One of the reasons I teach is that I need my students to train for. I literally can’t be bothered to learn anything I’m unlikely to pass on, and I’m not actually particularly interested in my own level of fitness, sword skill, etc. I train to remain able to do my job, which is teaching, and to set a good example to my students. Yes, I love swords, and being good at using them, but mostly because of the effect that has on my students.
Thanks to Corona, all my seminars are cancelled, and I can’t go anywhere. There was a time (a very long time) in which even if I didn’t get round to much personal training, I’d be in the salle for 12+ hours a week, and leading a bunch of warm-up sessions in that time. And even when that time of my life passed, I’d be travelling around teaching seminars, and needed to stay fit to do that properly.
In lockdown I have been trying to keep up a basic level of fitness, but the sad fact is I’d rather drink too much wine and sleep it off. So I have decided to create some positive constraints. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 8.15am UK time, and for the foreseeable future, I’ll be doing my morning training *in public*, leading whoever shows up through my usual routines. Sessions will be fairly gentle, and emphasise getting your body ready for the day. Expect some breathing exercises, some range of motion exercises, some strength training, and lots of joint care. Having even just one student there means I can’t skip it. Please note I won’t be doing technical sword training in these sessions, at least to start with.
This is not a class as such- you won't be taught how to do the exercises in any detail (you can find instruction at https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/solo-training), and there will not be time for questions etc during the session, but I will be talking you through what I’m doing, highlighting key safety issues, and so on, just as I do when leading a warm-up in class. Eventually, I expect to be taking requests from the regular attendees, and it may evolve into a more formal class. But I’m very much in favour of starting small, and creating better habits.
This project will do the following things:
1) guarantee that I actually get some physical conditioning training done
2) help anyone that wants it to do the same
Regarding equipment, I’ll use any or all of the following:
A mat
A short stick
Bladebells
Small dumbells
Kettlebells (not too big)
If you think you may have a shortage of equipment, you should watch this video on improvised training tools
I’ll be doing these sessions in my study, i.e. in a small space with normal ceiling height. You won’t need much space around you to follow along, but you will need a decent internet connection.
I have created BookWhen entries for the next few weeks. There are an unlimited number of free tickets so cashflow issues are no impediment, and for those of you that have the cash and want to support my work, I’ve also created tickets at £5 each. Cancelling all those seminars has dented my cashflow, so every little helps!
If this becomes popular and people in inconvenient time zones want me to do something for them, I’ll think about introducing an evening session as well. In the meantime, I’ll record the sessions and drop the videos into a section of the Solo Training course, so you can do them whenever you want. If you haven’t signed up to the Solo course yet, you should- it’s only $20 for the duration of the Corona crisis, or free if you can’t afford it. Just email me for the free entry code.
P.S. If you need a live class at a time when I’ll be tucked up in bed, by all means go train with my friends at Valkyrie Martial Arts Assembly in Vancouver, Canada. You can find their live online schedule here, and they also do entry fees on a sliding scale starting at free: http://boxwrestlefence.com/valkyriewmaa/remote-class-quick-guide/
It’s always the way. You bring out a new book, and somebody comes up with something that makes you jump up and down going “I wanted that in my book!!! Why couldn’t that have come out a month ago!!!”
It’s actually a good feeling. Because no book is the last word on any subject, and no non-fiction book is ever truly finished (which is why we have second editions, third editions, etc etc.).
You may have heard that I’m into bookbinding. I got into bookbinding while I was researching Vadi, and came across the auction house catalogue for the sale of the manuscript to the Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma. The catalogue included a collation of the manuscript, which is a description of the way the pages are bound together. It’s extremely important because it can give you a great deal of insight into what might be missing from the manuscript. I’ve written about that here.
