Productive Tension

"wanna go to Austin but I want to stay home
invite our friends over but still be alone
live for danger but play it cool
have everyone respect me for being the fool"

— "Ryan's Song" by Ethan Hawke

I heard this lyric the other day from Ethan Hawke's great TED video on creativity. I feel this deeply. As a sometimes-maybe-kind-of introvert, the tension he highlights between opposing desires is something I think about nearly every day.

Go to a party or read a book?
A long bike ride or hit the gym?
Business idea X or Y?

This applies to big stuff, too. Fundamental decisions around my career—what kind of work do I do, what kind of hours does it require, how much time do I get with my family—are balancing act between ambition and ease. The decisions around diet and health are frequently dopamine vs. longevity. The decisions around how I structure and prioritize social time are connection vs. recovery.

I was asking Claude about this (yes, I know, it still feels weird to me, too) and it (they?) hit on another nice framing for tension: productive vs. unproductive.

Productive is the kind that drives innovation and moves you forward. It's where competing ideas generate creative solutions. It's where opportunity cost becomes a forcing function to help form conviction and progress.

Unproductive, in Claude's words, are "where these opposing ideas paralyze rather than propel." It's when we're genuinely indecisive but let this tension hold us back, and stagnate. It's when we demand 100% instead of being okay with 70%.

So what's the right amount of tension? At what point are you just stretching yourself thin because you're indecisive? At what point does the tension break?

I don't think you find that answer in your head, or maybe even your heart. You find it with your hands and feet, by moving forward and seeing what happens. By trying things out and paying attention to how it feels, then course correcting as needed. By navigating the discomfort and holding some space for the unknown, while not getting stuck in it.

John Keats put this as "negative capability"—the ability to remain in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." It's about being comfortable operating within that paradox and allowing tension to be a creative constraint that helps you create magic within your unique experience.

What I'm Working On

As I alluded to last time, I'm working on some ideas in the aerospace world. It's the strangest, hardest left turn I could make at this point in my career but I'm learning a lot and meeting a hell of a lot of cool people. Quick asks:

• Again, if you know any aerospace engineers, please let me know!
• If you have any connections in the military and defense world who would be open to a quick conversation with me, I'd love to talk with them.
• If you know of any investors interested in long-shot, expensive, old-school-style VC bets... boy do I have a pitch for them. We're not actively fundraising yet but getting closer and eager for feedback and input.

Related-ish, I've been making paper airplanes as a morning meditation (for me meditation right now = working with my hands in some capacity, no screens). This and this (different Alex!) are excellent guides.

10 Things

It's very, very hard to narrow this down to ten, but I'm going to do my best.

🔠 I'm absolutely obsessed with [Bracket City], a new word game where you solve clues in brackets to unlock a fun fact. It's more fun than I just described, just go play it. Also the daily emails include a "word of the day" that is actually brilliant and interesting. Highly, highly recommend.

👨‍🎨 I linked above but I'll link again, Ethan Hawke's TED video, "Give yourself permission to be creative."

✈️ Chilly ATC combines chill music with air traffic control for a weird, perfect focus vibe.

📰 This article about the DAK Catalog is so nerdy and thorough and delightful. By Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic (and makers of the also delightful Playdate handheld video game system).

🔍 I'm testing out Chance AI, a new AI-powered visual search. For someone like me who loves fun facts and has a penchant for stumbling down lots of wikipedia rabbit holes, this is pretty fun.

📍This clever little microsite, things.in, shows you all the best things in whatever city you punch in. Will use this as a starting point for our April Europe travels.

📹 Astronaut shows you recently uploaded YouTube videos that almost no one has seen, as if you are quietly observing these little micro-moments while floating in space above the earth.

🃏My wife and I have started playing the card game spite and malice on quiet nights after the kids go to bed and it is very fun. (From the excellent Rambull newsletter.)

🗓️ The always-amazing Hiro Report shared Life in Weeks, an amazing life calendar tool inspired by Gina Trapani's "my life in weeks" page, which was itself inspired by the original from Wait But Why.

🧳 Peak Design is making a roller bag. Shut up and take my money.

Scroll Time

If I'm going to get stuck scrolling social media sometimes, I might as well share the interesting bits.

Media Diet

Ex-articles, etc.

📚 I started and quit Wolf in White Van, not because it was bad but just didn't vibe right now (written by the lead singer of The Mountain Goats, who we saw in December). Now almost finished with Redshirts which is pretty good but frankly I probably should've quit, too—just not amazing and life is too short for "fine" books. To make matters worse, as I was reading both I found underlines from when I guess I read them many years back, but remember literally zero details of either (that was a rough period, I'm not surprised I didn't retain much of my reading).

📺 Still working on Severance (SO GOOD) and started watching Common Side Effects while on the rowing machine, really excellent.

🎮 Less games lately, still working through the Call of Duty Black Ops 6 campaign (which is great!) and finally got myself a Playdate (after reading that DAK Catalog article), which is so cute.

A Note on Process

My timer has six seconds left so I guess I nailed it.