The Friday Thing #741

Thanks for all the kind notes back about last week’s story....

The Friday Thing #741 was going to be a piece about talent and its relationship with discipline, ritual and consistency but my brain is a little slow today and I need more time to turn that into something readable.

Speaking of readable, I was asked a question this week by a member of my team about my reading habits. In short, they wanted to know if I truly read as much as it appears I read given the links I share during a typical week. The simple answer was “yes” and not surprisingly, the follow up question was “how do you find the time?”. The answer to that is two-fold. First, I make the time with a few rituals – by having a pile of books, magazines, and printed pieces next to an armchair at home. I try to get through a lot of stuff on a Sunday, starting with the Sunday edition of the New York Times. I read throughout the week too, though I have tried to curtail my pre-bedtime reading via iPad to help with my sleep. The second thing I do is often more surprising to people – I don’t watch TV. This of course means I am clueless when it comes to cultural discussion about Game of Thrones or whatever the latest brilliant series is. I know I am missing out on a lot of cultural phenomena with this choice, but I am also freeing up many hours to explore a vast array of written content. It’s a choice and one that may change when my work changes as I do read a lot for work – to be more informed and to spark ideas.

In a way, I suppose I did talk about discipline, ritual and consistency there…but not in the way I intended to. I’ll go a bit deeper in a future edition.

Meantime, I also confessed that I don’t read many books – or as many as I would like. I tend to flit between different topics and the books I do read are often short and on topics where I am looking to learn something specific. I recently read Mountains According to G by Geraint Thomas as a way to learn a bit about riding bicycles up hills – and also because “G” is a pretty funny, down to earth guy who tells a good yarn.

As I was thinking about books this week, I stumbled across this lovely photo essay from the New York Times on How a Book Is Made. It’s a process I have some knowledge of but have always been intrigued by the details and this story beautifully takes you on the journey from a Word document to 150,000 copies of a 626-page hardback book. It’s so reassuringly analog. Best of all, you meet some of the characters involved in production – because every good story, even a story about a book being produced, has people at the centre.?

That’s all for this week. I hope you find something good to read this weekend.

Oh, and a small side note: I do watch 90 minutes of TV each week. The length of an English Premier League football game ?? #YNWA

?-Steve