Love Your Work

When Vincent van Gogh began his career as an artist, he had already failed at everything else. He even got fired from his own family's business in the process.

Not seeing any alternative, he completely immersed himself in art. In one two-week period, he created 120 drawings.

But exactly none of those drawings are famous today.

What feels like waste is not waste

Last week, I talked about the Iceberg Principle – the idea that any masterpiece you see is just the tip of the iceberg. There's far more knowledge and experience beneath the surface, giving that masterpiece confidence and grace.

But as you're adding layer after layer to your iceberg, it doesn't feel like that's what you're doing. It feels like you're wasting your energy. But you're not.

After Van Gogh's frenzied first couple weeks seriously pursuing art, he settled in to a more conservative pace. Instead of 120 drawings in two weeks, he was instead shooting to make just twenty a week. He figured that's how many he'd have to make to end up with one good piece each week.

"Waste" takes many forms

What feels like "waste" can take many forms:

• Failed projects: You made something, and nobody likes it.
• Off on timing: Nobody like it yet, but some day someone will.
• Unfinished projects: You started, got a little ways, and maybe Shiny Object Syndrome took over. For whatever reason, you didn't finish.
• Research and Preparation: You don't always know what you're trying to learn, but all sorts of tinkering may seem like a waste.

Creative waste is part of the creative game

Sometimes what feels like "waste," makes it directly into a current or future project, thus making it clearly not waste. But even the stuff that never becomes a part of your body of work is part of the creative game.

I talked in episode 256 about the Barbell Strategy. To succeed in creative work, put most of your efforts toward "sure bets" that protect your downside and keep you in the game. With the rest of your time and energy, play "wildcards," that have a chance of big upside.

Creative work happens in Extremistan, not Mediocristan. Success won't be a steady climb up-and-to-the-right. Instead, it will look more like a poorly-shaved porcupine. Long periods of time where it doesn't seem like much is happening, punctuated by big spikes that level up your career one at a time.

Yes, you're showing up every day and putting in the work, but all that is a series of small bets. You hope for one or two or a few to turn into positive Black Swans. Projects that take off, and take on a life of their own.

In the course of playing this strategy, you can't tell what will be wasted, and what will not. You have to trust that "waste" is part of the process.

Projects will fail, projects will go unfinished, and iterations will burn in the fire. That doesn't make you a procrastinator or a dilettante – that makes you a creator.

Waste in Van Gogh's first masterpiece

Vincent van Gogh's first masterpiece was full of waste. He did not just a sketch, but a small study, a medium study, and a print he could give out to test his idea. This was all before working on the final canvas. And that had many iterations, and four coats of varnish. He left it in his friend's studio to prevent himself from "spoiling it." Then he still came back and worked on it some more.

All that waste was on top of the years of work he did leading up to the project. The painting was about peasants, and he wandered around living like a peasant himself, begging people to model for him. And, there was the twenty drawings a week he had done.

And those 120 drawings he did in a two-week period? We don't even know what they look like, because he destroyed them.

Once this first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, was done, it must have felt like a waste to Vincent. Everyone hated it. He got in a fight with his brother about it, and he completely cut off a friend who attacked it, viciously.

Vincent van Gogh's first masterpiece was the result of a lot of waste. Each of those drawings was a failed project, surely many were left unfinished. He did a massive amount of research and preparation, and he was certainly off on timing. The Potato Eaters is regarded as a masterpiece today.

Creative waste adds to the iceberg

You already heard last week about how any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg. There's far more below the surface. So what new do you learn from creative waste?

Sometimes, you can't see the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes it all just feels like waste. Your projects are failing, and your preparation and planning isn't getting you anywhere, causing you to leave projects unfinished.

Just remember that other creators have embraced creative waste. I told you last week about how Margaret Mitchell re-wrote nearly every chapter of Gone With the Wind at least twenty times, Jerry Seinfeld says joke-writing is "ninety-five percent re-write," Meredith Monk's charts and graphs go to waste and don't end up in the final performance, and Stephen King reminds you to "kill your darlings."

Those are all fine when you're deep in a project and you can see where it's going, but what do you do when entire projects get scrapped?

Great creators embrace waste

That's when you need to remind yourself of the approach Picasso took to his paintings. He did one after another. He saw them as like "pages in [his] journal." He understood that not all his works would be successful. Even once he had a finished piece, he didn't know its true fate. "The future will chose the pages it prefers," he said. "It's not up to me to make the choice."

Embrace creative waste. No waste, no wins.

Image: Tale of Hoffmann by Paul Klee

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/creative-waste/

1920s, London. Radclyffe Hall was pacing around her study. She wore close-cropped hair, a tweed skirt, and a man's silk smoking jacket and tie. Her partner, Uma Troubridge, sat in a nearby chair, reading the writing of Radclyffe – or "John," as she preferred to be called. But just as Uma's voice wavered a bit, John grabbed the papers from her hand, and threw them in the fire.

In the 1920s, throwing writing in the fire meant it was gone forever. These weren't print-outs of digital files, safely backed up to the cloud. But Radclyffe still often threw her writing into the fire, if she didn't like the sound of what Uma was reading.

Radclyffe Hall, like many great creators, understood the Iceberg Principle

Any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg

What I call the Iceberg Principle is this: What you see of any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg. There is far more knowledge and work beneath the surface, giving the piece confidence and grace. The Iceberg Principle is inspired by Ernest Hemingway, who said, "The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

He explained further:

I've seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I've seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water once and harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.

In other words, when Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, he didn't need to include every story and every detail about the life of a fisherman. He had already lived it. His experiences fishing were the underwater part of the iceberg. The stories and details he did include were only the tip of the iceberg. They were more powerful because they were held in place by everything beneath the surface.

What isn't revealed gives power to what is revealed

If I say, "I'm David. I grew up in Nebraska. I now live in Colombia," I've only said three statements, but each of those statements is held in place by a massive amount of knowledge and experience. When I say, "I grew up in Nebraska," eighteen years of open skies and snow drifts and cornfields flash in my mind. When I say, "I'm David," more than forty years of being called David are behind that. I've never had a different name.

When you read a book by Daniel Kahneman, and he tells you something about human behavior, there's a lot of authority behind everything he says. Each statement he makes is backed up by mountains of data, and decades of running experiments and seeing it with his own eyes. While he maintains the humble uncertainty of a real scientist, there's confidence and grace behind each statement.

Just think of how much work, experience, and knowledge went behind Einstein writing the simple equation: e = mc².

This is something Radclyffe Hall seemed to understand. It didn't matter if she threw her writing into the fire and started over. When she heard Uma's voice waver, that signaled to her that her stories or her characters weren't flowing on the page confidently. The same way snow and ice layers onto an iceberg, making it bigger over time, pushing more of it underwater over time, it took many iterations for Hall to write classics such as The Well of Loneliness – the first great novel of lesbian literature. Each time she threw writing into the fire, the paper burned, but the iceberg didn't melt – it only gained mass.

Keep the Iceberg Principle in mind

Why should you keep the Iceberg Principle in mind? The Iceberg Principle helps you manage expectations about your work. It also takes some of the mystery out of great masterpieces you see.

The product is not the process

That last part, first: When we see a masterpiece, we can't help but marvel at how it must have been made. What we see is deceiving, because we tend to mistake the product for the process.

This is because the way we consume the product is very different from the process through which that product is produced. When we read a novel, we read one word after another. When we see a painting, it hits our eyes all at once. When we watch a movie, the images flash on the screen in order.

But that's not how any of it is made. The novel wasn't written one word after another. The painting wasn't laid down in orderly brushstrokes. The events in the movie weren't shot, much less conceived, one after another. And no, Michelangelo did not "simply remove everything that wasn't David." As I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management, an enormous amount of "Preparation" went into carving the David.

So when you see a great masterpiece, and marvel at how it must have been created, know that the product is not the process. What you see is only the tip of the iceberg.

Manage your expectations

It might feel intimidating to know that what you see of any masterpiece is only a small amount of the work and experience it took to create it. But it can be empowering, too.

Don't get frustrated when you sit down to write and it doesn't make sense. Don't lose hope when you strum a guitar and the strings rattle on the frets. Things don't come out perfectly the first time around.

I've talked a little on this podcast and in The Heart to Start about the Fortress Fallacy: that we tend to have visions that outpace our current abilities. One reason we fall for the Fortress Fallacy is that when we envision building a fortress, we only think of the act of building the actual fortress. We don't think about the other seven-eighths of the work that goes into the knowledge and planning and materials sourcing of building the fortress.

The iceberg takes many forms

The underwater part of the iceberg can take many forms. For Hemingway, it was his life experiences, fishing. For Hall, it was the many failed iterations of her writing. The underwater part of the iceberg can be other projects you've done, other projects you never finished, or even time your ideas have spent incubating, between projects. Any of these can be the underwater part of the iceberg. They hold up the visible parts with confidence and grace.

Great creators follow the Iceberg Principle

We rarely get to see the underwater part of icebergs in creators' work. But if you look hard, you can find it.

There are few art forms where the process is more unlike the product than movies. If you had asked me when I was a kid how movies were made, I would have guessed actors and camera operators just made something up. That's how the movies I made on our home video camera were done, after all.

But in fact an incredible amount of work goes into making a movie well before camera operators are hired and actors are cast. I know now that a writer writes a screenplay first. Thanks to screenwriting instructor Robert McKee's book, Story, we can see the underwater part of the iceberg.

McKee warns screenwriters that if every idea they come up with makes it into their final screenplay, they've got a problem. "If you've never thrown an idea away," he says, "your work will almost certainly fail."

The Iceberg Principle is why Stephen King tells writers, "Kill your darlings." (Don't dare try to keep your whole iceberg above water. Even your favorite parts.)

It's why when Meredith Monk is composing an interdisciplinary performance, she draws charts and graphs about how the various elements – music and dance and space on the stage – will interact with one another. None of those sketches make it to the final performance, but that work is there to add grace to the piece.

It's why Jerry Seinfeld has described the joke-writing process as an experiment that gathers data. In other words, you don't just get up on stage and tell a great joke. You have to go from writing desk to stage and back again many times. He said of his joke-writing process, "It's ninety-five percent re-write."

It's why, when Margaret Mitchell was writing Gone With the Wind, she re-wrote nearly every chapter at least twenty times.

Start building your iceberg

When we see masterpieces we admire, and try to replicate that work, we're bound to fail. What we create is so far from our vision, it seems pointless to even try.

But thanks to the Iceberg Principle, you now know that what you see of any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg. To build your masterpiece, start building your iceberg. The more you add to the underwater part of your iceberg, the more solid and beautiful your masterpiece will be.

Image: Crystal Gradation by Paul Klee

Thank you for having me on your podcasts!

Thank you for having me on your podcast! Thank you to Kjell Vandevyvere of Coffee and Pens. As always, you can find all podcast interviews of me at kadavy.net/interviews.

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/iceberg-principle/

It's 1997, and Tiger Woods is in a sudden death playoff, against Tom Lehman.

Lehman shoots first, on a par three, and hits his ball into the water.

Now Tiger's up, and this is Tiger's tournament to lose. All he has to do is hit a safe shot, far away from the hole, and far away from the water.

But that's not what he does.

An aggressive and dangerous play

The hole is way on the left side of the green, near the water. There's water short, and there's water left – where Tom Lehman's shot went. The smart play is just hit the ball onto the green, way right of the hole, so there's no chance it goes in the water. Then Tiger can putt twice, for par, and win the tournament.

Tiger hits his shot, watches with anticipation as it flies through the air – and almost goes directly into the hole. It's eight inches away. He just won the tournament.

The crowd goes wild, meanwhile, the announcers are trying to figure out why Tiger would make a play like that. Why shoot directly at the hole, when there's water all around? If he had made the slightest error, Tiger would have tied Lehman, and extended the playoff to the next hole.

The announcers say, Well he's 21 years old. He's aggressive. Some of you are no doubt thinking, Why would he make a play like that? Because he's Tiger Woods, that's why.

Perfection comes from imperfection

I recently showed my partner a career highlights video of Tiger Woods. She had never heard of him, and had never seen golf (remember, she's Colombian). By the end of the video, she was convinced Tiger Woods was a witch, who could magically conjure a ball into a hole from 200 yards away. Because that's what she saw. Over and over, this guy swinging, then a tiny ball flying through the air for several seconds, and jumping and spinning and rolling into a tiny hole.

When we see an expert in any field, we marvel at what they're able to accomplish. When we compare our own skills, we can't help but feel insignificant.

But sometimes, what seems like perfection is someone not striving for perfection, but instead working cleverly with their imperfections.

Several years after this playoff, where Tiger Woods made this bold play. He re-lived it in his book. He explained that he was very much aware all he had to do was hit the green – to play safely away from the water. In fact, that's exactly what he did.

When you're missing right, aim left

Yes, Tiger's ball almost went in the hole, but that's not where he was aiming. Besides knowing the smart strategy in this playoff situation, Tiger had noticed something during his warm-up before the playoff: His shots tended to go left. Like Tom Lehman, Tiger had pulled his ball to the left, but because Tiger was aiming to the right, he almost had a hole-in-one.

This is hard to process for many who don't play golf – indeed many who do play golf. How can the greatest golfer who ever lived be missing to the left? And why would the greatest golfer who ever lived aim away from the hole?

When we see greatness, this is often what's happening. Tiger was missing to the left, so he aimed right. I call it "aim left," because it's just less confusing than "aim right." Aiming left is simply accepting you're not perfect, and shooting your shot according to your tendencies. You can use this in your creative work, in your habits, and yes – in golf. When you're missing to the right, aim left.

Michelangelo aimed left

When Michelangelo was hired to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he faced an impossible task. As if it weren't hard enough to paint 12,000 square feet of ceiling, Michelangelo wasn't a painter! He was a sculptor. He had hardly painted anything to that point. Add to that, this was fresco – which is incredibly unforgiving. You get a patch of wet plaster to paint on each day, and once it's dry, it's literally set in stone.

So what did Michelangelo do? As Ross King – who I talked to on episode 99 explained, Michelangelo aimed left. He started with an inconspicuous part of the ceiling – one of the last places someone would look when entering the chapel – and one of the last places the pope would look while sitting on his throne. By starting with an inconspicuous part of the ceiling, Michelangelo was free to let his fresco-painting skills develop throughout the project. By the end of the project, he wasn't even transferring drawings to the ceiling, and was instead painting directly onto the plaster.

Other greats aimed left

Accomplished creators are always aiming left. They're always compensating for the weaknesses they know they have.

Ernest Hemingway knew starting a writing session was always the hardest part. So, he aimed left. He made sure to end writing sessions knowing what he was going to write next. That way when he returned to his writing the next day, he'd have no trouble writing his first few words. Kingsley Amis did this, and Todd Henry, who I talked to on episode 109 has said he stops in the middle of a sentence.

Edna Ferber built her dream house, complete with a writing study that had a beautiful view. After all that trouble, she decided that view was too distracting. So, she aimed left. She pushed her desk against the only blank wall in her study, so the view couldn't distract her. Somerset Maugham also faced a blank wall, and I did it a while myself.

Benjamin Franklin wanted to improve his character, but couldn't focus on everything he wanted to work on at once. So, he aimed left. He kept a schedule of his "thirteen virtues." Each week, he tried to improve at only one of those virtues – things like cleanliness, frugality, and humility. By focusing on only one virtue at a time – and forgetting the rest – Franklin improved his character in all thirteen virtues.

Ways of aiming left

To aim left, take anything where you consistently miss, and compensate for that miss.

In The Heart to Start, I talked about "The Fortress Fallacy." We tend to have visions that outsize our current skill level. Over and over, we start ambitious projects, but fail to follow through once we realize how daunting they are. To aim left, go ahead and dream of the fortress, but first, build a cottage – a smaller project that builds the same skills you'll use in the larger project.

I also talked about "Motivational Judo," which is a form of aiming left. If you struggle to get motivated, create conditions that use your own action-avoidance tactics against themselves. Pavlok founder Maneesh Sethi built a wristband to shock himself. Sociologist Harriet Martineau knew she only needed to suffer through the first fifteen minutes of writing, and she'd have the momentum to keep going. This is similar to the Ten-Minute Hack I also talked about in The Heart to Start.

In the previous episode, I talked about a way to cure Shiny Object Syndrome by aiming left. If you know you jump from unfinished project to unfinished project, treat shipping as a skill. Turn everyday things like meals and day-trips into "projects." Make plans and execute – ship the projects.

Many opportunities to aim left

Look around, and you'll find many opportunities to aim left. Anywhere you aren't achieving what you want, you can find a way to direct your imperfection toward perfection. Or, at least, near-perfection – eight inches away, to be exact.

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Subscribe to Love Your Work

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Support the show on Patreon

Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/aim-left/

Shiny Object Syndrome is an affliction that causes you to be attracted to "shiny objects." Shiny objects can be whatever is new and trendy in your field. But oftentimes, the shiny objects are simply new ideas you have – other projects you'd rather be working on. In this form, Shiny Object Syndrome will ruin any chance you have of finishing your current project – unless you do something about it.

Two sources of Shiny Object Syndrome

How do you overcome Shiny Object Syndrome? What you need to do is simple: Commit to your current project, ignore the new projects, suck it up, and follow-through. The reality isn't so simple. Shiny Object Syndrome causes mental distortions that will have you 100% convinced you're doing the right thing: This old project is a dud. This new project is sure to be a success. To cure Shiny Object Syndrome, we need to know its true sources. That way, we can nip them in the bud, keep Shiny Object Syndrome at bay, and finish projects. There are two main causes of Shiny Object Syndrome:

1. Naïveté of the novel
2. Frustration with the existing

We don't know much about the new project, so we view it with rose-colored glasses. We know a little too much about our current project, so it looks terrible in comparison. This creates a "grass is greener" effect.

Now how do we get in this position in the first place?

1. Naïveté of the novel

As humans, we're naturally attracted to the novel. That's how we've become such an innovative species. We were not satisfied with the old way of doing things – eating our meat raw and sleeping in the elements – so we're curious about our neighbor who's cooking with fire and has built a straw hut.

That explains why we're attracted to the "shiny objects" in the first place, but there's more happening in our minds that makes us not only attracted to the shiny object, but that makes us abandon what we have to pursue the unknown.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

A powerful force that makes us hop from one shiny object to another is the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is named after it's originators, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who found that when we know a good deal about a field, we underestimate our knowledge, but when we little about a field, we overestimate our knowledge.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a favorite of internet "gotcha" culture. People love to point out the Dunning-Kruger effect at work in others, but it does a lot of good to recognize it in ourselves.

When we get a great idea for a new project in a field we know little about, we often think that project will be easier than it actually will be. It seems like a good idea to drop what we're doing, and move on.

2. Frustration with the existing

This naïveté of the novel colludes with frustration with the existing. In fact, it adds fuel to that frustration. If we start a new project, thinking it's going to be easy, we're even more disillusioned when we realize it's actually hard.

We've run up against all the challenges we didn't think about. We've seen the hidden complexity in the current project. As former guest, Tynan has pointed out, when we're in the middle of a project, we've experienced all of the downsides, but none of the upsides, such as revenue or respect from our peers. Meanwhile, we know very little about the new project. It seems fun and easy.

When we started the current project, we said to ourselves, This will be easy. We've realized it's not so easy, but the Dunning-Kruger effect takes over again. We tell ourselves of the new project, Now THIS will be easy! Just knowing how the naïveté of the novel and frustration with the existing work together to cause Shiny Object Syndrome isn't enough to cure it. When you're in this situation, it seems rational. You can come up with good-sounding reasons why the current project isn't worth the trouble and the new project has a better chance of succeeding. And we won't admit we might be fooling ourselves.

Shipping is a skill

I have some good news: Your tendency to come up with new ideas is a good thing. Instead of trying to fight it, Shiny Object Syndrome is much easier to manage if you instead accept it. Accept it will tempt you to switch projects, then change the way you approach projects accordingly.

Remind yourself that shipping is a skill. The mere act of finishing a project, no matter how small, is a skill you should cultivate. If you've never picked up a golf club, you would know better than to expect to play like Tiger Woods your first time out. So if you've never finished a project, why would you think you could take on a giant one the first time around?

When I started on my own, I had almost zero shipping skills. I had piles of unfinished projects, and nothing to show for them. Fortunately one day, as I contemplated a giant shiny object I was about to take on, I realized I didn't have what it took to make my vision a reality. I had had enough of my Shiny Object Syndrome, and was ready to put it to an end.

So, I treated even the smallest things as practice in the skill of shipping. I looked up a recipe online, and planned my trip to the grocery store to get the ingredients. It sounds simple, but can you believe I had to go back several times? I planned parties and dates and trips. I treated everything as an opportunity to have a vision, plan how to execute that vision, and ship the project.

The Fortress Fallacy

In The Heart to Start, I introduced The Fortress Fallacy. We tend to have big visions, but those visions outpace our skills. We dream of building a fortress, when we haven't built a cottage, much less a lean-to.

This isn't about "breaking your project down" into parts. This is about doing small projects that build skills you can later use in a larger project. Breaking your project down doesn't build the skill of shipping. Doing small projects does.

Make predictions

A source of fuel for our frustration with the existing is our lack of foresight. We fall for the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy is why the Sydney Opera House took ten extra years and fifteen times the budget – you can see the same in countless construction projects. It's why the Greeks thought the Trojan War would take four weeks, when it ended up taking ten years – you can see the same in countless military campaigns.

It's demoralizing to expect something to work out one way, and have it end up another. One way to fix that would be to have things work out the way we expect – but that's not going to happen. The world is too complex and unpredictable.

The solution is to make predictions. How do you predict the unpredictable? You don't, really. But there's a lot of wiggle room between This will definitely happen, and This will definitely not happen.

In episode 245, I introduced the Avocado Challenge. Before you open an avocado, are you 100% sure it's going to be perfectly ripe? No. In the Avocado Challenge, you make percentage-confidence predictions, such as "I'm 60% confident this avocado is ripe." You then rate those predictions based upon the outcome.

As you start projects, make predictions. Accept that you're never 100% sure about anything, so make percentage-confidence predictions. For example, "I am 70% confident I will set up my blog and publish my first post by next Sunday." After Sunday comes, review your prediction. You can even use a handy free service called Prediction Book to keep track.

This does a couple things. One: It holds you accountable. We tend to approach all projects as if we're sure we're going to finish them – and that just ain't so. Two: It keeps you from beating yourself up. You can't be certain about the future, but when we don't finish projects, we feel bad about it. If we feel bad, we learn to associate working on projects with feeling bad. So we'll start fewer projects. As Roam Research founder Conor White-Sullivan said, "I can not speak highly enough for the practice of starting things before you know you're going to finish them."

Don't fight shiny object syndrome, work with it

In conclusion, the way to cure Shiny Object Syndrome isn't so much to cure it – it's to accept that you're going to have new ideas, and you're going to fail to finish some projects. If you pick small projects, make predictions about your ability to finish them, and treat shipping as a skill, you can reduce Shiny Object Syndrome, and work with it.

Thank you for having me on your podcasts!

Thank you for having me on your podcast! Thank you to Dolores at Attitudeable for having me on the show. As always, you can find all podcast interviews of me at kadavy.net/interviews.

About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Facebook
• YouTube

Subscribe to Love Your Work

• Apple Podcasts
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Support the show on Patreon

Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/shiny-object-syndrome/

If you want to grow an audience online, it's great to have a consistent newsletter. It keeps you in touch with your subscribers, and it gives you a place to test out small ideas you can later grow into big ideas. I've been delivering my Love Mondays newsletter every week for more than 100 weeks (and you can sign up at kdv.co). Here's how I streamline and automate the process, so I never miss a week.

Small bites of information

Newsletters work great as small bites of information. Your subscribers get your newsletter right in their inboxes, so they're in a hurry. If they know they can get a quick hit or two from your newsletter, they won't put off opening it.

You can see this with newsletters such as Tim Ferriss's Five Bullet Friday, or James Clear's 3-2-1 Thursday. The fact that these newsletters are full of quick hits is right there in the titles.

Keeping the bites organized

I design Love Mondays to have a few tiny bites of interesting things, as well as a light main dish. Each Love Mondays newsletter has a quick thought – maybe 150–300 words, about navigating the Extremistan world of making it as a creator. Plus, I have what I call "ABCs" – Aphorisms (or Quotes), Books, and Cool tools. Additionally, I may make a short announcement in the postscript.

Each newsletter has the main quick thought, two ABCs, and sometimes there's a P.S., sometimes there's even an P.P.S.

That's a lot of different things to think up each week, so I've designed my system so I don't have to do it all at once. Using a spreadsheet I built from a service called Airtable, I'm able to organize the ideas I'd like to share in Love Mondays, as well as Aphorisms, Books, Cool tools, and other announcements. I combine them to create each week's newsletter. My system keeps me from switching mental states trying to think up each item. The spreadsheet also allows me to track the performance of things like subject lines and clicks on items I share, so I can keep making my newsletter better.

Collecting ideas

Each newsletter idea starts as an even smaller idea. There's a sheet in my database that's full of some of my best-performing tweets. Using Zapier, I have an automation set up so that anytime I "like" one of my own tweets, it gets saved to this sheet in Airtable. It saves the body of the tweet, the number of favorites it has, a link to the tweet, and the date of the tweet.

I "batch" my Love Mondays newsletters on a monthly basis, using the "creative system" I talked about in my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. To begin a batch of newsletters, I start looking for ideas in this sheet of high-performing tweets. I sort them by date, then make sure the number of likes is updated on all the newest tweets. Then, I sort them by number of likes. I don't always grow the most popular tweets into newsletter ideas, but seeing the number of likes does help me get a feel for what ideas resonate with my readers better than others.

Collecting Aphorisms, Books, and Cool tools

I also have individual sheets in my database for Aphorisms, Books, and Cool tools. My Aphorism sheet also gets populated with a Zapier zap. If I like one of my own tweets, and it has an em dash in it ("—"), that filters the tweet into the quotes sheet, instead of my sheet of ideas. Again, I can sort quotes I've shared according to how many likes they got, to get a better feel for which ones my readers will enjoy.

Other than that, I manage the sheets for Books and Cool tools manually.

Reviewing the data

Each week, I enter the stats from the previous week's Love Mondays newsletter. I plug in the number of subscribers it was sent to, and how many opened, to get the open rate. For Books and Cool tools, I enter how many clicks the links got, so I can see each item's click through rate.

As I consider new Books and Cool tools to share, I check the performance of the past Books and Cool tools I've shared, to get an idea of what people will like. The data has been really surprising sometimes, as things I thought people would love got little interest, and things that didn't seem like a big deal got a lot.

Again, the numbers aren't the only thing that decides what I share. I share a lot of things I just like, even if I don't think the highest percentage of readers will be into it.

Identifying finalists

I keep a big backlog on all these sheets, so I never feel pressure to think up new ideas, or new ABCs to share. I just capture things as they come.

But as each new month approaches, I comb through these sheets to identify finalists I'd like to share. I just change a field in each record in Airtable, so my top candidates for tweet ideas and ABCs are at the top of each sheet, where I can later narrow them down further.

Writing the drafts

Once I've collected some of my favorite ideas, I write the idea section of the emails. I usually get the month's emails – four or five, depending – written in two sessions. In the first session, I write really awkward drafts. In the second session, I re-write those, and they usually come out much less awkward. I space the two sessions a week apart, so my subconscious does most of the work for me. Every once in a while, I just have a good first session and don't have to re-write – just edit a little.

I do this writing in Ulysses, one newsletter after another, in one document. Before the first session, I set up the document with a simple list of dates, the body text of the tweet that serves as inspiration, and whatever other things I might want to announce in that week's newsletter. I consult the schedule of my podcast, so I can share any recent episodes, I check my other spreadsheet of podcasts that have interviewed me to make sure I've thanked them, and I check my calendar to see if there are any promotions I want to announce.

Wrapping it all together

Now here comes the cool part. Airtable helps me wrap my main newsletter body together with my ABCs, my announcements, and my greeting and salutation. The result is a field with all the Markdown text for the newsletter.

To do this, I copy and paste the Markdown text of the main idea of the newsletter into a field. From other fields, I can select the Aphorism and/or Book and/or Cool thing I want to include in that week's newsletter.

Each record for Books or Cool things already has fields for my comments and the links for the items.

Once I select any ABCs, all this is added to the main body, in Markdown text. Each newsletter also has a P.S. and P.P.S. field, and if they're populated with anything, they get added onto that text, too.

Scheduling

Now all I have to do is copy and paste the Markdown into a translator. I then copy and paste the rich text into my email marketing platform, ActiveCampaign.

Once I have the main content of all the month's newsletters written, it takes about fifteen minutes to integrate the ABCs, the announcements, and to have the newsletters scheduled and ready to go.

Sign up for Love Mondays and see for yourself!

There you have it. This system really helps me save creative energy, so that I'm using it to think of good ideas, instead of trying to fumble around with all the things I want to put in my newsletter.

Obviously, all this could be automated even further. I'm actually surprised I haven't seen an email marketing platform that already has Airtable-like database elements for managing all the tidbits one shares in their newsletter. Maybe something for someone to build.

If you want to see all this in action, be sure to sign up for Love Mondays. My readers really love them, I consistently get replies saying how much each week's idea has shifted someone's perspective.

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You hear a lot about morning routines, but nighttime routines are every bit as important. Your parents probably had a bedtime routine for you, and if you have kids you probably have bedtime routines for them. But we need bedtime routines as adults, too. I follow a specific nighttime routine, and it helps me get to sleep faster, and wake up better-rested.

Wind down, and don't try to force sleep

My nighttime routine follows two overarching principles:

1. Wind down
2. Don't try to force sleep

1. Wind down: Before I started my nighttime routine, I didn't think about what I was doing before bed. I just went to bed when I was tired. I was treating all hours of the day as equal – following time management instead of mind management. Once I started my nighttime routine, I realized "going to bed" starts well before you're tired. It's like the difference between crashing a plane and a smooth landing.

2. Don't try to force sleep: I recently did a sleep study at a lab, and started doing my nighttime routine. But the study was supposed to start before my usual bedtime, and the nurses at the lab wouldn't let me follow my routine. I didn't sleep the whole night and the study was a waste. The problem for me was trying to force sleep. I had insomnia as a kid and trying to get to sleep always made me more anxious and less able to sleep. So now I'm careful not to force sleep.

Two phases: wind-down and sleep-time

In the spirit of not trying to force sleep, my nighttime routine follows two phases: wind-down and sleep-time.

Wind-down phase: During the wind-down phase, I want to signal to my body that it can get ready for sleep. Again, I'm not trying to force sleep, just giving my body permission to get sleepy. I'll get more into how I do that in a bit.

Sleep-time phase: In the sleep-time phase, I'm again careful to not force sleep. But I have specific steps I follow that help me transition from the wind-down phase to actually getting to sleep.

Five rules for my nighttime routine

Your parents probably had bedtime rules for you. In your bedtime routine as an adult, you need rules for yourself. Here are five rules I follow:

1. No social media after 9 p.m.
2. No bright screens after 10 p.m.
3. Blue-blocking glasses after 10 p.m.
4. Reading only after 10 p.m.
5. In bed by midnight.

Here's some more detail about each of those:

1. No social media after 9 p.m.

I have a theory that associating with anyone you're not close to before bedtime disrupts your sleep quality. The only proof I have of this is I've experienced it myself. Though it would make sense from an evolutionary perspective: You and the tribe might find it hard to sleep if strangers from another tribe were lurking around your campfire.

I don't want to think about a news story in the world at-large, witness a petty argument amongst strangers, or read a hostile Twitter reply too close to bedtime. I sense that it sets my brain on alarm, making it hard to sleep. Twitter is my social media of choice, and it's valuable enough to outweigh the above negatives, generally, but not after 9 p.m.

When I say no social media, that doesn't mean that I won't chat with a close friend on WhatsApp or Messenger. I would guess associating with people you're close to before bedtime makes it easier to get to sleep, if anything. I often make a FaceTime call to my father after 9 p.m., but no Twitter.

2. No bright screens after 10 p.m.

By now it's well-established that blue light exposure late at night disrupts sleep and is even associated with higher cancer risk. Yes, our devices have nighttime modes that reduce this light, but I don't trust that to eliminate blue light completely. So I avoid bright screens, wholesale, after 10 p.m. I stow my phone and tablet in a charging station in my living room, and ignore them until the next morning. This also makes it easier to follow my rule of no social media.

The brightest thing I look at after 10 p.m. is my Kindle. It's not great to be on an electronic device, but I set it in dark mode, so it's actually less light exposure than I would get reading a paper book under lamplight. As part of this rule, I also switch off my internet and WiFi at 10 p.m. This is a good way to keep yourself off the internet, but it also may be better for your health. Studies have shown that EMF exposure before bed alters your brain activity during sleep. Scientists haven't found any ill health effects from this (yet), but why not turn off your WiFi? We didn't evolve to have our brain activity altered while we sleep, and you're not using it anyway.

3. Blue-blocking glasses after 10 p.m.

Even if the nighttime modes on my devices did eliminate all blue light, there's still blue light in the lights in my house, or from street lights outside. So, I nip that in the bud with blue-blocking glasses.

The blue-blocking glasses I wear are not fashionable. They are orange, and large enough to wrap around most of my face, as well as cover my glasses. Very little blue light gets past these, and I get sleepy easier and wake up more refreshed when I wear these glasses, starting two hours before my target bedtime. I even take them with me when I travel, and they help out when I need to push my bedtime earlier to get up for early flights.

4. Reading only after 10 p.m.

Back when I didn't pay attention to what I was doing before bedtime, I would often work until I could hardly keep my eyes open. I've since tried different activities before sleep, and found that nothing works better to get me sleepy than reading. So, the only activity I allow myself to do after 10 p.m. is read.

This means there are a lot of activities I avoid before bed. Aside from bright screens, I've found that certain activities get my brain too active, and make it hard for me to fall asleep. If I play a video game on my VR headset, write in my journal, or even do something creative such as drawing, it's not as easy for me to get to sleep, and I wake up less-rested.

I also select the type of reading I do in a specific way that helps me get sleepy. For the first hour, I can read pretty much whatever I want. This hour helps me get through a lot of science, history, or biography books, the highlights of which I store in the digital Zettelkasten I talked about on episode 250. I use much of this reading as raw material for ideas for newsletters, articles, and books.

As I'm reading, I'm looking out for specific signals help to me decide when I'm ready for bed. The first thing I'm looking out for is how well I understand what I'm reading. About this time of night, I can lose my reading comprehension very rapidly. One minute I'm engrossed in a complex neuroscience book, the next minute I realize I've read the same sentence several times over. This happens before I'm consciously aware that I'm tired, but it signals to me it's time to change my reading material.

When that happens, I switch from non-fiction to fiction. If 11 p.m. rolls around and I'm still comprehending non-fiction well, I make the switch anyway.

Now I'm looking for the final signals that I'm ready for bed. At some point, I will realize I've just "come to." I will have just started to doze off – my eyelids have gotten so heavy they've started to close, and I may have even lost control over the arm that holds up my Kindle. I'm not the type to fall asleep accidentally, but as soon as one of these things happens, I close my Kindle and go to bed.

If by 11:30 p.m. my eyelids haven't started closing involuntarily, I bring out the big guns. This is the reading that's most likely to make me sleepy. I read some poetry by Robert Frost, or a play by Shakespeare. If I really want to go back in time, I'll pull out The Iliad. Sometimes I'll read some Emerson.

The Robert Frost poetry is folksy and he and Emerson talk a lot about nature, which is very relaxing. The rhythms of Frost and Shakespeare lull me to sleep. And The Iliad is just hard to read.

5. In bed by midnight

By following this progression of reading, I almost always get sleepy by midnight. My rule is "in bed by midnight," but really if I don't get sleepy by then, I find it does me no good to go to bed anyway. So I try to be in bed by midnight, but if I'm not sleepy, I'll just keep reading the big guns.

I have found that having a set bedtime helps me get to sleep more easily, and wake up more rested. There's not a big difference between whether I go to bed at 10:30 p.m. or midnight, but once it gets past midnight, there's suddenly a big difference. If I can't get to bed until 12:15 a.m. one night, I'll feel it the next day, and will take a couple nights more before I can get my sleep back on schedule.

By the way, I make sure to have already brushed my teeth by the time I'm going to bed. I do that at some point during the wind-down phase. I hate the feeling of being sleepy and still needing to brush my teeth, so I try to do it before. And this helps prevent any late-night snacking.

