S45E3 Uncertainty and grind

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https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-dazh4-15ab698
Pounding my local streets thinking about navigating a decade of ‘getting good’ at our craft. In this episode, I mention this chat between Dr. Cal Newport and Rich Roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofkz5RXSdEc&t=3089s

Episode transcript

Hello and welcome to Walk the Pod, your daily walking show, where I take my podcast for a walk because I don’t have a dog.

You’re very welcome along. This is Series 45, Episode 3.

Walking around my local streets, pounding a furrow into the pavement by circumnavigating a couple of roads every week, round and round and round, until there’s a big dent where my feet have trodden.

And talking about uncertainty, this series, which I’m enjoying enormously, I couldn’t really be in a more relevant place in my own life to talk about uncertainty. I feel like a lot is up in the air at the moment.

But this series is helping me to navigate my own uncertain situation at work, whilst simultaneously talking to you about uncertainty and what it means.

And if there’s a sensible or at least a sort of physiological, no, psychologically, possibly even philosophically sensible way to think about it.

You’re very welcome, along. This is series 45. This is episode 3.

We’re going to be talking about uncertainty and grind today because I just watched an excellent YouTube video by Dr. Cal Newport about, well, I mean, it’s basically about honing a craft.

And I think that there’s an enormous amount to be said with regard to uncertainty on the topic of honing a craft. and I also find the idea of honing a craft fascinating and hugely compelling. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Welcome to Walk the Pod.

[02:15]

Do you like my new music? Music by Lawrence Owen. I’m learning how to manually put it on the show whilst walking around my local streets, which is not easy.

I realise also that the vagaries of my new system mean that my actual voice tracks have been clipping recently. Now, as a former BBC sound engineer that brings me enormous irritation—I’m absolutely furious about it—but I am working on it dear friends what you will find is that as we go on I will work out how to make the whole thing so that it is up to scratch may not be up to scratch by the end of this series but by the end of next series will have nailed it.

I’ve got some new music by Laurence Owen and I absolutely love it. Very excited to sort of play around with it and see how to use it. So just bear with dear friends while I sort things out.

I’ve also got various support tickets in with Podbean to ask them to have a look into why some of the things on their app don’t work properly. And we will wrangle it into where I need it to be eventually, somehow, you know, via support tickets and trying new platforms and fiddling around and iterative tweaking and so on.

And in a sense, that’s what I want to talk about today, which is uncertainty and honing a craft and getting better at what we’re trying to do slowly and gradually and putting the work out there anyway, way even though it’s not how we want it to be hey pussycat hey there’s a cat friends it’s a bit like the cat we’ve got at home except i think it’s a girl it’s black and white so it’s a bit like our hooper cat who’s black and white hey sweetie and it’s very skittish it’s not coming to play it’s It’s a bit like, oh, my God, it’s a person. What do they want? Hey. Hey. Oh, it’s come to say hello. Yay. Hey. Oh, it’s super cute. Super cute. Okay, I’m not going to get a photo of it because what I can’t cope with at the moment is trying to record whilst taking photographs. That is completely outside the scope of what I can do at the moment.

But what was I talking about? I was talking about uncertainty and when we’re trying to get better at a creative endeavour, when we’re trying to build our skills in a particular artistic area, when we’re trying to learn how to be the best in the world at something, to be hugely ambitious, but why not about it?

What we need to do is create a huge volume of work. Ira Glass told us that. Keep putting it out there. Keep publishing it. Do not succumb to the imposter syndrome or the shame of this isn’t good enough and I’m not happy with it to the point where I’m not going to publish the thing.

Do not succumb to that, dear friends. We have got to put it out there anyway, and just think to ourselves, well, this is actually an excellent way of finding out not who our friends are, because when you start making creative work and putting it into the world, you discover that some people are ashamed of your work for you and go, well, this isn’t very good. I’m not sure I can support this and drift off and never mention it to you again, because it’s not good enough in their view.

