How to get better at lit-er-all-y anything
Oh, hi friends!
I often find myself thinking, I wish I could get better at X [directing actors/doing burpees/writing scripts/not having a murderer's handwriting].
Of course, with even just a tiny smidge of effort, I can. There are four dummy-proof ways at getting better at something:
Find help.
From your friends, former colleagues, Twitter followers, that loud lady on the train. Ask questions widely and often!
Google it.
Uhh. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten stuck and then thought, Oh wait, all this needs is five minutes of research.
Meet experts.
You can cold email, tweet, or Instagram direct message almost anyone in the world (the famous people are harder…) and ask questions. Why not try?
Practice.
And the biggest one, the one that doesn’t come with a quick fix or your mother cheering on the sidelines. Working a little every day helps you find the answers.
These are so simple. I don’t do them enough. Do you?
“Work,” Studs Terkel once wrote, “is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread … for a sort of life rather than a Monday-through-Friday sort of dying.”
Ol’ Studs was a brilliant journalist and oral historian. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a favorite.
(Photo by Artur Rutkowski on Unsplash, my favorite free place to get beautiful stock images.)
Do you let the kids sit in business class?
“Are you kidding? No, we’re all in coach. When my son was five, he said, ‘Why can’t we sit in those big seats?’ and I said, ‘Get a job.’ My daughter travels with her dad, and my husband’s different — he will kill himself to get a business class seat on free miles. She had one trip to Orlando with my husband and then she traveled with me and said, ‘Couldn’t we do what Daddy did and sit in those nice seats up front?’ and I said, ‘Get a job.'”
Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran is a tough cookie. And she always flies economy! I enjoyed interviewing her about her travel habits for The Points Guy: her genius travel tip involves rolling her clothes in dry cleaning bags—they never get wrinkled! She also always brings her own wine and cheese onboard. I want to try that, but I’ll avoid the smelliest varieties unless I want to make enemies...
Do you like these daily emails? Please share with a friend!
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara