It should be a verb – defuse your enemies by Ben Franklining them

The trouble is, that looks like frank lining. Like you’re really serious about the inset seam on your jacket.

But Ben Franklin, as in this fella, had enemies and he defused them. Maybe not all, but certainly his greatest. There was this one guy and…

Franklin set out to turn his hater into a fan, but he wanted to do it without “paying any servile respect to him.” Franklin’s reputation as a book collector and library founder gave him a standing as a man of discerning literary tastes, so Franklin sent a letter to the hater asking if he could borrow a specific selection from his library, one that was a “very scarce and curious book.” The rival, flattered, sent it right away. Franklin sent it back a week later with a thank-you note. Mission accomplished. The next time the legislature met, the man approached Franklin and spoke to him in person for the first time. Franklin said the man “ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.”

The Benjamin Franklin Effect – BrainPickings.org

That quote is from David McRaney’s book You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself. Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.org article is, typically for that site, partly a review of the book but partly an examination of topics it raises. There’s a great deal more in the article and, natch, even more in the book. Here’s the article and here’s the UK edition of the book, here’s the US edition.

Don’t plan so much

Posted by William Gallagher

This could be a sister post to one on how you shouldn’t spend so much time analysing, you should just write now and revise after: Use the Force – and Edit Later (27 February 2014). There is an argument that when we plan too much, too specifically, that we are also limiting ourselves. It’s fine and even good to have goals, but lighten up.

…of all the disappointments in life, there is hardly a kind more hazardous to happiness and more toxic to the soul than disappointing ourselves as we fail to live up to our own ideals and expectations.

The solution, however, might not be to further tighten the grip with which we cling to our plans — rather, it’s to let go of plans altogether. So argues British journalist Oliver Burkeman in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (public library) — a fascinating look at how our conventional approaches to happiness and success tend to backfire as our very efforts to grasp after such rewards generate a kind of anti-force that pushes us further away from them.

– Brain Pickings

Read the full Brain Pickings article for more on it and details of Burkeman’s book. The summary of the article and the book must surely be that there’s got to be a middle ground, though.

UPDATED WITH AUDIO: The Blank Screen on BBC Radio WM today

Posted by William Gallagher

15:48 Listen to the show here: 25 minutes, MP3 And the book we talk about is my The Blank Screen (UK edition)

12:17 GMT UPDATE I had a blast on BBC Radio WM. If the listeners who phoned in had half as good a time, then they were robbed. Audio to follow later UPDATE ENDS

Just a quick note to tell you that I'm going to be on BBC Radio WM's Adrian Goldberg show some time between 11am and noon talking about The Blank Screen book and how we writers can get going, can get off our backsides and write.

BBC Radio WM is the Corporation's local station for Birmingham and the West Midlands. I actually started my career there doing work experience in the 1980s so it's always a particular treat to be on it.

If you read this before 11am GMT then you can catch it streaming live and I'll update this with a link afterwards.

Always assuming I don't make an eejit of myself in it.

The Blank Screen book:
UK paperback
USA paperback

The night before the morning after

Posted by wg

Today is the 176th day I’ve got up to write at 5am. I can tell you that it was easier than the 175th because I’ve been awake since 4am trying to work out what to do. And the thing I’ve learnt is that more important than making yourself get up is having something to do the moment you have.

Er. Apart from the bathroom, the fastest shower in history and the mandatory giant mug of tea. I can get to my keyboard by around 5:15am at a push, and I do push, but it has happened that once I’ve got there, I’ve gone um.

Only a few times. But enough to give me the willies. I’ve had days where I’ve done some emails at that time, I’ve even had one day when I watched some TV that I could call research but, come on.

It is hard to get up this early and it is very easy to waste the time when you do. I wrote about this 5am start in my book, The Blank Screen, and it was meant to be an example of how you should search for the extra moments that you are able to write. How you need to find your schedule. I happen to write best this early in the morning, even though that goes against every late-night-jazz bone in my head. So I don’t like getting up, I really don’t like going to bed, and I’m not very keen on how tired I get by the end of the day, but the work I do is better. And, face it, it’s also more. I do more work and it is better. What’s not to love?

