Cookies, spinach, and your work
Oh, hi friends!
I was thinking about dessert this morning.
How it feels wrong—maybe a little naughty—to eat cookies before dinner.
You gotta eat your spinach before you earn your treat. That’s what we’re taught as kids.
The same goes for work. I feel like I can’t engage with my creative projects (that’s my dessert) unless I do my “work-work” (that’s my spinach).
But most days, I really don’t want to eat the spinach.
So I push it around on my plate for hours. Days. Weeks. Months. I resent it for keeping me from my dessert.
Not only is that gross, but all the food, including the dessert, gets moldy.
So there are three solutions.
Skip spinach and go straight to cookies.
Abandon all my work-work and devote myself to my creative projects! But that comes with a lot of guilt and not earning any money and probably a sugar stomachache.
Swallow spinach and get on to cookies.
Suck it up and power through the work-work so I can get to the things I really want to do! I live in this space often, except work then expands beyond its constraints and ends up being all I do. Not ideal.
Stop thinking of creative projects as cookies.
Instead of considering them the end result—the treat—after work-work, I can reframe my thoughts to make them the center of my life. Maybe the creative projects aren’t cookies. Maybe they’ve been my spinach this entire time.
It’s so easy to fall into traps when we set up these chain reactions (I can’t have Y until I do X). But you control what you think—and you control the order in which you work.
So what’s your spinach? What’s your cookie?
And can you make your dessert your meal?
Welcome to this life
Every day and night
I can feel the lights
Hands up
Glory
Loving “Glory” by Jessie J for an energy-filled start to the week.
This link wasn’t working in Friday’s newsletter! (Blame Porg.) Here it is: a whole bunch of grants and fellowships for filmmakers, VR content creators, and writers (h/t Mattie Johnson)
Do you speak Greek? My talented new friend Alex Parrish is writing a (very exciting!) musical and is looking for someone to translate one of his songs from English into Greek. Please email him at alex.d.parrish@gmail.com if you can help out.
Who's hiring right now? Friend-of-a-friend Lania Howell is looking for a junior PR role—specific interests are within cosmetics or media and her background is also in the agency world! She's in New York, and is also open to positions in LA or Chicago. You should definitely reach out to her at howell.lania@gmail.com or I can put you two in touch. (She also has a great beauty YouTube channel and Instagram!)
Plus, three things I’m excited about this week:
I’m taking a playwriting class tonight with Anne Washburn at Playwrights Horizons! (Two more classes with The Mad Ones and Robert O’Hara planned for later this summer.)
New York Public Library’s Across a Crowded Room collaboration series, which pairs lyricists, composers, and librettists to create short musicals this summer. Starts Saturday! I’m ready.
And on Thursday, I'm going to eat my way through Tasting Table’s Lobster Roll Rumble, the "biggest and butteriest” event of the summer. Because life's too short not to taste 25 lobster rolls in one evening.
Do you like these daily emails? Please share with a friend!
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara