Long Games, Slow Productivity, Thao Dien Night Street, and More
Friday, January 19, 2023
Happy Friday everyone!
Here are 10 things I found interesting from the last week or so.
LBJ is Insane
To start this week’s newsletter, I’d first like to share an insane LeBron stat:
Gigantic Eco-friendly Art
Here’s an artist I found this week who does these huge eco-friendly paintings using a biodegradable paint he invented himself. Pretty cool stuff. His name is Saype. Check out his work here.
Louis Vuitton’s New Recruit
In June last year, my nephew and I saw Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse. We both enjoyed the Lego scene in the film, and afterward, he explained to me it was actually a 14-year-old kid that did that scene. It blew me away that a kid that young got noticed and hired by Sony to become part of the animation team for the movie.
This week, I came across another wild moment. Louis Vuitton hired a 13-year-old intern after his mother posted his sketches on X (formerly Twitter).
Write Yourself Out
Here’s a quote I liked by writer John Rogers I came across this week:
“You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.”
Rogers’ quote is similar to Dipen Parmar’s quote:
"The magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding."
The magic you're seeking will not be found by thinking but by doing. Do the thing, do it scared, and take it one day at a time.
Long Games
Eliot Peper wrote an article on Substack about the beauty and the freedom of playing long games. Playing long games is often the tradeoff between good and great. Check out the article here.
Slow Productivity
To go along with Peper’s thoughts, I’d also like to share that Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, wrote another great column in the New Yorker two weeks ago about the concept of “slow productivity.” The basic idea is as he writes “We need fewer things to work on. Starting now.” Check out the article here.
Johnny Cash Wasn’t Kidding
He really did go everywhere. His discography spanned nearly five decades, featuring over a thousand songs he played around the world. And he’s got countless stories to prove it, too.
I’m slowly working through his autobiography, co-authored by journalist Patrick Carr.
You can tell Cash had a big heart, but unfortunately, that big heart cast a big shadow of darkness that he couldn’t escape. He had deep wounds that he learned to nurture in both good and bad ways. That was Cash though: a walking contradiction. Part truth, part fiction, part gypsy, part homebody, part simple, part complex—at times, it seems the music superstar was part Johnny, part Cash. The thing is that he embraced it.
That’s how great artists are made.
They walk the line of their contradictions. They embrace their paradoxical nature. More importantly, they understand what spiritual guru Ram Dass meant when he said, “The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light.”
If that’s true, Cash may have been one of its greatest students.
Think of Your Bookcase as a Wine Cellar
Last year in September, I shared a term I found: tsundoka. It’s a Japanese slang term from the late 19th century that combines tsunde-oku (“to pile things up for ready later and leave”) and dokusho (“reading books”).
Buying new books can trick you into believing you’re doing something productive (guilty), but it can also build what author Nassim Nicholas Taleb called an “anti-library.” Taleb believes having stacks of books around you that you are yet to read promotes humility and curiosity. I suppose there’s more than one way to justify buying many books, depending on how you look at it. In the case of this week, I found another way to do so — a quote by Luc Van Donkersgoed:
“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a “to be read” pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”
Mami Cocktails Kitchen & Bar
Nice little spot in Thao Dien. Twelve seats downstairs on the street level. Forty seats upstairs overlooking Xuân Thủy Street. Great cocktails, great tapas, and a fun happy hour from 4-8 pm. Worth checking out.
Thao Dien Night Street
To end this week’s newsletter, I’d like to share that the Thao Dien Night Street is set to open tonight and will go on every Friday and Saturday from 7 pm to 2 am until July 19!
Thank you for reading. Enjoy the weekend and see you next Friday
—Garrett
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the book “Sleight of Mouth” by Robert Dilts has been aging like a fine chianti should, on my shelf for the last 5yrs.