I have trouble sleeping.

There are a variety of reasons: I used to have really severe restless leg1 until a few months ago when I started on a treatment for it; I have mild sleep apnoea2; I sometimes over-think things and stare at the ceiling for hours while the day repeats in my head, or run through the following day instead. I sometimes have to read a book until my eyes are literally closing, even if I know it means a short night’s sleep, to ensure I’m not going to wake myself up thinking things through.

The reason doesn’t really matter, thought. What matters is the effect. A bad night’s sleep, or even just a shorter night’s sleep than is ideal, has a disproportionate impact on my productivity during the day, not to mention my mood.

I’ve become adept at functioning relatively normally – or at least appearing to – when I’m in the office, but it bothers me that the effort of doing that often means I’m not able to do it when I’m at home.

Sleep matters more than most of us think it does. Ensuring a good night’s sleep can make the world seem like a different place and provide a stability of mood that’s less and less possible when you’re not fuly rested. I struggle with that a lot, but the fight is on-going.

The irony, of course, is that the harder you try, the less likely you are to win.

1. Something called Rapid Limb Movement, with a score 100% higher than the classifiction of ‘severe’ [↩]
2. Quite embarrassing to admit, because it’s the kind of thing that is usually associated with older, heavier people than me. [↩]

I love blogs about habit, the power of habit, the reasons behind the power of habit, and of course it’s not hard to see from the minimalist design of this site, I take a lot of inspiration from Zen Habits.

What a lot of these writers appear to miss out, of course, is just how hard it can be to form a productive habit. This blog is a habit I’m trying to create: wake up, make coffee, write the blog, shower and get out to work1. It’s a good little routine except for two small things: what happens when you wake up super-tired, and how do you make sure you’ve got something to write about?

It takes discipline to form a habit. When it’s been a tough week and I’m lagging a bit, pulling myself out from under the covers into the cold morning air can be hard enough, let alone thinking of what I’m going to write. Luckily for me, the premise of this blog is pretty elastic, mostly focused on exploring life experiences, paired with a semi-instructional approach to telling great stories simply because that’s what I’m passionate about. I have the freedom to write what I like, so I can use the difficulties to inspire me to creation. Like I just have.

But today’s lesson is not about being able to write whatever I like, it’s about recognising just how hard forming new habits can be. I’m still doing OK on this so far, but I’m starting to wonder if I’ll start to slip if I think I’ve nothing to say. The discipline of forming habits is the toughest part.

1. Or ‘up to work’ on the days I’m working from home and commute to my eyrie at the top of the house. [↩]

Storytelling is vital to so many things that we do, even our everyday conversations are peppered with stories that we hardly recognise we’re telling. When it comes to having impact from storytelling, we have to find new ways to tell them.

Sometimes that may as simple as using a different medium: if you’re always written, try video; if you’ve always recorded audio, try writing something instead. Diversifying the method can help diversify the way the message gets across.

Other times it’s less about the media you use and more about finding a new way to tell an old story. Of course, we’ve been doing this for centuries – millennia even – if you hold with the idea that there are only seven stories in the world anyway1. And think of all the allegorical tales we tell. C S Lewis’s most famous work was a retelling of Bible stories with a lion as Christ.

For me, finding new ways to tell my own story has been a real challenge. Before my transplant it was really easy to help people understand how hard life with cystic fibrosis is, because I would turn up carting my oxygen behind me, skeletally thin, looking like death and all I had to do was saying “CF is rubbish” and people would agree.

Now, I look ‘normal’ so I’m not able to rely on the same visual aids to describe the challenges of day-to-day life with CF. Instead, I have to find a way to describe my experiences rather than show them, or use examples of friends to compare their day-to-day with the changes in my life. I have to be far more clever about the way I tell my story to have impact.

It makes me think more carefully about the way I approach my work, because finding new ways to tell old stories is both the hard part and the fun part of communicating with people. That’s the joy of being a storyteller.

1. A slight over-simplification, I know. [↩]

I’m quite open online and offline about my story. Of course, I don’t share everything, just the bits that I think are important about where I’ve come from and what I’m doing now. I share because I know the impact personal stories can have in the world.