So a couple of weeks after my new Fiore book came out, Mike Chidester (who was one of the inspirations for the book) sends me this email:
A few weeks ago, while trying to do preparatory work on the second facsimile project, I ran into problems with the Getty museum on the subject of how many pages are missing from their online offerings. The reproductions department sent me six scans (the inside and outside covers and one flyleaf) and swore blind that that was all of the missing pages. I was pretty sure that was wrong, and ultimately my questions were bounced to the manuscript department, which sent me this arcane formula:
This is an example of a collation statement, which tries to capture the exact way in which the manuscript is bound together. Manuscripts are built up out of quires, which are stacks of paper that are folded in half and then sewn down the middle, so that each sheet (bifolium) becomes two pages (folia). Medieval manuscripts are often bound in quires of 4 (quaternions), which is the number of parchment sheets of roughly A4 size that you can expect to harvest from a single goat. The number actually typically ranges from 3-5 (ternions to quinternions), because perfect plans rarely survive contact with reality.
The Getty manuscript is a normal-seeming manuscript of 49 numbered folia, so one might expect 7 quaternions (for 56 total folia), with several blank pages at the beginning or end. Instead, when I created a visualization of this diagram (inspired by work I've seen Daniel Jaquet and others do), it turned out like this:
Two single bifolia bound into the spine, and then a series of very large quires—quinternions and a sexternion. What's more, any student of Fiore knows that folio 38, which contains dagger plays, is misplaced; specifically, it belongs between folia 14 and 15, which are the end of quire III and the beginning of IV. Since folio 27 is also bound into the book as a single leaf, we can surmise that 27 and 38 were originally a single bifolium, forming the outside layer of quire IV—making it a septernion, or seven-sheet quire. At the time, I thought that this was a ridiculous number of pages for a manuscript quire. What little I knew. (Excerpt reproduced with permission. Personal correspondence, May 27th 2020).
Finally, finally, finally, we have a collation statement for Il Fior di Battaglia. And the mystery of how folio 38 ended up where it did is solved. It used to be the first page of the next quire, and at some point the vellum tore along its fold, the pages fell out, and what should be folio 15 got bound back in in the wrong place. That binder needs a good slap round the back of the head, of course. But it’s always a relief to get confirmation of a theory. Until now, there was no way to be certain beyond all doubt that the naughty folio 38 wasn’t in fact in its original place (if, for instance, it appeared in the middle of an intact quire), and Fiore just decided to strip a page of dagger plays and dump them between the pollax and the spear plays.
I hear that a lot- pretty much every time I express an opinion that is in any way political, or even somewhat outside my core competence. My response is always the same. If you don’t like what I have to say, then either challenge it with reason and evidence, or go away. The internet is huge- I’m sure you can find someone who agrees with you, no matter what your position. I am under no obligation to conform to other people’s expectations, nor does anyone have the right to tell me to stay in my lane.
Right now, the world appears to be on fire. There are riots in the streets of American cities, a plague has swept the globe, and in badly run countries like the UK and USA it continues to spread. Sure, I could write something about how to get better at your hobby, but I don’t think it’s the best use of my time right now. Instead I am just going to share some of the more useful resources I’ve come across, which may help you navigate these turbulent times.
Before I do so, a position statement:
Black lives matter. As I see it, in Europe and America non-whites have been systematically abused, exploited, and repressed, for centuries. And in the United States right now, it’s really obvious that peaceful protests against police brutality are being met by more police brutality, and vile disgusting white supremacists are inciting further violence and doing whatever they can to delegitimise the protests by looting and other criminality.
But it is also true that some police officers have seen which side they should be on, and joined in the protests. I have friends who are cops, in several countries including the USA. I honestly believe that most officers most of the time are generally trying to make the world a better place, and as a historian I am convinced that a well-regulated police force is an essential part of a safe and fair society. Power corrupts, and so it’s the “well-regulated” bit that’s the main problem. Better hiring practices, training, supervision, and more ethical leadership are the minimum requirements for the police to do their job for us, not against us. You only have to glance at what passes for leadership in both the UK and USA governments right now to see what failure of leadership looks like.
Nurses restrain agitated, violent, distressed people every day, and do it without crushing their airways. There is never a good reason to kneel on a suspect’s neck. Not for eight minutes, not for eight seconds. George Floyd’s name is on everyone’s lips right now, as it should be, but he is just the latest in a very long string of people murdered because the perpetrators thought they could get away with it (and in all too many cases, were correct in that belief). Eric Garner springs to mind. If I tried to list every black person killed while being ‘restrained’ by police, I’d be typing until my fingers bled. And it’s not just America: Sean Rigg (London, 2008), Joy Gardner (London, 1993): in the UK there is a long and shameful list of people incarcerated or killed because of their ethnicity. Racism isn’t always about skin colour (as the Irish and the Jews in the UK know all too well). It is always about whom those in power consider “us” and whom they consider “them”, which is why diversity (of sex, race, orientation, disability) is critically important at every level of government, and within any institution that wields power.