Everything.

But that’s about all the book said. I do talk in it about my particularly brutal way of making myself get up but that was as much about habit-forming and self-immolation as it was anything else.

And what I have really learnt since finishing the book is this business that you have to have something to do. Get up at 5am or whenever you like, but do not spend any time at all then planning what to do. Go to the keys and be writing immediately or you won’t do any writing.

It just occurs to me that this is a lot like people who lay out their clothes the night before. I have not once done that. Suddenly I see why they do it. I vow to you that I’m going to do that too, except I know I’m lying and, hey, I do enough with the making myself get up this early, enough already.

Maybe a better example is the type of novelist who ends the day by writing the first line of the next chapter. So in the morning, there’s line 1 already done. I can vividly understand that now.

It’s almost never that I’m lacking for a job to do. There was one time, back around the 150th day, that I’d finished a huge project and genuinely wasn’t sure what to get to next, genuinely wasn’t sure whether I shouldn’t instead breathe out for a bit. But usually there are plates spinning aplenty and it does take some figuring out to decide which is the most urgent or which is the most important. Fine. Just don’t do it at 5am.

Or 4am. I found 4am worse today. The fact that it was 4am was pretty bad all by itself but then I had the sense of pressure that I’d only got an hour before I had to be up and writing… something.

I’ve got meetings and travel I have to do today that are affecting the shape of my day and I have one urgent deadline that you’d think I should be doing right now but it’s a radio review and that means I listen to a play. I’m planning to do that while driving and travelling to these meetings.

I’ve got a lot of chores to do – literal chores around the house but who’s going to do any of those this early? – and I’ve always got lots of financial stuff to avoid.

But then there is the one big editing job that I need to get away today and there is the more creative one that I long to start.

I will get that editing done. I will do that review. I will start that creative project. I know I will because I have the time and I have that time because I made it by getting up at 5am.

But I also have you to talk to and that’s what I knew I’d do. Around 4:15am, I realised that I could do this, that I now had this to tell you about planning ahead, I knew I wanted to talk to you. In all the rush to be productive and edit this, write that, plan the other, we can forget the wanting and it’s important.

So hello. Nice to see you. If it’s 5am where you are, I feel your pain.

And I can help your pain just as much as I can help my own: tonight when I go to bed, I’m going to spend a few moments figuring out the shape of tomorrow. So that I can go straight to the keys at 5am on day 177 and begin writing.

Tremendous new book about mastering email

Posted by wg

My own book, The Blank Screen, has plenty about when and how to use email so that you get what you want – at least a lot more of the time. And so that you get a lot more time for writing. But David Sparks has just published an entire iBook on emails and it is first class.

I've had email for thirty years and yet before I'd read two chapters of this, he'd changed my mind about the whole thing. I stopped reading long enough to do what he says and then I went right back to it.

Inevitably, there are whole sections that don't apply to everyone: I only use gmail when I have to, for instance, so I've no need of advice on how to make that a better experience. A shorter one, yes. (If you're a gmail fan then let me say first that I know it's very good, I just got burnt with trivial problems that left a bad taste. And since I get such a lot of strong, hassle-free use from Apple's own Mail app, I've not been compelled to try again. Then let me say second and more usefully, you in particular should get this book because it's got oodles of advice on gmail.)

There shouldn't be all that much you can say about email yet it turns out that there is and it turns out to be a very entertaining read. You can hear a lot on the same topic by the same man in the Mac Power Users podcast he does with Katie Floyd but just buy the book. Here's a link to the specific MPU episode: http://www.macpowerusers.com/2013/11/17/mac-power-users-164-tackling-email/

He does say in that podcast that there is a PDF version: listen to it for brief details of that. Otherwise, Email: a MacSparky Field Guide by David Sparks is an iBooks exclusive that you can get here:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/email/id743560201?mt=11&uo=4