Archives: oli lewington

When we find people we can respect while respectfully disagreeing with them, we grow. We grow because rather than taking offence at their views or thinking negatively about them as people, they help us challenge our own beliefs simply because they’re different.

Difference is important. Difference creates challenge. Challenge is what powers the world.

“To fly we have to have resistance.”

Maya Lin

Without difference, without resistance, without challenge, nothing changes. Not individuals, not organisations, not countries. Only through opposition does anything shift.

Once we open up and take in opposing views one of two things happens: we change our mind, or we understand our own views better.

I subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog because I respect him and love his writing. But I also disagree with him often. When one of his posts lands in my inbox and I disagree with it, it makes me stop and ask myself not just why I disagree with it but what I actually believe (and why). 

When we find people who challenge us our thoughts, views and beliefs clarify in a way that helps us grow and move forward.

I hope you disagree.

Dmitri Shostakovich composed extraordinarily quickly. Once he heard the piece in his head, he would pour the notes onto the page. He could manage 20-30 pages of score a day and rarely made corrections.

I can’t write that fast. I can’t write music at all, but let’s leave that to one side. Words vs. music may be an indirect comparison, but even with the benefit of technology I can’t come close to that speed (or endurance).

Shostakovich, however, constantly worried that he worked too fast. He wrote a letter to a friend saying, “Undoubtedly this is bad… composing is a serious business.”, an idea that is so clearly ridiculous that it left me hoping his friend wrote back to tell him as much.

We must never get caught up in the idea there there is one right way to do something – a proper way or, even worse, the “done” way.

My wife and I make tea totally differently, but they usually taste the same. 

Lee Child’s writing process is totally different to Haruki Murakami, but they have both written bestsellers.

Clint Eastwood, when he directs a movie, shoots as few takes as possible, while David Fincher is renowned for shooting 20, 50, even 100 takes of a single shot before moving on. They’ve both made masterpieces. 

The way we succeed is not by doing things the way someone else does them, but by finding the way that suits us and owning it.

After all, for all his worrying, Shostakovich was a pretty solid composer all things considered.

When we have decided which boulder we’re going to put our shoulder to, the next question is whether or not we’re able to shift it on our own. 

The size of the boulder is directly proportional to the size of our ambition. The bigger our goal, the bigger the rock.

Our ability to move the rock is inversely proportional to the size of the boulder. The bigger the rock, the hard it is to shift.

That means if our ambitions are lofty, we cannot hope to move the boulder without other people putting their shoulders to it alongside us. We can’t be proud, we can’t be shy, we can’t be ashamed to say that we need help to achieve our goals.

If the rock looming over us is the one we really want to push, other people’s shoulders are the most important part of our efforts. 

When we finally overcome our nervousness about getting started we feel great. The first push of the boulder is always the hardest, momentum will help from here.

The reality, though, is that the hill is often not as steep as we thought it was and the momentum may be halted by tree branches, smaller rocks or even people rather than rumbling its way to the bottom untouched.

When that boulder stops no one can ever say for certain whether it’s gone as far as it can. It may be leaning up against an insurmountable obstacle or an unrelenting opposition, or it might be a finger-push away from barrelling down to its destination. But that’s not the point.

The point is that we have the chance to start again. We have a choice.

We can start pushing the same boulder and see if it’ll budge, we can start pushing a smaller rock on the same hill to see if we can get that one going instead, or we can choose an entirely different hill on which to find an entirely different boulder we think we can shift.

Of course, we also have the option to do nothing, to tell ourselves we can’t do it, that we’re done with pushing boulders.

We must never, ever take that option.

Regardless which boulder we decide to put our shoulder to, we must keep pushing. We must try to see how far we can go with this one, and the next one, and the one after that.

It doesn’t matter how many rocks on how many hills we try to shift, we must not stop starting.

Starting is hard. Things get in the way, we doubt ourselves, we worry that if we start we may not finish, we may not succeed, we may not make it to wherever we’re going.

People will often share the old Lao-Tzu quote, the “a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step”, but they often miss an equally great truism from the same chapter:1

“Rest is easy to hold.”

Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching

And so we hold our rest because if we start we may fail.

“But wait,” people say, “Failure is a good thing.” They tell us that Edison said “I know 10,000 things that will not work” 2 and while it’s lovely to know other people have done it before us, it doesn’t make failure easier to take.

Eventually, when we finally take that fabled first step, we remember: the reason people start is because starting feels good. It’s scary, fun, intimidating, energising, exhilarating, uncertain and, most of all, it’s a beginning. We can say, “I have started.” Our journey has begun, however long it may take and wherever the road may lead.

We can never feel the same regret for the things we start as we do for the things we never begin, so if you’re thinking about starting something, start.

Because you can. I believe in you.

1. Chapter 64, Tao Te Ching, quote taken from the Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo translation [non-affiliate]. [↩]
2. He didn’t, by the way – the quote attributed to him by biographer Walter S. Mallory in a 1910 biography was “Results? Why man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” Source: Quote Investigator [↩]

We all know the people.

The people who work 18 hours a day, sleep for four and spend the other two in the gym. The people who post screenshots of their 4am alarm clocks, their “getting my pump on” Insta stories or their late-night “I’m still at it” Tweets.

When we see them, we often forget a simple truth: they are not us.

We mustn’t get sucked in to living someone else’s life. Other people’s productivity is their own. Their habits, their lifestyles, their beliefs aren’t who we are. We can aspire to be as successful as someone else, but we should never aspire to be someone else.

My body won’t let me operate on less than seven or eight hours of sleep, so I’m never going to work 18-hour days. My brain won’t let me go through a day without spending time with my wife, chilling out, eating together, watching TV, so I’m never going to spend all my waking hours at work.

That doesn’t mean I can’t be successful. It just means I’ll do it differently to someone else. Which is the point.

The moment we start to build our lives according to the way other people build theirs, we lose touch with who we are and how we achieve what we want to achieve.

You do you, not them.

A good friend of our family died suddenly and unexpectedly last week. It’s tempting to trot out that old saying:

“Don’t cry because it’s over!

Smile because it happened!”

Ludwig Jacobowski

If we hadn’t had his many years of love and friendship we wouldn’t feel this sad, so we should be grateful he was in our lives at all. Anyone who’s experienced grief, though, will know it’s not always that easy. 

Gratitude is hard when things are tough. Whether we’re riding waves of grief, battling chronic pain or waiting interminably for a transplant that may never arrive, finding things to be grateful for can feel like a fool’s errand.

The trick, I’ve discovered, is to find the smallest possible thing to be grateful for. 

Be grateful for the phone in your hand that lets you distract yourself from difficulty on TikTok, or for the chair you’re sitting in while you’re doing it. Be grateful for the tea you’re drinking, or the mug you’re drinking it from. Be grateful for the pen you’re writing with, or the computer that lets you buy a condolence card without going to a shop.

Gratitude isn’t reserved for big things. Once we know that, we can find it wherever we look, even if our eyes are clouded by tears.

Share your work, even when it scares you. Pick up the phone, even when it scares you. Tell someone what they mean to you, even when it scares you. Apply for that job, even when it scares you. Be honest with someone, even when it scares you.

Yesterday I sent the first draft of the first three chapters of my first ever novel to my wife and my brother. I’ve never written anything like this before and I’m not ready to share it yet. I’m not ready for other people to read it. I’m scared of what they’re going to say.

Which is why I had to share it.

Fear holds me back more often than I’d like to admit. It holds me back even in those times I refuse to admit to myself that I’m scared. In those times, fear manifests itself as perfectionism, it surfaces in excuses. Those are the times I need to share my art.

Not despite the fact that it scares me, because of the fact it scares me.

Doing things, even when they scare you, is a mantra I’ve had for myself for a long time. It’s also one I rarely listen to. So I’m trying harder.

