[SB 213] Life reinvention in 4 months

Sep 19, 2023

I’m Matt, and welcome to Steady Beats. If you like to walk for a better life, and also like Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life,” you just might like this newsletter.

A fun life overhaul

Interesting question answered here by Cal Newport: “How do I reinvent my life in four months?”

I won’t summarize his entire plan (watch the video!), but basically there are four stages:

Establish discipline: Prove to yourself you can take on routines and positive habits
Codify your values: Reconnect with your moral intuition
Set control: Automate what you can, curtail what isn’t useful
Set your vision: Overhaul aspects of your life to be more remarkable

Most of us aren’t looking for total life overhauls, but we all have areas we want to improve. Newport’s framework works for that.

Make your hobby remarkable

Particularly interesting was the vision section, where Newport suggests you take on two areas in your life to make remarkable:

One small area, like a hobby
One large area, like pivoting careers or starting a business.

Newport uses the example of someone who enjoys movies, but decides to become a cinephile. Making that area of life more remarkable might include:

Upgrading your home theater setup
Setting up a system to watch movies every week (borrow DVDs from the library, or use the Netflix-by-mail system which still exists)
Committing to reading three articles about each movie in advance
Taking an online course about movie appreciation
Later on, joining a local cinema club

So the budding cinephile takes concrete steps for a hobby upgrade, and puts new systems into place to sustain it. After some time this hobby is a much more interesting and impactful aspect of the person’s life.

This act teaches you how to do an overhaul in a low-stakes way, giving you the confidence to do it with longer-range, higher-stakes areas of your life.

Using this framework to explore What-Ifs

We all have “What-Ifs” in life. What-Ifs are less than regrets. They are choices we made we think about, and wonder how life might have been different if we chose a different path, without necessarily regretting it.

Newport’s framework seems like a fun, low-stakes way to explore our What-Ifs.

Here’s one of my What-Ifs:

In college, I joined the school paper’s advertising team and eventually became the manager. It was fun. I made friends, learned sales skills, and made good money on commission.

But: what if I’d joined the paper as a sportswriter instead? Might I have continued that path after college?

I’ll never know.

I’m not sure I would have enjoyed working in the media long-term, and the newspaper business is a zombie industry today.

So I don’t regret it. But I do wonder. It’s a What-If.

Couple the What-If with my sports fandom. I love college football. I like the NFL and baseball. And I often feel guilty because watching and reading about sports because it isn’t “productive.”

But what if I used Newport’s framework to upgrade my sports fandom to explore sportswriting? What if instead of just watching, I used my fandom to:

Get smarter about sports strategy and history
Create content
Connect with other fans

Using Newport’s framework, I could create steps to make my sports fandom more remarkable:

Set up a Twitter account to connect with other fans of Michigan State football, basketball, and Major League Baseball
Commit to researching Michigan State opponents and Tweet out a short scouting report in advance of each game
Set up a Substack to write and vent post-game, and to talk strategies during the off-season

Bonus step: consider collecting some cards from the teams I follow, and write about player history and the process of buying the cards.

After a few months, I’d have:

A (small) following
Better sports knowledge
Some new connections around my fandom
A body of creative work — real output rather than just consumption

Will I do this?

Not sure, but it does sound fun. And it’s an upgrade from consumption to content creation and connection with others.

How could you use Newport’s framework to explore your What-Ifs?

A free Write of Passage test drive

You’ve seen me write about Write of Passage from time to time, where I work as the director of student success. Some of you have taken Write of Passage already.

If not, maybe you’ve thought about writing online, but aren’t sure what to say, or if what you have to say is valuable, or even how to say it.

Write of Passage has helped hundreds of writers (me included!) push through these questions and obstacles to start publishing their work online.

On Thursday, September 21, at 12pm ET, you can join us for a free test drive of Write of Passage.

You’ll learn frameworks, complete live exercises, and see examples of others who have used writing online to catapult themselves toward new clients, businesses, and book deals.

I promise you’ll leave the free workshop a better writer than you came in. So grab a spot, and feel free to reach out with any questions.