Imagine a young Ben Folds. He’s walking to piano lessons. He loves the piano but not this particular teacher. It’s snowing. And windy.
There’s a bicycle track through the snow. It’s all Folds sees. It’s snowing and windy.
He sees the track and imagines what happened. The track changes direction, the story changes too. Folds writes:
“I want to laugh at how old-fashioned and easily entertained I must sound to a kid today, who has a lot more seductive electronic shit competing for their attention. But a story is a story, in any era. And the best ones, I’ve always thought, develop from mysteries you want to solve.”
There’s a dichotomy between deep work (Newport) and Against Waldenponding (Rao). We balance on this tightrope each day. Some days more on one end, other days at the other, and some we troop between the two.
Newport wants people to learn first principles, to study things which change slowly. Rao wants people to fit first principles into the world in interesting ways, to prototype, to gather rough consensus and run code.
Stories are a first principle idea to consider. We run on stories and one way to get better at telling them is through boredom. Folds again:
Related: The 3 Ways to Spend Your Day.
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