#92: Maria Popova on Being Interesting, Creating More Time in a Day, And How to Start A Successful Blog

optimal minimal and there's altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking and I also have a special question now what is even a broken time? what's happening? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue I want medical care me to ferrous show this episode is brought to you by AG1 the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health now do you get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is invariably AG1 it simply covers a ton of bases I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road so what is AG1? 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to deconstruct them to show you how they do what they do what makes them unique their routines their favorite books and so on and today we have a repeat guest maria pope of a maria pope of a has written for amazing outlets like the atlantic and the new york times but i find her most amazing project to be brain pickings dot org founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends brain picking now gets more than five million readers per month it is massive and she does not have a big team around her this is just maria she is prodigious in the amount of content she puts out i read very few blogs regularly at all but brain pickings is one of the few that makes the cut it is a real treasure trove so i encourage you to check it out maria is a massively successful content creator and her output is staggering as i mentioned none of its accidental she is great and she is very great at teaching what she's learned so this episode answers the top 10 most popular questions you all had for maria and i'm not going to add any more to this preamble please enjoy part two with maria pope of a okay here we go sun in singapore asks knowing what you know now what advice would you give a complete beginner about starting a blog right for yourself if you want to create something meaningful and fulfilling something that lasts and speaks to people the counterintuitive but really really necessary thing is that you must not write for people the second you begin to write for or two a so-called audience and this applies equally to podcasting and filmmaking and photography and dance and any field of creative endeavor the second you start doing it for an audience you've lost the long game because creating something that is rewarding and sustainable over the long run requires most of all keeping yourself excited about it which in turn of course requires only doing things that you yourself are interested in that enthues you i think the key to being interesting is being interested and enthusiastic about those interests that's contagious that's what makes people read you and come back which by the way shoot and can only ever be a byproduct of your own willingness to keep coming back to your work to your creation because if you do it for people trying to predict what they'll be interested in and kind of pretzling yourself to set those expectations you soon begin to begrudge it and become embittered and it begins to show in the work it always always shows in the work when you resent it and there's really nothing less pleasurable to read than embittered writing um reminded of vonigat who um in the seventh of his eighth tips of unwriting he said write to please just one person if you open a window and make love to the world so to speak your story will get pneumonia now first of all gotta love vonigat always so witty and so wise but when i first came upon this which was maybe about five years into brain pickings it's so elegantly crystallized something that i deeply believed and was kind of living by and operating by but hadn't articulated this succinctly even to myself now sometimes i think people usually younger people can misinterpret that to mean write to please your teacher or your publisher or the person you really love with but vonigat really meant write to please yourself and the other thing related to this which is a major major thing is this i bet you that if vonigat were alive today and was writing on a medium like a blog he'd be approaching it the same way that he did his fiction and he like any self-respecting writer would never ever ever refer to or think about his writing on that platform on any platform as quote-unquote content on that platform be it a blog be it something else which is just a medium for the writing he would be writing things more in the spirit of cat's cradle than in the unspirited vein of cat listicles there's actually i think nothing more toxic to the creation of meaningful cultural material whatever it's medium than the term content which already implies like a like an icky external motive content is something you produce and purvey to other people filler material that becomes currency for advertising and whatnot and not something that you do for yourself nobody does content for the joy of their soul and the second you start thinking of your writing as content you've altered the motive you're no longer writing for yourself so to distill write for yourself stay interested don't ever let yourself think of what you do as content or be bullied into viewing it much less treating it as such and lastly perhaps the best advice on writing ever given which applies just as much to blogging courtesy of Susan saun tag love words agonizer or sentences and pay attention to the world next question Lou from alicia asks you have probably read and understood all the wisdom and knowledge shared on brain pickings do you feel you have become who you want to be if not what is stopping you it's such an interesting question because there's so many layers to it as i told him in our original conversation i started brain pickings in my early 20s as a kind of record of my own becoming and now nine years in it's still that and it can only ever be that because we never stopped becoming we never stopped growing if we do that's how we know we're dead life life is a continual process of arrival into who we are and the funny thing actually is that from the vantage point of any moment in our lives we look back on ourselves say five years earlier and we think wow what a spiritual embryo i was what an intellectual baby and yet that very vantage point when look at from five years into the future we'll look just as primitive a version of who we are then the Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert whose books stumbling on happiness by the way should be required reading for every human being he puts it perfectly he says human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished and i think that's so true but there's a fine line between contentment and self-satisfaction and i think the key is to be content with who you are and where you are at any given moment because living with presence both requires and gives rise to such contentment but not to be so self-satisfied as to assume that you've reached perfection or who you're supposed to be and to kind of cut yourself off from that vital impulse for for continual growth so back to the question i don't think i've become who i want to be and i have become who i want to be in this moment but not in an ultimate sense and what's topping me from becoming who i want to be well in a way what i do is all about stopping myself from the illusion of having arrived of having become a static