#45: Three Things that got me thinking
🤷🏽♀️What works for you + 📖Other Parents + 🔬heart-warming Nobelist
Bonjour dear subscribers,
This week, I am sending posts on Monday and Wednesday (instead of the usual Tuesday and Friday).
Tell me, do you have preferred days of the week and / or times of the day to receive and read this newsletter? Do you read my emails whenever the mood is right, or open them at a predetermined time in your schedule? I’m curious to know!
Here are three things that made me think about intrinsic/extrinsic motivation in the past week.
1. Know thyself, and all that
In her fun, informative newsletter Agents + Books, literary agent Kate McKean signed us a generous permission slip to do / not do certain things as a book author. (Or any other creator. This definitely applies to newsletter writers, too!)
For example, McKean says, you don’t have to ever tweet, or make a book playlist (I love making mine!), or have hot takes about things that outrage other people. You don’t even have to publish your book, she writes (in her newsletter about book publishing):
!!!!!!!!!!!!! SHOCKING I KNOW, especially coming from me!!!! But no one says you have to write everything for publication. You can put it on your website […] or Patreon or print it out and leave it on park benches! You can just write it for fun! For YOU! You can also very much desire to be traditionally published and that is ALSO ok.
And that’s because, McKean says, the most important skill a writer can have is self-awareness:
You might be able to write 3,000 words a day every day and pop out a book in a month, but if you develop Vitamin D deficiency and carpal tunnel, is it really working? I’m not (only) talking about work life balance. I’m talking about knowing the difference between what works, and what works for you. […] Know thyself, and all that. It’s corny, but it’s true.
AMEN, and thank you.
2. Pride, stretch and cash
Last week, I read Other Parents by Sarah Stovell, a dark-ish, entertaining novel that reminded me of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies. Other parents is also a school gate drama with a struggling single mother in a small, privileged town, over-the-top PTA politics, and shameful secrets slowly revealed. It’s set in a well-off area in the northeast of England, and gave me a little UK nostalgia.
The quotes below caught my attention as I was reading (no spoilers to worry about). The ways these people view intrinsic/extrinsic motivation give an immediate sense of their characters, and are a good sample of Stovell’s acerbic tone1:
22-year-old Luke:
He’d achieved all As in his GCSEs and A levels, plus a first-class degree from a top university, and his parents hadn’t given him anything apart from a few celebratory meals. ‘Mum says hard work is its own reward, and what more do I need than the results? Well you know, a bit of the old Mum-and-Dad pride wouldn’t go amiss,’ he said.
16-year-old Maia:
Hamlet was part of Maia’s enrichment class, aimed at stretching the most able to prepare them for their eventual Oxbridge entrance. Maia was scornful of Oxbridge, and said she had no intention of going. She wanted to be stretched for the purpose of being stretched. There didn’t, she argued, always need to be a tangible outcome to deeper thought in order to be worthwhile.
‘Professional parents’ at the school gates:
It wasn’t enough for them to simply know they were the best, most devoted mothers in town. They needed to make sure everyone else saw them that way, too. Otherwise, what would be the point? They could have just stayed at work, been rewarded with hard cash and recognition.
3. Nobel crush
I have a science-crush on biologist Ardem Patapoutian, who shared last year’s Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine with David Julius.
Exhibit A—His research work is cool and important, as this news article by Gretchen Vogel in Science explains:
The molecular discoveries that explain why chili peppers taste hot and mint tastes cool—along with the reveal of proteins that help us sense a gentle breeze or a sharp poke—have earned two scientists [the 2021] Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
“Every organ in the human body has tissues where pressure sensing is really important,” says Katharina Zimmermann, an electrophysiologist at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen–Nürnberg.
Exhibit B—Read this heart-warming interview on the Nobel Prize organization’s website:
I think in science many times we get discouraged by these practical setbacks that we all experience, a paper doesn’t get accepted, a grant you write does not get funded. […] What I try to remind myself and everyone else is to remember why you got into science to begin with. […] We come into the lab every day, ask questions about nature, how things work, and [design experiments] to address them. What a great luxury that is, what a privilege it is. I think if you [focus] on the pleasure we get from the discovery process, the joy we get from doing experiments, I think that takes care of all the other setbacks.
Also: Ardem Patapoutian sticks with the trumpet even though he sucks at it! A man after my own heart. (H/T: My Beloved)
I play a little bit of trumpet and it’s interesting. I’m really, really bad at it. I’ve played for many years and I have not mastered this instrument. It’s not an easy instrument. But I enjoy being bad at trumpet.
Exhibit C—Watch him read a cute poem to his colleagues at Scripps Research (from 1:53):
May this mood accompany you for the rest of the day.
I won’t forget this sentence:
“Really, it was charming that Tess went to an outstanding school in a park and Maia played the flute in the high school orchestra, and of course it was long overdue progress that flashers were no longer accepted as just another tiresome thing a girl had to put up with, like monthly cramps and the glass ceiling.”
> "But no one says you have to write everything for publication. You can put it on your website […] or Patreon or print it out and leave it on park benches!"
This reminds me of a schpiel that Margaret Atwood gives about an idea from "The Gift," by Lewis Hyde. Something like this: "Some people write to get their idea out into the world; some write to make money. It is sometimes possible, though not always easy to do both."
For me, some of the best writing I do is in an email or in a discord DM for an individual friend. I THINK best when trying to answer a thorny question FOR someone--a real person who I care about. Additionally, if it's over Discord/Real-Time chat, I get the benefit of a feedback-loop with that friend! They relay their response back to me, and I can find out if my words "hit" at the scale of 1 or 2 sentences, rather than "trying out" 6 paragraphs all at once!! (or--better--they add something new, and we can build on each-others' ideas!)
And SOMETIMES once I've worked out the thought, (and phrasing for it) it might be useful for a wider audience--I might "replay" it later! (having the benefit of knowing "it didn't sound crazy to at least ONE person!") Even Paul Graham sometimes posts essays with the explanation, "This sort or grew out of a question I was answering to a friend over email!"
To answer your first question, I read this whenever I see it published! I’ll read any Tania anytime!
This was all interesting, as always. I really liked those quotes from the novel: “She wanted to be stretched for the purpose of being stretched.”