I don’t think this is a controversial position, but I know from experience that I am about to get a deluge of hate mail from racist arseholes who happen to like swords. Seems to me that’s the least I can put up with for the sake of supporting my friends.
But wringing my hands going “oh, the humanity” is not helping anyone. So what does? So far this week, three of the people whose mailing lists I follow have produced guides I've found helpful.
Mark Manson has a mailing list called “Mindf*ck Monday”, which is always worth reading, and this week’s is especially useful. It covers historical precedents, cognitive biases,and the major socio-economic trends underlying the situation. It’s focussed entirely on the USA, but is well worth your time even if you live elsewhere. Read it as a kind of mental warm-up to taking useful action.
Pandora Blake (see their NSFW patreon profile here if you dare), a political activist I support (they were influential in preventing the ghastly stupidity of the British Government’s attempt to enforce age verification on adult websites- a privacy nightmare and a gross violation of both common sense and human rights) has a long list of suggestions, including links to organisations you can support, protests to attend, ways to register protest online, things to read, and so on.
Iain Broome, who I follow for writing tips mostly, has another list of useful resources in his online newsletter here.
Now may be a good time to gently remind everyone of Septimius Severus and his sons Caracalla and Geta, Emperors of Rome from 193-217. Septimius was African, born in Leptis Magna (which is now in Libya). And of course the mother of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, one of the most famous swordsmen of the 18th century, was black. Speaking of the Chevalier, he was not only an amazing fencer, but also a pretty damn good composer: here’s his Violin Concerto in B flat major, op 7 n. 2:
And within hours of this post going live, kind friends reminded me that Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, was the son of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (1762-1806), a full general in the French Army, whose mother Marie-Cessette Dumas was black. De la Pailleterie served at the same time as Touissant Louverture. And let us not forget Abram Petrovich Gannibal, another general, though this time in Russia, whose great-grandson was not bad at writing either- his name was Alexander Pushkin (and as everyone interested in duelling knows, was killed in a duel).
Personally, I am very careful about the actions I take at times like these because it is difficult to predict their outcomes. But doing nothing is also a decision, and a position. At the moment, with two of my household in the high risk category for death from COVID 19 if they catch it, I’m not going out unless strictly necessary, and I certainly won’t be joining any crowds for any reason. Simply taking a position and stating it publicly, as I’m doing here, is not much but it’s more than nothing, and I hope it will do some good while I research, think, talk to people with relevant experience, and come up with something more tangible. It’s not as if the world is waiting for me to spring into action.
One last thing.
I’m an optimist, and I find it comforting to remember that the race riots of 1968 helped trigger the passing of the Fair Housing Act, and the Stonewall riot in 1969 was the origin of the Pride movement. Corona has shone a light on how much we need our key workers of every kind, from supermarket shelf stackers and lorry drivers to nurses and doctors. The widespread collapse of businesses resulting in massive unemployment has shown us how a social safety net is an absolute necessity in a modern society. And the millions of people peacefully protesting the racism baked into our systems of justice show us that racism is not acceptable to the majority of us. I am hopeful that we are living through the fire from which a fairer, safer, better society will emerge.
It is extremely useful to be able to direct your attention to whatever you want. It is also extremely useful to be able to control your state of mind.
There is an awful lot of unnecessary bullshit around meditation. You can use bells and whistles, if you want. You can build yourself a special meditation chamber on a remote hillside, if you’ve got the cash and the time. But to be really useful, you need to be able to meditate without special equipment, and without a calm space around you. With the right training, you can be the calm space.
There is nothing mystical or magical about this (though I am partial to a bit of magical mystery myself). Meditation, as I do it, is simply practising to direct your attention, and using that skill to create a state of mind, a particular pattern of brain activity, which has (I believe, and as is quite well documented) benefits that persist after the practice is over. It’s a bit like sleep: sleep is a very active brain state, but differently active to being awake. Good sleep massively improves your awake time. Good meditation can too.
One of the students on the Solo Course contacted me about how to train after an injury which has him not allowed to move much for the next six weeks. Meditation is an obvious thing to practice in that condition- but for some reason I haven’t created a meditation course, though I’ve been teaching it for twenty years. I don’t know why I hadn’t gotten around to it yet, but it’s time I did.
I thought I’d do something a bit different this time though. Rather than just video myself teaching the course, I’m going to run a live six-week online class, record those sessions, and use them as the basis for the online course. The classes will be on Tuesdays at 4pm UK time, starting next week (June 2nd). I’m charging £55 for the six classes. All students will get access to the recordings as soon as technology allows, and as and when I get the online course ready, they will get free access to that too.
Each class will begin with a gentle physical warm-up, to get your bones comfortable, then we will do one or two kinds of meditation, and finish with a gentle ‘return to normal headspace’ practice.
Over the six 45 minute classes we will cover:
The theory of meditation
Ways of sitting and lying down for meditation
Creating a regular practice
‘Awareness of Breathing’ meditation
‘Body Scan’ meditation
Using mantras
Moving meditation
There should be some time for questions and class discussion before and after each session, so allow a full hour for each class. By the end of the course you should be able to meditate without help, and be feeling the benefits of the practice. I can’t promise that you’ll be able to levitate, move things with your mind, or see the future though.
You can find the course sign-up page here.
While I was researching how to set up this event, I figured I might as well use the same platform for my consultancy times. So if you need help, coaching, or advice and want to book a 30 minute consultation with me (or even a private meditation class), you can do so here.
I look forward to seeing you in class!
Now is the perfect moment in history for snake-oil sellers to make a fortune. There is a shadowy plague out there, and it has everyone even more worried than usual about their health. It is also the first time in history, as far as I’m aware, that there is apparently a real (if very small and highly debatable) health benefit to smoking- it seems to make it less likely for the virus to propagate inside your tissues. But does that mean you should take up smoking?
If not, why not?
If there was a pill you could take that had a 10% chance of killing you right now, but if you survive you are immune to all diseases, would you take it? I’m guessing probably not.
In other words, how do you assess the relative merits of different health strategies, and come to a reasonable decision about what advice to follow, and what to ignore? I’ll take three possible anti-corona prophylactics and compare them, so you can see how I think about this issue. These are smoking, vitamin D consumption, and Guy’s Quite Amazing Corona Kure (QUACK™ for short), which is a pill I am selling for only a thousand dollars each. One 30-day treatment (three pills a day) guarantees you’ll never catch corona. Really!
Here’s my approach.
1. Evaluate your sources.
2. Measure the downside.
3. Evaluate the upside.
Step One: evaluate the sources of your information. Top tip: if the person telling you something is good for you is also selling you that thing, they may be right, but they are an impossibly compromised source. If you are a trained scientist you don’t need my advice on this, but if you’re not, you should definitely read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science (affiliate link). It’s a critically useful book to help you evaluate sources, and critique scientific studies.
I’ll rank the common sources in ascending order of reliability.
Politicians generally (and especially right now in both the UK and the USA) are so full of shit you could fertilize your roses with them. Treat everything they say with the greatest suspicion unless it exactly follows the advice given by the people at the end of this list.
People selling the treatment. They have a vested interest in you buying, so may or may not be telling the truth. Their sales page is usually tricked out with snazzy videos and testimonials. Testimonials are problematic. Yes, I use them in my course sales pages, because they are true and they work. But really, if the seller is in control of the testimonials, then any negatives will be filtered out. Reviews on Amazon work because you know that people can post negative reviews, so a good average star rating can be trusted. So, be very wary of reviews when buying anything from a source where the seller is in control of the sales page. If there are more than 20 reviews, and they are all entirely positive, there’s probably something going on to filter out the negatives.
Newspapers and general magazines are also notorious for taking studies out of context and publishing misleading reviews under frankly fraudulent headlines, so the publishing source is crucial.
Probably the best sources for advice are the national-level health services (such as our NHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organisation. Yes, any of these places can and do sometimes give out recommendations that later prove to be wrong- but in general their advice gets better and better over time, and you can be as sure as is humanly possible that the advice is coming from a disinterested view of the available evidence.
The Halo Effect is a well-documented cognitive bias that leads us to make mistakes by letting positive feelings you may have towards the messenger influencing how much you trust their message. Watch out for it when considering the reliability of your sources.
I’ll link to some reputable sources for the effects of smoking and of vitamin D below. Sadly I couldn’t find a single scientific study done on QUACK™, which is a damn shame because it would blow all the other options out of the water!
Step Two: measure the down-side.
Notice I said ‘measure’, not ‘evaluate’. Because anything that doesn’t have a measurable downside has not been studied sufficiently to be safe. If you can’t measure the downside, at least in part, don’t do it. You can start with time and money, but there should also be some solid data on probability of developing side effects.
Smoking is very expensive, and is known to have all sorts of health disadvantages, such as early death from cancer, heart disease, and stroke. It also reduces athletic performance, smells disgusting, and poisons everyone around you, not just yourself. Its downside is measurable in several ways, and in every dimension, that downside is huge.
Vitamin D is acquired by exposure to sunlight, and through dietary measures. The downsides are harder to establish- if you live in Australia, then the sunlight could also give you skin cancer, and if you live in Finland, there’s rarely enough sun to produce any vitamin D. But you can get it in pill form, at very low cost, and you can get it from eating fresh vegetables, at higher cost but with considerable additional health benefits. So the primary downside of vitamin D seems to be you have to get outside, and eat healthily. Hmmm…
Literally every treatment you can buy from a reputable source (such as your local pharmacy) has a list of side-effects that comes with it. There is no such thing as a treatment that has no downsides. Except QUACK™, of course. I totally promise that QUACK™ has no downsides at all. The price is very fair and reasonable, and it’s guaranteed to work. If you die of Corona, you get your money back!! Honest!
Step Three: evaluate the upside.
As far as I can tell, if you smoke, you may be less likely to develop the disease, but if you do develop it, you’re more likely to die. This article from the New Scientist is a good starting point.
Vitamin D has a host of well-established and incontrovertible, even measurable, upsides. Without it you die. Nobody ever died of not smoking.* Vitamin D is required for a host of physiological processes, not least bone development, immune function, and yes, it seems that patients with higher levels of vitamin D in their blood (but within the safe range) do have better survival rates if they develop the disease.
QUACK™ is the only preventative treatment for Corona virus that has a 100% success rate, and is guaranteed to work. I’ve been taking it for the recommended 30 days and I don’t have Corona. See!
So, I’m taking orders for QUACK™ now…. A mere $90,000 guarantees your Corona-free-future!™
But seriously, you can use this process for evaluating any health advice. Breathing exercises, for example. Should you do them? I’d say so, but then I’m selling a breathing training course in my Solo Training package so don’t listen to me. But the down-sides seem relatively small: you wasted some time (if you did the free stuff), and some time and not much money (if you paid for training, and besides, you can get your money back just by asking for it). Nobody ever died of breathing. The potential upside is better physical and mental health, so it’s probably worth trying it out. Supplements are a different kettle of fish- how do you know what’s really in them, and what the effects will really be? Evaluate your sources. Measure the downside. Evaluate the upside.
I hope this helps.
So what am I actually doing to stop myself catching the plague?
1) I’m staying the fuck home.
2) If I do go out, I wear a mask. That is more likely to keep others safe than it is to stop me from getting it, but if everyone wore a mask, infection rates would drop. I’m also careful about social distancing.
3) I wash my hands a lot more than I used to.
4) I’m careful about touching my face if I’m out. The mask is a very helpful reminder for that.
5) I’m keeping up my vitamin D levels with sun exposure, and healthy eating.
6) I’m maintaining my basic fitness with breathing exercises, calisthenics, and stretching.
7) I’m taking cold showers regularly (but not if I’m feeling even a bit under the weather).