And then there are other people, the stone cold legends, who go, yeah, I see what you’re trying to do there. And whilst that might seem like faint praise, ease. What they’re actually saying is, you got this. You’re going to keep working on it until it’s brilliant. And I believe that you are going to make it brilliant. And those people are the ones to be held on to with both hands and your legs. Don’t let them get away.

I’m lucky enough to have several of those types of brilliant people in my life and I’m not letting them out of my sight accordingly.

So anyway, what does all of this have to do with, I feel like I’m not quite on topic at the moment, what does all this have to do with uncertainty and grind?

Well, the thing about uncertainty is that in a sense what social media offers is instant gratification. So if I put out a tweet or a TikTok video or a Instagram post, within 20 minutes of releasing that into the world, I know whether it was any good or not. People respond to it and like it or don’t like it.

And that instant gratification means that it’s harder in 2024 to make creative work which is based on honing a skill set that takes a decade to perfect than it is to do something quick and easy on Canva, which everybody can agree looks professional and excellent.

Now, Now, there’s nothing wrong with creating things that look professional and excellent on Canva. And even that takes skill. Of course it does.

But the point I’m making is, if I’m trying to become a writer, for example, I should put my work out there, but I can’t expect to get good at it quickly. It takes time. It takes studying the form. It takes real concentration. It takes a lot of self-editing. It takes a lot of self-confidence. It takes a lot of self-trust.

And the same goes for podcasting or anything else. and so what we have to do I think is decide that we’re going to concentrate on becoming, better and better and better at something even when there’s very little to show for it and that has not got to do with grind in that I don’t think it’s the same as saying you’ve got to, stick your head down and get on with something you hate for years because because that’s the only way to get good

I’m not saying go into a forest and kill loads of boar I’m just saying. It’s got to do with constancy as we spoke about in series 44 it’s got to do with deciding this is the thing i want to do this is the creative pursuit i’m interested in and i’m going to spend 10 solid years for example i mean it might be double that doing it creating the enormous volume of work putting it out into the world and the putting it out into the world bit is important because, as we put it out into the world it gives us feedback on how we’re doing and and the fact that we’re learning it it confirms that we’re learning and uh uh some interesting advice i received recently was to do something a hundred times to number all of the times so say you’re trying to draw a cat for example draw a cat a hundred times and number the drawings if nothing else simply to look through the stack at your first attempts and see how far you’ve come in just 100 times have tried to do something.

Now that I don’t think is, it’s not saying to grind and to just, you know, miserably copy something. It’s not like doing lines when we’re in Victorian primary school, as we all are.

It’s got to do with simply observing the power of practice and repetition. And practice and repetition means that a huge amount of what we’re doing becomes comes absolutely within our wheelhouse of expertise. We can do that bit with our eyes closed. And that then gives us bandwidth, to use a rather silly phrase used by the Silicon Valley tech pros, bandwidth to think about how to do the bit that we can’t do so well, how to do the difficult bit.

And this is why I’m grateful to Spotify because they did put an app out there which made it possible for me to make two solid years of this podcast easily without having to do the tech myself so that now I know how to make the podcast now what I’m trying to learn is how to do the tech myself now that Spotify are changing everything and stopping it from being easy easy to make on a mobile phone, which is what I’ve decided to do.

So I now have the slightly easier task, not of trying to work out how to podcast as well as how to make a podcast, but simply how to make a podcast, having already learned how to deliver one, if that makes sense.

So the more we can put into muscle memory, the more we can make absolutely straightforward, the more space we’ve got to think about how to push it to the next level, how to take it to the the next level, or how to do the surrounding peripheral work that needs doing to get the thing out there into the world, for example.

[10.57]

What can I see directly in front of me? Well, I’m going to have to keep it quite brief because I seem to have ramble chatted extensively about uncertainty today.

Have I even covered what the point is of uncertainty? I think what I haven’t spelled out, I’ve just realized, in all of that ramble chat was the fact that we have to exist within uncertainty for the time where we’re putting all the work in to become excellent at the thing we want to learn how to do and navigating uncertainty is absolutely essential for creatives because they’ve got to go from here a place where they can see how it’s going and what they’ve got and what skills they’ve got to a point that is unknown in the distance which they have no evidence they’re going to reach which they are the artists they wish to be so navigating uncertainty Uncertainty is an absolute crucial part of that, as well as actually improving the skill itself. Thank you. Right. Yes. Thanks for asking.

Even less time to tell you what I can see directly in front of me now. But actually, that’s not a bad thing because it is another grey and miz UK day in March, where really the weather should have perked up a bit by now, but it hasn’t.

The clocks are still to go forward. And thank you to Sam for pointing out that I spoke yesterday about the clocks going, springing back. They don’t spring back, they fall back in the autumn they spring forward so the clocks are going forward quite soon in the uk because we still do that time time shifting nonsense in the in the spring and the autumn it feels like nonsense to office workers if you’re a farmer it probably makes a hell of a lot more sense or if you’re an allotment owner probably makes a hell of a lot more sense too which i now I am, excitingly.

Anyway, so look, I’m not going to focus on what I can see directly in front of me today because I’ve spent so long talking about uncertainty, but I’m walking under some white cherry blossom, which is absolutely beautiful, even though the sun isn’t highlighting it or showing it off to any great extent.

Thank you so much for walking with me, dear friends. It is such a tonic to make this podcast for you. I cannot tell you how helpful it is, how good it is for my mental health. No doubt my physical health as well.

So thank you for coming with me wherever you are in the world. Thank you for bearing with as I sort out the technical aspects of what I’m making and expect it to improve as we go along significantly.

It may take a while, but we will get there. take care of your beautiful mind yourselves and each other and i wish you glimmers of joy in this imperfect day i’ll be back with episode four tomorrow.

S45E2 Uncertainty is everywhere

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Walking around the park behind the hospital and considering the thoughts of Warren Buffet who said that uncertainty is everywhere.

“You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.”— Warren Buffett

Episode transcript

Hello and welcome to Walk the Pod!

Your daily walking show where I take my podcast for a walk because I don’t have a dog. You’re very welcome along. This is episode two, series 45, where I’m walking around the park behind the hospital, welcoming you into the park with me to walk in nature for just 10 minutes, tempting you away from your desk.

And we’re talking about uncertainty this series, a very fascinating topic and I have something to bring you today which is that there is no such thing as an uncertain time, an idea I got from Warren Buffett, an American trillionaire probably by now or maybe maybe he’s no longer with us, should probably check.

Warren Buffett had some things to say on uncertainty and whether we’re ever in a time that we can call certain. And that’s an interesting thing to consider. I’ve also discovered that we’ve covered uncertainty once before. We actually talked about it in series 11 and it was at a similar time of year. So that’s quite interesting. It seems that March is a time where I like to consider uncertainty on an annual basis. So you’re very welcome along to Walk the Pod.

[A voicenote plays]

Hi Rach and Poddies,

I’m taking advantage of the new 90-second voice note feature because I’m in Regent’s Park in North London. It’s a big green lung, and for someone with asthma like me, any extra lung is music to my ears. Sandwiched between the West End and Primrose Hill, it’s the part of London that always reminds me of the cartoon version of 101 Dalmatians. I love it and will probably never live there because it’s too expensive.

The park is also famous for the zoo, the mosque, and the open-air theatre, none of which I can see right now. Just a few seconds ago, I whizzed past a child on a bright purple bike. She looked so happy! There are also lots of runners, none of whom look happy, and several hosts of golden daffodils, well, yellow actually, sorry Wordsworth.

