Struggle-Play
You’ve not got much to report when you get home, besides a desultory slideshow that might have well have been Xeroxed from your thinly used copy of Lonely Planet Paris
Happy Friday!
And greetings from pre-Coronation London.
Thunder and sunshine is rolling around the palace against the crackdown on our right to protest, heavy Conservative losses at the polls and a ragged display of ironic Union Jack bunting.
‘What are you doing for the Coronation?’ is the question on nobody’s lips.
Some need to protest. Some need to dance. To find the others. To find some solidarity.
Last night I found all that and more, one of thousands protest-dancing at the Troxy, an Art Deco ballroom in Stepney, East London.
Yard Act could be described as the post-punk lyrical voice of lefties abandoned by the Labour party.
Or, as frontman James Smith put it last night:
Raise your glasses, everyone. This is for King Charles The Second.
Of course it fucking isn’t. This is for us, the people.
So don’t be disturbed by the pageantry of distraction up at the palace. Instead, take a look around you and see what you, the people need right now.
Maybe it’s a bloody good dance.
It's all so pointless, ah, but it's not though is it? It's really real and when you feel it, you can really feel it Grab somebody that you love Grab anyone who needs to hear it And shake 'em by the shoulders, scream in their face Death is coming for us all, but not today Today you're living it, hey, you're really feeling it Give it everything you've got knowing that you can't take it with you And all you ever needed to exist has always been within you
For those of new around these parts, welcome 👋 My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor and cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel. I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I love a bloody good dance. I’m looking forward to more of the same again tonight — thanks BG!
Welcome to edition 359.
Struggle-Play
Today’s story is the statement of the bleeding obvious.
Stuff is hard.
Anything worth doing is a struggle.
We know this.
To pick up on last week’s story (co-written, in a way, by Mohammed Salah): the struggle is the process, the only way to do anything worth doing.
The struggle is where the value is at. So why does the struggle have to feel like such a struggle?
Well, it doesn’t.
It’s A Mindset Thing
As I’ve written before, we have two mindsets and we jump between them like monkeys between the trees of a forest.
Our fixed mindset:
Skills aren’t learnt; they’re natural talents
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks
This should be easy; if it’s not easy, it’s impossible
Better to avoid completion than to risk exposing ourselves as frauds
Deal with problems and setbacks as we’d wish them to be
Results above all
Our growth mindset:
All skills are learned (some are just learned so young that we’ve forgotten how)
If anything, old dogs have an advantage, building new tricks on old foundations
Value patience, persistence, perspiration and process over defeatist ‘shoulds’ or impossible ‘can’ts’.
Better to admit our ignorance and learn by asking for help
Deal with problems and setbacks as they truly are
Process above all
It’s not that our brains are all either 100 percent fixed or growth, by the way — if you think that, then you’ve got a fixed mindset about mindsets.
You will access both mindsets at different times in your life, in different domains. Maybe you’re a creative in the kitchen, but a despot at your desktop.
That should be enough to show that you can choose between them.
Anything worth doing quite often shows up first as a fixed mindset struggle: an obnoxious obstacle to be effortlessly overcome by our natural genius.
In this case, only success can be a success.
But we can also frame it as a growth mindset struggle: a roll in the hay, a game to play.
In this case, taking part — stepping into the arena and grappling with what’s before us — that is the only success.
Alternate Realities
Our two mindsets make such a difference to our lived experience that switching between the two feels like switching between alternate realities.
Imagine travelling to Paris for the first time in your life with a fixed mindset:
You can’t learn a word of French because your language ability is fixed at zero. Alternatively, you feel you ought to be good at French because you got an A at GCSE, but you don’t risk crashtesting any actual conversation because you might get something wrong.
You’re suspicious that every Parisian waiter is out to destroy you because you once read a Guardian article on the topic. As a result, you don’t stray beyond familiar transglobal eateries like Subway and McDonalds.
You’ve not got much to report when you get home, besides a desultory slideshow that might have well have been Xeroxed from your thinly used copy of Lonely Planet Paris.
An otherwise identical traveller with a growth mindset might as well be in another universe:
You don’t know a word of French, but that doesn’t stop you trying and failing repeatedly, slowly improving over the weekend, but never really getting beyond good-humoured willingness.
Some Parisians visibly wince when you say ‘Bon-jaw’, but others laugh kindly and help you translate the menu of the irresistibly crowded brasserie that you stumbled across on your late night ramble across town.
Your new friends show you a secret tunnel that leads down into the catacombs and, when you get home, everyone’s badgering you to tell that story again about your night dancing to a Brazilian funk band in the bunker underneath Saint Lazare station or the grisly tale of what you found in The Room Of Cats.
A Game We Never Want To End
Our fixed mindset is quite often based in a false world of apriori paradigms, often learnt by rote in childhood: a world of imagined shoulds and oughts.
Only if you think you can, will you. If you think you can’t, well, you won’t.
By contrast, our growth mindset is rooted in the real world of a posteriori experimentation: a world of constant trial and error.
Whether you think you can or you think you can’t yet, you will try and try again.
The difference between the two realities of the fixed and growth travellers is the difference between (our worst possible definition of) work and (our best possible definition of) play.
The best games make us curious, experimental, vulnerable and willing to learn.
They make us willing to play again, over and over, building on and testing our skills, enjoying the pleasure of the flow more than the endgame of victory or defeat.
The very best games we never want to end at all.
From inside a growth mindset, life itself feels like a game we never want to end.
The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play?
And now: a warning against pointlessness.
It’s an astonishing fact that almost every time we do anything, we probably could have got away with doing nothing at all.
In some cases, we would have been better off doing nothing at all.
Sometimes, when I publish this newsletter, I end up with fewer subscribers than I had before I sent it.
Was it worth my while putting hours of work into writing the damn thing?
As Jason Kottke noticed back in 2018, this better-doing-nothing conundrum also features in the work of newspaper proprietors, baseball superstars and most business entrepreneurs.
Kottke quotes from a remarkable-sounding book called Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert Dreyfus:
Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skilfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. […]
Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.
What this means is that the value of almost everything we do comes down which mindset we apply: are we focussed on fixed results or growth process?
So the motivation of my writing this story cannot be found in what value it might hypothetically bring for an unknown number of readers, sometime in the future.
That would be a fixed mindset idea of value.
The motivation — and immediate value — is found in what the process of writing does for me, at this very moment.
That sets the growth mindset in play. The pressure’s off. I can enjoy myself, experiment and be curious about what I learn next.
I don’t need you to love every word, but, all the same, I hope you found something to take away with you today.
Days Of Adventure 2023: 23
🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢 What is this?
An expedition through the ancient beech forests of the Chilterns. Mad that I get paid for this.
Q: What story do you and your team repeat over and over to each other, until that story becomes the unquestioned, unquestionable only story?
Would you maybe benefit from a change of story?
This is a serious analysis of the Russian ‘firehose of falsehood’ propaganda model, but — besides offering protection against such tactics — it made me think about how these cognitive biases show up in our daily lives, in the stories (or propaganda) that we repeat to ourselves and to those in our inner circle.
Repeated exposure to a statement has been shown to increase its acceptance as true.
The “illusory truth effect” is well documented, whereby people rate statements as more truthful, valid, and believable when they have encountered those statements previously than when they are new statements.
Even with preposterous stories and urban legends, those who have heard them multiple times are more likely to believe that they are true.
If an individual is already familiar with an argument or claim (has seen it before, for example), they process it less carefully, often failing to discriminate weak arguments from strong arguments.
This is a good example of what I think is a fairly healthy general principle for approaching scary news: zoom the fuck out, then zoom the fuck in.
Zoom The Fuck Out
Catch yourself getting caught up.
Putin is singlehandedly destroying truth!
Hold on. Stop the doomspread.
Look around you: does life go on? Does the sun still shine? Does your dog still love you? Is the heat death of the universe more than a lifetime away?
Then Zoom The Fuck In
How can you use the struggle of existence, the struggle of reading this article and grappling with its consequences, to become a better player for Team Human, right now?
Okay. Go and do that, then.
Three Small Big Things At The End
1. Nature Works Unfortunately
2. Best Croissant In Paris
Two YouTube comments to accompany this gastronomic review video by Luis:
This guy is the embodiment of the internet. The world is falling apart around us but we’re just trying to have fun
Meanwhile in the UK our retirement age is 67 and we literally let the Government make it illegal to protest. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I envy the French for their bravery
Superb.
3. How Extraordinary A Life
Meditation teacher Guy Burgs + Mt. Wolf music + the ocean of Hawai’i.
It doesn’t actually take very much to make the deepest part of us incredibly happy.
Thanks to CW for sharing the wisdom.
That’s nearly all for this week.
I feel very lucky that I get to sit here and write to all 574 of you, picking up these words from 53 countries around the world.
That includes 1 of you 👋 in Slovakia 🇸🇰, where, in 1930, a farmer by the name of Štefan Hulman-Petrech ploughed up a 24,800 year old mammoth tusk ivory statue that we call the Venus of Moravany.
I mean, come on: any minute now, any old farmer, miner or gravedigger anywhere in the world, might just stumble on the tender remains of once-forgotten humanities, reaching their hand out to us across the aeons.
You know how this kind of stuff makes me feel: 🤯 OMG WE ARE SO CONNECTED.
Thank you for reading and I hope you found something to take away with you.
How You Can Support This Writer
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Big love,
dc: