Suneel Gupta is the author of BACKABLE: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance On You. He's the founder of RISE and is on faculty at Harvard University.To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Hey, it's The Best Advice Show where every weekday I talk to someone awesome and they give you one thing that you can do today to improve your life. Today, the writer and entrepreneur, Suneel Gupta. He just put out a book. It's called Backable. What does it mean to be Backable?SUNEEL: Backable is...you're able to walk into a room and people want to take a chance on you. And the thing that makes backable unique is that it's this mix of creativity and persuasion. Even when the creative idea you have...even if that's yourself isn't fully baked. You may not be the obvious choice. You may not have the perfect resume and yet there's a leap of faith that people want to take on you. ZAK: And in his book, Suneel proves that it's not just natural talent that can make people want to take a chance on you. There's a bunch of things you can do to become backable or get to get ready to be backable. Like using low stakes practice sessions to prepare for high stakes moments.SUNEEL: We call these exhibition matches. And those exhibition matches tend to be very, very sloppy.ZAK: But sloppy, at least initially is good. Because Suneel says long-term success comes from short-term embarrassment.SUNEEL: So, if you're gonna be embarrassed, the viewpoint is why not be embarrassed in-front of friendlies in these low stakes moments. What ends up happening is you get to this level of mastery where you can be fully tuned-in and fully present with what's happening inside the room. Charlie Parker, the jazz musician had this great quote which is, somebody came up to him one time and said, how do you have such incredible stage presence? And his answer was, practice, practice, practice and then forget yourself and just wail. And I think that's the state that we really want to get to. But we can't get there simply by winging it. We get there only when we have such incredible mastery of our material that we're no longer wondering what to say next. We're fully tuned in and adaptive to exactly what's happening inside the room. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center.How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/The Club From Nowhere: Cooking for Civil Rights https://www.npr.org/2005/03/04/4509998/the-club-from-nowhere-cooking-for-civil-rightsTo offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Every Friday on the show we talk food. Today's episode is also the final installment of Amanda Alexander week. Amanda is the founder of the Detroit Justice Center.AMANDA: We're lawyers who support people's movements here in the city and who are fighting for a world without jails and prisons.ZAK: Amanda and I have been diving into the letter she wrote to her niece, Fiona, and later published in the Boston Globe. It's all about how Black woman have created movements and cultivated joy. And Amanda's letter is filled with some deep, deep wisdom and advice. Like this, find what brings you joy and use it for movements.AMANDA: Given that the task is as big as remaking society, and ending mass incarceration, creating conditions for people to thrive, it means that the problem is so deep that there is work for everyone all the time. And so, that means that everyone can be part of the solution and being part of the world that we need. And actually, there's so many good examples of people putting their talents and passions and particular joy to work for movements.ZAK: Like Georgia Gilmore and the Club from Nowhere.AMANDA: They were a group of cooks and bakers from Montgomerie, Alabama who made and sold food to help fund the Montgomerie Bus Boycott. It was 382 days long. And people often think that it was Rosa Parks, she refused to give up her seat, and maybe a few days later the busses were integrated.ZAK: Right, this spontaneous thing.AMANDA: Right, but this was a very long time and so people were doing things like The Club from Nowhere did to take their skills in cooking and baking and using the proceeds from sales to power right back into the movement. So in that case creating some delicious food that would fuel people and fortify their bodies and then taking the profits from that and very literally funding movement work.ZAK: We watch a lot of Mister Rogers around here and he has a song that you just reminded me of. The song is, There Are Many Ways To Say I Love You.AMANDA: Oh, I love that.ZAK: And this is an example of...find the thing that you care about or that you are good at or that you love and, like, use that for the greater good.AMANDA: Yes. Everyone has a role to play.ZAK:I hope you enjoyed this week as much as I have. Thank you so much, Amanda Alexander. If you haven't read her entire piece, How Black Woman Have Built Movements and Cultivated Joy, you must. It's at The Boston Globe. It's also linked in our show notes. As always I want to hear your advice. Give me a call at 844-935-BEST. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center.How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/TRANSCRIPT:ZAK: Welcome back to my week-long series of advice with Amanda Alexander.AMANDA: The founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center. We're lawyers support people's movements here in the city and who are fighting for a world without jails and prisons.ZAK: Earlier this year, Amanda wrote a letter to her young niece, Fiona. She wrote it in response to a question Fiona's mom posed to Amanda. How do you stay focused on Black joy and liberation? And how can I raise my child with that sense of possibility? Amanda thought a lot about those questions and came up with this beautiful letter, full of advice that was recently published in The Boston Globe. All week, I'm digging into that letter with Amanda and today we're gonna talk about one piece of advice which I find so vital. The advice is, admire ease, not just struggle.AMANDA: I try to admire our great movement builders not just for these moments of confrontation that are seared into our collective memory, but also for their ease. There's this photo that surfaced in the last few years of Rosa Parks doing yoga and there's the documentary of Toni Morrison that came out a couple years ago and there are just these images of her sitting by the water on the dock by her house. I loved learning in that documentary that Toni Morrison loves a good party and loves to dance. And there's a reason that that photo of James Baldwin and the Freedom Rider, Doris Jean Castle, the photo of them dancing together feels so good and it's because they're delighting in each other's freedom and their own. And so I think it's important to see and celebrate and create these moments of delight. To delight in each other's freedom and not just honor the struggle.ZAK: And I think it also helps to remind that we're all these three-dimensional people and we're not one thing. Like, Rosa Parks isn't just responsible for having catalyzed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she's also, like, a lady that likes Yoga! You know, we're all these things at once.AMANDA: Yes. Yeah. Yes we are fighting for freedom in a very different world but right now we need to delight in each other's freedom. We need to dance. We need to make music. We need to stretch our bodies. Whatever it takes to feel free with each other.ZAK: Yeah. I just googled this photo of Rosa Parks practicing yoga.AMANDA: Right. There are several. I think they're in the Library of Congress.ZAK: She looks so cool, too. Like, cool and calm in that moment.AMANDA: Yes. Yes. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center.How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: My wife does this, a lot, and I don't know how she learned it. But often, she'll be the one in a room to say the thing that other people don't have the courage to say, myself included. And, Amanda Alexander who I'm featuring on the show all week believes that when we see someone do this...When we see someone speak up and act courageously, it's important to go up to them and them them for it.AMANDA: Yeah, I think back to...I'm a lawyer...and in law school there were these moments where it was often Black woman who would say what needed to be said, We had been talking about a case for 45-minutes and talking around the real issues of race or white supremacy or all of that and then there would be the person would just cut through it all and say what so many people were thinking and feeling and it being important to go over to that person, you know, or in the moment, in front of everyone, building on that comment so that it's something that's affirmed right there in-front of everybody else. And just standing alongside that person and I think that there can never be enough people who are saying what needs to be said and so, just affirming that courage when we see it and when we hear it. ZAK: Yeah, this should be taught in schools. Like, what an important life-skill this is, to affirm someone else's courage and to practice it yourself when you can. And we're not taught that. AMANDA: Yeah, it's a micro-thing and I think that I learned it from a friend of mine who is just really good at that and it was a law school friend who just modeled that really well and I saw the way that their, um, affirming that courage it made it ripple. You know? So, suddenly you have not just courageous individuals but a whole community of people who are emboldened by each other's courage. ZAK: Yeah. Yeah. Courage is contagious.AMANDA: Yeah. I mean I think it's really then creating a culture of courage. ZAK: All week on The Best Advice Show, I'm featuring Amanda's advice. She first collected it in the Boston Globe in a piece entitled, How Black Woman Have Built Movements and Cultivated Joy. This is part 3 of Amanda week and I'm excited to bring you two more episodes, tomorrow and Friday. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for thanking the brave ones among you. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center.How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander - https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Last summer Amanda Alexander and her friend Mo Connolly were at a protest together. It was led by students calling for Police free schools in Detroit and as they were leaving the rally, Mo asked Amanda...MO: In the wake of everything that's going on, how do you stay focused on joy and possibility and liberation? How can I raise Fiona with that sense of possibility?ZAK: Fiona is Mo's daughter. And though Amanda and Mo aren't actually sisters, Amanda is Fio's honorary aunt. And Mo's question got Amanda thinking a lot. She compiled her thoughts in a letter to Fiona. It was published in the Boston Globe recently and all week, Amanda and I are talking about it and the advice it contains. Like this...Define the future worth fighting for.AMANDA: So, this is one where I try to stay very clear on what is a question worth fighting for? What is at stake? I say in the letter that there are so many well meaning people in the world who would have you believe that the question of our day is how do we end cash bail? Or, how do we keep police from shooting black people? And I think the powerful thing that our movements have shown in the last few years is it's not about demanding scraps or the basics of what we think we can win but staying focused on what is the future that we're truly fighting for. Like, what does it actually gonna take for black people to thrive and be free and so I say it's not these other questions about cash bail or police shootings, it's the same question that