24: Be Noteworthy

An attempt to find peace with who I am.

“These actions are not essentially difficult; it is we ourselves that are soft and flabby.” –Seneca

The Human Distillery

When you take a step back, the greatest of people in history are a distillery. The most talented and hard-working of people often produce only a handful (or even just one piece) of great work or events that are noteworthy. The rare and devoted few actually go through a great person’s minutiae–hundreds of thousands of small pieces that were completed daily to work towards that great work.

There is a deep conviction required for this. To spend hours per day working towards something bigger, something that might instead fail quietly. As well as the remarkable forethought to understand what needs to be worked on, and in what order.

Though, perhaps there isn’t such planning. Rather, these great works instead are conjured up organically by a repeating persistence and habitual work. Regardless, the conviction is still there.

For myself, personally, I find I’m only able to recognize a completed project in hindsight–I do not go about working on tasks with the plan being that there’s going to be a neat, finished-product once I’m done. This has only occurred a handful of times, anyways. Whether it’s my early photography, music, art, or this blog itself.

I don’t believe these projects are impressive or noteworthy by any means, but it’s nice to see that I’m able to accomplish something at all.

I’m getting older now–I just turned 24, hence this birthday post–and I cannot help but to feel a drive to do more, and to work harder, to be a noteworthy person. This is not motivated out of ego, as it sounds like, but rather a growing sense that I need to take my time and actions seriously.

I am surrounded by memento mori reminders that are plastered around my workspace. A reminder that is uncomfortable, perhaps anxiety-inducing to others. I am going to die one day, this fun and absurd ride is going to end. Each birthday, I get closer towards this, and perhaps that’s why the topics have become increasingly morbid.

But for the past few months, death has become less avoidable as a topic. COVID-19, the worst pandemic in a century, has taken over 340,000 lives as the time of this writing. The eerily prophetic post I wrote last year, TK “Dying Without Seeing You Again”, would be a far more appropriate piece of writing a month ago, when the exponential growth seemed at its peak, and it felt like none of us were ever going to see each other again. That was a meditation on the acceptance of impermanence, and having the feeling of loving-kindness towards others intensified by it.

But to go back to the topic at hand, I believe that if you are able to properly accept how temporary you are, it can really push you into doing. I have a deep yearning to create and leave something behind that’s far bigger than just myself.

I do not care so much for me, specifically, to be remembered–as discussions of people are interesting, but frankly shallow. As Eleanor Roosevelt said: Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Instead, I believe the cultivation of ideas, through profound aesthetic and storytelling, is what’s important to leave behind and have others remember and pass down.

Of course, even completely detaching yourself from this, there is still anxiety. Such work requires the investment of years of time and energy–what if you choose the wrong thing?

What if you tirelessly work all your life and it’s all for nothing, or you aren’t personally happy with the finished product? To picture the gifted but miserable artist that’s doomed to go their grave, with the masses popularizing but misunderstanding their work. Does that absence of inner-peace even matter, though–or is the effect on others paramount?

It is obvious that such anxiety is both nebulous and navel-gazing. It matters far more that you do something, even the incorrect thing, than to do nothing at all. So many lives wasted, and so many ideas dead-in-the-water by people who think about the lofty creations they want to achieve, but never act on them.

So instead I decide to act. But what then–where do you start? That’s a very good question, and I’ve essentially been trying to answer it for years for myself.

The Piecemeal Approach

Akrasia, is an obscure Greek word for a universal feeling, the lack of self-control or the state of acting against one’s better judgment. In other words, knowing what you ought to be doing, and instead doing something easier that’s perhaps fun but wasteful in your eyes.

Perhaps I identify with this feeling more intensely than with others — it is an ever-present problem for my wandering monkey-mind. After nearly a decade of constant procrastination, missed opportunities, and general laziness, I have found a partial solution.

More specifically, I have found a tool that allows me to do work, or rather the metawork, if you don’t mind getting nerdy. I’m of course talking about Beeminder, which is essentially the only thing I’ve been writing about for the past few months on my secondary blog dedicated to it.

But why Beeminder, specifically? Because it is effortless. Through the power of APIs, webhooks, and other various forms of technical automation, the things that I find important are tracked and recorded there automatically. I am given a visual representation of my progress with no extra work on my end. It demonstrates to me that I am actually getting somewhere, and I’m not stuck in a nebulous purgatory.

It allows me to take a step back and understand the minuscule, day-by-day advancement towards creating something noteworthy. I have definitely not figured it all out, but at least I’m taking steps in the right direction.

My Current Life: Things I’m Currently Keeping Track Of

Getting somewhere important and creating something big requires a bunch of small steps that nobody sees, and in an act of transparency and pragmatism, I’ve decided to share mine here.

(You can view the progress/graphs to all of these here.)

Writing:

• Writing: This keeps track of each word that I type on Draft, which eventually will become a finished work within one of the following:
  • Blog: My current blog, connected via IFTTT on Medium for ease of automation. I’m still trying to find my voice and what I’d like to consistently write about, but I am going to be starting to post bi-weekly.
  • Journalbar: That’s what you’re reading! A side-blog where I force myself to review and reflect what I want/ought to be doing vs. what I’m actually doing.
  • Poetry: I’m currently writing a new poetry chapbook, and publish one new piece per week.
• Twitter: Not exactly related to my other writing, but I’ve been using Twitter as a private, short journal for daily summaries and progress.

Productivity:

• Productive Time: A daily count of software and website monitoring. Recently had to increase the rate to 3 hrs/day, since I’ve been on the computer so much.
  • GitHub: Keeping track of the commits I push to my coding repositories, also had to increase the rate since I’ve been programming a lot.
  • Courses: Keeping track of the courses I’ve been taking, currently on a good tutorial about express and node.js!
• Distracting Time: Ideally, I want to be spending all of my recreational time on analogue, since I have to spend so much time in front of a screen for work.

Fitness:

• Daily Activity: I’m aiming for 10k steps a day, and I usually take an hour-long walk or bike ride daily–I find it really helps with my ability to work mentally.
• Sleeping: Sleep hygiene is a major issue for me. I need to convert this to a custom goal since I also want to cap the amount that I’m sleeping to further improve my consistency.
• Weight: Having to archive and do-over this system, since it can be automated with my FitBit now.

Lifestyle:

• Gratitude: Writing down one thing that I’m grateful for, each day.
• Duolingo: Currently in the silver league! Aiming for two lessons in French per day.
• Books: Currently taking out audiobooks on Libby which are not only free, but also give me only two weeks to make sure I get through the entire book.

About B. Kenneth Brown