Last week, I spent three days in a room with 39 of HubSpot’s other top individual contributors. We were there for Fellows Leadership Academy, where a laptop wasn’t required.
My mother homeschooled six kids all the way through high school during the 1990s and 2000s. A significant challenge then was assembling a coherent curriculum for each of us. Homeschooling’s primary benefit, flexibility, is also its biggest challenge. Back then, few paths were proven and assembling the materials involved everything from the local middle school to regional homeschool conventions and subscribing to upstart periodicals. And she did it all. Springing up to fill the demands of religious homeschoolers were mail order catalogs, small publishers, and the like. Mixed in with the educationally-minded were some people with truly strange beliefs. When you’re on the fringe of the fringe, theflat-earthersandJohn Birchersaren’t far away. That’s how we heard about Doug Wilson.
The finishing piece for my basement office was two leather club chairs. I'm not sure why I have two, as I'm the only person who ever sits down there, but these chairs arrived as a pair. I began sitting in the chair near my desk at the beginning of some workdays. Sitting with your laptop on a club chair isn't a picture of good posture and I can't do it for very long. I didn't buy the chairs to help me focus, but they do. But hunching over a small screen focuses my attention. I can only usefully see one thing at a time. Putting together my to-do list or writing emails or reading, while in the chair, are things I must do one at a time. The opposite is true when I move to the desk. Its giant monitor gives me ample room for the kinds of things that take small slices of my attention.
One of my more privileged complaints was over the length of the walk back to my Dad's secret free parking spots after sports games. The place behind Foxboro Stadium was probably two miles away from the gates, which felt a whole long longer after a January night game. (Yes, the tickets he bought were often playoff tickets—the complaints were privileged!) The parking spots for Red Sox games were a good ways through the Fenway itself, at a Brookline stop along the green line trolley. We didn't take the trolley, though, we walked. You could blame Frederick Law Olmstead for how long that walk felt: the paths are always curving and the vistas always of foliage and water. This was back before baseball games proceeded at their current maniac pace and we always got there for batting practice. A mile or two of walking afterwards could make the event feel interminable. That we had prime seat after prime seat didn’t stem the tide of my grumbling.
A few weeks ago, I sat down to breakfast with an old friend. Among all of the bon mots, one anecdote stuck with me. A most annoying person to talk with about their new idea is the shallow enthusiast. This is the one who is so smitten with the idea he’s just run across, that he can’t help but talk about it, but he hasn’t thought about it at all, so his talk is essentially a referral to wherever he heard the idea. He can do nothing aside from direct you to the original person, perhaps with a quote, but always with a link, “just listen to this podcast.” The shallow enthusiast is forever telling you to listen to so-and-so’s podcast or quoting some writer at you or referring every question to a favored expert. I think of this person as an enthusiast of thought leaders, but not of thoughts. This person is into the thinker, not the idea. The sad truth is that one wonders whether the shallow enthusiast has actually thought things through or whether he’s only consumed the words enough to get excited and pass them along to you. You want to shake such a fellow: it’s all well and good to know how you came by your thoughts, but I want to know your thoughts—not someone else’s!
When my reading app,Readwise, added an RSS subscription feature, it reminded me of those halcyon early days of internet when the cool kids gathered on Google Reader. We subscribed to feeds from indy blogs; we read posts, liked them, and shared them; zany comments on the shares were all the motivation we needed to keep going. Much later,Google Reader died. RIP. The indy blogs we read continue to exist mostly in Substack, as writing for the internet, for free, wasn't something that lasted for most writers. I still read the fellows from 37signals, although they don't really blog anymore. I found some new RSS feeds, though: people on the internet are still writing and I am still reading.
Want some bad advice? Show up as a single golfer, join some strangers to make a foursome on the first tee, and then ask them about their equipment. Golfers, especially the worst ones, like me, are perpetually tempted to blame their equipment. Sometimes this is specific, like when I shelved my driver for half the season; other times it's general, like when I vaguely thought about swapping every club for something newer (or older). Either way, we're very often focused on the club being swung, not the person swinging it. I'm guilty of a decades-long tendency to hit manic slices. While I could change my swing, the gearheads ask, why don't you just replace your driver and three wood with the all-new "thriver"?
Things often aren't what they seem to be.
Early LLMs, when asked to create any kind of promotional or interest-capturing text, would mostly open with the wordsdelve and dive. HubSpot's email subject line generator still often tells me I ought to invite you to read my emails with such words. For today's it recommends, "Discover Depths: Essays & Stories Await You, Friend." The words usually start with "D" and say the opposite of what AI actually gives us. Delving and diving into depths suggests there's something far below the surface, worth reaching, but AI writing is only the slim surface. It's the path of least resistance, for us, where instead of doing the mental work of reading, thinking, and putting pencil to paper, we ask a computer program to allow us to gloss along the surface of a given subject.