Going to bed: the sleep-time phase

Once I'm in bed, I'm still following the principle of not trying to force sleep. I take off my glasses, but leave on the orange goggles. I get a couple of other valuable sleep tools ready: I position my sleep mask on my forehead for quick deployment, and I put in earplugs.

Now, I lay on my back stare off into space, and let my thoughts flow. I do not close my eyes and try to go to sleep until I feel my eyelids get heavy again.

You might wonder: My eyelids were just heavy, now I've gone to bed and am waiting again for my eyelids to get heavy. Why didn't I just read in bed? I'm a big advocate of the philosophy that you should only do two things in bed, one of them should be sleeping, and the other should not be reading. If you do other activities such as reading or surfing the web in bed, you're just programming yourself to not be sleepy when in bed. So, I make the small compromise of having to get myself to bed once sleepy, then needing to again wait to get sleepy.

It usually only takes a minute or two before my eyelids are falling closed. At that point, I take off the orange goggles, lower my sleep mask, and fall asleep.

There's my nighttime routine

There's my nighttime routine. After that, I sleep until I wake up. I don't use an alarm. I try to stay in bed until at least 8 a.m., even if I do wake up earlier. (I find if I'm patient, I do fall asleep again.)

I hope this gives you some ideas for your own nighttime routine. Pay attention to what activities do or don't help you get to sleep, wind down gradually, and keep a regular bedtime. You may, like me, get to sleep easier and wake up better-rested. Image: Gauze by Paul Klee

New Book: Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods & Examples

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About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/nighttime-routine/

I once was a professional dater. I was good at getting dates. I was terrible at finding a partner – which I really wanted. I went on so many dates, I made $150,000 on an online-dating-advice blog (which I recently shut down).

I've now been in a relationship for several years. Here are the harsh truths I wish my single self had known.

1. Dating is noise. There's nothing about dating that has anything to do with being in a relationship. Dating provides false signals. If someone is exciting on a date, that's often a sign they'll be a nightmare in a relationship. If someone is boring on a date, they may be great in a relationship. I don't know how to fix that, other than be very careful how you judge whether or not a date went well.
2. You'll never be "ready" for a relationship. Self-help books will tell you, "You have to love yourself before you can love someone else," as if you'll never be ready until you've achieved the platonic ideal of a fully-formed human. At that point, you and another fully-formed human will fit together like puzzle pieces – forever. More likely you'll meet someone who's screwed up in the perfect way to complement your own screwed-up-ness. You'll change one another, and your best hope is the people you change into will also be compatible. You'll never be "ready." You'll always be changing.
3. Yes, you need someone. Once in a while you might decide you're fine being alone. A self-help book will tell you it's okay to be single and you'll be happy in life with hobbies, personal achievements, and pets. This is just fuel for the hedonic treadmill that keeps capitalism running. New products and services are always being invented with the purpose of replacing some form of love – whether that's a meal delivered to your door, or a ride home from the airport. Love is free, but priceless. Love is bad for GDP.
4. If dating is miserable, you're miserable. Many people's stated dating preferences are emotional judo to justify their own unhappiness. If you say to yourself, "I cannot be happy until I meet someone with [insert impossible set of criteria]," you have a great scapegoat for your unhappiness, besides its true source. Don't blame your misery on not finding what you want. Perfectionism is a refusal to start the journey before you've reached the destination.
5. Beware the ferris wheel. There's a self-selection bias in the dating pool. It's full of miserable people who blame their dating life on why they're miserable. If you want proof, look at dating profiles. I don't know how men feel about this question, but when I was dating I remember seeing many a woman's profile demanding men have something better to say than "How are you?" The problem is, there is literally no question more central to existence than "How are you?" Every action every person takes their entire day is in pursuit of affecting the answer to the question, "How are you?" A truthful answer to "How are you?" is guaranteed to lead to a conversation relevant to your well-being. And isn't that what dating is supposed to be about? So why would someone not want to answer the question, "How are you?" Because they're miserable. They don't want a real conversation – they want a source of entertainment. What does this have to do with a ferris wheel? Dating apps are especially full of these miserable people. Dating apps are like ferris wheels: Some people would like to see the lay of the land, but the seats are taken up by people addicted to the ups and downs.
6. People are not e-commerce items. Dating apps give the illusion of customization. There is no magic algorithm, there is not an unlimited supply from which to deliver your perfect match, and you would be shocked with whom you can be happy. The lines of code are designed to play into your narcissism. Like Narcissus, you'll think you're looking at someone else, when you're only seeing yourself. It's a person, not a made-to-order blazer.
7. You do not need to be "challenged." You hear it all the time: "I want someone who challenges me." This is usually code for them having an impressive job or education. I get it, you want to be successful and achieve things in life. You'll do a lot more of that from a foundation of caring and support than from partnering up with a drill sergeant. If you want to be challenged, look for someone so attentive and considerate they challenge your own self-centeredness.
8. So what if they like Nickelback? Oh, the energy you'd save if you realized similar taste in books, movies, and music is the last thing to look for in a partner.

There you have it – eight harsh truths about dating from me, a former professional dater. I have to admit, dating is mysterious and it's possible I know little more about what sequence of actions cause love to land in one's life than does a cargo cult. But since I'm delivering these truths from my privileged position in a happy long-term relationship, I think I have a clear head about it. Think of me as your designated driver: More sober than you single people, but still capable of crashing us into a light pole.

I'll close with this quote from Roxanne Gay, "I didn't really learn that I deserved to be loved well until I was loved well." I hope you find the love you deserve – it may not be what you expect.

Image Credit: Senecio by Paul Klee

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About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Does image-based media make us think less about our principles and ideals, and more about pursuing mere appearances? Daniel J. Boorstin thought so. In his book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Boorstin breaks down why "The Graphic Revolution," has built a world where our fantasies are more real than our reality. In this book summary, I'll explain why Boorstin says, "By sharpening our images we have blurred all our experience."

Pseudo-events

The thirtieth anniversary of a hotel is coming up. They reach out to leaders in the community to form a committee: A banker, a society matron, a lawyer, a preacher. The committee plans a banquet to celebrate the thirty years of service the hotel has given the community. They invite journalists to the banquet to take photos and report it in the newspapers.

This hotel's anniversary banquet is what Boorstin calls a "pseudo-event." Pseudo-events have these four qualities:

1. Pseudo-events are planned, not spontaneous.
2. Pseudo-events are created so they can be reported.
3. Pseudo-events are only ambiguously related to reality.
4. Pseudo-events are self-fulfilling. The event is evidence of the thing the event was planned to illustrate.

The thirtieth anniversary banquet didn't happen spontaneously: The hotel created a committee for it. The main reason to have the banquet was to generate press. If the hotel was so valuable, would they have to task members of the community with planning the banquet? It was hardly real. But since this contrived banquet happened, it served as evidence that the hotel was, in fact, valuable to the community.

The Graphic Revolution

Boorstin blames the proliferation of pseudo-events on what he calls "The Graphic Revolution," or our rapidly-growing ability create and disseminate imagery. The Graphic Revolution was cited, by the way – as a trigger to our departure from long-form text – in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I summarized on episode 252.

The foundation of The Graphic Revolution was built when the telegraph was first applied to news reporting in the 1830s and 40s. The first American newspaper was monthly, but when information could suddenly be transferred around the world in seconds, news became a product to be manufactured. The Associated Press was founded in 1848, making news a salable commodity. As printing technology became more sophisticated – such as the New York Tribune's press, which in the 1870s could print 18,000 papers per hour – the capital required to run a newspaper meant it made good business sense to find more and more news to report. The American Civil and Spanish-American Wars, while newsworthy events, made the news machine bigger and more hungry, leaving more space to fill with pseudo-events once the real events subsided.

As the term "Graphic Revolution" implies, graphics were a part of the proliferation of news. The first photograph that appeared in a newspaper was published in 1880. But also, audio is a part of the Graphic Revolution. The phonograph was invented in 1877, followed by radio broadcasts in 1900.

The copy is more real than the original

In 1922, De Witt and Lila Acheson Wallace used scissors and paste to put together the first issue of their magazine, in a one-room basement office in Greenwich Village. They carried the magazine copies to the post office and mailed them. It was an instant success.

The Wallaces were able to start Reader's Digest with almost no money, because they didn't need editors or writers. De Witt simply went to the New York Public Library, and wrote summaries of articles in the magazines there.

Reader's Digest became more popular than the magazines it was summarizing. In fact, it was nearly twice as popular as America's second-most popular magazine. Reader's Digest became so popular, that – according to the company's official historian – they had to help the magazines they were summarizing stay in business. To do this, they would write a short summary of an article. They would then write the article and place it in another magazine. At one point, more than half of summaries published in Reader's Digest were of articles they had placed in other magazines.

The copy is more real than the original

As Boorstin says, "The image, more interesting than its original, has itself become the original." The runaway success of Reader's Digest was a symptom that reading had become not about reading – it had instead become about creating the perception of being "well-informed." People wanted to browse the summaries to feel that they were aware of what information was out there, not to learn anything from the information itself.

