Taking a Pause

Goodbye for now

Yesterday I posted an article on my other Substack — Planning Means Choosing What Not to Do. It’s about the power of doing less and saying no to new commitments. It’s about doing a few things well rather than doing many things in a half-assed way.

This is common advice and vaguely inspirational, something you could put on a greeting card. I talk about planning as a process of contracting activities rather than expanding them, and I see myself as someone who puts this into practice.

Except…it’s not working. I still feel overwhelmed. I still manufacture many more ideas than I could ever implement. Yes, I’m a creative thinker. But sometimes it feels like a burden.

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Today I had an aha! moment. I’ve been missing something significant: Saying no means sacrifice. It means letting go of ideas even when they’re great and I really want to follow up on them.

When I say no, it’s got to hurt to a little ( maybe a lot). If it doesn’t, then it’s not going to make a difference.

Jony Ive, for many years the head designer at Apple, Inc. said it well:

One of the things Steve [Jobs] would say [to me] because he was worried I wasn’t focused — he would say, “How many things have you said no to?”…What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea, you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you are focusing on something else.

I got this quote from a wonderful essay by Henrik Karlsson about his own experience with saying no:

I learned this, as many do, when I had my first child. I had been a bit nervous about becoming a father. Having failed to achieve what I had expected I would, I thought strapping a child to my chest meant setting myself up for permanent failure. It did not. When Maud ate about half my time, I had to force myself to make priorities: I would care for her, I would write, and I would say no to everything else.

Painful? Yes. But the payoff was substantial: Doubling what he got done to the level of excellence.

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For decades I’ve planned to write a book about playing the guitar as a path of mastering life as well as music. I love this idea, and I’ve written 80,000 words about it — the rough draft of a book.

As of today I’m submitting this project to the fire of self-sacrifice. There’s a lot on my plate. I’ve finished a novel that’s being published this fall. I want to promote it, and I’d like to write a sequel for the same publisher. Those projects will take a lot of time. And as a 73-year-old man who’s managing several chronic health conditions, this is something I cannot take for granted.

Perhaps I’ll revive the guitar book someday along with this Substack. It could happen! But for now I’m opting for a narrower life, one that allows me to go deeper rather than wider.

Thank you so much for being here, and for reading my previous posts. Let’s all keep playing the guitar, listening to music, becoming a virtuoso of everyday life.