Panda bears,

I was out to lunch with a friend yesterday, and she asked me how I was. My answer was:

“Brilliant. I gave up social media. I don’t browse the internet anymore. I only check my emails twice a day. I feel more inspired, creative and content than I have in YEARS.”

And of course, when I talk about it, people always have questions:

  • But how do you find out news?
  • How do you market your business?
  • But… like… HOW?

As though this screen-ridden life is not optional, it’s mandatory.

And I get it, because I felt EXACTLY the same way before I did it.

My only answer is:

Just try it. Do it for 21 days. See how it feels for YOU. And while you’re at it, read Digital Minimalism or How To Break Up With Your Phone. It will give you the fuel you need, a way to glimpse a better life.

And I figure these Scrapbook posts are a great way to prove as well just how inspired I am. How I might not be browsing the internet or scrolling social media anymore or spending anywhere near the amount of time I used to on screens… but the QUALITY of what I read is wildly different. I used to do link posts all the time back in the olden days.

And then at some point, I didn’t have anything to put in them. I’d think back on the last week of online life, and could not remember one single, important, inspiring thing. I didn’t have anything to talk about because I was reading the equivalent of mental junk food. Re-orientating myself from social media to reading blogs using a blog reader (I use Bloglovin currently) has been a game changer. I read wildly thoughtful, inspiring pieces and itch to get creating. And I can’t wait to share with you some of the incredible things I’ve discovered.

“The challenge of this show was that I was an odd combination of journalist, archivist, anthropologist, historian, museum curator, biographer and fact checker — with artist being the umbrella term that allows you to do all of these things,” she said. “I’m not bound to the same final destination as a journalist or historian would be, but there is a sort of ethics to this project for me.”

Veronica Roberts, a curator at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, who organized Katchadourian’s 2017 show “Curiouser,” pointed out that “being curious is her job as an artist.” She continued, “I love the way she follows these irrational ideas rather rationally, all the way to the end.”

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
― Louise Erdrich

For every tough time, we call on the wisdom that we gained from tough times past, and use it power through. We remember that we made it once before, and all evidence is that we’ll do it again. We look for the light, and remember that we can do hard things.

Steinbeck was “productive” in any practical sense of the word: he wrote 33 books and won a Nobel Prize for his efforts. But he wasn’t busy. In our current moment, by contrast, ambition is intertwined with overload — as if aspirations can only be alchemized in the heat generated by frenetic, hyper-connected digital motion.

“your purpose

your art

will land in the hearts

it’s meant to

you won’t be for everyone

but you are for someone

and to that someone

what you have to give matters

and that’s the beginning

of everything.

– Danielle Doby

  • John Do: History of Pandemics (F A S C I N A T I N G!)
  • I read a profile on Jayne Hrdlicka (new CEO of Virgin Airlines in Australia) in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, and came across this fascinating tidbit. That would be a fucking COOL university experience I reckon. That’d work bloody brilliantly for my Autistic brain!

So then of course I had to do a wee bit of a deep dive to learn more about the Colorado College approach:

I love that they have a built in break between their study blocks. A wee bit like my 21 day challenge setups! You can read more about their block plan approach here.

My main goal is embarrassingly simple: A continuous and rigorous production of book-shaped projects until I’m dead … And so, whenever I embark on a new membership-adjacent project — walk, newsletter, members-only zoom session, podcast, et cetera — the main question in mind is: How does this help us make a book?

While we may think that habits are intentionally formed, habits are more often unintentionally formed.

“The flower doesn’t dream of the bee.
It blossoms and the bee comes.”
– Mark Nepo

Life is so scrumptious and SO GOOD.

Thank goodness for all these incredible creators for inspiring us so!

Go make your shit. It’s important. And I can’t wait to read it.

Big love,

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