It’s Sunday afternoon, and since I’m not outdoors or needing to prepare for the week, I figured I’d attempt my first back-to-back blogs in forever.
I was successful this past week in taking a more relaxed pace with my trading work, and still got a good amount of things accomplished. I’m hoping to continue that this week. I get a little jealous when I read about people who happily shut everything else outside of their life and just do one pursuit like trading/poker/writing/physics/etc. day and night for their lives, but I need balance for better and worse.
My sister got me the Kindle version of “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work” by Mason Currey for Christmas. I bought an audio version of the book about a decade ago, but I lost the ability to download it, and I remembered enjoying it. I started reading it this past week, and I’m still a fan. It’s basically mini-biographies of famous writers/musicians/philosophers/artists as it pertains to how they did their work. The segments are just a few pages long, but it’s enough to get some inspiration and a taste of their lives.
It’s interesting to see how many people throughout history used stimulants and downers to help them fight the mental battles of procrastination, fear, and doubt. Just like it’s fun to fantasize about being a gangster when watching a movie, but not wanting to actually have that life, I can see the appeal to people who got hyped up on amphetamines to write, and then boozed heavily at night with friends to numb their minds. I wish there weren’t such physical and psychological consequences to that lifestyle. In the book they denote the years the person was alive, and I noticed that many of the people who regularly used drugs harder than coffee/tea lived around 50 years or less.
The majority of people in the book, whether they were living like degenerates or monks, did have some routines they followed to produce though. There are always exceptions, but the prolific people especially seemed to have a simple schedule that they could repeat daily to guarantee output over time. I guess it’s not different than showing up to an office from 9-5 and even though you’ll have better days than others, you’ll be getting things done over time. Creative endeavors seem to require that type of rigidity, even though we naively wish we’d be happy and able to do them during our daily downtime as if they require no discipline.
My girlfriend and I started watching “Succession” in the evening this past week, probably making us the last people to start watching that show (it took us years after “Game of Thrones” and “Breaking Bad” were finished too). We watched a few episodes several years ago, and I thought the characters were too cringy for me to enjoy, but we’re both really liking it now. It’s a great blend of comedy, family drama, and cutthroat business. I also like that there’s the fantasy element of having unlimited money in New York, but also the harsh (dramatized) reality of what you need to do to keep that lifestyle going. Shows without the fun parts of being rich (“Ozark”) or with only the glamorized version of things (“Entourage”) can still work for me, but it’s like being fed only vegan food vs cake nightly; it loses the appeal with time.
With that I’ll leave you with a pic from my mornings when my cat Hunter decides I don’t need any more screen-time, leaves my lap for the table, and closes my laptop laying on it until I give him my full attention again.
Andrew Manser 