Useful Background

If you’ve never watched CGP Grey on Youtube, I can’t recommend this work enough. He’s one of the leading educational content makers working on the platform right now. He also creates a ton of content related to his creative process and workflow, like the following video:

Got that? If you didn’t bother to hit play let me give you a very brief summary:

1. New Year’s resolutions are destined to fail. We all know this to be true.
2. Instead, you can try setting a Theme for yourself, which rather than being a binary success/failure goal is instead a guiding principle for decisions.

Habit change ain’t easy at the best of times; if deciding to do things differently was that easy, we wouldn’t need the excuse of January 1st to do it. I find the Theme approach a useful one; it comes with the knowledge baked right in that any habit is not one big decision but instead many small ones, and you might as well set yourself up to make the greatest possible proportion of those decisions good ones.

My situation in 2023

As I reflected in late December on the 2023 that had been, two aspects stood out to me. One was a long-term background observation. I’ve always been one to pursue the thrill of a new interest; a dabbler, if you will. The omnipresent distractions of the era we live in are also a challenge for me at times. I often find myself wishing I had pursued a thread more deeply. I am constantly warring with my devices and inboxes to staunch the tide of notifications and emails clamoring for attention.

The other aspect is that oh my god parenting takes over your life. This will undoubtedly be a “No duh” observation to the fellow parents in my audience, but it still bears mentioning. My daughter was born in August (to extremely great fanfare, I’m super excited to be a dad) and since then hardly an hour goes by where I don’t at least think about taking care of her and/or supporting her mom in doing so.

I concluded that I had room to grow.

Why Flow

In 2023 I read the Tao Te Ching for the first time. (Ursula K Le Guin’s translation if you care about such things) This began my descent into becoming a white guy fascinated by Eastern philosophy.

Among the ideas promoted by Taoism, one that spoke to me is wu wei, or “effortless action.” This is an idea I am certainly failing to do justice do, but by my interpretation it’s about aligning your actions to match your circumstances. It’s recognizing that forcing a path will wear you down; that the world will push back against you. It’s not aimless drifting; it’s the difference between paddling and putting up a sail.

This concept resonates with me. It gives me a good sense of the kinds of things I want to be doing with my life and how I want to be as a person while I’m doing them.

Things which are Flow-y

• Playing with my baby
• Reading books and other high-quality writing
• Playing board games and roleplaying games
• Writing
• Walking
• Cooking
• Yoga practice
• Deep work

Things which are not Flow-y

• All social media
• Phone games with ads
• Solitaire
• Alarm snooze button
• Short-form videos

I freely admit, this theme is wishy-washy and my list of items above essentially boils down to “good vibes/bad vibes”. I think that’s a feature and not a bug! I like that this theme has a broad purview because the whole approach is about small improvements. That said, I think it’s a good idea to give oneself clear metrics for success. That’s why I created 4 sub-goals for myself, which I will be expanding on in a future post. Look forward to that!