Thank you for this post! As a creative, I so needed to read this. I particularly liked the part about that "Some people prefer to be mildly contented all the time, where others derive greater happiness and meaning when their lives are peppered with high highs and low lows." How does it relate in your opinion to the widely promoted idea of maintaining a routine and 'producing creative work' every day? It seems that 95% of creatives speak for a kind of won't-budge routine. What is your take on that?
Excellent deep dive, and the lightning round was a good goal to look forward to at the end of the journey. Like orange slices after a soccer game in the 1980's. As an aside, my kid is now rewarded with cookies (instead of real fruit with fiber, water, potassium, and sugar) at the end of her tennis matches - another sign of the decline of Western civilization.
In terms of feedback for longer posts like this one, I'm good with cohesive long form mixed in. I don't have time to "read it", but I listened to this post as a podcast using the app (and the female bot voice works fine). It was a great trading of ideas, and introduction to a new author I have not read, yet!
In terms of trading progressive intimacies about oneself, I feel liberated to keep commenting about myself here, ha! In primary care I don't have the challenge of "getting stuck." The constant stream of people's problems and chaos seeking order affords me a ready made, actionable framework. But that leads to burnout, and a deep craving for creative outlets.
When I started practicing at 30, I still had time to write creatively about my patient encounters and life in medicine, ridiculously aspiring to some William Carlos Williams/Atul Gawande vignettes and reflections. Then too many responsibilities and the actionable grind took over for about a decade, and without making time for creative pursuits, I became pretty anxious, hollowed out, and resigned to the grind.
I jumped back in with the advent of Substack, and although I'm still rusty, I've been able to rescuscitate some creative parts of my brain. Forcing myself to do this has flattened anxiety, filled my sails a bit, and helped me thrive amid the grind. And in terms of getting stuck, I have a list of like 100+ ideas that I would love to type into being if only I didn't have the ever expanding day job.
So while this is not practical for creatives and intellectuals and writers who make a living by keeping their creative, well-oiled, expert engines humming along, I would add my own personal experience: that to deprive oneself of generative pursuits, and relentlessly just take care of business, might lead to a real hunger for those moments of transcendance being deferred, and a font of ideas might come bursting through the dehumanization of the grind.
So, less poetically, and without having to go through med school... maybe washing dishes for a month straight might unstick, too?
I really appreciate the dichotomies you mentioned above. Many books try to persuade people that their intervention is the one that will work, not many consider that different interventions work in different situations. My wife and I go back and forth about this in regards to behavior change. I do small steps with SMART goals which is also what I recommend to patients. My wife seems to have little success with that but much more success when she makes a drastic change all at once. So maybe certain interventions aren't only different per situation but also per person. This is dangerously close to losing the "truth" and everything being subjective - the whole, "do what works for you" thing, which I don't feel is helpful.
Also, you asked about feedback on Q&A's. My feedback isn't quite what you are asking for, but I will say that Q&A's often feel too long for me to read. I much prefer them in podcast form. But I love the content of your Q&As. Hope that helps!
Love the (implied) circumstantial nature of so much of this. Leads to better developed theory. Eg in this circumstance, pausing and reflecting makes sense but in this one do y instead. Etc etc. Helps parse between things that are seemingly opposite (quit vs persist) but are really circumstantial.
This was such a lovely and helpful interview. I put a copy in my notion and have taken copious notes.
Edit: Since it seems like David reads his substack comments...I just wanted to say thank you for Range. As a career late bloomer who felt lost for a long time and beat myself up a lot, I found it very consoling. I need to re-read the book, come to think of it.
The more time passes and I look back on pivots or decisions I have made I find myself becoming resistant to defining anything as quitting. We stop doing an activity or change jobs or foci but when I pull back the question I always find is, in a running context as usual, what is the race? Following that metaphor, I might drop out of X race because an injury would result but the actual race is long term improvement over a season or a career.
When we “quit” a job in pursuit of a better quality match, that is not really quitting but relentless forward progress in pursuit of the more ultimate goal.
Perhaps my beef is more with the connotation of the word quit which implies some amount of giving up. It is a short term assessment of a small part of a long game.
