next to a picture of what I look like today. That photo of me next to those words… they aren’t even the same people! Also, my YouTube subscribers consume outdated versions of me, and they always write to me expecting that I’m still the same as I was a few years ago. Time’s out of whack online and everyone knows it — just look at the comments section under any video. People don’t want to know who else is here they want to know who else is now: “Anyone watching in 2021?”

In case you’re interested in sharing your story with Aaron’s project, you can contact his digital hotline here.

My own experience

I’ve been blogging since 2005 and have written well over 2200 articles which are available both on this site and the Collaborative Piano Blog. All of these articles are freely accessible on search engines, and many people in the musical field are constantly accessing them (many of which I've completely forgotten about). Comments are still open, and reflections from over 10 years ago co-exist with things people have written last week.

Many readers know my past work better than I do. This is one of the things that differentiates blog writing from social media writing - it can be quite challenging to read someone's social media posts from several years ago. With blogging, it's not so easy to forget the past because archives are easily accessible and searchable.

A few years ago I received a kind email from a reader who started a personal project to read every single Collaborative Piano Blog article in chronological order in order to discover narratives and patterns. I’ll bet they found stuff I never realized. Back when I used to be on the road two months out of the year, people would approach me in various places and mention articles that I wouldn’t remember writing.

People email me out of the blue all the time to talk about something I had written years ago. I’m constantly having to dive into the Collaborative Piano Blog archives to see what I had written about and forgotten, but which is immediate to someone else.

But writing a blog over the course of years helped me to establish contact with many people and develop online friendships that could not have sprung up any other way. It’s like having an out-of-body existence that engages with people’s brains and hopefully inspires them as well.

The feeling goes both ways. I admire the work of my favorite bloggers, link to their best articles, and contact them from time to time to tell them that they’re doing an awesome job. Reading high-quality blog articles is one of the things that moves me forward in my own inspiration and development, especially from bloggers who aren’t interested in clickbait and ad impressions, but in having a space independent from social media where they can explore their ideas over the passage of time.

(Image courtesy of Josh Reimer on Unsplash)

Optimism Might Be Fleeting: Let's Focus on Growth Instead

Today is a morning when things are finally starting to look up. Joe Biden is being sworn in as president after four years of disastrous ineptitude by Trump, vaccines are slowly being rolled out, and we might be able to turn the corner on the pandemic in around six months or so. Many on social media are expressing their first burst of optimism in a long time.

But optimism can be fleeting, and can actually hinder you from taking the action that can create positive change. Far better is to focus on making the small steps that can result in personal growth and getting projects up and running.

Below are some links from the blogosphere that can help you to channel those positive vibes into long-lasting growth.

How to be an explorer of the world. A short manifesto by Keri Smith that eventually became a book of the same name. These are all things you can do to explore without traveling the world (yet). Some highlights:

1. Always be looking (notice the ground beneath your feet).

5. Observe for long durations (and short ones).

7. Notice patterns. Make connections.

9. Incorporate indeterminacy.

12. Trace things back to their origins.

Useful and overlooked skills. This list by Morgan Housel won’t make your career, but will give you some actionable skills to navigate a changing world more effectively.

Respectfully interacting with people you disagree with. Confirmation bias gets easier when people are more connected. But connectivity also means you’ll also run into more people who disagree with you. Benedict Evans: “The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.” Handling that challenge without digging the hole deeper is one the 21st century’s most important skills. If you’re not blessed with perfect empathy, the trick to opening your mind to those you disagree with is to find people whose views on one topic you respect – that checks the box in your head that says “this person isn’t totally crazy” – and debate them on the topics you disagree about. Without the first step it’s too easy to write someone off before you’ve heard their full argument.

Always helpful with the QAnon followers on your Facebook friend list.

Getting to the point. Everyone’s busy. Make your point using as few words as possible and get out of their way.

I attended a Zoom meeting a few days ago that finished 40 minutes early. Gratitude aplenty.

How to Get Better at Anything. Nicholas Bate’s wisdom keeps getting more refined as the years pass. Here are some highlights from his 22 bullet points to self-improvement:

1. Read the best book on the subject by the best expert.

4. Read that notebook (3) daily.

6. Keep that plan (5) visible.

9. Talk to experts and practitioners.

10. Note exactly what they (9) do. Not necessarily what they say they do.

Think Like a CEO: The Best Way to Improve is to Measure. Yina Huang makes the argument that the best way to actually improve is not by setting goals but developing a system of relevant metrics and improving on them:

You’ll find tons of quotes related to goals: usually some inspirational quote with beautiful typography backset against picturesque scenery that that doesn’t have much to do with the subject matter at hand.

And while I am all about planning, I do challenge this approach to goal setting and attainment. Instead, I wonder if the priority should not be in the plan, but in the metrics you define for success.

With established metrics that align with your goals, I sincerely believe the plan becomes easier to build, pivot, and execute. Because you now have a target, understanding what’s working and what’s not becomes crystal clear. This limits the uncertainty and decision paralysis we often face when it comes to vague and unclear goals. It allows you to experiment, try new things, and then return back to your metric to see if the numbers have improved or not.