The difference in how these stories are told can be stark. Consider two charity events: one that has someone from a non-profit talking about how they make a difference, and one that has someone who has lived experience of the reason the charity exists. Without a doubt, the more effective stories are told by the people who’ve lived it.

It’s one of the main differences between the most recent moves in my career: World Vision UK and the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. At the Trust, we have the ability to put someone with CF in the room with people, to look into their eyes and connect with them on a personal level. My role at World Vision involved finding new and innovative ways of helping supporters walk hand in hand with the world’s poorest children, even when they’re thousands of miles apart and unable to tell their stories face-to-face.

People are understandably fond of quoting Gandhi:

Be the change you want to see in the world.

It’s a great philosophy to share, because it encourages you to tell your story to create the change you want to see. I stand as someone who shows the impact of organ donation and transplantation, as well as the possibility of hope for people living with CF who are struggling, for whom transplant may be the only option.

It doesn’t have to be that grandiose, though. Sharing your story – the change you want to see in the world – can be as simple as telling people how you think your job should be done differently, how your industry should change, how you personally want to change with fitness, ‘wellness’ or just stopping a bad habit and starting a new one.

Your stories matter because they have impact. A personal perspective is powerful, it’s a tool with remarkable influence if you’re willing and able to communicate your experience. Because no one has your unique perspective on the world, don’t be afraid to share it.

I made myself laugh this week. I posted on Wednesday about my fear of publishing, of how Resistance was trying to take hold and prevent me from sharing more widely.

I’ve not shared any of these blog posts on my social media channels as it stands, althought they are all public for people to see.

It turns out that this site is setup to auto-Tweet my blog posts as soon as I hit publish. So all the time I thought I was fearfully not sharing, it turns out I was sharing with everyone anyway. And no one’s reading them.

The fear I felt about publishing and sharing things with the world – largely because they might not work – is totally unfounded. Of course, I could have told you that. I pretty much did in that post. But now I’ve proven it to myself.

This blog is an exercise in creativity, in experimenting, in trying new things and seeing if they work, and it doesn’t matter to me if they’re read by one person, no people or a million people,1 so the fear made no sense anyway.

Which makes me wonder to myself what else I’m fearing that I needn’t. What other things am I focusing on in my own head, avoiding for the sake of protecting myself, believing that more people will care than I think? And why would people caring matter to me anyway?

1. Let’s face it, it’s never going to be millions! [↩]

I can be so prescient sometimes. Not only did I predict that my writing-and-posting-daily habit would come to an end, I predicted it literally the day before it happened.

But it highlights one key point in this battle for routine and regular updates: the fact that a transplant doesn’t remove some of the many challenges of living with cystic fibrosis, the key one being energy management. After a busy and stressful few days at work,1 I had a bad night of almost no sleep that arrived with aches and pains across a lot of my body and a general level of fatigue. Although the fatigue is probably explained by the lack of sleep come to think of it.

I tried to get up in my normal routine, but my body and my brain weren’t having it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the many years of living with CF and my new body post-transplant, it’s that I have to listen when my body is telling me things. So I gave up on posting here and took myself back to bed.

There’s a lesson for everyone in this, because too often I see people struggling on, fighting through the beginnings of a cough or a cold because they think they have to, but totally ignoring the fact that they’re actually making things worse. The best thing you can do for your body when you start feeling unwell is to rest it and let it repair itself. Try to carry on too long and you end up making yourself even sicker, taking more time off work and increasing the stress levels you thought you were avoiding by continuing to work when you were unwell.

We can’t avoid some of the fear of ‘not working’ when we know we have a lot on our plates, but believe me when I say I speak from experience: giving yourself time to rest, recover and re-energise when you need it will make you stronger and more productive in the long run.

1. Nothing too stressful: I love my job, but it’s the same as any other job when it comes to it’s everyday stresses and swings-and-roundabouts of challenges and successes. [↩]

In his book the War of Art, Steven Pressfield talks a lot about Resistance, that unstoppable, unceasing force that does all it can to prevent you from doing the work. Yesterday I wrote

The real test of any habit is in its sustainability, so we’ll see how long it lasts. The intentions are good, we’ll have to see is the practice bears up.

and this morning that sustainability has been tested. The Resistance is strong.

On Tuesday it manifested as a challenge with my laptop1 and this morning it’s come along as much stronger doubts.

Why am I writing this, who’s going to be reading it, what’s the point of blogging every day and is it really sustainable? If it’s not sustainable, why carry on, why not just stop now because there’s no point in pushing forwards only to fall down later.

Luckily, I’ve managed to overcome Resistance and sit at the kitchen table, coffee in hand, to write this post. Writing about it is the only way I seem to be able to beat resistance.

I’m writing this blog precisely because it’s hard, precisely because it’s a bit uncertain and it might not work, precisely because there’s a challenge to the habit and discipline that I want to practice and get better at.

Tim Ferriss’ interview with Seth Godin has had a big influence on me, where Seth (of whom I’m a massive fan anyway) says that everyone should blog every day because everyone should put things out into the world to be seen. It’s not about whether the content or predictions contained in it are right or wrong, it’s about just being comfortable putting yourself out there.

I’m not confortable with that yet. I’ve not shared any of these blog posts on my social media channels as it stands, althought they are all public for people to see. So the Resistance is still strong, but I’m still writing, still publishing, still putting myself out there. Baby steps, but always moving forward.

1. The battery on my 10-year-old MacBook Pro has completely failed so I had to run a power cord awkwardly across the kitchen to be able to write at the table. [↩]

I’m a real stickler for the power of positive habits, for finding the ‘right’ routines to follow every day. The trouble is, I’m terrible at actually forming and following productive habits.

Take this blog. This post will be my second in as many days, drafted between 6-7am in the morning and posted straight away1 because I’ve been energised by working on revisions to my book and wanted to get back to a daily, public practice of noting things.

For two days in a row I’ve got up, put on a pot of coffee, grabbed a protein shake and a protein bar as a breakfast and sat at the kitchen table to draft a post to share on here2. It seems like a good plan, and one that I know a lot of creatives – especially writers – follow, writing first thing in the morning when the world is quiet and their brain is still rousing and it’s been enjoyable so far, so naturally it’s a habit I’d like to stick to.

It’s almost inevitable that I’ll fail, though. The ‘nice to haves’ are always the first thing to go when things get a little bit difficult. It’s only Tuesday, which means my mind and body are still quite fresh from the weekend, and the exertions of my commute and daily meetings etc at work have yet to take their toll.

The real test of any habit is in its sustainability, so we’ll see how long it lasts. The intentions are good, we’ll have to see is the practice bears up.

1. Hence, doubtless, the typos that I’ve missed because I’ve only skimmed-proofed it before hitting ‘publish’. [↩]
2. In the process I’ve discovered that my laptop battery has officially died, lasting just 10 minutes on ‘68%’ before turning off mid-draft. [↩]

I’m creating a 10th-anniversary copy of Smile Through It, the book I self-published back in 2012.1 It’s going to be fully revised and updated – there were a disappointing number of spelling and grammatical errors in the current version (that’ll teach me to be my own copy editor) that I’ve been keen to correct for a while, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and correct the errors while expanding some of the copy.

In the process, I’ve realised how helpful writing the old blog was to me as a place to work through things. It was a space to talk through what I was experiencing and try to explain my own feelings and reactions as I went.

When I rejigged my online presence at the start of the year and shift my blogging over here I wanted to create a space for comments and lessons about storytelling and how it can be applied to everyday life or used in the right situations for significant effect. There will be posts like that here going forward, but what I’ve realised is that this needs to also be the space for me to give voice to the thoughts and experiences of life, things I shouldn’t shy away from.

I’ve learned over the years that being open can really help people (including me), and while there are obviously things in my life that I’ll not be able to share, I still need (and want) to be able to talk about things that matter to me and why.

So that’s what to expect from here on. A return to a space that I’ve found to encourage me to share things that are happening and explore my own mind, as well as notes from the books I’m reading2 and tips and techniques of storytelling. It’ll be something of a smörgåsbord of content, but that’s because that’s who I am as a writer and creator and that shouldn’t be hidden behind some half-hearted attempt at ‘branding’ myself as something specific. I hope you’ll read on.

1. I know, I know, not technically a 10th anniversary book, but I’ve just celebrated my 10th transplant anniversary, so that’s my basis for the edition. [↩]
2. See the hugely impactful notes I took from Siddhartha [↩]

The Art of Winning An Unfair Game

I’m not going to lie, I read this book mostly just because I really like the film, but it turns out I actually took away a huge amount from it. I did have to stop reading fairly often to Google baseball terms, though, because I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about at times.

This book isn’t really about baseball, though. Well, of course it’s about baseball, but it’s not about baseball. It’s really about innovation and finding new ways to do things that have been done the same way for years. I took away a very timely lesson to question everything and work hard to take assumptions for what they are: someone assuming they know the best way of doing things without having tried any other way.

Key highlight: “If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.” p98

“The difference in Billy wasn’t what had happened to him, but what hadn’t. He had a life he hadn’t led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.” p15

“People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t.” p18

“That Erik had never played even high school ball was, in Billy Beane’s mind, a point in his favor. At least he hasn’t learned the wrong lessons. Billy had played pro ball, and regarded it as an experience he needed to overcome if he wanted to do his job well. “A reformed alcoholic,” is how he described himself.” p24

“A person willing to rethink everything he learned, or thought he had learned, playing baseball.” p24

“Foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced. That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success.” p33

“That was the moment when the scouts realized just how far Billy Beane was willing to go to push his supposedly rational and objective view of things.” p35

“‘You take a guy high no one else likes and it makes you uncomfortable. But I mean, really, who gives a fuck where guys are taken? Remember Zito? Everyone said we were nuts to take Zito with the ninth pick of the draft. And we knew everyone was going to say that. One fucking month later it’s clear we kicked everyone’s ass. Nobody remembers that now. But understand, when we stop trying to figure out the perception of guys, we’ve done better.'” p39

“The Mets scouting department had badly misjudged Billy’s nature. They had set him up to fail.” p44

“He decided that his talent was beside the point: how could you call it talent if it didn’t lead to success?” p55

“The new, outsider’s view of baseball was all about exposing the illusions created by the insiders on the field.” p62

“It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language. —Bill James, 1985 Baseball Abstract” p64

“Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.” p65

“After all, wrote James, ‘you have to do something right to get an error; even if the ball is hit right at you, then you were standing in the right place to begin with.'” p67

“Fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him.” p67

“‘When the numbers acquire the significance of language.’ he later wrote, ‘they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry.'” p67

“But the details of the thing didn’t matter. What mattered was James’s ability to light a torch in a dark chamber and throw a new light on a dusty problem. He made you think.” p69

“What got counted was often simply what was easiest to count.” p70

“A hitter should be measured by his success in that which he is trying to do, and that which he is trying to do is create runs. It is startling, when you think about it, how much confusion there is about this.” p76

“‘The people who run baseball are surrounded by people trying to give them advice,’ said James. ‘So they’ve built very effective walls to keep out anything.’ p85

“People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.” p90

“Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be.” p98

“‘What you don’t do,’ said Billy, ‘is what the Yankees do. If we do what the Yankees do, we lose every time, because they’re doing it with three times more money than we are.’ p119

“Highly trained mathematicians and statisticians and scientists who had abandoned whatever they were doing at Harvard or Stanford or MIT to make a killing on Wall Street. The fantastic sums of money hauled in by the sophisticated traders transformed the culture on Wall Street, and made quantitative analysis, as opposed to gut feel, the respectable way to go about making bets in the market.” p190

“Bill James’s work had been all about challenging the traditional understanding of the game, by questioning the meaning of its statistics.” p133

“His coach was creating an alternative scale on which Hatty could judge his performance. He might be an absolute D but on Wash’s curve he felt like a B, and rising. “He knew that what looked like a routine play wasn’t a routine play for me,” said Hatty. Wash was helping him to fool himself, to make him feel better than he was, until he actually became better than he was.” p168

“No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo.” p193

“The power of an imagination can arise from what it refuses to foresee.” p224

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.