Zach Phillips

Relentfulness

In the past I have celebrated “relentlessness.” Here is the first-listed definition of “relent”:

re·lent /rəˈlent/ abandon or mitigate a harsh intention or cruel treatment

I’m interested in abandoning all harsh intentions and cruel treatments. I’m switching to relentFULness. 👇

It’s obvious where this comes from. We want to win and because we live in a coercive culture we assume that we can get more performance out of ourselves by pushing harder. The more painfully we can inflict harsh intentions and cruel treatments, the better our chances of winning.

One of the problems with inflicting harsh cruelty on ourselves is that we’re biologically programmed to avoid pain. That’s not a bug. It’s a feature. But the culture would have us believe it’s a bug.

When you’re relentless, you set up all the conditions that promote avoidance.

I’m not coming at this theoretically. I’ve now experimented with mitigating harsh and cruel treatment since before Christmas. Some results: I’ve exercised 75 days in a row, done my job better than ever before, and I’m actually working on “passion projects.”

Oh, and I feel good.

The joke is totally on relentlessness because I get way more done when I don’t treat myself like shit. Relentlessness does the opposite of what it claims. It both makes you sad and unhealthy and it causes you to do less.

The really tricky thing is that it seems relentfulness cannot be pursued for the sake of productivity. That’s relentlessness in disguise. And if, like me, relentlessness is all you’ve known, it’s very difficult to trust that relentfulness will lead anywhere good.

A belief can’t simply be claimed or mantra’d into power, particularly when there’s an opposing incumbent. For a new belief to win, the truth of it must be experienced directly.

Go easy on yourself. You may find, as I have, that relentlessness was never a virtue, or even useful.

False Dependencies

One trick I’ve frequently played on myself is “since THIS isn’t good enough yet, there’s no point in doing THAT.”

I allow a weak link to become a dependency with the power to invalidate the whole chain. 👇

“Since the design for my blog isn’t quite right yet, there’s no point in posting anything.”

“Since I’m not in the shape I want to be in, there’s no point in dressing nice.”

“Since I don’t have a perfect system for organizing my stuff, there’s no point in putting anything away.”

I’m writing about this today because I need to remind myself that these are all false dependencies. They’re tied to self doubt, to a feeling that I’m not good enough, that I don’t have what I need to do X or Y.

I forget that I’m ultimately responsible for setting any dependency.

I have a habit of adding as many false dependencies as possible, aiming for this perfect set of conditions before I can start.

Constraints in creative work are essential and important. Dependencies are not.

A Constraint helps us finish something. A Dependency prevents us from starting something.

A (simple) Constraint: “I have one hour to post 250-500 words.” A Dependency: “Once this (task of indeterminate length) is ready, I can start.”

Dependency is Constraint’s evil twin.

Premature Automation

Working on automating a thing before you’re already doing the thing regularly is almost always a bad idea (though it can be fun).

And it’s always a bad idea if you’re working with a team. 👇

I was reminded of this the other day when I noticed this guy had a screenshot of his blog post for the post’s social image, so you could read the beginning of his post when he shared it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jakobgreenfeld/status/1366363872324542468?s=21

Brilliant! He must be using some kind of plug-in that runs a headless Chromium browser that loads and takes a screenshot and—I asked him, excitedly…

His response: https://twitter.com/jakobgreenfeld/status/1366777955213582340?s=21

Those of us who like to play with automation (“Leave matters of the robots… to the robots…) are always jumping the gun with automation, over-engineering something before we’ve even fully understood the problem it’s solving by encountering it over and over.

We spend all this time automating, perhaps with justifications to ourselves like “this thing won’t be worth doing at all if it doesn’t happen automatically.” This is usually just Yak shaving, often to avoid doing the thing in the first place.

Sometimes we’re prematurely automating just for fun, because we like playing with computers and robots. That’s fine, but if it’s something we’ve put between ourselves and doing the thing we care about, it’s probably just a common Yak.

This becomes particularly unhelpful when we’re working with a team—when others need to use the products of our automation. Most of them a) won’t get it/care, and b) when it inevitably doesn’t do what they expect or doesn’t cover an edge case, they’ll just do it manually anyway.

Now you’re not just the premature automation person, you’re the angry premature automation person.

This happens all the time. So many software applications exist to accomplish a task that would have been done better manually with a spreadsheet, or by email, or on paper…

And all this leaves aside that most stuff isn’t actually worth automating… Could a robot do it? Sure. But is the time and context switch that it will take to automate worth it, particularly since the automation is inherently inflexible?

Probably not: https://twitter.com/zachphillips/status/1366780348516990978?s=21

My First COVID Vaccine

Yesterday morning, I got my first COVID vaccine.

The fact that tears well up in my eyes when I say or type the words “This last year has been hard” indicates to me that it has, in fact, been hard. 👇

At this point, my tendency is to hem and haw about how lucky and privileged I am and how this has been so much harder for most everyone else than for me (all true) but I’d like to question my motive here, because I wonder if I might be accomplishing the opposite of my intention.

