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Learning Chinese again
When my parents decided to immigrate from Hong Kong to Canada, there was a system-level consequence: their future child was going to grow up speaking English, soaking up North American culture, and living a Canadian lifestyle. Saturday morning cartoons were part of this culture and lifestyle, but my parents had other ideas. Instead of letting…
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Shape your projects and tasks
Shorten how long it takes. It’s easier to convince yourself to do a five minute task, than it is to do a thirty minute one. You can outpace procrastination. Shrink it. Small projects and tasks look more approachable than big ones. Simplify it. The more straightforward it is, with fewer steps to follow through the…
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Learning fast vs. learning with your heart
When you’re a child, you have a superpower: you learn incredibly quickly. You soak knowledge up like a sponge. The only condition is that your heart needs to be in it. (This is known as enrollment.) This turns out to matter a lot, because you’re not always in control; you haven’t learned to trick yourself…
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Define your creative surfaces
One of the prompts in Creative Doing is Set Up Surfaces, which suggests that you create new places to store or publish your work. “Set up at least three different surfaces—one for storing your works in progress, one for sending to other people for feedback, and one for displaying your finished work,” I write. I…
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Keep interruptions brief
In a series of events that’s too detailed and boring to explain, I found out the bank sold all of my stocks. It felt very jarring. As I considered what to do next—should I just move all the money out? Wait to buy my positions at the same price I sold, or even cheaper? Reassess…
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Release and consumption cycles
If your favorite TV show releases once a week, and you want to binge watch it, here’s a simple tactic: wait until the whole season is out. All it takes is restraint. We live in a time where there’s no shortage of distractions, so that can be useful here as well. Here’s how I apply…
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Early and late are relative
When you book a flight, you know you need to get to the airport by a certain time. If you need to get there four hours ahead of boarding time to feel comfortable, anything less than that buffer feels late. Even if you arrive two hours before boarding, you may feel like you should’ve been…