May your 2021 be filled with health, success, and growth. Let’s get to work.

(Image courtesy of Markus Spiske on Unsplash)

The Suleika Project: An die Musik

Here’s the latest video from Edmonton-based mezzo soprano Alia Amad and myself: Schubert’s An die Music. Since the two of us live across Canada, we record separately - I make the piano track first, then Alia records her part on top of that, after which I put them together using iMovie’s split-screen feature. The subtitles are a useful feature, and help people who don’t know German to understand the import of the text with a specific rather than general idea.

Because of the danger of Covid-19 transmission (and the fact we’re currently under strict lockdown orders here in Ontario), this is one of the only ways that singers and pianists can collaborate safely at present. I can hardly wait until the time when safe music-making among groups of people can safely happen once again.

The Challenge of Working Through Era-Defining Moments

I still remember what I was doing back in 2001 in the days leading up to the September 11 attacks. In those years Wendy and I lived in a condo on the New Westminster waterfront just outside of Vancouver and we were making the initial preparations for making the move to Toronto a year later. Having just accepted a last-minute offer to play a concert tour of northern BC with violinist Judy Kang, I was looking forward to some time to focus on learning her concert program in only two days. Judy was to arrive from New York on Wednesday, September 12 for rehearsals on the 13th prior to our flight up to Prince Rupert for the first concert that weekend. My first day of practicing was scheduled to be September 11.

On that fateful morning, I got up at 6am for an hour of yoga prior to checking my email or the internet. I had finished a full and energizing routine when my mother-in-law called just after 7am Pacific (10am Eastern) to ask if I knew what was going on, and to turn on the TV immediately. One of my most vivid memories of that morning is stepping outside to the balcony a short while later and noticing that the sky was filled with around two dozen planes en route to emergency landings at Vancouver International Airport.

That was how my September 11 started, with the intention of practicing the entire day. But with my plans completely derailed trying to make sense of what had happened that day, I didn’t actually start practicing until September the 12th. As it turned out, I already knew all the works on the program, but I always felt badly that I had missed an entire day of critical practicing by watching news.

Anne Helen Peterson wrote about a similar experience with her writing getting derailed last week in How to Work Through a Coup:

And I was just trying to write a chapter! Imagine people trying to teach high school, or work at a grocery store, or file an insurance claim during an attempted coup! But the logic of capitalism — and the way we’ve internalized its mandates for constant productivity — means there is no pausing for national crisis. The last time the gears actually ground to a stop was 9/11, which was nearly twenty years ago. 

Since then, we’ve worked through smaller terrorist attacks, through financial catastrophes, through literally dozens of mass shootings, through the police killing of unarmed black men and women, through assaults on water protectors at Standing Rock, through seemingly endless causalities of forever wars, through mass foreclosures, through hurricanes and floods and derechos and wildfires, through a pandemic, and through repeated, coordinated attempts to undermine democracy. And when we struggle to perform at peak productivity levels, we feel bad about it.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been finishing an article for a scholarly publication with a deadline of last Friday. Wednesday, January 6 - the day of the attack on the capitol - I had already accomplished a substantial amount of work by the early afternoon. My lists for the day indicate that I checked off 11 items, the only ones being missed were proofreading end notes and a final run-through of the entire paper. But when events started unfolding in the early afternoon, no work got done beyond my online teaching for the day. The next day nothing got done.

My gut reaction, just as on September 11, was that I should consume less news in order to improve my work habits. So many productivity writers always say that staying away from the news can help us to improve mental health, improve work habits, and help maintain focus. But these events are different. These are era-defining moments that define the course of events of years and decades afterwards, and we need to process them in order to understand what is happening in the world.

AHP on the real issue here:

This is the black heart of productivity culture: the maniacal focus on the individual capacity to produce elides the external forces that could (and should!) short-circuit our concentration and work ethic. A hyper-productive person isn’t necessarily a focused person so much as a person who’s often hardened or excused themselves from the needs of their immediate and greater community. There’s a lot to admire about the work of Cal Newport, for example — best known for his books Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, and A World Without Email. But his advice is for an imagined worker who’s been able to insulate themselves from so many demands and distractions. Do the same strategies work for someone navigating the world who is not white, male, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied, with secure citizenship and a stable living situation?

Productivity has become so all-encompassing that not even a terrorist attack on the capital is supposed to derail us. But as artists, our way of working involves processing world events rather than being stuck in an ivory tower and ignoring them. Then again, many classical musicians do precisely that.

Back in 2001, the tour was a memorable one. The first three communities where Judy and I performed were Prince Rupert, Terrace, and Kitimat. The weather could not have been more spectacular, and the drive from Prince Rupert took us through some of the most spectacular mountain and forest scenery in Canada.

But what impressed me most in the concerts that we played that weekend was a deep need for the solace that only music can provide. I’ve never heard audiences so quiet. On a visceral level, they needed the transport and meaning of the works on our program. It felt like a communion between humans and Art, and rare has been the time when I’ve felt that connection so deeply, or the need so great.

