Mental Pivot #26: Golf, Storytelling, NFTs
Golf with my father, “Storyworthy” by Matthew Dicks, and non-fungible tokens.
It’s a hot, sunny afternoon on a golf course at the eastern end of Oahu in 1988. There’s a wide green swath of manicured fairway to my right, but my ball rests on a parallel sliver of hard, reddish-brown dirt—I’m in the rough with a terrible lie. I’m frustrated as I squint at the distant flag of the 11th hole. Meanwhile, my father waits patiently. As usual, he’s landed the green without incident. He's smiling which further irritates me. I enjoy our time together, but I hate golf. He loves it, it’s his favorite thing. So much so, that he insists on sharing it with me.
I pull an iron from my bag and prepare to address the ball. The golf swing is a tricky thing. It requires coordination and dexterity that doesn’t come naturally to me. From a young age, my father wanted to instill the love he has for the game in me. As a youth, I developed a decent swing. Even so, I lack confidence. There’s always so much mental noise every time I set up a shot: I worry about the position of my feet, my club selection, whether I’m judging my target distance properly, my target alignment, my grip (and the raw spot of skin on my palm from gripping too hard), how far to choke down on the club, the angle on my backswing, checking the top of the backswing, hip drive, ball impact and squaring up the club face, the followthrough, and then remembering to watch the flight of the ball.
As usual, my father recognizes my self-induced paralysis and makes a suggestion. In his easy-going way, he reminds me to settle my mind and focus on one thing. For today, focus on “nice and easy” half-swings. The desired output is straight shots, nothing more. A half swing simplifies the shot mechanics and all but guarantees good ball contact. Don’t worry about distance, don’t worry about power, don’t worry about stroke count. There’ll be time to work on those things another day. Fine, I huff. I reset and calm my inner-voice, forget about the other stuff, and focus on delivering a nice, easy half-swing. Will I overshoot? Undershoot? I don’t care. I force myself to narrow my objective: shoot straight, get closer. Everything else is just noise.
Today, I’m sitting at my desk in my home in San Francisco trying to finish another weekly edition of my newsletter. The morning fog is burning off. Daylight streams into the room and momentarily reminds me of Hawaii. I tap the laminated table in frustration rather than the keyboard. Like golf, I find the act of writing challenging. There's so much to consider: theme, word choice, punctuation, coherence, structure, resonance, imagery, insight, and pacing. It's easy to suffer paralysis from the sheer range of tasks one must master to become half-competent. I'm still learning and far from half-competent, but my thoughts drift to the lessons from golf so many years ago. I take a deep breath and remind myself to focus on one aspect of writing this week, one small facet. Don't sweat the other stuff, there’ll be other days for that. Simplify and focus. Almost immediately, words flow.
As I’m writing, it hits me: I haven’t played golf in 14 years. The last round I played was with my father in 2007. We played 18 holes at the very same course where I spent so many afternoons growing up in Hawaii. My father had recently finished another round of chemo and radiation therapy. That day was the first time he felt well enough to play since starting his treatment. Being back on the course was special for him, it was the happiest I had seen him since his diagnosis. There would be more chemo, but no more golf. I didn’t know it at the time, but that day was his final round. A few months later, he succumbed to cancer.
I realize at this moment that, while I don't care for golf, I don't hate it today, at least not in the way I did as an angsty teenager. Golf gave me a chance to spend quality time with my father and an opportunity to experience something he loved. It also left me with cherished memories and valuable life lessons. Golf will never be my favorite thing; it’s unlikely that I will ever play the game again. That’s ok. Sometimes it’s enough to acknowledge and appreciate the thing and all that it’s given you.
Now onto the updates...
What’s New on the Blog:
Book Notes: “Storyworthy” by Matthew Dicks
The author is a teacher, novelist, and writer who made a name for himself in live storytelling competitions. To date, he’s won a record 48 Moth StorySLAM events and 6 GrandSLAM championships (The Moth is a non-profit that organizes storytelling events and produces a popular weekly podcast showcasing short personal narratives). Storyworthy is a blueprint for the methods and techniques Dicks uses to find, develop, and perform his award-winning stories.
If you want to sample the author’s ideas, “Homework for Life” is a video about one of his storytelling techniques (Chapter 3 in the book). It’s a daily habit of observation, reflection, and idea collecting. It’s how Dicks’ uncovers interesting seeds for his stories.
What I’m reading next: Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. Here’s a video of a talk Duke gave in 2018 if you want to learn more about her ideas about decision-making, probabilistic thinking, and professional poker.
Articles:
A Practical Philosophy Reading List: Ryan Holiday’s list features a good number of Stoic texts alongside works by Victor Frankl, Montaigne, and Laozi.
All By Myself: Martha Bailey looks at changing attitudes towards solitude throughout history. Virginia Wolf said it best: “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” (The Waves, 1931)
The Base Rate Is a Hell of a Thing: Cedric Chin examines a specific kind of helpful probabilistic thinking.
The Educational and Economic Necessity of Lifelong Learning: “In one generation, the average job tenure has gone from ten years to less than three years.” Ann-Laure Le Cunff considers how to be an effective lifelong learner in the face of uncertainty and new market dynamics.
Memes and the Atomic Units of Culture: “Once dismissed as silly and trivial, memes have become an important vehicle for political messages, social causes, and global movements.”
The Self-Silencing Majority: Bari Weiss writes about self-censorship across the entire political spectrum: “When those who disagree with the surrounding majority speak their mind, they suffer the consequences.”
What Do You Do?: Stew Fortier ponders the answer to a frustrating question.
Podcasts
The Kitchen Sisters: Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The poet and publisher recently passed, so the KS podcast reposted this episode from 2018. This is a gorgeously produced program, with evocative digital soundscape and wonderful stories and poetry readings from Ferlinghetti.
Seth Godin: Failing on Our Way to Mastery: Conversation with the always insightful Godin about creative work, shame, trusting yourself, what it means to be a professional vs. amateur, and how we learn.
Steven Pressfield on The Artist’s Journey: Tim Ferriss interviews the prolific author (The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Gates of Fire, The War of Art) and self-described “overnight success after 30 years of abject failure.”
Odds & Ends:
Stories about NFTs clogged my RSS feed recently. NFT stands for “non-fungible token.” What they are is a kind of unique cryptographic token or digital asset. A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is fungible, that is any single Bitcoin is interchangeable (equivalent) with any other single Bitcoin. NFTs are unique and not interchangeable. NFTs can be used to create ownership of “scarce” items. For instance, one might create an original .gif image. An NFT can be tied to the .gif. Ownership of said NFT would confer official ownership of said asset (I won’t get into the issues of digital reproduction here). Here are a few articles on the technology:
Beeple Mania: How Mike Winkelmann Makes Millions Selling Pixels (Esquire)
What Is NBA Top Shot? (Coincentral)
Stanford University’s 2021 AI Index Report is available as a freely downloadable PDF. The report looks at the state of AI research and advances, economic impacts, ethical challenges, public policy, and more. The report is over 200 pages, but even one glance at the “Top 9 Takeaways” (page 4) will provide you with a good summary of the industry.
The inaugural 2021 Ambies Nominations are out. The Ambies are The Podcast Academy’s awards for excellence in audio. While I’m not particularly interested in awards of this sort, the nomination list is a great opportunity to discover high-quality podcast programming from a variety of categories (business, comedy, documentary, history, and more). It’s a curated list of podcasts, and I love curated lists of podcasts.
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