#073 That Went By Fast

Dec 13, 2022

Common Discourse is a project designed to help others (and ourselves) think through creativity, focus, and intentional work—from Alex Tan & Alice Otieno.

Every Tuesday we share words from a journal, a few ideas, a quote from somebody else, and links worth sharing. On Fridays we invite a guest to share images from their camera roll and a sound that resonates with them.

We love a Tuesday.

This is the last Weekly Briefing of the year as Alice and I both are taking time off from Common Discourse to reset the mind and go into 2023 with fresh eyes. We’re also taking all of January off to brainstorm and set goals for this project, keeping our promise of making this as intentional as we possibly can.

I’ll be sharing some images from my camera roll on Friday and one last Journal post before we fully log off and head into the sunset.

But for now, here are my favorite creations and curations from this year.

— Alex

A few ideas

I. SPEED OF TRUST

There are hundreds of ways to optimize efficiency and speed in our work, just ask the Internet:

Use a timer, make a plan, organize your workspace, minimize distractions…

Even with the perfect game plan, there’s still a question of how we approach the work mentally.

Questions like: How quick are you to make decisions? What is your ability to facilitate tasks to others when you feel overwhelmed? To what level do you allow ourselves to consider the input of teammates when you feel stuck?

Environment design always reduces friction, but fundamentally, we only move at the speed of trust.

II. BOTTLENECK

Waiting for the perfect idea or circumstances will always be the bottleneck. Write down words and start doodling until it makes sense to you. If it doesn’t make sense today, try again tomorrow. And then again the next day.

The person who sits down to make sense of their thoughts 100 times will strike lightning more than the person who sits down a few times before throwing in the towel.

III. GROWTH BOTH WAYS

If you’ve ever seen the growth diagram of a tree, you’ll notice that the growth that is happening beneath the ground is often just as large if not larger than the visible part of the tree above ground.

Nature and humanity are one in the same. The systems, habits, and lifestyles that we choose behind the scenes are required to take place before results become visible.

A quote from somebody else

“When we choose growth over perfection, we immediately increase our shame resilience. Improvement is a far more realistic goal than perfection. Merely letting go of unattainable goals makes us less susceptible to shame. When we believe “we must be this” we ignore who or what we actually are, our capacity and our limitations. We start from the image of perfection, and of course, from perfection there is nowhere to go but down.”

— Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t)