[Weekly Wrap] Field Notes #50, Mastery, & Effortless Mindfulness

I hope you had a great week and are resting through a calm weekend. My family and I are on vacation this week so emails will go out on Tuesday and the (next) weekend WRAP. We'll just miss one :)

Here's what I'm making, watching, reading, and listening to 📹 📺 📖 🎧

📓 Field Notes released their 50th edition notebook with a bonus desk ledger for quarterly subscribers. It's packed full of interesting anecdotes about Field Notes, including the 9,000,000 staples used in the binding of 50 editions worth of notebooks. Watch the flipthrough and review.

🎙️ I was a guest on Peter Akkies podcast How They Get Stuff Done. We talked bullet journals, digital migrations, and a protecting your time to focus on high-leverage work. I had a great time and Peter is a great interviewer. Enjoy!

🥋 I listened to Lex Fridman's interview with John Danaher, a legendary jiu-jitsu coach. The full episode is 3.5 hours long (!!) but I found this short clip on mastery and skill development.

What really stood out to me was the persistence of hard thinking. Going through the motions with the same ol' same ol' mindset will lead to competence, but not mastery. You need to challenge your way of thinking to grow and master whatever you're doing. Blew my mind.

🚢 My most popular Ship30 essay from this week was The Most Important Lesson I Learned Working with the World's Top Creators. Read it on my Twitter feed and check out my Ship30 training to help you start a writing habit.

✍️ Another popular link I shared this past week was a video of Stephen King and George RR Martin from 2016. Martin asks King "how do you write so fast?" and King lays out his entire routine. Martin retorts...

Aren’t there days you get distracted, check your email, wonder if you had any talent at all, and thought you shoulda been a plumber?

Martin has sold more books & made more money than 99.9% of writers, yet he still asks these questions! It's ok for you to ask them too :)

🧘 The last share of the week is a book I'm reading - The Way of Effortless Mindfulness by Loch Kelly. I was fortunate to be a part of a group session with Loch recently and his meditation style really clicked with me. It was simple, elegant, but powerful. This passage stood out to me...

They (glimpses) are “micro-meditations” or “rest stops” where we can refresh or reboot our whole body-mind system... the primary way of practicing effortless mindfulness is small glimpses, many times.

I hope you can find some mental rest stops this week. I know I'll be doing the same. Have a great week!