#79: Three Things that got me thinking

🌱Hope Jahren + 🎸Arcade Fire + 🐆Glennon Doyle

Bonjour,

I'm going on a summer break! In my absence, you’ll receive a few re-runs of Three Things, so you can (re)discover some old favourites while I spend time away from my keyboard. Also, if you missed last week’s posts, you can:

• share / find book ideas on this discussion thread

• read / listen to my interview with Daniel Pink

Now, here are the Three Things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation in the past week:

1. a scientist’s memoir

2. incentives for musicians

3. a rallying cry

Happy August.

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1. True scientist

I want to dedicate this quote from geobiologist Hope Jahren¹’s beautiful memoir Lab Girl to anyone who’s plodding through a Ph.D. at the minute, and anyone on their support team (yay us!):

A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you’re told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs².

Also this:

People are like plants: they grow toward the light. I chose science because science gave me what I needed—a home as defined im the most literal sense: a safe place to be.

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2. True music

Did you notice that recent pop songs tend to last around 2:30? It’s not only because we have a short attention span, or because lots of musicians suddenly decided that they loved the short form, but possibly because artists get paid more money that way. (As a daily user of music streaming platforms, I am feeding that system.)

Here’s Arcade Fire’s Win Butler telling BBC interviewer Faisal Islam how the band’s playing the streaming platforms’ game all wrong:

Islam: As musicians, does [the algorithm] create strange incentives?

Butler: Not [for] us. We’re doing it so wrong. The modern trick is you put a thousand tracks on your record because that’s more streams [and more streaming revenue]. We don’t do this crap for the money, let’s put it that way. If we weren’t playing music, I don’t think we’d be functioning humans.

BBC Newsnight @BBCNewsnight

"Streaming money is laughable for younger bands." Arcade Fire’s Win Butler tells #Newsnight we wouldn’t have iconic musicians like U2, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan if they started their careers in the era of streaming Watch the full interview at 2230 on @BBCTwo

PS: If you’re after human music suggestions, you can:

• watch out for my August list of motivation-adjacent songs

  (subscribe to get it in your inbox, and find my playlist archive here)

• check out Leo Mascaro’s rich and lovely Shuffle Sundays

• subscribe to composer Fog Chaser’s atmospheric monthly newsletter

fog chaser @fogchaser__

As artists, I don't think we should be writing for the algorithm, but it's getting harder not to when the algorithm is the only way to get your music heard by people. And to make the algorithm happy, we feel pressure to cater to the playlisters. The gatekeepers.

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3. True wild

I finally read Glennon Doyle’s mega-best-seller Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living, a memoir in the shape of short inspirational chapters. Throughout, Doyle urges readers to challenge their social conditioning, in particular prescriptions about motherhood as martyrdom. In short, she suggests women do whatever the heck they really want: she doesn’t write about self-improvement, but about finding what and who was always there.

This New Yorker profile aptly describes her style:

Doyle, who sometimes refers to herself as a “clinically depressed motivational speaker,” has a knack for distilling wisdom from seemingly incompatible sources—radical feminism, evangelical Christianity, twelve-step programs, Pema Chödrön—into an easy-drinking blend. Everything will be better, she suggests, if you just tell the truth about yourself.

Here are two bits from the book that stood out on first reading:

We can make our own normal. We can throw out all the rules and write our own. We can build our lives from the inside out. We can stop asking what the world wants from us and instead ask ourselves what we want from our world. We can stop looking at what's in front of us long enough to discover what's inside us.

We all want purpose and connection. Tell me what breaks your heart, and I’ll point you toward both.

1. Before having kids, I bookmarked and returned again and again to Jahren’s wise, warm, funny advice piece: “Five Things I Say To Career Women Who Tell Me They Might Want To Have A Baby”. It still rings true years later:

As with everything else that’s important, only listen to people that you trust and respect, and even then make sure you decide for yourself.

2. Though I believe many capable, willing people also leave their Ph.D. programs because their academic environment is ruthless, not because they’re incapable or unwilling.