Wow this is great. Your enthusiasm for this book really leaps off the page, and I find it all so fascinating. Your talk about nuance and being able to listen to contradictory pieces of advice reminds me of this F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." (Or, alternatively, Toynbee's "No tool is omnicompetent" -- but I was too afraid to mention that one outside of the parenthetical because I know it's Range's epigraph and I don't want to preach too much to the choir.)
I also really loved Alter's note about how Messi begins games. LeBron does something similar, where he shoots much less in the first quarter than he does in all others. It also reminded me of the possibly apocryphal Lincoln quote: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." All of this is to say I love all of this.
What you said about plateaus is also really resonating for me. Was it difficult to make that switch from SI staff writer to ProPublica intern? Looking back, did it help you grow in the ways you thought it would?
Also, do you just casually have chats with Isabel Allende?? That conversation sounds very cool. Thanks again. Another great one as always.
PS - I think for Q&As of this length I have a slight preference for splitting it up.
Thank you for conducting this interview and sharing it with all of us! This interview and the discussion were just what I needed. I downloaded the book before finishing the column, have read 1/3 of it and will finish the rest today, because it is so helpful for this moment in time in my life. I will also be sharing it after reading. Thanks, David, for this interview. Thanks to Adam for not giving up when it got hard.
On diversity of behaviour: If two directors always agree, one is not needed. Disagreement is essential to the exploration of concepts. Dr Meredith Belbin told us a long time ago that an effective team was a collection of differences. And he told us why.
On quit/persevere: I worked with a Zimbabwean organisation that decided to 'get the business into Zambia'. We tried and tried and tried again. We were caught in the 'sunk cost fallacy' where because we had spent so much time and money on the project, we thought it 'stupid' to stop. Eventually after spending far too much, we quit. We would have been far less stupid to have quit a whole lot sooner.
For me, it didn't. Shout out from Brazil :)
Very cool idea!
Thank you for this post! As a creative, I so needed to read this. I particularly liked the part about that "Some people prefer to be mildly contented all the time, where others derive greater happiness and meaning when their lives are peppered with high highs and low lows." How does it relate in your opinion to the widely promoted idea of maintaining a routine and 'producing creative work' every day? It seems that 95% of creatives speak for a kind of won't-budge routine. What is your take on that?
Love the idea that you reach good ideas once you exhaust bad ones. So counter intuitive yet still makes sense when I'm writing!
Excellent deep dive, and the lightning round was a good goal to look forward to at the end of the journey. Like orange slices after a soccer game in the 1980's. As an aside, my kid is now rewarded with cookies (instead of real fruit with fiber, water, potassium, and sugar) at the end of her tennis matches - another sign of the decline of Western civilization.
In terms of feedback for longer posts like this one, I'm good with cohesive long form mixed in. I don't have time to "read it", but I listened to this post as a podcast using the app (and the female bot voice works fine). It was a great trading of ideas, and introduction to a new author I have not read, yet!
In terms of trading progressive intimacies about oneself, I feel liberated to keep commenting about myself here, ha! In primary care I don't have the challenge of "getting stuck." The constant stream of people's problems and chaos seeking order affords me a ready made, actionable framework. But that leads to burnout, and a deep craving for creative outlets.
When I started practicing at 30, I still had time to write creatively about my patient encounters and life in medicine, ridiculously aspiring to some William Carlos Williams/Atul Gawande vignettes and reflections. Then too many responsibilities and the actionable grind took over for about a decade, and without making time for creative pursuits, I became pretty anxious, hollowed out, and resigned to the grind.
I jumped back in with the advent of Substack, and although I'm still rusty, I've been able to rescuscitate some creative parts of my brain. Forcing myself to do this has flattened anxiety, filled my sails a bit, and helped me thrive amid the grind. And in terms of getting stuck, I have a list of like 100+ ideas that I would love to type into being if only I didn't have the ever expanding day job.
So while this is not practical for creatives and intellectuals and writers who make a living by keeping their creative, well-oiled, expert engines humming along, I would add my own personal experience: that to deprive oneself of generative pursuits, and relentlessly just take care of business, might lead to a real hunger for those moments of transcendance being deferred, and a font of ideas might come bursting through the dehumanization of the grind.