[voicenote ends]

I don’t know why I reference Silicon Valley people and billionaires so much. Maybe there’s a tiny capitalist part of me amongst all the socialist tendencies. But Warren Buffett, the famous investor, spoke about uncertainty during the pandemic. He said there is no time that is not uncertain. The only difficulty we have is that we throw forward a plan of what we think the future will look like, and then when it’s disrupted by events, we get upset. The actual future looks exactly how it’s going to look. The only difficulty is that we thought otherwise.

So, when we consider uncertainty, we should think about whether there is ever any certainty or whether we just think there is.

Right now, I’m walking around the park in the rain. The rain is falling from the sky. There’s a white van ahead of me and puddles on the ground. In the distance, there’s a digger and the playground up ahead. It’s all rather wet, grey, and miserable, and there’s nobody about. The mud is getting very wet, the same mud I talked about yesterday.

Where are we in the pagan wheel of the year? Well, we are somewhere heading towards the spring equinox. The clocks are going to spring back (I should have said forward – Ed) quite soon. I was reading through a newsletter post I put out where I mentioned I really needed the clocks to spring back because I was getting depressed with all the wet and rain. It seems to be quite consistent, this feeling of being under the weather at this point in the year. Maybe that’s what “under the weather” actually means. Who knows?

Anyway, it’s a busy day at work, so I’m taking a break to walk around the hospital and take a breath of fresh air before I dive back in. It’s nice to be amongst nature, even if that nature is polluted. It’s still nice to be away from the emails and stress of work. The grass is very green, and there are little daisies poking through. All the foliage is starting to emerge, which is really nice.

Thank you so much to John for his walking report, a lovely walking report from central London, one of the green lungs of the capital in the UK. If you’d like to send a walking report, you can do so by going to walkthepod.com and leaving a voice note. I encourage you to share what uncertainty makes you think about. It doesn’t have to be deep thoughts; it could be anything.

As you can see, I’m not quoting quotes. I am simply recalling something I vaguely remember at the thought of Warren Buffett. You’re very welcome to join in. The more perspectives on uncertainty we get, the better.

Thank you so much for walking with me. It’s been a delight to stretch my legs with you this lunchtime in the rain. I hope you can hear some of the rain. Rain is a nice sound if you’re inside.

Take care of yourselves and each other. I hope you find a glimmer of joy in this imperfect day. Here’s hoping for sunshine soon. I’ll be back tomorrow.

S45E1 Uncertainty and leadership

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https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-97wmu-15a7ba2
Walking around the park behind the hospital, thinking about uncertainty and leadership this lunchtime. Welcome to Series 45.

That Scott Belsky quote from Tim Ferriss’s interview:

“I use the analogy of driving your team in a car with the windows blacked out, so no one knows where they are and how far they are in the journey. And that is sort of what a startup experience is like, by the way. You don’t know where those milestones actually are. You don’t necessarily even know where you’re going and how far along you are. The only thing that makes that more comforting or tolerable is a great narrative during the journey. Okay, we just crossed the state line. There’s this on the right. There’s this on the left. Even if it’s not necessarily answering the question of how far are we and where exactly are we going, there’s something about being talked through it. And I think that’s one of the jobs of someone at the helm is to build that narrative.”

Episode outline

Introduction

  • Welcome to Walk the Pod, your daily walking podcast.
  • Series 45 focuses on uncertainty.
  • Acknowledging the difficulty of defining uncertainty.

My experience with uncertainty

  • I feel uncertain about upcoming changes at work.
  • I feel pressure to provide reassurance to others despite personal uncertainty.
  • Shares anecdote about Tim Ferriss discussing leadership and uncertainty.

What uncertainty means

  • The pandemic was a period of collective uncertainty.
  • Discussion of various situations that can create feelings of uncertainty (having a child, starting a new relationship, etc.).
  • Personal strategies for coping with uncertainty (shortening time frames, focusing on the present moment).

Call to action

  • Please share your experiences with uncertainty via voice note.
  • Brief mention of upcoming content (voice note walking report from John Machin).

Walk in the park

  • Description of the muddy park setting.
  • Mentions small plants that might be rhubarb (but warns listeners not to eat them).
  • Talks about using the Merlin app to identify birdsong.
  • Comments on the gloomy British weather and expresses hope for spring.

Outro

  • Thank you for joining me on my walk around the park this lunchtime.
  • Do take a walk during your lunch break.
  • Additional tips for managing uncertainty (sleeping on things, letting go of unimportant details).
  • Thanks listeners again and reminds them to submit voicemails and join the Walk the Pod Lunchtime Walk Club.
  • Thank you for listening, take care of your beautiful mind, and try to enjoy this imperfect day.

Episode transcript

Hello and welcome to Walk the Pod, your daily walking show where I take my podcast for a walk because I don’t have a dog.

You’re very welcome along. This is series 45 of the daily walking podcast that invites you away from your desk, away from your keyboard and your screen at lunchtime to walk in nature and pay attention to what’s directly in front of you for just 10 minutes.

This series we’re going to be talking about uncertainty. I feel like we’ve touched on this this before. I’m not sure we’ve ever done a whole series on it before, although you may remember better than I do.

And I think it’s worth revisiting in any case, because uncertainty is all around us all the time. It’s a very, very difficult subject to even begin to know where to talk about.

Begin to know where to talk about, begin to know how to talk about, because it can apply to so many different aspects of life.

As usual, I’ll be asking for your input as well.

But I’m in the the park behind the hospital and the main point is to stretch my legs get away from my desk and stress and anxiety of the work morning and welcome you along to walk the pod.

So uncertainty let’s start with where I am at the moment in terms of uncertainty. I’m in a quite an uncertain place at work at the moment there’s some big changes happening in the next six months I don’t quite know where I’m going to land.

It all feels very uncertain.

And whilst things feel very uncertain to me, quite a lot of other people are looking to me for some kind of reassurance about what’s happening.

And I remember listening to a podcast between Tim Ferriss, who wrote The Four Day Work Week and runs an excellent podcast called The Tim Ferriss Show, talking to a Silicon Valley Mali, CEO of some kind, who said that leadership is like driving a car with all the windows blacked out.

You’re driving all your friends in a car with all the windows blacked out and they’re asking you, where are we going and when are we going to get there and are we nearly there yet?

And you can see probably the same amount that they can see, possibly less, but you’ve got to nevertheless sort of navigate, not navigate, narrate your way through the landscape you find find yourself in for their benefit, even whilst you feel exactly as uncertain as they do.

And I thought that was a very powerful demonstration of what leadership looks like. It’s got to do with having to be confident of as much as you can be confident about whilst also dealing with your own insecurity and feeling of uncertainty about what’s happening in the future.

So that’s what uncertainty means to me at the moment. The moment being March 2024.

We’ve all been through a huge chunk of uncertainty in recent years with the pandemic. Nobody quite knew what that was going to be like. or how that was going to end.

So we all got through that. So I think we can all say that we’ve been through a period of uncertainty recently.

And I’m sure that some of you have other examples. Maybe there are all kinds of things which constitute uncertainty as well, like having a child, entering into a new relationship, buying a cat, any of these things.

You’re entering into, you’re signing up for a big chunk of uncertainty, really, because you don’t know what’s going to happen, signing up for a new job, changing jobs, any of those things, starting to take care of somebody who needs a lot of help for whatever reason in your life, becoming a carer as well as becoming a parent, starting to take seriously feelings about your own identity.

Any of these things can constitute uncertainty, even entering into a new friendship. There’s no end of things that can constitute a big chunk of uncertainty in our lives and how to navigate that is a really really big question

My own way is to shorten my time frames and I’ve spoken about this on walk the pod before when I know I’m entering into a period of uncertainty I tend to just take it one day at a time and if that’s too much I sometimes take it one hour at a time and if that’s too much sometimes I take it one minute at a time and that’s my way of getting through difficult periods.

And if things are getting really bad, I might be reading Marcus Aurelius’ meditations for the third, fourth, fifth or sixth time, which reminds me I need to dig that out of a box somewhere.

So those are my initial thoughts on the topic, but I would much prefer to hear yours.

Please go to walkthepod.com and press the button marked leave a message for Walk the Pod if you possibly can.

I have a voice note walking report to bring you tomorrow from the wonderful John Machin, one-eyed bloke in Muswell Hill.

And I have quite a lot of people to sort of tap up and say, hey, what does uncertainty mean to you?

So if you’re in the Walk the Pod Lunchtime Walk Club, expect that tapping up very soon because I really want to know what uncertainty means to you.

What can I see directly in front of me? Well, I’m in the park behind the hospital, as I said, and the park here is looking really very muddy.

The work people who were here in the previous series, Series 44, have sort of dug up all of the ground around here.

It’s got small plants bursting through that I can see over yonder. I don’t know what they are. They sort of look like they might be from the rhubarb family.

Went to Annick with Sam in last, was it last summer? Visited the poison garden and in the poison garden they tell you that in some of the wars I think the first world war and maybe even the second world war as well in Britain the government confidently telling people that you can eat rhubarb leaves instead of cabbage or anything any other veggies you can’t get hold of but it’s a terrible idea friends you mustn’t eat rhubarb leaves because they’re very toxic and they’re particularly toxic if you eat them over time they sort of cumulatively build up in your system and they can kill you even so just be very be warned that rhubarb leaves are not for eating thank you your public service announcement ends here so I can see some plants that remind me but are not rhubarb I can see a little tree that is bravely putting leaves out another one behind it that’s got some slightly more major foliage going on and some beautiful white flowers popping.

I’ve been loving the Merlin app recently listening to birdsong around here and I can hear what sounds like a robin in a nearby tree and it’s absolutely miz miz miz miz this week in the UK. It’s grey, it’s rainy, it’s cloudy, it’s cold, everybody’s annoyed because we were hoping for a bit of spring-like weather which has not materialized so everybody’s stamping around furiously at the moment as soon as the sun comes out and makes a proper attempt to keep us all warm we’ll be in better spirits.

And I think also the clocks are going to spring back quite soon, which means we’ll get another hour of daylight in the afternoon, which will be lovely, and that’s going to cheer everyone up as well.

So we’re just hanging on in there in the UK for the start of spring proper.

Thank you for walking with me, dear friends. It’s been an absolute delight to stretch my legs with you this lunchtime in the park behind the hospital, just to get away from my desk and to encourage you to do the same.

I hope you’ve got away from your desk this lunchtime. Maybe you don’t get away from your desk at lunchtime. Maybe you prefer to work more or less through your lunch break and get out of the office earlier but that’s fair enough if that’s your preferred way who am I to argue but if you can take a 10 minute stroll in the middle of everything it does kind of allow things just to settle down a little bit another thing I find quite helpful is just the process of sort of sleeping on things and letting myself wake up with the most important information in my brain in the morning don’t know whether you get that but if I have slept properly sometimes I will wake up and think do you think the most important thing that happened yesterday was this thing and often it’s not one that I’ve even noticed that’s interesting but it does require going to bed at a decent time.

So it’s not easy to do necessarily it’s so lovely to start the new series thank you so much for listening thank you so much for walking with me send me your voice notes on what uncertainty means to you walkthepod.com press the button marked leave a message for Walk the Pod and it will take you to speak pipe which will offer you the opportunity to leave me 90 seconds of your beautiful voice and if you’re delighted to hear Walk the Pod back on the air and you’re not already in the Walk the Pod lunchtime walk club consider joining the most friendliest collection of walkers from all around the world you can join the Walk the Pod lunchtime walk club at walkthepod.com too.

Take care of your beautiful mind. Try to find a glimmer of joy in this rather chilly day and I’ll be back tomorrow.