Dean's 🧠Newsletter #3
How to talk to your future self.
Hello ya’ll!
Here’s this week’s sampling of things I find useful and interesting.
FutureMe Emails
I struggled with journaling growing up. I think I found it hard to feel the purpose of it. Starting in 2012 I started using FutureMe to do my journaling. It’s a service that simply sends you an email at a chosen time in the future. This ensured that at a future date I’d read my journal entry and knowing I’m for sure going to read it motivates me to stick to my journaling. I usually do at least 5 or 6 of these every year on different holidays and occasions. It’s eye-opening to see what things have changed and what never changes over the years. Sometimes I’ll think that I haven’t accomplished much in a given time, but getting an email helps me remember things differently.
Daily Rituals
Learning someone’s processes gives you permission to do things the same way. Learning multiple people’s processes lets you know that there’s more than one way to go about things. Daily Rituals does this in a book of short snippets explaining the creative processes of history’s great creative minds. I have the Kindle version and I’ll crack it open and read a few when I’m waiting at a doctor’s office or for a takeout order.
This chart gives you a visual representation of some of the variety of daily rituals in the book:
Sego Full Album Video
The most refreshing band in music, Sego, put out a new album this week. You could listen on Bandcamp, but I’d suggest watching the full-album music video on YouTube instead.
Rocksmith
I have played guitar on and off since I was 17. I taught myself using guitar tabs on the internet. If anyone were to ask me how to learn guitar or get better at guitar these days I’d tell them about Rocksmith. It’s Guitar Hero, but with real guitars and full of tools to learn, practice, jam, and play guitar (or bass!). You need a guitar with a pickup and a custom guitar-to-USB cable (included with a physical game). I highly suggest the PC version because with a little extra work you can tap into the custom downloadable content to get songs that aren’t available through the in-game store.
Quote
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn't work out, you had your head cut off.
- Edwin H. Land - Founder of Polaroid