Sometimes things just pop into my head. Unprompted, unwanted and not always helpful. But sometimes things pop into my head unprompted, unwanted and very, very helpful. Like yesterday when I started thinking about learning vs. teaching.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I wanted to move this site and these posts further towards the original intention of this blog. While mulling it over after I posted it I realised what wasn’t working.

Every time I’ve tried to restart this blog I’ve focused on what I can teach. What lessons from my life I can shape to apply universally. How I can benefit other people (like you, Dear Reader) with my knowledge.

And that’s bullshit.

If I sit here every morning1 and try to think about what I can teach today, I’m going to tie myself up in knots. But – more importantly – I’m going to create inauthentic, disingenuous posts.

The reason my blog resonated with people when I first started writing was because I was focused on learning. I was trying to make sense of my world as it was. Horrible, scary, intimidating but also funny, bright and full of excitement.

That’s precisely what I need now. Not a place where I can come to preach my wonderful wisdom, but a place I can put down what I’m learning every day.

If that’s something you can also learn from, fantastic. Have at it. Take away what you want to take away. But this place is for me. For my lessons. For my knowledge. For my experience. This place is where everything starts to make sense. I hope.

1. or afternoon, or evening, whenever I managed to plonk myself down [↩]

When I’m pottering around the house, making tea, washing up, vacuuming or any of the other household tasks I don’t do often enough, I listen to podcasts. Yesterday while doing some extended kitchen cleaning after a messier-than-necessary roast chicken dinner, I was listening to Tim Ferris’s latest podcast with Seth Godin and it helped me to realise that I need to move on from my current state of fear, confusion or just plain laziness and start doing the work.

I frequently battle with Seth’s work. Some of it is inspired, inspirational and intrinsically motivational. Other books and posts seem more polemical, more dictatorial, more out-and-out instructional – the kind of thing that I bump up against. But it always makes me think, which is why I’m so addicted to listening to him talk.

What stuck in my mind listening to this conversation was the same thing that stuck with me in the first conversation Tim had with Seth on his podcast, the same thing that stuck with me the second time Tim had him on the podcast and the same thing that stuck with me reading Do The Work 1 , which seems like the least imaginative and best book title of just about any book you’ll find on the virtual shelves of the Kindle store (if, like me, visiting physical book stores it out of the question at the moment). The idea of showing up every day, doing the work and not making excuses for failing to do something every day has always, always resonated with me even as I’ve consistently failed to do it.

“Just do it” may be one of the best-known and most cited inspirational instructions in the world, but it’s also an inappropriate attitude, Seth says. “‘Just do it’ implies ‘what the hell’, ‘it doesn’t matter’ [which] pushes you to be a hack who’s not responsible for your own work.”

By contrast, “merely” doing the work takes us away from time spent catastrophising the work and its results. And catastrophising is what I do best, both in work and in life. I’ve shied away from continuing to post on here or on my YouTube channel because I’ve been spending too much time worrying about what image I want to project of myself. I’ve worried about how people will see me. I’ve worried about people disagreeing with me. I’ve worried about a lot of things and I am still worrying.

But the worry and the outright fear is stopping me from doing anything. It’s paralysing. So the time has come to start trying2 to spend some time everyday merely doing the work. Merely spending time each day on an act of creation, whether that’s written word on here, a video to share on YouTube or working on the edits to the novel I wrote during lockdown that I’m feeling massive resistance towards.

I don’t want to be afraid of making or sharing my art any more. But the only way I’m going to defeat that fear is, paradoxically, by making and sharing my art.

This post, then, is the first step. One step, every day, will eventually lead me somewhere. Where that is—for now—I’m not sure. I simply know that I can’t wait until I’m certain of my destination to set out because I’ll just spend all my time poring over maps and weighing up the options. Perfection will never happen. The sooner I understand that, the sooner I’ll be able to keep on keeping on.

This might not work. But it also might.

1. This is an affiliate link, which means I get a small amount of money if you choose to purchase the book. If you’d rather not do that, you can use this link instead. [↩]
2. Note: I try a lot of things that don’t work, so who knows where this will end up going? [↩]