Last week on January 6, the two younger kids I taught online knew that something was amiss. They had probably experienced their parents’ worry in front of the TV and on their phones all day, but didn’t understand the depth of what was happening. As a result, they turned into chatterboxes and only wanted to talk about random stuff. I obliged them for the most part, gently leading them back into their piano playing at opportune times. My final student of the evening was an adult, and also needed to talk about the events of the day on a far more serious level. We both fully understood the gravity of what happened, and why art is so important in the human equation.

(Image courtesy of camilo jimenez on Unsplash)

Sunday Morning Links

Here are some worthwhile reads to enliven your Sunday morning:

Pianists from the Past: Sergei Rachmaninov - Melanie Spanswick writes about Rachmaninov’s pianistic style and character. Underneath the gaunt exterior was a man with enduring love of family, friends, and a sardonic sense of humor.

Paul McCartney as management study - Beyond his much-storied career with the Beatles, Paul McCartney has shown mastery of nearly every musical genre he as written for, including classical, heavy metal, and electronic music. Tyler Cowen shows us why McCartney is the perfect example of a lifelong learning machine that we should all aspire to emulate.

Favorite Books of 2020 - Maria Popova of Brain Pickings lists her favorite reads of 2020, including works by Zadie Smith, Audre Lorde, Victor Frankl, Gertrude Stein, and more.

Think Like a CEO: The Best Way to Improve is to Measure - 2021 is right around the corner and Yina Huang shows us the importance of establishing the right metrics to help you achieve your goals.

Finally, a short film by Daihei Shibata about graphing sudden changes is notable for not just its concept but a clever choral soundtrack:

(Image courtesy of Michael Krahn on Unsplash)

Reflection and Planning Using Sources of Personal Competitive Advantage

As 2020 comes to a close and the hope of a brighter day beckons, nearly all of us are thinking about what we could improve for 2021. Having the right goals to work on is important, as is developing the right mental models and organizational systems in daily life.

One of my favorite Twitter threads of all time is Shane Parrish’s question in early 2019 about things that could give one a personal competitive advantage:

Sources of personal competitive advantage:

- delayed gratification
- capital
- network (who you know)
- unique skills or combinations
- platform
- ability to suffer
- family / home life
- speed
- ability to change your mind
- ability to learn/adapt

What am I missing?

— Shane Parrish (@ShaneAParrish) January 31, 2019

The resulting thread was epic in scope, and looking through well over a thousand responses yields a sizeable snapshot of what people consider the attributes they either have or need in order to succeed. I collected elements that stood out from the many responses, arriving at a long list of things that could help me to stay grounded while navigating a changing landscape. This proved highly beneficial during the pandemic.

Putting together a list of this type could be useful to your own development. Here’s how to do it:

1. Read through the thread and curate a list of things that 1) you’re good at as well as 2) you’re not good at, but need to work on given present circumstances.

2. Look through the list you’ve made, highlighting avenues for future personal growth.

3. Get to work on things you’ve identified.

4. Revisit the original thread from time to time and to add or delete items that have become relevant or are no longer relevant. Then repeat steps 2 and 3.

Below are just a few attributes that I’ve found interesting to ponder, with a few thoughts on each:

• Delayed gratification. Because of the pandemic’s inexorable spread, this can be a life-or-death ability. We all want to go out and see people, travel, and have a great time. But the downside is far greater than the upside when each social interaction is a calculated risk. Therefore we must wait until the pandemic ends.

• Network. When we’re in lockdown, it’s far too easy to fall into the trap of staying comfortable with one’s pre-existing connections. Knowing where to expand your network and how to connect with folks new to your acquaintance through the right online places is a genuine skill. In mid-2021 when we’re mostly immunized and life returns to some semblance of normality, in-person networking will become more important than ever.

• Ability to learn/adapt. I was fortunate to have already learned how to teach online a year before the pandemic hit. So when early March came around, I had to apply the same teaching model, but scaled upwards for an entire studio of 50, and only a few days to organize the switch. Previously niche tech skills in music education (such as knowing the best music studio management software, USB microphones, how to set up multiple cameras in a studio, and how to run online events) became par for the course. Those who learned the quickest were able to continue their work.

• Ability to accept change. Also applicable in every profession, at all levels of society, and especially in politics.

• Transparency and clear communication. At Foley Music and Arts, we've tried to be as clear as possible with all the changes to our studio policy. Larger companies may need to adopt a more measured approach with both employees and customers, while trying to become a “ghost ship” until things (hopefully) revert to normal.

• Knowing how to manage your energy. For some reason, many of us haven’t got as much energy as before. Periods of reflection and idleness will help us to better harness what focused energy we do have throughout the day.

• Focus. Stress and screens are sapping our potential to focus on what’s important. Check out Cal Newport’s work on how to cultivate the deep benefits of learning hard things.

• Good mental health. With so many of us facing significant stress, one of the biggest lessons of 2020 was how we can cultivate sound mental health. Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s article on mental health budgeting is a good place to start.

Reflection on how to lead with your strengths and work on your weaknesses is a strong way to navigate change and get started on your projects for 2021. Best wishes to everyone for a healthy and safe holiday season!

(Image courtesy of Alexander Kovacs on Unsplash)