🏈 Halftime
Game's not over yet, and anything can happen.
Hello! I'm Gina Trapani and about once a month I round up the 10 best posts from Note to Self in this newsletter. Since the last issue, over 500 of you signed up to get this email, which is great because sending it to myself was getting pretty lonely.
- After a year of writing in private, I announced the blog and newsletter on social, and spent the week high on the love and encouragement I got back. Then I froze.
- There’s a big difference between intellectual and experiential knowledge. Experiencing something firsthand gets your body involved, and that's how you absorb information into your bones.
- Turned 50 years old in September, so I've officially got half a century of experience in these less-dense bones. Here are a few halftime birthday notes to myself.
- "Be kind and forgiving to yourself, and treat yourself like a friend." My almost birthday twin Anil Dash also turned 50 in September, and shared 5 community actions to mark the day.
- When inspiration strikes, capture it. KPop Demon Hunters star and singer-songwriter EJAE, the voice of Rumi, wrote mega-hit Golden on her way to the dentist.
- In 1995, during a tumultuous time in her personal life and high-visibility time in her professional life, Mariah Carey blew off steam by writing and recording a secret grunge album called Someone's Ugly Daughter.
- Asked Mike Monteiro how he thinks about creativity, and he wrote about how life’s big and small, important and trivial, mundane and creative activities are all interconnected. Good answer.
- When your self-worth is linked to your productivity, you see every activity in your day as either valuable (productive) or not. Rick Foerster argues for the value of “unproductive” time.
- "Completing tasks, no matter how inane, made me feel productive. Never you mind the fact that most of those tasks have no real importance and frequently represent phony work." – Living a FI describes their firsthand experience detoxing from life in constant too-effin-busy mode.
- If you've got a book in you, Kevin Kelly's essay Everything I know about self-publishing is a must-read. My story: Being an author has a lot more cachet attached to it than being a blogger, but interacting with an audience online is way more fun than having a book with my name on it sitting on a shelf.
Thank you for being here. Just reply to this email to let me know what you think.
– Gina
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