As the Graphic Revolution and our ability to reproduce images has strengthened, copies have become more real to us than originals. We go to an art exhibit to see the original of the painting we've seen copies of – visitors to a Gauguin exhibit once complained that colors in the original paintings were less-brilliant than the reproductions they were used to. Movies became important in about 1910, often reproducing stories found in novels – by 1917, Publishers' Weekly was writing about "cinema novels." In the 1880s, you could only enjoy music if you or someone near you was playing an instrument. By the 1930s, Muzak was mashing together 24-hour mixes of sound to be played in businesses as "background music." At one point, streaming their "muzak" made them the largest user of telephone networks.

And yes, bloggers like myself gain traffic by attracting readers to summaries of books, such as The Image, by Daniel J. Boorstin.

Images beget images

The proliferation of imagery creates demand for that imagery, which drives demand for pseudo-events. This shapes our culture, driving us away from our principles. Pseudo-events are in higher demand than actual spontaneous events for several reasons:

1. Pseudo-events can be planned to be more dramatic.
2. Pseudo-events are easier to spread (you can have the news release ready to go before the pseudo-event happens – Boorstin points out it should be called a news "holdback").
3. Pseudo-events are easily repeated.
4. Pseudo-events cost money to produce, so there's more incentive to spread them (the publicist wants to show results, the client wants those results, the journalists need something to write about).
5. Pseudo-events make more sense (they are planned, after all).
6. Pseudo-events are more memetic. They have elements people want to spread.
7. Pseudo-events are social currency. Knowing about pseudo-events happening in the world becomes a test of being "informed" – something that's encouraged on the societal level.
8. Pseudo-events spawn other pseudo-events.

The effects of pseudo-events

As pseudo-events spread in our image-based media, they change what we value in our culture. Pseudo-events affect who we look up to in society, how we travel, and what art we value.

Pseudo-events and heroes

Pseudo-events shape whom we choose as heroes. We used to choose heroes based upon their accomplishments, and how those accomplishments represented our ideals. Now we choose our heroes based upon how they appear in media – are they in the news a lot, and do they project an image in which we see ourselves?

I shared in my Amusing Ourselves to Death summary that early U.S. Presidents wouldn't have been recognized on the street. We didn't know them by their images – we knew them by the words they wrote or said. Demagogues such as Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler show what we get when we seek someone who fits our image of a "Great Leader."

Today, our heroes are our celebrities. We don't make them famous because they are great – we think they are great because they are famous. Celebrities know that to be celebrities they need to get in the news and stay there. They create pseudo-events of themselves, including intensifying their images by publicizing relationships between one another. Meanwhile, dead people who deserve to be heroes fall into the background – they won't hire a publicist, and journalists get nothing out of writing about them.

Pseudo-events and travel

Pseudo-events have shaped the way we travel. The word "travel" used to mean the same as "travail." In other words, travel meant trouble, work, and torment. We love that we can easily get directly to our destination, and bypass any places that might be along the way. We calculate distance not in miles, but in hours. We don't move through space, we move through time. We expect the faraway to be familiar, and we expect the nearby to be exotic.

But travel used to be travailing. It meant spending time with strangers and strange cultures. It meant getting lost and being disoriented. But the capital required to build railroads and then highways meant we needed more people traveling. And to get more people to travel, we had to make travel less travailing.

Travel has become a tautology. At the time Boorstin wrote The Image, in 1962, that meant traveling to Mount Sinai to see where they filmed the movie The Ten Commandments – or traveling to Rome to see if the Trevi Fountain really looks like it did in the movie Three Coins in the Fountain. Today, we go to see the places we've seen on Instagram, then take a selfie to…post to Instagram.

Pseudo-events and movies

I already mentioned how novels were made into movies, which then spawned novels written to become movies. The mass-distribution of actors in movies spawned the star system. Movie-goers wanted to see stars with a distinctive look, such as Mary Pickford's golden curls or Charlie Chaplin's bowed legs and cane. By being put on film, actors no longer get direct feedback from their audiences. Actors aren't tested by how well they interpret the story – the story is tested by how well it displays the actor.

The "bestselling" book is a pseudo-event

The publishing industry became driven by what Boorstin calls best-sellerism. The Bookman was a literary journal that turned the idea of the best-seller into an institution, around the turn of the century. Printing books costs money, so publishers started planning "reprints" before they even released the originals.

A paperback publisher wouldn't plan their paperback until they had a contract to print the hardback. The hardback publishers wouldn't print a hardback until they had a contract to print the paperback. Either contract served as evidence the book was popular, which would drive sales. Booksellers only wanted to order new books they were sure would be bestsellers.

Yet the public became so obsessed with purchasing bestsellers, bookstores couldn't carry the really big bestsellers. Retail stores like Macy's would sell them below cost to attract customers, thus making bookstores unable to compete.

We want to be deceived

Pseudo-events are so ubiquitous in every part of our life, we've come to expect them. We actually want to be deceived. We expect the advertising we encounter to be hyperbolic and non-sensical. Maybe we want to see the originals of the photoshopped model not to change our unrealistic expectations, but rather to marvel at the work that goes into deceiving us?

Consider that Schlitz advertised their beer bottles were steam-sterilized, which boosted their sales, or that Lucky Strike advertised the tobacco in their cigarettes was toasted. Nevermind that all beer bottles were already steam sterilized, and all cigarettes toasted. The claim by Ivory soap that their soap is 99.4% pure is just a little modest, so as to be believable nonsense.

Are we pursuing images, or are we living life?

Boorstin may sound like he wants people to get off his lawn – and he does write with a shrill tone much of the time. But much like Marshall McLuhan would say two years later in Understanding Media, which I summarized on episode 248, Boorstin is mostly trying to make us aware of our own illusions. Boorstin's concern is mostly that, "We fill our lives not with experience, but with the images of experience." Neil Postman later built on Boorstin's ideas to warn in Amusing Ourselves to Death, that image-based media was devolving our discourse into nonsense.

A final quote from Boorstin:

Chewing gum is the television of the mouth. There is no danger so long as we do not think that by chewing gum we are getting nourishment. But the Graphic Revolution has offered us the means of making all experience a form of mental chewing gum. There's your The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America summary

I hope you enjoyed this summary of The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, and lest your reading experience consist only of summaries, check out the full book. I personally found it to be a great history of media and publishing. It's one of the major classics of media theory – a must-read for anyone who creates media.

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David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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The business of creative work is the business of riding randomness. If you want to write a bestselling book or launch a revolutionary company, you're going to need luck. You're navigating Extremistan, not Mediocristan, as I talked about in episode 253. How do you increase your chances of having a hit without risking everything? You do it with "The Barbell Strategy." You can use the Barbell Strategy in many areas of life and work.

The Barbell Strategy defined

The Barbell Strategy is introduced in Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, which I summarized on episode 244. The Barbell Strategy protects you from catastrophic losses that can take you out of the game. Meanwhile, it gives you chances to make big gains.

Why "barbell"?

Think of a barbell – a very lopsided barbell. On one side of the barbell is a big weight. On the other side of the barbell is a small weight. In the middle is the thin bar that connects the two.

The Barbell Strategy is an investment strategy

Taleb introduces The Barbell Strategy in an investing context. This is the strategy Taleb has used as a financial trader. As we'll see, you can apply it to other areas as well.

Taleb says:

If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and if you accept that most "risk measures" are flawed, because of the Black Swan, then your strategy is to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative. (emphasis mine)

In other words, you have to accept that the world is full of Black Swans. As a review, Black Swans are outlier events with extreme impact. We think we can explain Black Swans after the fact, but we really have no idea. They can be positive, or negative. Things like financial market crashes or mega-best-selling books. By being hyperconservative, you avoid the negative Black Swans. By being hyperagressive, you expose yourself to positive Black Swans.

85% hyperconservative investments, 15% hyperaggressive investments

Most people go with the "safe" investment. I'm not a financial advisor, and nothing I'm saying is investment advice, but for most people, that's the index fund: Keep putting money in an S&P 500 ETF. Expect to get a 7% return over your lifetime.

The strategy Taleb espouses is to avoid so-called "medium risk" investments. Instead, put 85% of your portfolio in hyperconservative investments – places where you won't lose money. Invest the other 15% of your portfolio in hyperaggressive investments – places where you might lose your money, but where there's also no limit to how much money you could make.

When you're invested in the index fund, your entire portfolio is exposed to Black Swans. The stock market dropped nearly 90% during the Great Depression, and swift drops of 30 or 40% are not uncommon. If 85% of your portfolio is spread across hyperconservative investments, you're unlikely to need to weather such storms.

With 15% of your portfolio in hyperaggressive investments, you can only lose 15% of your money. Meanwhile, there's no limit to how high those hyperaggressive investments can go. Imagine you put 1% of your net worth in Bitcoin five years ago. Multiply that by 100, and that's your current return. Even if you lost all the other 14% of your net worth in hyperaggressive investments, you would have nearly doubled your money, with little downside risk.

The Barbell Strategy in creative work

As you learned in episode 253 about Mediocristan vs. Extremistan, creative success is unpredictable. As award-winning screenwriter William Goldman said, "Nobody knows anything." Most creatives expect their success to go "up and to the right." When someone suggests they take some chances, to justify not taking those chances they abuse survivorship bias – as I talked about on episode 251.

So they stick to "the middle." They do the thing they feel will get them a little success. For authors, this is the strategy of cranking out a formulaic novel every month that's sure to sell some copies – but for which nobody is ever going to camp in line outside a bookstore to be the first to get. Maybe they make the graph go "up and to the right," but they'll never have a breakout success.

