📙 #061 - Dentist, anti-advice, a small chance of success & riso honeypot.
🦷🔧🚮💊💊🚂🗞️📓📝🌈🪩
Today a man removed a tooth from my skull, snapping off and then extracting a root in the process. Admittedly that man was a dentist and I was paying them to do it, but at the same time I thought this appointment was deciding if that was going to happen rather then it actually happening.
So if you’ve ever asked the question “Hey, I wonder what Dan’s newsletter would be like if he was even more irritated than usual and in pain?”, well I guess we’re about to find out.
Incoming; bullshit rules, bad advice and a riso printer as a substitute for social and cultural interaction.
# THE SLIGHTLY PARADOXICAL CATT’S LAW
Catt’s Law states this…
Don’t listen to advice from those older than you,
do listen and pay attention to those younger than you.
…I’m 53, so keep that in mind for the rule above and advice down below, but I’ve always found it to be a good rule of thumb, especially when given a choice between two bits of information/feedback/advice/criticism.
And the nice thing about getting old is there’s more and more people to pay attention to.
Of course if I’m older than you, you should ignore this advice, but if I’m younger then I am very smart, thank you!
# OTHER PEOPLE’S NEWSLETTERS
In last week’s newsletter, I said I’d be travelling back from London, (but things have changed a little bit, which means that when this newsletter is scheduled to go out I’ll most likely still be in London, having a Team-Meal and working out which is the softest most chewable item on the menu) and so this will be about other people’s stuff.
The first is Owen’s newsletter (linked below), which has so many small quotes I want to pull, that if I did all of them I’d have the whole newsletter 😅
‘But for the last month I was dealing with burn out for a long while without realizing it. Every day felt like a slow march with no end in sight with an ever-present anxiety pushing me to produce “something of value” every day’
And an eight point bullet list I’m going to snag these two out of…
Focus on YouTube and SubStack to build audiences
Forget social media, it’s a waste of time (Insta, X, BlueSky, etc.)
You can read the rest and more here…
…and subscribe to his YouTube channel at the same time…
Meanwhile Anna touches similar ground in her newsletter, and a longer quote…
‘I met someone new the other day, and as often happens, they asked to see some of my work. Normally, I'd show them my Instagram page on my phone, but since I'm taking a break from social media, I couldn't. The person I was talking to didn't have Instagram either, leaving me with no easy way to show my work. They asked, "Don't you have a website?". I did, but at that moment, it was only bullet points of text, and the homepage didn't give a good visual overview of what I do.
A few days later, without social media to distract me, I spent half a day updating my website, adding 20 images that I feel give a strong visual overview of my work.’
More here…
Now clearly I’m drawn to what Owen and Anna are saying, having myself “temporarily” ditched X, BlueSky, Instagram and so on, while keeping a newsletter, YouTube channel and a very slowly updated website (more on that in the next newsletter).
YouTube definitely isn’t for everyone, it’s incredibly fun but hard work, so I think the trifecta is; newsletter, website + one social media channel.
Where the newsletter is a commitment, the social media is pretty much a job, and the website is, as Anne smartly says, like tending a garden.
# SURVIVORSHIP BIAS
So here’s the thing.
I’ve watched (and studied, as previously part of my job) lots of large YouTube channels (and newsletters), which follow a pattern.
Scrappy, hustle and grind
Grow and find a niche
Exhaust that niche, start including other things
Burn out, and either…
Vanish, or…
Switch to talking about the value of slowing down, and how everyone should not hustle and grind, but take things calmly and easily.
Let me just find the Smaug the dragon image I’ve saved somewhere just for this kind of thing.
My story, in brief, and using hand-gliding as a metaphor is this:
About 20+ years ago I helped build the photo sharing website Flickr dot com, at a moment in time when Web 2.0 was exploding, working in Silicone Valley & San Francisco, surrounded by people starting things like Twitter and so on.
That was me essentially dropped at the top of a very high hill, with a hand-glider, without the slog of having to walk all the way up in the first place. Some of my friends jumped off from there directly into up-currents to spiral even higher. I took my hand-glider and decided to just gentle glide downwards, hitting some up-drafts along the way, looking for a nice spot to land in a field and take it easy. The ever-fading “I worked at Flickr” card opening doors to work at large media organisations, and museums & cultural orgs around the world, which in turn open more (ever decreasing) doors.
Which is a very different experience to starting in the middle of a different ground level field holding a hand-glider and trying to float upwards.
So when highly successful YouTubers, having hustled and grinded for years (more than I ever did) turn around with the grand discovery of taking it easy to avoid burnout, it feels a little bit the same as when people sell their house in the big city and their possessions for the simple life into the countryside and minimalism. It’s a great place to end up, but a hard place to start from.
And while we should aim to work less and be happy with the act of being creative, we live in society that costs more and more each day.
Back to hustle and grind; those big YouTubes got there because of all that, but what about all the ones who also hustled and grinded but didn’t get there?
There’s an apocryphal and somewhat mathematically incorrect story about stock brokers (or whatever people who play the stock market for clients are called), which goes like this…
Say you have 10,000 stock brokers working for a company and, due to pure randomness and chance, around 10% end up accidentally picking stocks that do well, so 1,000 of them. The following year, in a scattershot fashion 10% of those luck into picking the right stocks; 100. Year three 10% again = ten people, on the fourth year one of them has picked the right stocks four years running and gets a big promotion.
How did this person pick winning stocks four years in a row? They must really know what they’re doing. But in reality if the dice has rolled another way it would have been someone else being a top performer. These are the people who made it up YouTube mountain with hustle & grind and now see the benefit of slow living.
See also Darius Kazemi at the XOXO festival 2014.
So if I give you the advice of quitting social media and focusing on newsletters and websites and YouTube, I say this as someone who’s hand-glided down into having a studio and the luxury of not quite getting my shop back online for the past year.
But the opposite advice of hustle and grind until you’re high enough to glide down (or catch up-currents) is also wrong for most people for the stock broker 10,000👉1,000👉100👉10👉1 reason, so here’s five things.
ONE
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” - Jean Luc Picard (yay quotes from fictional characters —* surely the script writers should get the credit for that).
TWO
The antithesis therefor is; it’s possible to continuously always commit mistakes and still win.
🤔
THREE
The book “How to Decide” by Annie Duke (and her follow up “Quit”) - talks of how to make good decisions, and how bad outcomes don’t retroactively change the decision into a bad one; you made a good decision based on the information you had, it just didn’t work out. The book essentially boils down to, getting more information before making a decision, which is usually by either asking other people, or reflecting on past decisions/outcomes.
FOUR
“The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by Leonard Mlodinow which kinda suggests that none of the above decision making really matters that much because someone else may be having a bad day as they forgot their umbrella, and that now affects you.
I think that’s the main message, although I could be missing a few important parts.
FIVE
Therefor you can only do what feels right for you at the time, while keeping Catt’s Law in mind.
THE ONLY ADVICE THAT REALLY MATTERS
Tell your friends they are loved, often, (in whatever your friend-love-language is).
# GENERATIVE NOTEBOOKS
Continuing the theme of very slowly moving a project along by grabbing an hour here and there, I’ve been having fun making notebooks.
The idea is ultimately to use the latest version (3) of Spectral.js, github: https://github.com/rvanwijnen/spectral.js, demo: https://onedayofcrypto.art/ to pick random colours for each page so that the dots form a nice colour field.
So far I’ve gotten as far as writing code that creates the page layout, while picking random colours from Studio Yorktown’s Colour Town Hall
The part I’m finding most relaxing about this is spending evenings sitting and folding the sheets, and then sewing the stitching by hand. Which is giving me something to do that doesn’t involve the laptop. I now want a little carry pouch for paper and thread so I can be doing this in waiting rooms, the park, or wherever else I have a spare moment.
The next step is to design a “Belly Band” to put around them and then probably send some off in the post, again (my friend-love-language). The joy is in making them, not in having them slowly take up more space in the studio!
# THE END
I was going to mention the new Riso machine that I got delivered to the other studio and my plans for that, but that’ll have to wait for another day, it’s basically a way to tempt local artists into the community studio so I can make friends with them!
Because I want to be friends with artists who use Riso machines 😁
My life for the next few months is very straight forwards, with each day split into; filming/editing the pen plotter tutorial videos and then work. In between those I’m stealing slithers of time to work on three small things.
The Sea Howls From The West, pen plotting project
Handmade notebooks
A riso version of my Fallingwater project
Which means the next newsletter will be featuring; website updates, riso machines, very small incremental project changes on one/some of the above three small projects, and should be with you on the 29th of May.
Not entirely sure how to make that sound enticing, but life can’t be exciting all the time, I’m just super glad I didn’t commit to a weekly newsletter, because OMG I would cry.
Until next time, and remember you are loved,
Dan
❤️
*— em-dash was added by a human, actually.
Hi Dan, I'm part of a collective of artists in Worcester, some of us make zines. Can we be your Riso friends? Pleeease… :)
Re: decision making - I like what you said. I haven't read the books you mentioned, but I have read a fair amount about cognitive biases and decision making. There's a freedom in being able to say "I made the best decision I could, with the information that I had at the time", even if the outcome is bad. It helps fight perseverating on what I could have done differently.