The Breukelen cemetery is one of the few locations on the planet that has lasting meaning for me. It’s a place to which I make a pilgrimage each time I’m in The Netherlands.
This year’s pilgrimage had an additional agenda.
It was 35 miles round trip by bike.
I don’t have that many particularly significant places on this planet. Those that would be are the “places” that are less about locations than they are about who happens to be there (i.e. “wherever my wife is”, “my close relative or friend’s current home”, and so on). These kinds of places can change as people move.
The more traditionally meaningful places have all fallen by the wayside. Significance has faded over time. The places themselves have fallen in to disrepair or become virtually unrecognizable. In perhaps my most personally significant case, they’ve disappeared completely.
I originally wrote this in 2017 as part of a 60 days of gratitude exercise, forgot that I had, and wrote a completely new version in 2022. Whoops. This is now an amalgamation of the two, updated during a recent trip to The Netherlands, of course.
♥
English is not my first language.
I love to tell people that for two reasons: it’s absolutely true, and most would never guess.
Naturally, there’s a story.
(Long one, today. I didn’t plan on it, but here we are. 
)
I’ve been asked a couple of time how I manage to do so much. If I look at what I produce each week, it adds up:
Even considering all that I don’t accomplish every week even if I’m supposed to (my wife has that list), it’s still quite a lot.
The answer to the question turned out to be longer than I expected. I have a combination of frameworks, routines, habits, tools, and mindset that are probably pretty unique to me. While I pay attention to a lot of “productivity porn”, as it’s sometimes called, I think I’ve ended up with a blend of approaches that work fairly well for me.
I don’t expect they’ll work for everyone. But let’s look at how I do what I do hoping you might find a nugget or two that resonates and can help you get s**t done.
One of the thoughts brewing in recent months, particularly because of my writing exercise, is the value of time.
I know, I know, it’s old hat, a cliché even, that time is our most precious resource. Except, it’s true. Nothing’s driven that home more than:
All this is leading me to be significantly more aware of where and how I spend my time.
Or, rather, where and how I choose to spend my time.
That it’s a choice is, perhaps, the most important point.
When we’re young, it seems we conflate wisdom with knowledge. The more you know, the wiser you must be. Thus, the quest is to know as much as you can.
As we age, we slowly begin to realize that wisdom is also about understanding what you don’t know. In a sense, I suppose, that’s more knowledge. The quest becomes to be more self-aware about what you do and do not know. Perhaps you then use that as a guide to increase your knowledge, or to understand your limitations and, with that understanding, make better decisions.
At some point, though, wisdom is none of that.
With 65 daily essays, and a bit of a breather, under my belt, I thought it might be useful to review my reasoning and process.
Having a deadline forces me to produce. My weekly newsletter forces the Ask Leo! wheels to produce or update content each week. I started Not All News Is Bad as a daily newsletter to force myself to find something good in the world every day.
Honestly, 65 Thoughts was the same thing. I wanted to write more, and I wanted what I produce to be a little more meaningful. Setting a cadence of having to publish something every day for 65 days in a row did the trick.
And here we are.
65 years. 65 trips around the sun.
What does it all mean?
Many poets, songwriters, and philosophers have settled on “Love” as The Answer. But what does that mean?
I think many people discard the very thought because of the phrasing. The conflate it with romantic love, or sexual attraction, and have no room to consider it as something much greater than either.
The best advice I’ve ever heard about how to get ahead in life is to choose your parents wisely.
If only it were that easy.
I have a love/hate relationship with goals and goal setting.
I recognize their importance and potential. But, I suck at setting them.
Goals are one of the first things you encounter when doing any kind of personal, entrepreneurial, or business growth or training. What are your goals? Where do you see yourself in five years? What do you want to accomplish?
I. Have. No. Idea.
I never did, really. But things have worked out alright, anyway.
Having the freedom to do something does not exempt you from the consequences of doing it.
Having the right to do something doesn’t exempt you either.
Individuals and groups often argue for the freedom or right to do something without wanting to concern themselves with the consequences. They might even think that having the right somehow gives them a pass.
Nope.
Amid the arguments of personal rights, the rights of others, and more, an important concept seems to have been lost.
With rights come responsibilities.
Without those responsibilities, “rights” become entitlements.
This is one I struggle with. Does someone turning out to be a bad person invalidate their unrelated prior work?
“Cancel culture” might say yes.
And yet, there are many instances where the prior work was so significant that the individual was given a pass.
Should charity be anonymous?
Having some means, motive, and opportunity, I find myself asking this from time to time.
It’s not as simple a choice as one might believe.
The ability to generalize is both a blessing and a curse.
It’s perhaps the only way we can make sense of the massive amounts of information we face every waking moment. Rather than worry about the minutia of each situation, we generalize and make assumptions based on that generalization to take action.
Just being able to start is a super-power.
In science, “activation energy” is the effort required to get something going. It applies to just about anything, though.
Even writing these essays requires that I put in a certain amount of non-trivial energy in just getting started … 65 times.
Most consider being open-minded a virtue.
I suspect many, though, have difficulty with what it really means.
