Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”
But how do you write things worth reading in a world where so few people are reading anymore?
Most of what is on the Internet is video and garbage. It’s not worth watching. Yet that’s the medium that we consume.
Perhaps the modern equivalent is to do things worth making a TikTok reel about.
Old Ben must be rolling in his grave.
It’s the ambiguity. It’s not knowing what you’re doing or what’s expected of you. Uncertainty about the next right thing.
It’s the feeling of incompetence, not being sure that it’ll work or if you’re even capable of it.
Most jobs can be quite fulfilling, but not knowing what needs to be done, or how, robs us of that satisfaction.
And in the Information Age, with ever greater numbers of bullshit jobs and technology advancing faster than ever, that uncertainty becomes more prevalent each day.
It’s a truism, but you can’t do more than you can do.
Yet we insist on committing to more than we’ll ever be capable of doing.
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” —Arthur Ashe
You can’t do more than that. And you don’t have to.
How will you know when you get there?
“Know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.” —Stephen R. Covey
If the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall, he liked to say, you’ll only get to the wrong place faster.
Not tomorrow. Not Monday. Not on New Year’s Day.
Right now.
There will always be another tomorrow to which you’ll be tempted to push it.
Until there isn’t.
Maybe your job isn’t to teach the class a mass of information.
Instead, your job may be to show students you believe in them. That they have value. That they are anything but average.
Analyze a great piece of writing they submitted with the rest of the class.
Have them teach a math solution to a concept they’ve grasped.
Give them the opportunity, as my middle school teacher did, to stand up and lecture on a great moment in history on which they have become self-motivated experts.
Do your best to get them the information, but more importantly, help them understand their worth as human beings.
After that, the learning will take care of itself.
Sometimes, you just have to let people touch the metaphorical hot stove.
We work so hard to enact safeguards that protect people from making poor choices. But those safeguards are often viewed as a shackle on individual liberty, either because they don’t understand or don’t care.
For many, experiencing the consequences of their actions and choices is the only way they’ll learn.
The problem is that, in a society as interconnected and dependent as ours, those of us who know the stove is hot often get burned in the process.
I found this quote in one of my old folders. It seems apt for our current situation:
“This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
—C.S. Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age (1948)
“Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation.
Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience. That means it requires a lot of compromise. Democracy is the slow politics of the half-loaf.
Baseball is the game of the long season, where small, incremental differences decide who wins and who loses particular games, series, seasons. In baseball, you know going to the ballpark that the chances are you may win, but you also may lose. There’s no certainty, no given. You know when the season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time; the worst team is going to win a third of the time. The argument over 162 games—that middle third.
So it’s a game you can’t like if winning’s everything. And democracy is that way, too.”
—George Will, “Ken Burns: Baseball“
I would now posit that Americans’ declining interest in, and ability to watch and focus on, baseball directly correlates to our declining democratic ideals.
When winning is everything—like it is in the new American pastime, football—and our culture reflects that, American democracy can no longer function.
Baseball has become the jazz music of American sports culture: something we created that truly reflects who we are as a culture, yet no one cares about anymore.
Baseball and jazz—two of the greatest cultural creations that are 100% genuine American innovations—are the same two things most Americans don’t care about, understand, or appreciate.
We’ve traded cerebral, authentically human jazz for three-minute pop songs, mostly created by computers with singers who rely on autotune to hit anything above or below a 5-note range. A 162-game baseball season over 8 months, for a 16-game football season that lasts 5 months.
I’ve often said that our declining interest and ability to follow baseball is an indication of social media’s detrimental impact on our ability to focus for long periods.
Now I’m quite certain it heralds something much worse.
Would you be proud of what you were doing?
How you were doing it?
Who you were doing it for?
Mindfulness in each task leads to mindfulness in all things.
Nathan's Blog 