freedom movements have posed for generations which is how do we expand black joy and liberation and ensure that all people on the planet can thrive?AMANDA: And lately I've been thinking of it in terms of, how can we have all the elders that we're supposed to have? I am tired of losing people in their 40s or 50s or 60s and I think it's going to take a lot for us to create the conditions where we can just delight in watching each other grow old, you know? I want to be 80 and 90 and watching each other. And I think if we stay focused on that vision and what it's gonna take in terms of the whole shift in society to get there, that to me is what it means to define the future that we're fighting for and it also means being able to define what victory is and isn't so that we know that we're not settling for something that's less than that. Or a vision that's too small. And so I shared in the letter to Fiona that, you know, Rosa Parks has been painted as an integrationist and she was always clear in her time that if wasn't about integration. That wasn't the point. It wasn't about getting to sit next to white men on the bus. The ultimate goal was to discontinue all forms of oppression against everyone who is weak and oppressed. And so when she was black listed down in Montgomery after the bus boycott, she couldn't find a job. Her husband couldn't find a job. She came up to Detroit and she spent the never several decades working on housing and economic development here in the city and building up things like the first Black-owned shopping center in the country in the early 1980s. She knew that the work was to cultivate Black freedom and to create the conditions that we would need for all us to thrive and it was simply about integrating the bus system. And I think it's that clarity of vision that probably kept her focus on the long haul of the struggle. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center.How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: One of Amanda's nieces is named Fiona, or Fio. And Fio is the inspiration for all the advice Amanda is gonna share this week.AMANDA: So this was last summer when people had taken to the streets in the wake of the calling of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and Tony McDade and Elijah McClain and so many people. And I had gone to a rally that was called by some brave, young organizers here in the city of Detroit and they were calling for police free schools. So they were demanding that all of the funding for police be cut by next here. And Mo and I were there with her daughter, Fiona, who is now almost 2 years-old and we were leaving the rally and Mo turned to me and just said, you know, in the face of everything that's going on. All of the misery and trauma and everything that we're up against, how do you stay focused on joy and possibility and liberation? And the second part to her question was, how can I raise Fiona with that sense of possibility? And I certainly can't give parenting advice. I'm not a parent. I wouldn't presume to do that. But I did think there might be some things I could share with Fiona directly. So I decided after giving her what felt like a throwaway answer, I promised to give it more thought and sat down and spent some time with old journals thinking back on what are some of these practices that feel second-nature to me now that are so part of how I live. What is there that I could pass on to Fiona as she's coming up? And what could be useful to her and to folks in her generation.ZAK: Amanda's letter to Fiona was first published in the Boston Globe on February 11th. The headline is, How Black Woman Have Built Movements and Cultivated Joy. And so all week Amanda and I are gonna dig in to that letter and talk about some of the advice that she shared with Fiona which I think is also very relevant to you and me. Today's advice, practice your freedom.AMANDA: So this one I wanted to let Fio know that even-though we are fighting to be free, we also have to practice our freedom now. Most weeks I'll take a tech Sabbath so I just put my phone away and laptop away and I sit down in the morning at my dining room table and I write out a list and at the top of the page I write, TODAY I WANT. And then I listen. I want to make it clear this is not a to-do list. This isn't a list of things I should do but it's a list of things that if I really listen deeply to my gut and to my intuition, it's what I want. Today I want to be by the water or I want to take a walk through tall trees or I want to hear my friend's voice. And it keeps me in the habit of being guided by my intuition and making sure that I know what I want and I know what it feels like to practice my freedom and making sure there's a distinction between that and the imposition of someone else's will. And I got this idea after reading Lorraine Hansberry's list she had written back in 1960. She would write a list of her likes and hates. Things like, I love Mahalia Jackson's music. I like my husband most of the time. I like dressing up. And what stuck me was how well she knew her interior world. As a Black, queer woman in the 50s and 60s and I just really admired that and I wondered, do I know myself that way? Do I know how I feel most free? So I wanted to challenge myself to do that every week and to stay in that practice and to know what feels good to me. How I want to move through the day and by knowing that I can then communicate what I feel, what I want and what I need and it helps me show up in my relationships better. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Kamala Puligandla is the author of the novella, You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone and writes The Dyke Kitchen Column at Autostraddle.TRANSCRIPT:ZAK: It's Food Friday.KAMALA: I'm Kamala Puligandla. I'm a writer. I do a lot of things but it usually revolves around writing.ZAK: Kamala writes a column called The Dyke Kitchen and I knew I needed to talk to her after I read her piece, The Art of Salad.KAMALA: Yeah. I don't know, I love salads because I think the possibilities are endless and I think all the things that I might want to eat when I'm hungry...If I don't really know what I want, all the things I could want will be in a salad.ZAK: For people who don't feel like free-form salad musicians, how do you think one can practice becoming a better salad improviser?KAMALA: I think part of it is having a bunch of stuff ready. I always have citrus at my house. Partially cause I'm in LA because you can turn it into a dressing or you can put it in whole and it will just drip its juices in, which is one of my favorite lazy salad methods. Put a bunch of wet stuff in your salad and then you don't have to make a dressing. That's kind of one of my cheats for salads.ZAK: I consider my mom a salad artist and I think that's where I get a lot of my chops from. Pun intended I guess. Chops. Like, for people who aren't confident in making salads or think that salads are boring, how can you help them feel more empowered in making a delicious salad that's actually gonna be satisfying.KAMALA: I think that people have this notion that salads are gonna be healthy and I think if you discard that, you're more likely to have a better salad. So, the thing is it's going to be healthy if you're eating vegetables. But you still have to use fat or else it tastes terrible and also a friend of mine told me that you have to have fat in order to digest the raw ingredients, so I was like, ok, great! So there's that and you can also put spices and flavors in to your salad. It doesn't have to be a bare, acetic salad. I put chicken in there and I'll grill my chicken with fish sauce and curry paste and other things like that, so that it's definitely not a boring salad. I think all the things you might like in a non-salad food, you can have in a salad food too. Sometimes I put the seasoning that I would put in my beans in my salad dressing. And things like that where I'm just like, what is some other taste that I like and then I'll put it in a salad.ZAK: This is such good salad therapy.KAMALA: I'm glad! Wait, what are your favorite salads?ZAK: Oh, last week I made a chicken shawarma salad where the dressing was tahini.KAMALA: That sounds so good.ZAK: With pickled cucumbers and pickled radishes. Um, when your grocery shopping, do you think about the salad that you're eventually gonna make?KAMALA: Sometimes I do. A lot of times I don't. The way that I grocery shop is like, ok, I sort of set my fridge up like someone's deli bar at the store except for it's in my refrigerator. So, I'll be like, ok, here's a couple vegetable I'm gonna cook a particular way that's like, flavorful but I could always add more to it and then I also get a couple of proteins that I'm gonna do something do and then it's like, ok, do you want to have it with noodles, do you want to have it with rice? Do you want to just put them together? Do you want to put that in an egg dish?ZAK: You have them prepped already?KAMALA: Yeah, so one of my favorite things to do is just to blanch broccoli and blanch green beans and then they're pretty much ready to eat but I could cook them again if I wanted to or I could just throw them into things, like if I'm making instant noodles, I could put broccoli in there. I also roast eggplant a lot and that's one of my favorite salad ingredients. So I just have a little thing in the fridge of whatever vegetables I bought that week. I guess I'm not putting a lot of raw ingredients in the salad except for my greens. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Greg Fox (@gdfx) is composer, drummer, teacher and coach. He was last on the show talking about the 2 of 3 rule in episode #129.To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: You might remember Greg Fox from episode 129 of this show. He talked about the 2 of 3 rule. The idea is you need two of the following three things for a project that you're thinking about to be worthwhile.GREG: And those three things are, good hang, good product and three, good pay.ZAK: Today Greg, who is a composer, drummer, teacher and coach is back with some more advice and an exercise he teaches his drumming students.GREG: In my teaching, the first exercise I teach everybody is an exercise of just spending five-minutes doing single strokes while focusing on the breath.ZAK: Single strokes. Just left, right, left right, left, right. This is something you can try at home. You don't need to be a drummer to practice this. All you have to do while you're doing left, right, left, right is just to notice when your thoughts start to drift.GREG: And then bringing them back to the breath. And that practice is not about how much of this five-minutes can I spend fully focused on my breathing as some sort of measurement of success or failure. It's about those moments where you notice, oh, I'm thinking about this thing that happened yesterday or I'm thinking about this thing I'm excited or anxious about that's gonna happen tomorrow and say, oh, I am thinking about this thing. Now I'm focusing back on my breath. And that's the exercise, right? Coming back. And so if you're doing that while you're drumming, right...I am drumming and then the thoughts start to drift, I'm over here thinking about when I was in my car yesterday and had this argument with somebody...Oh wait a minute. I'm drumming. Come back here. It's not about perfectly always being in this levitated moment. It's just reminding yourself to check in and remember, oh, I'm just in this body right here in this moment. And what am I doing right now? Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Alexandra Cohl (@pod.draland) is the host of The Pod Broads podcast. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Are you someone who wants to be heard but you feel a little nervous to actually come out and say the thing?ALEXANDRA: And someone who wants to connect with other people and feel seen and help other people feel seen and someone who ultimately does like to share parts of themselves in a public space.ZAK: If so, you should heed Alexandra Cohl's advice, which is this...ALEXANDRA: Do not be afraid to quote yourself and share the words that you say. You have important, thoughtful, funny and quotable shit to say and you don't have to wait for someone else to do it for you.ZAK: That's Alexandra Cohl reading from a post she wrote on Instagram last year. In other words, that's Alexandra quoting herself, quoting herself about quoting oneself. ALEXANDRA: So, don't be afraid to quote yourself is essentially saying, don't be afraid to identify what about yourself is important and worth being heard. It is not atypical for woman to feel like people are gonna view them as full of themselves if they are shouting themselves out or being very confident. You know? Like an "overly-confident woman" is seen as a negative thing in society. Not with everyone of course, but as a societal structure, that's kind of a thing that goes along with it. ZAK: Yeah. Yeah. And what do you think is the difference between you before you started sharing parts of yourself and Alexandra know? Someone who posts a lot and who quotes themselves a lot. ALEXANDRA: I would say, prior to doing this I was way more stuck in my anxiety, depressive cycles and my feelings of being very alone. And I deal with PTSD and i think this has been an outlet for me to be able to come back into my power and to not be afraid to speak up in situations where in the past I wasn't able to do that. And so its really helped me cultivate and hone my own voice an opinions in a place where I get to hold the reigns and I'm not answering to anyone. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Mason Currey (@masoncurrey) is a writer living in LA.Mason Currey's Subtle Maneuvers - https://subtlemaneuvers.substack.com/John Cage on music and mushrooms - https://subtlemaneuvers.substack.com/p/john-cage-on-music-and-mushroomsHow about singing the chorus to Yellow Submarine and sending the recording to ZAK@BESTADVICE.SHOW for use in a near-future episode? THANK YOU. TRANSCRIPT: MASON: So, my advice is specifically for people doing creative work or people doing work that involves a lot of idea generating or problem-solving which I think is a lot of people. And it comes from an e-mail interview I did with the artist, Maira Kalman. For my first book I was asking her about her daily routine and her work habits and in one of her replies she said, "I procrastinate just the right amount." And I remember thinking at the time, yeah, haha, me too. But since then I've come to think there's a real kernel of wisdom in that response. That, actually it's kind of an idea. To procrastinate just the right now amount because at least in the all the research I've done on writers' and artists' habits and creative process, you see how important ruminating on an idea is, letting an idea percolate in the back of your mind. I think we've all had the experience with, you kind of plant the seed and then you have an idea out of the blue while you're in the shower or taking the walk. But you need that PLUS a burst of focused, head-down work. You kind of need both things. And I think procrastinating just the right amount is kind of a great strategy or shortcut to getting the ideal balance of letting the idea percolate...letting your brain gnaw away at it in the background and then actually executing the piece of work and getting it done.ZAK: And how have you figured out how to build procrastination into your routine.MASON: I think I'm maybe a natural at that. This whole project of studying people's routines began with an act of procrastination. Many years ago I was supposed to be writing an article for this magazine I worked at, at the time. I went into the office on a Sunday afternoon. I was gonna do this thing and instead I was slacking off, surfing the internet and I was reading interviews with, like, writers about their routines cause it felt like maybe that would get me in the mood to work and I was like, somebody should start a blog to collect these little snippets. And then instead of writing this article I started this blog and over the course of many years it turned into book projects and now this newsletter, but I always felt bad about procrastinating. I never felt like I was doing something good or effective or strategic. And now I'm starting to think it's not something to feel bad about. It works for me. I think it works for a lot of creative people and maybe you should cultivate it a little bit instead of beating yourself up about it.ZAK: Yeah, that's a big point. Just the way that you view procrastination. Because if you have shame around it rather than, like you're saying, just cultivating kind of a positive air around it...the shame is going to impact the work and impact the amount you procrastinate.MASON: Also, if you get an assignment and get straight to work on it, you might be being very efficient but I think you're missing out on the part of the process that leads to the best work. You're missing out on the...you plant the seed and then let it work away in the back of your mind. That kind of efficiency might be inefficient in creative work because you're losing out on part of the process that leads to the best ideas. And then doing this effectively requires understanding yourself, understanding your own habits and your process and that is always a good thing to try to do creative work. Like, I think you should be aware of how you work best. When you've had success what kind of conditions created that? Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow