Stucco Them

I've discovered that with certain writers and producer-people, I like to keep up with them on a weekly basis. Daily is a bit frequent and more for regular news. The weekends tend to be slower for news, and life in general, which is good for slower reading, video watching, thinking, etc. It's already producing amazing results.

It turns out that Saturday is one of my favorite days to get up super early. I didn't get to bed early last night, but my neighbors helped motivate my early rise just after 4 this morning. (I discovered a while back that even if I wake up at 2- or 3-something, I should still rest until at least 4am. Otherwise, it's an easy way to get sick.)

I've recently started using IFTTT and their email digest channel which has a weekly option. Pipe into that from the feed channel, and you're good to go for weekly RSS. This morning I had 8 weekly digest emails waiting for me (set for 3am Saturday) that all came in just after 3:30. Perfect timing. I made my initial reading and run through all 8 emails in about 16 minutes. Some things I read just in the email, others I opened and read in a browser, a few I saved in Pocket, and then the rest were videos which I watched for just over an hour until about 7am.

One of the weekly digests was from Seth Godin's blog. I've read his material before, and I've enjoyed it. He's in the idea business. He makes me think, and I enjoy that. I've read his material on a daily basis before, and while good material, in the past I have found it to be “one more thing” to do each day. In the end, I've decided the burden outweighed the benefit and I could live without keeping up. Today, though, on the weekly basis, it didn't feel like a burden at all. It was a very fluid process reading his short posts and his longer posts in one single stream.

And then there was the winning post that won about half of the hour I spent watching videos: the one week challenge. (I view the valuable part of that hour as my time; Seth views it as my attention.) I opened the links, and they were basically about his book, and a follow-up challenge.

I watched all the videos in those two links. If you read and watch enough Seth, a couple themes emerge: permission to fail, freedom to be wrong, commitment to fish or cut bait, etc. This very post here is an answer to my time spent giving Seth's ideas my attention this morning. I'm not necessarily taking the 7-day challenge. I believe in a day of rest. And I've been inspired by Seth's writing before about building a blog, though not fully carried that idea to fruition. In one of the videos he talked about how we all know that guy who talks for 19 years about an idea he's going to launch. I'm sure for many people, I'm that guy. As one of my friends often says, “Don't be that guy.” So, not today.

Recently I've discovered the usefulness of the voice dictation upgrades in iOS 8. (In fact, even in writing this post I realized that makes for a new reason to download the Blogger iOS app. After all, I could use it to draft posts or at least capture ideas.) As I was noting how I spent my morning, when I said the name “Seth Godin,” iOS' first guess was that I had said, “stucco them.” In some ways this is perfect: Seth Godin is all about throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Permission to fail. Freedom to be wrong. Stucco them.