Hello lovely email friends, and let me be the umpteenth to wish you a Happy New Year. I like to visit new places in that weird disorientating last week. So since last I wrote, I’ve been in Hamburg: a vibrant, friendly and interesting city. If you can, go. Meanwhile, time to look ahead…
Optimism: Today’s a good day to ponder what we could change for the better. But before we resolve to do anything, let’s all be at least frank with ourselves that New Year’s Resolutions don’t work. That’s why we’re so bad at keeping them. So, how should we focus?
If you’d like to leave something behind, think about how you might break up with a bad habit, since simply resolving to do so ain’t gonna be enough. Similarly, if you’d like to pick something up, figuring out how you’ll stick to a training plan will be more beneficial than developing the plan itself.
This is important right now not only because it’s the first day in a new year: more broadly, it can be hard to identify things to feel optimistic about. Instead of perpetual growth, for example, things will be objectively worse for the kids. If you’ve thought much about politics or economics recently, the pessimism may be catching. And then there’s the climate. Oh god, the climate.
But, there’s reasons for optimism. I don’t mean blind hope, and there is a difference, I mean deliberate, applied optimism. Not taking a sigh and wishing for better times ahead; instead, conditioning ourselves for optimism. Changing our own outlook to see the glass half-full allows to participate actively in the outcomes we seek.
If for no other reason, optimism is our default setting: even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes we’re naturally good at looking on the bright side. So how we we put that inherent outlook to good use? 👍
✅ 6 Tips to Getting Things Done in 2020: Instead of rigorously scheduling every minute of your day around tasks and to-do lists, approach work more from the perspective of: What are the things I care about, and what are the things I want to devote my attention to?
💃🏾 The dancing species—how moving together in time helps make us human: Why is dancing universal? An exploration of current explanations. At one end, an individual chooses to dance for entertainment, exercise, artistic or personal reason. At the other, an assertion that dancing a means by which the earliest humans solidified strong social bonds irrespective of blood lines.
♻️ The No-Waste Goal That Succeeded by Failing: Years ago, the Japanese village of Kamikatsu set the goal of producing zero waste by 2020. They’re not going to make it—and that’s just fine with them.
📺 The golden age of kids’ YouTube is over. Good: On January 1, thanks to COPPA and the FTC, YouTube videos for kids will look much different. But will it be better?
🏥 Apps don’t provide reliable help for suicide prevention: A handful of depression management and suicide prevention apps—downloaded millions of times—included incorrect contact information for crisis help lines.
🎸 How Dick Dale Changed the Sound of Rock Guitar: shortly after his death last year, Pitchfork examined the impact of Dale’s 60-year career. See also: Keith Flint was the face of raving for a generation.
🎲 Long Bets: As all and sundry look ahead, this pitches itself as the arena for accountable predictions, to improve long-term thinking.
Reasons to be cheerful: I keep reading about resilience; how we need it, how to develop it, how young people don’t have it. Resilience begins to sound like a core component of a greater whole that is your bad self. Good news: the reverse is more true. Being resilient is an outcome, and factors such as optimism and social connectedness prop it up. So, fostering optimism by imagining a positive future is a step towards your best possible self.
You can start today, with 99 good news stories you probably didn’t hear about in the year just past. Then there’s Our World in Data, a drive to make the knowledge on the big problems accessible and understandable, which in turn often reveals the objective reality isn’t as dark as you might suppose. Further, Beautiful News pursues and visualises good news, positive trends, uplifting statistics and facts. 📈
Finally: Looking for a binge-worthy podcast? Then you need look no further than Dolly Parton’s America, a fine nine-part documentary. The thing about Dolly Parton is she provokes surface reactions, and then smashes through them. Her persona as an artist with universal appeal, transcending political, national and sexual spectrums, belies greater depth, lack of ego and prolific songwriting talent.