The purpose of acknowledging my advantages, privileges, and arbitrary luck is presumably to not be selfish, to increase my capacity for empathy and compassion for others, to honor their pains and struggles, and hopefully to inspire myself to action to provide needed change.

But are these really my underlying motives? I worry they are not.

More importantly, I worry that my response, which amounts to a rote vocal minimization of my own pain, actually accomplishes the opposite of my intention to cultivate a greater sense of compassion for others.

When I feel the impulse to caveat every pain (or celebration) with an acknowledgment that “I don’t really have a right to complain or celebrate because blah blah blah,” I think I’m doing at least two really unhelpful things, and with faulty reasoning behind them.

1. I’m not allowing myself to fully feel or process my suffering, which I require to appreciate the suffering of others.
2. On some level I’m using the acknowledgment of others’ pain as a false device by which I can soothe uncomfortable feelings.

These aren’t my intentions.

It’s possible to look at something that seems to be important to your intentions, to evaluate carefully whether it’s true, to determine that in fact it is true, yet be looking in entirely the wrong direction.

I want to lean into this experience. To really feel it. I need to cry.

Cutting off compassion to yourself doesn’t preserve more compassion for others. It does the opposite. It’s a clumsy soothe, an avoidance of experience like any other, its own kind of suffering.

Money and positions in power structures are limited resources. Compassion is not.

Power Puttering

Yak Shaving isn’t always bad. Most of the skills I have were cultivated in the process of Yak Shaving. Discoveries. Useful digressions.

If you lean in to Yak Shaving, you can achieve another thing entirely: Power Puttering (I think this term was coined by @hotdogsladies).

For those unfamiliar with Yak Shaving: When I explained the concept to my coach @m_ashcroft, he sent this Bryan Cranston scene from Malcolm in the Middle and it’s a perfect illustration: https://youtu.be/AbSehcT19u0

Power Puttering is Glenda the Good Sister Witch of Yak Shaving.

Power Puttering is about just going with the flow of Yak Shaving, allowing the task at hand to diverge seven different ways. You just keep moving. Never stop moving. Podcasts and books on tape are great companions for this.

Power Puttering can be incredibly relaxing.

Proper Power Puttering requires eliminating interruptions, and certainly any and all judgments of whichever putterpond you’re deep into.

Caution must be employed, because getting knocked out of a deep, earthy Power Putter is a recipe for snapping at loved ones.

As soon as you begin to judge your Power Putter negatively, it becomes a common Yak. Be kind. Be open. Just allow the exploration.

My First Few Screenwriting Tips

First: Screenwrite however you like. Aside from formatting, there really aren’t rules. There can and should be as much style, personality, and nuance in screenwriting as any other form, but here are a few tips/frames that might help beginners. 👇

1. The main purpose of the screenplay is to allow readers to see the movie in their minds, ideally at the right pace. You can really cut out all filler, especially “We see ” and add lots of visuals. Sentence fragments are fine/encouraged.

.EXAMPLE 1A, FOREST, DUSK

We see a battle taking place in a forest of pine trees. We hear sounds of clashing swords and men screaming.

.EXAMPLE 1B, FOREST, DUSK

Hundreds of men slice through the brush and one another, barely able to see. Swords, axes, screams of death.

2. Film is 80%-90% visual. Dialogue is cool/fun, but writers (because they’re “writers”) almost universally start out in screenwriting with 800% too much dialogue and 90% too little visual description.

A useful exercise: Try writing your movie without any dialogue.

Another pitfall with dialogue: Writerly folks can easily spend way too much time on it too early. We rewrite a dramatic row ten times before we’ve visualized our movie, possibly discovering that the scene is way too long, out of place or rhythm, or is visually deadly.

3. It’s easy to start directing the film on the page, announcing camera placement, movement, and cuts. This can be helpful in certain cases but it comes with problems. It violates my first tip above. Excessive visual instruction ironically makes it harder to visualize the movie.

Humans have incredibly capable imaginations. Just as “a picture is worth a thousand words,” words can evoke thousands of images. As soon as you say “The camera pushes in on her face,” you’ve taken your reader out of their imagination and you’ve lost the emotional thread.

4. In regular prose, you can describe a character’s inner life. Your words are all there is. A screenplay is an intermediate document for creating a movie. In a movie, what is on the screen is all there is.

Try not to write things that aren’t on the screen.

5. This last one may seem obvious but it’s stunning how often it’s overlooked: Be a writer! Have fun! I know great writers who, for some reason, when they try screenwriting, immediately turn dry and boring, focusing so much on rules and conventions that everything dies.

I don’t intend for this to be prescriptive. These are just some tips/frames that could be helpful and that I find myself offering to almost every beginner who gives me a script to read.

One more thing: I can’t recommend John August and Craig Mazin’s Scriptnotes podcast enough.

Writing for One Person

One probably-helpful-to-lots-of-people-but-not-to-me piece of advice: “If you’re having trouble writing for an ‘audience,’ try picking one person and write only for them.”

