Reframe Your Inbox (Tuesday’s the Day Edition)
Hey everyone. After way too many hours writing and rewriting and re-rewriting, Reframe the Day finally comes out on Tuesday. A huge thank you to everyone who has pre-ordered it and supported the book (and me) throughout this very long and meandering process.
Three brief book-related updates:
E-book and Kindle pre-orders are available now—just head here to find the online bookstore of your choosing. All pre-order profits will continue to go to Direct Relief. All profits from Tuesday onward will also go to Direct Relief and other charitable causes and organizations.
An excerpt from Reframe the Day will be featured on the Optimal Living Daily podcast on Tuesday. Every day, the OLD pod features a short excerpt from a book or article focused on one aspect of personal development and minimalism. It’s high-quality stuff. Be sure to listen on Tuesday—and subscribe, rate, review, and share!
If/when you get your copy of Reframe the Day in the mail or on the e-reader next week, I would love it if you would post a picture of the book or—even better—of you doing something fun with the book. The hashtag is… #ReframeTheDay.
Here are four things you’ll find in this week’s newsletter: 1) an excerpt from a new foreword to Reframe the Day in which I reflect on how much the world has changed since I submitted the manuscript a few months ago, and how much I’ve been struggling to live the practices I talk about in the book; 2) a great line from Seneca’s Moral Letters that appeals to me for obvious reasons; 3) a link to the sixth installment of my “Radical Rethink” series; and 4) a couple of interesting links.
FIRST THING
A few weeks ago, in a brainstorming session with my friends Micael and Jonathan, we were discussing how much the world had changed in the short time between when I finished Reframe the Day and when it would be published. They gave the great suggestion to write a few words exploring why the ideas in the book feel particularly relevant to our current moment. I decided to tack on a few additional reflections, including how the coronavirus crisis has reminded me that the ideas in Reframe the Day are practices, not solutions, and why I’ve decided to donate future profits from all book sales (not just pre-orders) to good causes.
Here’s an excerpt from the new foreword, Reflections on Launching a Self-Help Book in the Middle of a Global Pandemic:
As I’ve learned over the past few years, writing, publishing, and promoting a book can feel enormously selfish and self-serving. Writing is, almost by definition, a solitary activity. Meanwhile, the publishing process takes a huge amount of time, attention, and money — three scarce resources that, when spent on a book, can no longer be spent on anyone or anything else.
Unsurprisingly, the promotion part feels the most selfish and self-serving of them all. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of months emailing book reviewers, messaging Instagram influencers, and urging my friends and family members to urge their friends and family members to pre-order Reframe the Day. I think I’d be pretty uncomfortable with these asks anytime, but under the current circumstances, all of the self-hype and self-promotion feels decidedly inappropriate. Being frustrated by the rejections and lack of responses feels even more shallow, given the suffering, grief, and hardship that the coronavirus has delivered to millions of people.
If that’s not enough, there’s more: During every single stage of the book-creation process, especially the publicity part, I have struggled mightily to follow the practices I write about in the book. It’s almost funny — if darkly so — how much I’ve struggled. It’s gotten to the point where I sometimes feel like I’m mocking the book by how overwhelmingly I’m failing to practice the practices that have helped me so much.
In the first chapter, for instance, I write about the importance of creating moments of stillness. Yet these days, from the second I wake up until the second I fall asleep, I’m racing around (metaphorically, at least), worrying about everything I need to do to finish the book and wondering how I’ll fit that work in between doing my day job and exercising and chatting with friends and reading and hanging with Erin.
I write about building awareness, but I’m being yanked around by anxiety and despair about this book even though the whole purpose of writing it was to make some sense of the thoughts bouncing around in my brain. Even though six months ago, if you’d promised me that I would someday get to hold a printed copy of the book in my hands, I would’ve been beyond ecstatic.
I write about making more time for the people and activities that matter to me, but I’m spending endless hours in front of a screen crafting promotional emails and tracking down social media personalities instead of calling my grandparents or signing up to volunteer to deliver groceries to our neighbors. (Literally as I was first typing these words, Erin asked if I wanted to work on a crossword puzzle with her, and I almost responded, “After I finish this article.”)
I write about resisting our collective obsession with being busy and productive all the time, but I’m still calibrating my self-regard by how much book-related work I “produce” on any given day. I continue to find my sense of self-worth contingent upon whether I’ve heard back from a publication I’ve submitted a book excerpt to, or whether I responded to all of the book-related emails in my inbox, or whether I did enough promotional outreach for the day.
I write about how no one can “do it all,” despite the tantalizing promises of so many life-hacks and productivity blogs and “hustle culture” mantras. Even so, as I try to balance launching a book with working a full-time job, I continue to set impossibly sky-high expectations for what I can accomplish in a single day. I continue to convince myself that I can find time to do it all, both personally and professionally.
I write about the importance of having a trajectory, not a plan, and how much I learned from realizing that there isn’t a single prescribed path for any one of us. Yet I increasingly feel myself putting more emotional and mental weight on my identity as “writer” or “author,” leaving my well-being precariously dependent on professional success, much of which is out of my control.
I write about the power of thinking regularly about death and mortality to remind us of the privilege of being alive. These days, reminders of the fragility of life are swirling around us constantly, hitting us every time we read the news or put on a homemade face mask to go grocery shopping or substitute a Zoom happy hour for an actual happy hour. But I’m still crashing through each day in a to-do list-obsessed fog, focused entirely on what I have to do next, and what I have to do after that, and will I ever get it all done?
You get the idea. If I ever needed a reminder that the practices I’ve written about are just that — practices — launching this book in the middle of a global pandemic has delivered that reminder. Over and over and over and over again. All I can do, I guess, is try to recognize it, forgive myself for it, and try to do a little better tomorrow. After all, they’re practices. Not prescriptions. And certainly not solutions.
You can find the full foreword on Medium here. And yes, the final header in the article is a Frozen 2 reference.
SECOND THING
“The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”
I recently stumbled across this line from Seneca’s Moral Letters in Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s The Daily Stoic. It’s a great quote. I can’t help but wish I’d stumbled across it before finalizing the manuscript to a book that talks about “embracing the craft of life, one day at a time.”
THIRD THING
Earlier this month, I published the sixth article in my “Radical Rethink” series: Most Individuals Are Good People with Good Intentions. Is That Good Enough? Here’s part of it:
How is it that so many people mean so well, and are so aware that the status quo is unsustainable, and yet so many aspects of our political and economic systems remain broken and seem to be getting worse? How can it be that most Americans going about their day-to-day lives are working hard and trying to do the right thing, and yet those at the top do better and better while everyone else falls further behind?
This is, of course, what makes it a systemic problem. And it calls for more radical thinking, not less. We need more radical thinking not in spite of good people with good intentions, but because of them. We need more radical thinking precisely because in their individual lives, many people already mean well and think they’re doing the right things. Even some of those at the top, whose behavior and decisions sustain a system that protects their wins and minimizes their losses. Even some of those who are thriving because of rules that have made life so difficult for so many others. […]
Even if most people mean well, even if they have good intentions, there’s too much invested in the status quo, and too many people comfortable with the way things are, for meaningful and systemic change to bubble up — or trickle down — on its own.
The full piece is on Medium here.
FOURTH THING
Here are a couple of links to wrap things up this week:
My pals (and former softball teammates—go Cutthroats) Craig Frucht and Michael Sparks recently launched Ascend Digital Strategies, a creative digital firm specializing in political campaigns and issue advocacy. If you’re trying to change public policy, raise money, recruit volunteers for a cause, or win an election—and there’s a lot of each of these things that needs doing—check them out. Support super talented people doing super cool things!
“Make no mistake, the heart is what has been most traumatized this last month. We are, as a society, now vulnerable in a whole new way. … What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again.” That’s from this unsettling and important article on Medium: Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting. Thanks to my friend Kate for sharing this.
Stay safe out there. As always, thanks for reading.
—Adam