and and self-satisfied final self so the thing's topping me then is the very thing that's driving me forward and i think that's true of all of us if we're serious about personal growth and this lifelong process of becoming malica in switzerland asks what is the most significant characteristic that distinguishes people who have accomplished greatness in any given field i would say consistency showing up day in and day out psycho emotional and rain or shine if you look at the diary of any great artist or writer and i read a lot of those of a pretty vast sample bull here the one thing you see over and over is that whatever happens whatever they're experiencing be it agonizing self-doubt which by the way all of them experience nowhere more beautifully than in steinbeck's working days which i highly highly recommend or the intoxicating elation of being in love which makes you unable to think about anything else at all whatever this they're feeling they still show up they still face the blank page the empty canvas the fresh roll of film every day and they do their thing and what this dog in this is is really a deep love of the work a deep need to do the work in order to feel alive making a living is merely a byproduct of that and for some of them that doesn't even come in their lifetime and make a mistake by the way all those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is and oh how tedious the creative process and oh what a torture genius they are don't buy into it they're doing it perhaps because we've created a society that mistakes the notion of hard work to mean not just dedicated work but difficult work as if difficulty and and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work doing great work simply because you love it sounds inner culture somehow flimsy and that's a failing of our culture not of the choice of work that artists make but here's the thing yes a number of artists are bedeviled by serious mental illness that makes them experience actual real anguish in their lives and i've written by the way about the relationship between creativity and mental illness if you're curious it's far more complex than we then we realize you can find that online but in any case the reality of that is that without their art all of these artists would have suffered more and one of my big big big pepies is when someone say comments on vangu's letters to his brother which are absolutely beautiful and and full of so much wisdom and and light and somebody says oh you know well why should we heed vango when he ultimately perished by his own madness well how many people are there in the history of the world who perished by their own madness and and didn't paint the starry knight vangu's art didn't take his life it it redeemed it without it he would have he would have just been an average unkempt mentally ill man who died miserable in a small village with it he was able to experience moments of transcendent joy and meaning which also happened to produce some of the greatest most lasting works of art of all time and of course vango is an extreme case both in in his talents and in his misery but his life illustrates why every great artist and i mean artist in the broadest sense of a human being creating work that makes other human beings feel something meaningful why every great artist does what they do that's the key to both their consistency and and their greatness so if you're looking for a formula for greatness the closest we'll ever get i think is this consistency driven by a deep level to work next question by mattie silverman in chicago who by the way asked a number of great questions this is one of them how do you decide what to read and what to read first what makes something not worth reading i often say that literature is the original internet so every footnote in a book every citation every reference is essentially a hyperlinked another book most of the great books i've come across and this applies especially to really wonderful forgotten books most of those i've discovered through a mention by an author that i already enjoyed it's kind of the ultimate recommendation algorithm that leads you to new very surprising manifestations of the same shared sensibility short to please you and for instance recently it was through Cheryl strays memoir that i came upon a beautiful book from 1968 by a man named edward abbey it's called desert solitaire and he writes about a few months he spent as a park ranger in the moab desert but he's really writing about solitude and her intricate connection to the natural world and how we find ourselves by getting lost very profound things through what's essentially a travel travel log and similarly it was through lisabeth gilbert's novel the signature of all things which is obviously fiction but it's heavily inspired by the long history actual history of of largely unsung female botanist it was through that i came upon a tiny miraculously beautiful book called gathering moss by a biologist uh that i learned is a scientist who studies moss a biologist named robin wall kimmera she writes about moss but she's really writing about how to live how to pay attention to the world how to relish beauty how to inhabit your own existence with a deeper sense of presence and that's kind of the answer to the second part of the question about what makes something worth reading to me that's a book that illuminates some aspect of how to live however large or small that that leaves you with a sense of having understood a little bit better your purpose here or or having appreciated a little bit more some aspect of the world inner outer or ideally both and as for the sequence of what to read when it is so much a matter of what's on my mind what i'm experiencing in my own life what i'm trying to make sense of i read to make sense of life and and the writing is just the record of the reading so mood life events time of year time of the month time of the day all of these can have an impact on what of the things that i have chosen to read i will read begin reading in that specific moment but again it has to answer some aspect of this question of how am i going to make my life better and richer in this moment and in the long run actually a number of people ask very similar questions so i'm going to combine them and answer them all at once here here's one from carlos infuegos in la just said what is a text you refer to again and again and christian and san francisco said what book have you read multiple times and have read the most i would say right now and this answer might be different in the other nine years the diaries of henry david throw speaking of this intersection of the outer world and the inner world nobody writes more beautifully about the immutable dialogue between the two than he there is just so much and i mean so much universal timeless truth in his private reflections on on everything from the best definition of success to the perils of sitting which he wrote about a hundred fifty years before we started saying sitting is a new smoking and actually what i said just a few moments ago about our warp cultural ideas of of hard work reminded me of a journal entry one of his journal entries let me let me see if i can uh find it okay okay here it is from march of 1842 throw writes the really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work but will saunter to his tasks surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure there will be a wide margin for relaxation to his day he's only earnest to secure the kernels of time and does not exaggerate the value of the husk think of what a beautiful metaphor this is for not mistaking the husk the outer accoutments of productivity like business or a full calendar or or a clever outer responder not mistaking those for the kernel the core and substance of the actual work produced and he then says those who work much do not work hard i love that and a related but somewhat different question from fatos in pristina cosevo which is very near my hometown of sofia balleria he asks if your house was burned and you had the chance to only rescue one book assuming that you cannot buy any other book later on which one would it be now if i can't ever buy another book the answer i guess would be the same through those journals but perhaps a more practical approach assuming i can at some point replace the burn books however far off into the future then what is most valuable to me in red books is actually my marginalia so for instance while i have a physical copy of throes diaries it's actually available as an e-book which is how i most frequently revisited and and my highlights and notes on it are electronic so i have so-called copies of them in the cloud it's not clear in the question whether the braid big fire is going to wipe out the internet assuming it does not but there are out of print books that i treasure that are hard if not impossible to replace in which i have copious notes by hand and in that case if that counts that i'd have a different answer and it would be a tie between a wrap-on race which is the transcript of james baldwin and margarita needs extraordinarily prescient 1970 conversation on not just race but also gender equality and democracy and forgiveness and the difference between guilt and responsibility and and what comes after consumer culture uh it is amazing it is very very very hard to find my book has so much of my own writing that on some pages it's more than the actual text so that would be tied with on science necessity and the love of god by the french philosopher simon vay whom i consider one of the most luminous and lucid and underappreciated minds of the 20th century that book is also very very very very hard to find um both of them in fact are so deeply out of print that there's actually a black market for them online so if you manage to find a copy you can probably make some good money for it on on ebay or amazon use books and again those both of these copies my own copies are so heavily annotated that what i'd be running with really is as much my own thoughts and ideas recorded in there as the actual ideas of of the authors daniel in paula alto wants to know if you could guarantee that every public official or leader read one book and engaged in one habit what would those be the book would be perhaps rather obviously plato's republic um i'm actually gobsmacked that this isn't required in order to be sworn into office like like the constitution is required for us immigrants when it comes time to obtain american citizenship and the practice would be mindfulness meditation it's not a vaccine against greed and corruption but it does make it significantly harder to be selfish when you when you cultivate equanimity when you when you come to dismantle the illusion of the separate self when you begin to see the inherent interconnectedness of everything of of all people and of all beings how our smallest daily actions add up to our collective destiny and after all if you're a public official the public good which is just another word for the best possible collective destiny should be your primary concern and nothing centers you more powerfully on that than the mindset gained through meditation and through mindfulness okay and the last question comes from friezy in france how do you turn down invitations that don't interest you how do you avoid getting time jacked by people who are just seeking from you and don't share anything i think that's harder early on both earlier in earlier in any vocational trajectory because we're such paviluvian creatures and we we crave positive reinforcement and we often mistake interest for for affirmation of our worth especially if there's an element of prestige attached to it that is interest from people or institutions we admire we perceive as prestigious so if somebody admirable is interested in us we think well we too then must be admirable but over time i think you get better at at trusting your criteria for what makes you and your work admirable admirable on the inside that is what makes you proud maybe appearing on cnn for two minutes we'll make her grandmother proud but if the travel and preparation and logistics eat up 20 hours of your time so that your writing suffers so that you will ultimately not be proud of the result then maybe it's not worth it often i think the paradox is that accepting the requests you receive is at the expense of the quality of the very work that was the reason for those requests in the first place and that's what you always have to protect i um recently read Oliver saks's memoir on the move which by the way and i don't say this lightly because perhaps by now we know how much and and how wholeheartedly and voraciously i read it has been one of the most transformative reading experiences of my life and i couldn't recommend it more heartily but in any case in a dr saks mentions that when his career as a writer started picking up so did obviously the volume of demands for speaking in interviews and this and that and so he put a piece of paper on the wall by his desk that simply said in all caps no with an exclamation point it was to remind himself to decline invitations that chipped away from his writing time and these reminders they're so simple there's so you know in this case don't analog and they work i have um i have a tattoo on my right arm that my right forearm which i see all the time that reminds me every day what to focus on now this said i think it's a very subjective thing this this dance of discerning whether the end product will make you proud will be rewarding and fulfilling by your innermost measure so for me for example i almost always do things for students even if it takes up my reading and writing time because i feel that if i can help one young person even consider a life path other than the corporate grisvelle if i can persuade one aspiring journalist to consider not working for buzzfeed and to refuse to feed the public's appetite for mindlessness and mediocrity and to assure this young person to have faith in the possibility of building a life in a career based on epi white's journalistic ideal of lifting people up rather than lowering them down then it's worth my time it is absolutely worth my time i also always do things for friends and for people who's work i admire and want to support and with whom i i feel a kind of kinship of spirit hi tim even if it takes time away from my own work i really really really believe that creative culture is woven of these invisible threads of goodwill between people who who who believe in one another and and art is carried on the wings of this kinship so anytime you put toward that is an investment in in the most rewarding thing about being in a position to be asked to help in the first and that's the loveliest word of life