Find some "sure bets" – protect your downside

To play the Barbell Strategy in creative work, first, you need to find some sure bets. Protect your downside, so you can stay in the game. Remember on episode 251 when I told you about my poker-player friend who needs a certain "bankroll" to make $100 an hour? That's what you need. You need some room to explore long enough to let ergodicity take over.

That could be a literal bankroll. I personally invested a lot when I had a secure job, knowing that some day I'd use the bankroll as runway to start something on my own. Some creatives like to have a secure day job, and spend a little time creating before or after work. Anthony Trollope and Charles Bukowski worked at the post office. Octavia Butler's many jobs included potato chip inspector. Comedian Mark Normand was a janitor, which allowed him to think about his bits while he worked.

When I first started on my own, after I had gone through savings I had bookmarked for exploration, I spent ten hours a week freelancing – the rest of the time I spent building passive income streams. I told you on episode 214 how one passive income stream made me $150,000. I now live in Colombia, where my three-bedroom apartment costs less than $700 a month – which takes off a lot of financial pressure.

To play the Barbell Strategy, you need to protect your downside. There are no guarantees in life, including life itself – so this means something different for everyone. Figure out what it is for you.

Play some "wildcards"

Now, play some "wildcards" (Note that "sure bets" and "wildcards" are my own terms. Taleb hates gambling analogies because in gambling the actual odds are known – but you get the idea.)

Wildcards are things that – as Seth Godin would say – "might not work." In fact, they probably won't work – but they have unlimited upside potential. They're the "asymmetric opportunities" Tynan talked about on episode 145. "Asymmetric" refers to the risk profile: The potential downsides are small, but the potential upside are huge. The profile is not symmetric, it's asymmetric.

For example, it costs little to write a blog post. You have little to lose, but you may gain a lot. I've written many hundreds of blog posts in seventeen years. Two of those have led to positive Black Swans: One got me my first book deal, and catapulted my status online from nobody to somebody. Another got me an advisory position with a company that sold to Google, and became the subject of my latest book. Numerous others brought smaller benefits, but I can't think of any I regret.

Your wildcards have a chance to become positive Black Swans. You can't predict what will work, so make lots of small bets with unlimited upside.

Avoid "the middle"

Finally, avoid "the middle." There's a few reasons for this.

One, the middle is crowded. As restauranteur Nick Kokonas said on episode 213, most people aren't as afraid of failure as they are of success. They want to do okay, but they don't want to do great. At the same time, we have a loss-aversion bias. We hate losing an investment twice as much as we enjoy gaining from an investment. So, everyone goes for the middle. And there's more competition in the middle.

Two, the middle is where the negative Black Swans happen. You're only investing a little in the wildcards, so you can afford to lose it all. We tend to go all-in on the middle, so when an unexpected catastrophe happens, we lose a lot.

Three, the middle has little chance of bringing positive Black Swans. Your index fund is supposed to return 7% a year. It could lose 40% of its value in a day or two. Meanwhile, does it have any chance of gaining 1,000% just as fast? Very unlikely.

What's hot is usually "the middle"

Look at what is hot in your field, and you'll probably find "the middle." In writing, it's churning out formulaic fiction series for Kindle Unlimited. In blogging, it's making sure you're sharing every blog post to every social media channel. In SEO, it's manufacturing mediocre articles on high-volume keywords you have little chance of ranking for. In SaaS entrepreneurship, it's A/B testing to make minuscule gains in conversion rate. Some of these things might bring a little progress, which is why people do them, but they have no chance of big upside.

Avoiding the middle protects your downside, and gives you a chance for more upside. With less invested in the middle, you can invest more in the wildcards.

The Barbell Strategy in other areas

The Barbell Strategy is useful in investing, and it's useful in creative work. If you look around, you can also apply the Barbell Strategy to other areas.

The Barbell Strategy for exercise

"The middle" for exercise is steady-state, medium-intensity, training. Taleb himself is an advocate of doing power lifts, as heavy as you can. This certainly exposes you to upside, but I think it also exposes you to the downside of injury.

I think the true Barbell Strategy for exercise is Body by Science, which I summarized on episode 160. It's a very intense and short protocol, with little chance of injury. Other than that, go for long walks or do physical activities you enjoy.

The Barbell Strategy for technology use

You can apply the Barbell Strategy to your technology use. Some technology exposes you to potential serendipity. Surfing around on Reddit or social media is fun, and you never know when you'll happen across a breakthrough idea. But like a risky investment, it's risky to spend all your attention in these areas.

The "sure bets" in technology are to use specific tools for the job you're trying to get done. I talked about "grippy" and "slippy" tools on episode 230. If you're a writer, get an AlphaSmart, or a typewriter for the initial brainstorming phases of your work. High-powered technology such as smartphones and laptops can be sure bets, too. But just use them for short bursts for specific tasks.

What you want to avoid is the always-on use of the highest-power technology available. If you're always glued to your smartphone or laptop, you're connected to the internet, but you're disconnected from your own mind. You can't use technology without technology using some part of you. Marshall McLuhan, whose book, Understanding Media, I talked about on episode 248, would say that as technology extends, it also "amputates."

Another "wildcard" for technology is to not use technology at all. When I took Naval Ravikant's meditation challenge, which I talked about on episode 246, I found that during meditation I thought more about asymmetric ideas, which I later implemented when I was using technology.

The Barbell Strategy for time management

You can apply the Barbell Strategy to time management. "The middle" is trying to get the most done in the shortest time. It's being on clock time instead of event time, like I talked about on episode 235.

The "sure bets" for time management are to have clear priorities, build habits, document processes, and automate what you can. These tactics help you use time and energy more effectively, without stressing you out and disrupting your creativity.

The "wildcards" for time management are mostly the opposite of the sure bets. Meditate, daydream, go for walks, take naps, tinker, play, and discuss. As Taleb says, "Go to parties!" Instead of having clear priorities, spend time on "anti-priorities": Things that don't seem important, but that you want to do anyway.

What you want to avoid is the stuff most people try to do to "save time": full schedules, tight deadlines, last-minute crises, mindless outsourcing, and complexity creep. These tactics lead to negative time Black Swans: When one thing goes wrong, everything collapses, you lose time, and stress yourself out.

Live the barbell life

Let's close with a quote from Nassim Taleb:

I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decisions around that.

To apply the Barbell Strategy to any area of your life and work, avoid the middle, find sure bets, and play some wildcards. It's the best way to stay in the game long enough to get lucky.

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About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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I recently got a message from a reader, who said, "I don't know if it's meditation or you reaching a new level professionally, but I feel like your writing is on FIRE!" I do feel my writing has improved over the last year. They're right to think the meditation I talked about on episode 246 has helped. If I had to pick one thing that has improved my writing, it's starting to use the Zettelkasten method I talked about on episode 250. But I wouldn't be able to manage my Zettelkasten if it weren't for a recent breakthrough in how, physically, I write. It wouldn't be possible without my new low-EMF computing setup.

What are EMFs?

On episode 206, my Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs summary, I talked about evidence suggesting non-ionizing EMFs, or electromagnetic fields, may cause health problems. EMFs are emitted by electronic devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and computers – even the electricity these items run on emits EMFs. (I'm cautious to use the term "radiation", since – as the irrationally rational are always quick to point out – it's non-ionizing radiation. But it is radiation).

When I learned about these potential health effects, I started to look more closely at my day-to-day exposure. What I discovered through trial-and-error has changed the way I use electronics, and it has improved my well-being, and thus the clarity of my thoughts and the clarity of my writing.

Your Mileage May Vary

I'll preface this with a couple things. One is that I have long struggled with a mysterious illness. I won't go too far into details here, but my worst symptoms are chronic muscle tension, brain fog, and a wide breadth of food sensitivities. One doctor thinks it's chronic Lyme disease, and I'm one of the unlucky people highly sensitive to the contents of amalgam fillings, as I've been responding very well to replacing my fillings and following a heavy-metal chelation protocol.

Everything I just said is controversial in traditional medicine, and I remain open-minded about the true sources of my suffering. The fact remains I'm one person, living in this body for what remains of this life, and I can't wait for definitive answers when it comes to treatment and management – especially when all traditional avenues have repeatedly failed me.

But I mention these things to say, also, that Your Mileage May Vary. You may have zero sensitivities to EMFs, and you may deem the potential health risks worth the benefits. I am not here to convince you that I am sensitive to EMFs, nor that you are sensitive to EMFs. I'm only here to share what I wish I had known years ago.

Electrohypersensitivity (EHS): Is it real?

I'm 95% sure that I have electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS. This, once again, is controversial in the medical establishment. Some say this is totally a thing. Others say it's all in my head. Governments such as France and parts of Sweden recognize EHS as a disability. But The World Health Organization does not recognize EHS as a medical condition, despite the fact a former head of WHO claims to suffer from EHS. The WHO suggests – in addition to searching for other root causes such as noise or flickering lights – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Still, as much as 10% of a population have reported they suffer from EHS.

Well, I've done plenty of therapy, and I've done a ton of meditation. I've pushed the edges of self-control and self-knowledge in emotional, behavioral, and dietary interventions. I've systematized and tracked diets and symptoms, trying to reduce noise and find patterns. I'm an active student of the many biases and errors of observation that can cause one to fool oneself. Still, reducing my exposure to certain bands of EMFs has been one of the biggest breakthroughs in my health struggle.

