Welcome to the first installment of Books & Reflections, my regular roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, and reflecting on. This series tracks the ideas shaping my work, my writing, and myself.

📚 Inputs & Influences

Books – Fiction

Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen, 1813.

The Mystery of the Blue Train. Agatha Christie, 1928.

The Masqueraders. Georgette Heyer, 1928.

The Pursuit of Love. Nancy Mitford, 1945.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. Benjamin Stevenson, 2022.

Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect. Benjamin Stevenson, 2023.

Books – Non-fiction

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Oliver Burkeman, 2021.

Mere Christianity. C.S. Lewis, 1944.

The Color of Water. James McBride, 1995.

On Writing Well:  The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. William Zinsser, 1976.

Essays & Editorials

Antisemitism in Britain. George Orwell. Contemporary Jewish Record, 1945.

Notes on Nationalism. George Orwell. Polemic, 1945.

A Journey Into My Colon – And Yours. Dave Barry, Miami Herald, 2008.

Articles

George Orwell. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces. Kayla Gogarty, MediaMatters for America.

How Leading CEOs are Engaging in Politics. Brian Bartlett and Piotr Pillardy, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.

Podcasts

Actors on Actors: Angelina Jolie & Cynthia Erivo. Variety.

Actress Roundtable: Angelina Jolie, Demi Moore, Zendaya, Zoe Saldaña, Mikey Madison & Tilda Swinton. The Hollywood Reporter.

Conferences

Keynote Craft. Cerené.

🔍 What’s Sticking With Me

Four Thousand Weeks reframes time management into an existential reckoning. The average human life span is 77 years – roughly 4,000 weeks to create a meaningful life. Rather than try out countless productivity hacks to squeeze more into life, Burkeman argues we should get very good at doing less. The name of the game is to make peace with all the things we won’t do, get crystal clear on the 2-3 things that do matter, and ruthlessly remove everything else – the noise – from our lives.

On Writing Well builds upon this existentialist world view. “Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it,” Zinsser writes. But what about people like me, who don’t know what we want to do – or even who we are? Zinsser argues that writing is the cure – a painful cure because good writing is hard to do – but muck about long enough with any piece of writing and the result is self-discovery. After all, “clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.”

💬 One Sentence I Can’t Shake

Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.

Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Penguin Books, 2021.

🧠 The Big Question

The aftermath of the American election – and the anticipation of our own Canadian one – brought a sobering realization: a decade of social media has fragmented our attention and eroded our shared context. As a result, our identities – personal, social, national – feel more fractured than ever. I felt the effects strongly on my concentration, incapable of reading to the bottom of a page without checking my phone, bracing for the next news alert. Never mind thinking clearly, at times I couldn’t string two coherent thoughts together!

Thanks to Four Thousand Weeks, I’ve reconnected with my agency: the challenge is to extract the pertinent knowledge from the news cycle without allowing current events to grab my attention. My job is to get clarity on what matters for my remaining 2,000 weeks (hopefully!) on Earth and then channel my sustained attention to those priorities. A clear mandate within my control.

💡 What I’m Curious About Next

The Variety interview and The Hollywood Reporter roundtable explore how our voice shapes our storytelling and our ability to connect with one another. I’m curious: what is my voice? how do I use it? what is mine to tell?   

📝 Creative Update

To help answer these questions, I’ve joined a Toastmasters Club! A safe space to explore storytelling and creative intention, without contributing to the collective noise.

📣 Invitation to Engage

What’s your relationship to attention right now? And what are you feeding it?