Issue #16: A 5/7 is Good Enough, Why Americans Eat Dessert for Breakfast, and The Newsroom
A 5/7 is Good Enough, 10,000-Hour Rule, Dessert for Breakfast, The Newsroom, and T.S. Eliot
16 weeks and 4 months. Honestly, I'm baffled because this is the longest I've ever committed to anything in my life. If you could be so kind please reply to this email with any thoughts on the newsletter so far, how I can improve, what you would like to see more of - even one sentence or a 20-second response would really help me. With that said let's get into it.
In this issue you will find:
5/7 is Good Enough
Breaking Down the 10,000-Hour Rule
Why Americans Eat Dessert for Breakfast
The Newsroom
a quote from T.S. Eliot
A 5/7 is Good Enough
I'm a person who has always had trouble maintaining habits. I'd try to take on too much at the same time and end up giving up when I missed a single day. There are times where I'd be trying to develop a habit and if I messed up one day on Tuesday or something then I would declare the war lost and postpone trying to develop the habit to next Monday.
Something I've realized after waking up at 5 AM since January is that just because you miss one day, the war isn't over. If you miss one day that's fine - what's important is that you're back on the horse the next day.
There are times during January when I needed to spend some late nights for school completing homework and attending club meetings. I just had to sleep in the next day or risk obliterating the next day running on only a couple of hours of sleep.
Other days I might have quit at the earliest inconvenience or bump in the road but now I realize that Life happens. Sleeping in for one day is much better than forcing myself to stay awake and risking my mood and energy for the next day.
In particular, waking up at 5 am over the last month has been life-changing - even with the days where I had to sleep in. While talking with my buddy Kurt - who decided to be my accountability partner and wake up at 5 am with me - we both came to the realization that a 5/7 is good enough.
Even though there might be days where we might not jump out of our beds at 5 raring to go, the days that we are able to do that - which happen most of the week - are so productive that it offsets the days that we need to sleep in. The trick is not to get discouraged by momentary failures and accept that doing things 5 out of 7 days is a great win by itself.
Breaking Down the 10,000-Hour Rule
The 10,000-hour rule is nothing new at this point. Popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Gladwell posited that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery and become world-class in any field. This can sometimes feel like an arbitrary number. Even though I knew the number and the rule, I never took the time to break down what that number meant in order to achieve mastery until I had it broken down for me in The Defining Decade.
Say you work as a musician and spend 40 hours a week practicing your instrument and honing your craft. If you work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks in the year, that puts you at 2000 hours for the entire year. Therefore, it would take that musician 5 years of spending 40 hours a week, slaving away at his craft, to become a master. 5 years seems like a lot to me.
Just doing this simple multiplication quantifies the concept to me and makes it clearer about the commitment that I need to place in the things that I want to get better at. For example, my writing - I spend a maximum of 3 hours writing this newsletter at the last minute on Thursdays. 3 hours a week for 52 weeks in a year means that I only spend 156 hours a year writing. By that math, I will become a "master of writing" in 64 years! That's just not good enough. Just doing this simple math has made me realize the work that I need to put into my craft in order to improve exponentially.
Why Americans Eat Dessert for Breakfast - Johnny Harris
The YouTube algorithm served me up a treat this week and introduced me to Johnny Harris. I'm nowhere near ground-floor on this channel because he's literally got Late to this cause he’s literally got 750k subscribers but I've been binging his content this week and he has instantly become one of my favorite YouTubers. A journalist by trade who used to produce videos for Vox, Johnny leverages great storytelling with cinematic footage and an entertaining obsession with maps to tell important stories. I started with the Dessert for Breakfast video linked above which is really interesting and funny. If you want something current and more substantial to sink your teeth into here's an excellent video he recently released about the Navalny situation in Russia that I cannot recommend enough:
The Newsroom
Hi. My name is Rohan and I'm an Aaron Sorkin fanboy. West Wing, Newsroom, The Social Network, Molly's Game - loved them all. I've already written about how I loved the West Wing in previous issues but The Newsroom might have just surpassed it. Over last week, I stumbled upon The Newsroom, also written by Aaron Sorkin, which ran from 2012-2014. The Newsroom is a political drama/comedy TV series that centers around a fictional cable news network Atlantic Cable News and its staff. We follow an irritable and erratic lead anchor played by Jeff Daniels on his "mission to civilize" the news after losing a majority of his audience after a rant at Northwestern. I'd venture to guess that almost everyone's seen the viral "America is not the greatest country in the world" rant and I had to but the show is just sooo much better than you would think from seeing that clip out of context. The show is still as timely today with the message behind it being to report the news not for entertainment or ratings but for a well-informed electorate. I wanted to watch this show "the old way" by limiting myself to one episode a day but it was so good that I finished all 3 seasons and 25 episodes in less than a week. Feel free to check out the trailer below:
Quote of the Week
“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.”
T.S. Eliot
That’s all for this issue, thanks for reading!
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See you next week!
Newsroom still slaps tho I am still an Aaron Sorkin fan boy
We get it bro you’re waking up at 5 am