So, less poetically, and without having to go through med school... maybe washing dishes for a month straight might unstick, too?
I really appreciate the dichotomies you mentioned above. Many books try to persuade people that their intervention is the one that will work, not many consider that different interventions work in different situations. My wife and I go back and forth about this in regards to behavior change. I do small steps with SMART goals which is also what I recommend to patients. My wife seems to have little success with that but much more success when she makes a drastic change all at once. So maybe certain interventions aren't only different per situation but also per person. This is dangerously close to losing the "truth" and everything being subjective - the whole, "do what works for you" thing, which I don't feel is helpful.
Also, you asked about feedback on Q&A's. My feedback isn't quite what you are asking for, but I will say that Q&A's often feel too long for me to read. I much prefer them in podcast form. But I love the content of your Q&As. Hope that helps!
Love the (implied) circumstantial nature of so much of this. Leads to better developed theory. Eg in this circumstance, pausing and reflecting makes sense but in this one do y instead. Etc etc. Helps parse between things that are seemingly opposite (quit vs persist) but are really circumstantial.
This was such a lovely and helpful interview. I put a copy in my notion and have taken copious notes.
Edit: Since it seems like David reads his substack comments...I just wanted to say thank you for Range. As a career late bloomer who felt lost for a long time and beat myself up a lot, I found it very consoling. I need to re-read the book, come to think of it.
Awesome topic, I learned so much from this. I can see why some of my strategies of dealing with problems work or fail and I reset.
Thank you for this article.
The more time passes and I look back on pivots or decisions I have made I find myself becoming resistant to defining anything as quitting. We stop doing an activity or change jobs or foci but when I pull back the question I always find is, in a running context as usual, what is the race? Following that metaphor, I might drop out of X race because an injury would result but the actual race is long term improvement over a season or a career.
When we “quit” a job in pursuit of a better quality match, that is not really quitting but relentless forward progress in pursuit of the more ultimate goal.
Perhaps my beef is more with the connotation of the word quit which implies some amount of giving up. It is a short term assessment of a small part of a long game.
two-part posts that preserve more content, please :)
Please do a podcast version!
Wow this is great. Your enthusiasm for this book really leaps off the page, and I find it all so fascinating. Your talk about nuance and being able to listen to contradictory pieces of advice reminds me of this F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." (Or, alternatively, Toynbee's "No tool is omnicompetent" -- but I was too afraid to mention that one outside of the parenthetical because I know it's Range's epigraph and I don't want to preach too much to the choir.)
I also really loved Alter's note about how Messi begins games. LeBron does something similar, where he shoots much less in the first quarter than he does in all others. It also reminded me of the possibly apocryphal Lincoln quote: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." All of this is to say I love all of this.
What you said about plateaus is also really resonating for me. Was it difficult to make that switch from SI staff writer to ProPublica intern? Looking back, did it help you grow in the ways you thought it would?
Also, do you just casually have chats with Isabel Allende?? That conversation sounds very cool. Thanks again. Another great one as always.
PS - I think for Q&As of this length I have a slight preference for splitting it up.
Thank you for conducting this interview and sharing it with all of us! This interview and the discussion were just what I needed. I downloaded the book before finishing the column, have read 1/3 of it and will finish the rest today, because it is so helpful for this moment in time in my life. I will also be sharing it after reading. Thanks, David, for this interview. Thanks to Adam for not giving up when it got hard.
On diversity of behaviour: If two directors always agree, one is not needed. Disagreement is essential to the exploration of concepts. Dr Meredith Belbin told us a long time ago that an effective team was a collection of differences. And he told us why.
On quit/persevere: I worked with a Zimbabwean organisation that decided to 'get the business into Zambia'. We tried and tried and tried again. We were caught in the 'sunk cost fallacy' where because we had spent so much time and money on the project, we thought it 'stupid' to stop. Eventually after spending far too much, we quit. We would have been far less stupid to have quit a whole lot sooner.
Thanks for an as always, useful read