Last year, I shared about James Clear's Atomic Habits a few times in public and private and a surprisingly large number of friends and colleagues have gotten in touch since then to let me know that they ended up picking it up and that it had a powerful impact on them. It's a darn good book and an easy read so maybe it shouldn't be too surprising. It continues to pay dividends for me.
Since then, I have continued on my journey of self-discovery, and one of the more impactful books I've tackled since then, and a great pairing with AH, is Cal Newport's Deep Work.
Cal suggests that we quit social media, drain "the shallows" of email and ad hoc messaging, and regain control over our phones in order to live more balanced, meaningful lives full of significant work contributions to our friends, our family, our professions, and our other goals. Among the concepts is "embrace boredom" - by which he means resisting the urge to *immediately* douse our discomfort with "ordinary life" by running back to our phones for another micro-dose of distraction dopamine.
Sherry Turkle explains it: “Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” Cal thinks we should heed the call. (Brené Brown does too; she quotes Turkle in her book, Atlas of the Heart.)
Earlier today, I was reminded that I gave a TED talk at a TEDx conference several years back. The title was "Classical music is boring. So are the best ideas." I make the case for taking on big, "boring" things at slow time scales. I wanted to rehabilitate the idea of "boring."
It is interesting to see in hindsight that it came out a year after Deep Work, though I didn't know much about that book or Cal Newport in 2017. Now, I'm seeing that it's more of a reflection of the Zeitgeist:
I've talked with so many friends about our disenchantment with the form of modern knowledge work, the constant churn of back-and-forth ad hoc email, messaging, and social media, to say nothing of viral video apps like TikTok which "plays your brain stem like a harpsichord," that it seems like something virtually everyone is awake to it at this point.
I've talked to so many about it, it's not even interesting to talk about anymore.
I think we all want to come out of this undifferentiated sea of snackable, viral content, back and forth messages, contextless tweets, and seemingly meaningless work tasks, and move in the direction of books, records, marathons, no-tech camping trips, meditation retreats, long form journalism, 5000-piece puzzles, baseball, writing cabins, undistracted 2-hour coffee with a friend, and of course a night at the symphony or theater. Spending 6 hours assembling and filling bookshelves and beds has recently been one of those long form projects for Erin and I.
So in that context, though I hate to use a cliché, I think we need long form music—classical being one example—now more than ever, in this one particular way:
It seems to me that for colonial-enculturated folks for whom classical music is salient, a lengthy work by Florence Price or Anton Bruckner or Gabriela Lena Frank can be one place, a great place, to seek refuge from churn and a place to promote depth and meaning. This can can be applied to most types of music, though - we can for instance skip over the auto-recommendations of Spotify and YouTube and instead listen to an entire pop/rock/hip-hop/jazz/classical/etc album from beginning to end, with great headphones, no screens, and no interruptions. (Many have written about doing so in the past few years: see here and here.) Gamelan is one of dozens of musical cultures around the globe in which depth in the form of significant time commitment is a virtue.
Regardless of the genre, this commitment to depth or even "boredom" - lengthy time blocks with no context switching - gives us the time and space to get into something with scale and scope and story.
Scale, scope, and story - these are some of the finer things in life, and the things that our tailored algorithms that follow us around the internet know very little about, and in fact the things they actively try to distract us from.
As for evidence of its efficacy, so far this year, I’ve made a number of major changes, some of which seen my first peer-reviewed paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the College Orchestra Directors Association; I’ve written a total of 23,000 words (inclusive of the accepted paper) on rehearsal technique since January, many of which will show up in multiple future projects. I use this domain as one of the more tractable leading indicators of the effect the book has had on my ability to think deeply about the things that are important to me. I expect that in time, I’ll have more to say about the other ways in which this book has been transformative.
For anyone looking for a way out of the shallows, I found Cal's suggestions extremely helpful as I try to cultivate my best work.