I can't be 100% sure, but I'm sure enough that I've changed how I use technology, and I feel much better since I've done so.

Which types of EMF to reduce?

When I started trying to reduce my exposure to EMFs in my daily computing, I was thinking only of WiFi, Bluetooth and LTE. I started using a wired Ethernet connection at home. I reduced my use of Bluetooth devices. I felt better, but it wasn't a dramatic improvement.

Then, I noticed something strange: On my iPad, I could write for hours. On my computer, I quickly got fatigued. I had long used a program on my computer that reminded me to take a break every hour. Whenever that reminder came, I was already having trouble concentrating. I didn't have that program on my iPad, and I didn't need it. I got fatigued less often on my iPad.

No, a wired keyboard is not magically low-EMF

I got a wired external keyboard, and distanced myself from my computer, thinking maybe my fatigue had something to do with being close to the computer itself. Again, I saw an improvement, but whenever I returned after a break, I could feel muscles in my chest twitch and tighten, and my breath shorten. Even far away from my computer, on a wired keyboard, I needed to limit my computer use, and take long breaks.

I tried to do as much as I could on my iPad. But, strangely, I had to use a lightweight keyboard to use my iPad without symptoms. If I hooked up my heavy-duty keyboard to my iPad, I soon had the muscle tension and shortness of breath.

Bluetooth may be your best bet (than again, maybe not!)

It wasn't until I distanced myself from anything physically connected to the computer that I could use it for hours without fatigue and trouble concentrating. Surprisingly, this meant using a wireless trackpad, and a wireless keyboard. That's right: Bluetooth.

When I finally bought a meter, I realized that in the electric field band – AC power is 60Hz – my computer emitted way more EMFs than my iPad. My wired keyboard I had carefully selected also emitted high EMFs in this band, when connected to my computer. And, this same keyboard emitted high EMFs, even when connected to my iPad – which helped explain why I had symptoms when using it with my iPad.

Based on my personal experimentation, I'm not terribly sensitive to Bluetooth, nor WiFi, nor LTE. I think I am a little sensitive to all of them, but it's nothing like when I'm exposed 60Hz radiation. That's when my symptoms are at their worst.

I optimize my EMF exposure more to be able to actually work than to avoid health effects. Bluetooth and WiFi are possibly not good for you – then again, maybe they'll make no long-term difference to your health. I avoid unnecessary exposure when practical, but am mostly concerned with being able to work.

Know which band(s) you're sensitive to

If you suspect you are EHS, keep an open mind about which bands of EMF, specifically, you are sensitive to. I feel better when I reduce exposure to 60Hz. I've met other people who say Bluetooth and WiFi are their nemeses. For others, it's LTE. Others are sensitive to the new 5G technology (I can't believe I have to say this, but please don't lump EHS sufferers in with 5G conspiracy theorists.)

After I discovered I was sensitive to electricity, it made sense why I needed to take such frequent breaks when using my laptop, but not my iPad. It also made a lot of sense why I had gravitated toward writing on an AlphaSmart. At first, I thought my improved concentration on either of these devices had to do with the lack of ease with which I could access other information – which would effect my propensity to think about other information (the characteristics I called "slippy" and "grippy" on episode 230). I posit this affects my stress response, and thus my symptoms, but I don't think it explains the drastic differences in my symptoms across these devices.

My low-EMF computing setup

So, Your Mileage May Vary, but here is my low-EMF computing setup.

I keep my laptop a few feet away at all times

I keep my laptop a few feet away from me at all times. Yes, this means that I never use my laptop as a laptop, and I use an external display. You may wonder, Why don't I get a Mac Mini or a desktop computer? I'll explain why in a bit.

I keep my laptop far away, and use an overbed table to keep distance from the monitor, using a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad.

I experimented with keeping my laptop several feet away, in a closet, and considered constructing an EMF-blocking enclosure for it – called a Faraday cage. This would be nice, but since Bluetooth is my best option for peripherals, a few feet away provides the best mix of lower EMF exposure, and somewhat-reliable connectivity for my keyboard and trackpad.

The only times I've used my laptop as a portable computer over the past coronavirus year has been to take it into my recording studio. I still try to stay as far away from my computer as possible, but in these cases I'm using the screen on the laptop, and EMFs are emitted by my microphone. So, the time I can spend recording is limited, before my thinking gets cloudy. It takes time to recover if I get to that point.

I use battery power whenever possible

My laptop emits less electric field radiation when running off battery power, so I use battery power on my laptop whenever possible. I keep my laptop plugged into an AC power switch. In this way, it is plugged in, but not pulling power, because the switch is in the "off" position. For reasons I don't understand, my laptop emits a weaker EMF in this way – perhaps this grounds it. When I'm low on battery power, or when I'm leaving my office for a while, I switch the power on, to recharge the battery.

This AC power switch makes it easy to run my laptop on battery power

Anything that is connected to AC power emits an electric field. Even dormant outlets themselves emit one. Peripherals connected to the laptop also emit this radiation.

When I use battery power, that lowers the power of the electric field emitted by my laptop, and by any peripherals connected to it – such as my monitor, a webcam, or a microphone. There is still some, but it is lower. And that is why I don't have a desktop computer – it's better for me to run on battery power.

I use an external monitor

I use an external monitor, attached to my laptop. I don't use my laptop screen at all. I point the laptop screen away from me so it doesn't distract me. I wish I could operate my laptop with an external monitor and the laptop closed, but on my laptop this only works when it is connected to AC power. That of course would greatly increase the power of the electric fields the computer and all peripherals emitted.

I have not experimented with different monitors to find which ones emit less radiation – I just bought the cheapest and smallest monitor I could find. The monitor has to be connected to AC power to operate, but the radiation emitted is lower when the laptop is running off battery power, as radiation travels through the HDMI cable.

I suppose I could get a large tablet and use that as an external monitor, with battery power, perhaps even connected through AirPlay. I have not experimented with that yet. As I write this it seems like a clearly better idea.

I keep my distance with a rolling overbed table

I have a rolling overbed table, which I bought to write on while laid back in my recliner.

My favorite new writing setup: In a recliner, with one of those over-bed tables you might see in a hospital. Laid back, with my mind on writing and writing on my mind. pic.twitter.com/5tpvF67rr0

— ? David Kadavy (@kadavy) July 30, 2020

I now also use this overbed table to keep my distance from my monitor when at my computer. Since my monitor is connected to AC power, it emits a lot of 60Hz radiation, and I notice if I get too close.

Since I stay back a few feet, I've adjusted my display settings to display things larger. Again, being so far from my display probably wouldn't be necessary if I used a large tablet, on battery power, as my monitor. I don't feel sensitive to my iPad when I write on it from quite close. It emits very little radiation. Larger tablets probably emit more, though in comparison it's probably negligible.

I use a Bluetooth keyboard

The first keyboard I tried was a mechanical iKBC CD87 v2, based upon another article on low-EMF keyboards. This article had said that mechanical keyboards emit less radiation. I now realize it didn't specify what band of radiation. I still developed muscle tension, fatigue, and brain fog when using this keyboard far from my computer, and even when connected to my iPad.

I experimented with using, on my computer, the portable keyboard I use with my iPad, in Bluetooth mode. It was a big improvement. This was when I realized I was not nearly as sensitive to Bluetooth radiation as I am to AC power. So, I set out to find a nice Bluetooth keyboard.

I decided on the Mistel Barocco MD770, which is a mechanical split keyboard with both Bluetooth and wired capability (I went for the extra-clicky Cherry MX Blue switches). Like any Bluetooth keyboard I've used, its connection is flakey at times – especially since I use it several feet from my laptop. But for the first time in years, I can work on my computer for hours with little fatigue.

I use a Bluetooth trackpad

For mousing I use a Bluetooth Magic Trackpad 2. In the beginning of my low-EMF computing quest, I was using this wired to my laptop. Once I realized AC power was my biggest culprit, I switched to Bluetooth, which was an improvement. However, I do wire the trackpad to my iPad without a problem.

I use an EMF meter to optimize my setup

The EMF meter I use to optimize my low-EMF computing setup is the Meterk. It's very cheap – only about $35. It only measures electric fields and magnetic fields, so not Bluetooth, nor WiFi, nor radio frequencies. AC power is what I'm most sensitive to, so I'm satisfied with how this meter helps me manage exposure. Anyone sensitive to other bands will want to get a meter that measures the offending bands. Many people like the Trifield.

Then again, I'm not entirely sure that what's measured by a meter in a particular band directly translates into effects EMFs have on the cells in one's body. This could be part of why scientists are having trouble agreeing on whether EHS even exists. Really there's nothing better than experimenting until you come up with what works for you.

There's my low-EMF computing setup

There's my low-EMF computing setup. It's admittedly strange. I hope none of you are sensitive to your devices, because as you can see it's massively inconvenient – bordering on debilitating – when you work with computers most of the day. Still, the effort and extra expense has paid off big for me. If you're one of the many people with a mysterious chronic illness, it may be worth experimenting to see if EMFs are contributing to your symptoms. If you are sensitive to EMFs, I hope this gives you some ideas for how you can be productive and feel better when working with technology.

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About Your Host, David Kadavy

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/low-emf-computing/