This actually strengthens my paralysis.

There’s a different reading that’s interesting, though. 👇

Writing is, by itself, helpful to me. When I write, I feel better, think better, I’m more pleasant to family, friends, and passersby. Exercise comes easier. My Sense of Impending Doom knob is turned at least three clicks to the left.

But why publish? Why not just journal?

It’s these questions of “Why publish this?” that remain, even when it’s clear that writing simply makes me happier/nicer/better: “Why are you putting this out there? Who is this for? Who gives a damn about this?”

The answer that satisfies me right now is: “Maybe one person.”

So, to me, writing “for one person” means that if what I’m writing, along with all the attendant benefits to my health and happiness, could possibly be of use or of interest to one person who I may never know, then that’s a good enough reason to press publish.

I think of those who have written the half-baked, way-too-niche, sometimes-cringey stuff that helped me along the way. Thank God they didn’t let ego bullshit stop them.

The vast majority have never, and will never, hear from me, but I’m at least one person they wrote for.

Slowing Down

Almost everything is possible when you slow down.

The only reason it seems hard to slow down is because we’re viciously screaming at ourselves to speed up. 👇

Slowing down is, in fact, the ease-y-est thing one can do. It requires zero effort. That can be read two ways. Both are true but the second reading is more instructive:

1. Slowing down requires ZERO effort.
2. Slowing down REQUIRES zero effort. 👈👍

The reason it’s so hard to release effort is because our entire society is fully bought in to the notion that the way you get things done is through force, coercion, effort. We can say we don’t believe these things but they are fully internalized.

It takes a big leap of trust to consider:

1. What if I stopped yelling at myself about the book I haven’t written?
2. What if I stopped trying to force myself to exercise or “eat right” (whatever the fuck that is)?
3. What if I let go of this Drill Sergeant voice?

Or does it?

Let’s appeal to the “reasonable,” “grown-up” part of you for a moment: What’s the worst that could happen if you gave up self-coercion for, say, one hour? Five minutes? One breath?

Think you’ll be worse off?

We’ve (finally) Reached Peak Camera

Most people don’t know this, but we reached Peak Microphone more than half a century ago. Most of the best microphones, pre-amplifiers, and even processing tools we have today were available in the 60s.

I’m happy to announce that we have now (finally) reached Peak Camera. 👇

On pure image resolution and color fidelity, we actually reached Peak Camera around the same time as Peak Audio, more than half a century ago, but motion picture film (as beautiful as it is) will never be practical or affordable. Digital (sadly) is a requirement of Peak Camera.

For still photography, we reached Peak Camera lonnnnng ago, other than specifically low-light photography, but to be clear, I’m considering motion picture to be a critical requirement of Peak Camera, because it is. The people want it.

Okay, moving on…

We have a tendency to assume that a technology can always get better. That simply isn’t true when the limiting bottleneck is our human senses, our ears and eyes. And I’ve already written about why perfect realism has never been a goal of photography in the first place.

Digital imaging has spent the past 25 some-odd years trying to get that maximum useful fidelity we had already achieved with film. We got mostly there (in my opinion, film is still “better”) for professionals about 5 years ago.

Now we’re there for people with ~$1,000.

This means you can (finally) safely buy a camera. The images and footage you get (the reason to have a camera) won’t get any better. This is Peak Camera. If you’ve got ~$1,000 and want to make the best 2D representations of reality humanity will ever achieve, today’s the day.

Which camera you should buy depends on all kinds of factors, but if you’re even mildly interested in photography and cinematography and want to spend the minimum amount for the maximum photographic return, a camera that you can grow into and never fully exhaust its capabilities…

I recommend the Fujifilm X100V. For most people, this is the last camera you will ever need in your life (assuming it survives, which I expect it to).

In addition to being Peak Camera (all cameras are now), it was designed by toolmakers who actually like photography.

My Commitment to Learning in Public

Today I am making a solemn commitment: Going forward, I will do as much of my learning as possible in public. One reason I’m doing this is to repay my debt to the thousands of generous people who have publicly shared their learning, immeasurably improving my life. 👇

Every person who posted in a forum about how they got a microphone to work, every kid who put up a 42 minute YouTube video about how they’re currently doing unit testing, every person who wrote publicly about their struggles with writing publicly… I owe them all.

I have (almost) no aspirations of building a “channel” or amassing followers. I know that most of the esoteric stuff I’m learning might appeal to one other person in the world 20 years after I’m dead.

That would be the greatest fulfillment of the deepest promise of the web.

Even if your goal is to become a Profitable YouTuber™ with a hyper-focused channel/brand (nothing wrong with that), I hope you never get so focused that you can’t share your learning somewhere.

It takes little extra effort, it helps you, and it might change someone’s life.

The best way to thank an Internet Pal is to do it for someone else. You have no idea the effect that your rambling post about getting your spaghetti carbonara just right could have. It might be the thing that opens up an entire culinary world to someone.