8) I’m maintaining social contacts as much as possible- there are several friends I’m “seeing” much more often than I used to. This is good for mental health which in turn is good for immune response, as well as giving me the spoons to keep up with steps 1-7.
9) I’m paying attention to the quality of my sleep. Sleep is massively important for every imaginable health metric. I’ll write up a full post about it soon, but in the meantime you can check pages 245-248 of The Theory and Practice of Historical Martial Arts for basic guidelines and suggestions, or read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (affiliate link).
10) I’m also using my parenting power to keep my wife and kids as safe as possible, so we won’t bring the virus home.
None of this guarantees anything, but there are no guarantees in life anyway. What it does do is reduce the probability of my catching the virus, and if I am exposed to it, it reduces the likelihood of my spreading it, and increases the likelihood of my surviving it. That’s enough.
*Literally every categorical statement ever made on the topic of health probably has at least one exception if you can find it. I look forward to a deluge of emails giving examples of people whose lives have been saved by smoking. Somehow, somewhere. But you get my point, I think.
Last week’s post was for the busy people finding that lockdown gave them less free time, not more. This one is for the rest of you, those finding time hanging heavy on your hands.
Let me reiterate: if you’re busy, read this if you want to, but it isn’t written for you.
Okay, so you’re stuck in your home, your job may be gone, your social life is toast, and there’s bugger all to do to keep you sane and happy. What can you do about that? I have three steps that might help.
It would be absurd to expect you to get through lockdown fitter, stronger, better educated and better qualified than you were going in. Absurd to expect it, but not absurd to work towards it. This is the perennial problem of the truly self-employed- there is no-one telling you what to do. That’s a double-edged sword* :
On the one hand, you’re free to never wear a tie, spend all day watching Netflix, and eat yourself into a diabetic coma.
On the other hand (in my experience, being self-employed for the last 20 years), your boss is a dickhead who never gives you a raise or a day off.
I imagine that entrepreneurs are generally doing quite well in lockdown- we’re used to being self-directed. But I remember what it was like going from a full-time job (as a cabinet-maker) to being suddenly self-employed. It was disorienting, and I spent an awful lot of time pursuing distractions because I had no idea how to be self-directed. If you are used to a boss and a paycheck, deciding for yourself exactly what you’ll do every day is hard, and if you’re anything like me you’ll tend towards reading books and watching tv.
The thing that really pulled me out of it was deciding to open a sword school. This is obviously not a practical suggestion for you, especially in the current circumstances. But the key point was not “open a sword school”, it was having a direction to work towards.
Step one: find your jam
So step one is this: decide what you want to be doing six months or a year from now. Whether that’s getting a job, starting a company, writing a book, lying on a beach sipping Mai Tais, or growing your own carrots, it doesn’t matter. What is your jam? Once you know what your jam is (and it may have nothing to do with being self-employed or starting a company), adopting an entrepreneurial mindset will help you achieve it.
The best definition of entrepreneurship I’ve ever come across is Prof. Howard Stevenson’s, which I paraphrase as: “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”. Let me unpack that a bit. “The pursuit of opportunity” is simply working towards a goal of any kind. Seeing the thing that you want, and going for it. The second part is the key. A sensible person looks at what they have and makes what they can from it. An entrepreneur looks at what they want to build, figures out what they need to build it, and finds a way to acquire those things. That could be cash, a team, a change in the law, a thousand kilos of beef jerky, it doesn’t matter. If it’s required to get the job done, you find a way to get it.
So the entrepreneurial approach to being stuck in lockdown is to decide where you want to be when it’s over, and spend the time acquiring whatever it is you need to make that happen.
The problem with this is it’s daunting. It may even seem impossible. The fundamental personality trait that makes entrepreneurship possible is a tolerance for risk, which is one of the many reasons why so many ‘successful’ entrepreneurs come from wealthy backgrounds- they can afford to take the risks, because failure is survivable. I imagine it is also extremely helpful to have the seed money in your trust fund. This is also, incidentally, one reason why I think that the limited liability company is one of the most important inventions in human history. By capping the downside, it enables entrepreneurs to take risks that would otherwise be too dangerous. But I digress (as usual).
In my case, I had been made redundant and nobody was hiring in my chosen field. Entrepreneurship was the only way forward, and it took a lot of getting used to. But having that clear goal made figuring out what to do infinitely easier.
Step two: identify the resources required to make your jam.
This will probably produce a list of things that are entirely out of reach. That’s okay; they are only out of reach at the moment. But presumably they exist. If your list includes unicorns or perpetual motion machines, then you need to re-think. But I know from personal experience that line items like “have a permanent training facility that is not shared with other groups so we can leave our swords there” can be achieved- the necessary first step was to open a school using hired gym spaces, get enough students paying training fees to cover the rent, go searching for spaces, and then rent one.
So what do you need to make your jam?
Step three: break it into bite-size chunks. Do one chunk a day.
But now you have a gargantuan to-do list, big enough and heavy enough to smother even the most ambitious dreamer. A lot of it is probably outside your current area of control. But narrow it down to things that you need (not want), and find something in there that is within your reach. It may seem trivial, too small to matter, but my entire house is built out of individual bricks, any one of which is largely irrelevant, trivial, the house would stand without it. But I'm very glad the bricklayer put it there anyway. So step three is break it down into bite-sized chunks, and at any given moment focus only on that one little chunk; the ideal chunk size is something that can be done in less than an hour. Then do one thing every day. If you do one thing every day, you’ll probably get there eventually. But the magic of doing one thing is that on good days one becomes five or ten.
Writing a book is incredibly hard. That’s why most people who want to write fail to produce much. But writing a paragraph is easy. Writing a chapter is manageable. I don’t think of the book I’m working on as “a book” until after the first draft is complete and I’m then working on beating it into the shape of an actual book. (Like my new book. It's very book-shaped.)
The smallest chunk in my book-writing is probably “send an email to the editor for a quote”. That totally counts as a day’s work, if that’s all I’ve got in me that day.
The key discipline in this process is being able to focus on what you can control. I’ve written about this at length here, so if it’s an unfamiliar idea, go have a read. Seriously, it’s the one Jedi mind trick that really matters. I'm well aware that if you've been laid off and have no idea how you're going to pay rent this month, none of this advice will seem very helpful. You have my sympathy, though it's no help at all. But you might find that there are ways forward that you hadn't previously considered if you give yourself the mental freedom to focus on the things you can control. Worry doesn't pay the rent either.
Bonus step: embrace boredom
One final thought. It has been well established (most recently and accessibly by Manoush Zomorodi in Bored and Brilliant) that boredom is a necessary aspect of creativity. It is the mental equivalent of letting a field lie fallow, in preparation for planting. So especially in lockdown, embrace boredom. One reader of this blog sent me an email with this:
“Now that I *have time* to sit and think, and to look out the window and enjoy the day, and be alone with my thoughts, I realize that prior to being laid off, I rarely had time for my brain and I to just hang out. In the winter, I'd work, I'd sword, I'd come home, exercise, eat, watch tv, go to bed, repeat. In the summer, same list, but add in gardening and volunteering two nights a week. I was mentally exhausted. No wonder I got depressed! I had no time to let my mind wander.Now that I am not working, I feel more productive than I have in, well, a long time. I can't remember the last time I felt so accomplished. Mind you, last week the arthritis in my right knee went a bit crazy, so I have had to slow down even more.I don't mind.Anyway, back to the point – I am enjoying thinking and having time to work on my mental state. I can examine my thoughts and decide if they are worthy of reflection, or need to be ‘let go'. I am enjoying listening to birds outside my window. Drinking tea. Taking MOOCs (one is about human evolution, the other one about Einstein and the Theory of Relativity. Woot! Awesome! These are on edx.org, and coursera.org, respectively).I *was* doing online sword classes, but then my knee got too sore so I am resting for a while, and allowing it to recover.” (Shannon E., Vancouver)
That’s the best description of the necessary mental approach I’ve ever read!
*I hate that metaphor. It means it’s both good and bad, one edge cutting the enemy, one edge cutting you, which is not at all how double-edged swords work. The point of sharpening the back edge is so you can cut other people with it. Only a complete moron would cut themselves with it. But I digress, again!
If you liked this post you might also find my other “let's get through Corona without going mad” posts helpful:
