You can finish what matters without changing who you are
Author David Kadavy made a fantastic podcast a while back about the contrast between Leonardo and Raphael: Leonardo mind, Raphael world.
As a sought-after artist Raphael was reliable and prolific, if a little conventional. Leonardo, on the other hand, was a wildly inventive polymath, a genius far ahead of his time. Unfortunately, he had a poor track record at finishing what he started. I was intrigued by this, and it inspired me to write a little about learning to make notes like Leonardo.
Leonardo depicted as Plato (or is it the other way around?) in Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens (1509-1511)
Well, now I’m delighted that David has expanded his insights into these rival figures of the Italian Renaissance in his latest book. I read an early version of Finish What Matters, prior to its release on 14 September 2026. And I have to say, already the introduction spoke to me personally as though the author was looking me in the eyes and examining my soul. Having late-diagnosed ADHD I’m acutely aware of how much I still don’t know about harnessing my innate creative abilities to deliver something tangible. And it feels like the author really gets this.
“You’d like to be a Raphael who gets things done. But many of us are Leonardos, who start project after project and never finish anything. The ideas that ignite our curiosity matter to us deeply, yet we can never seem to make them count.”
It was a little uncomfortable to be seen in this way but it boded well for the rest of the book. It’s gripping, absorbing and exactly what I need a self-help book to be: directly useful in a potentially life-altering way. I don’t say that about every book I read, but for this I’m making an exception.
Finish What Matters has dramatically increased my confidence that with the right mind-set and the right process, finishing a creative project is not only quite achievable but can also be a lot of fun. It’s also a reminder that I don’t somehow need to become a different person. There’s more than one path to finishing your work and more than one way of being productively creative. The world is better because Raphael and Leonardo were irreducibly themselves. More modestly, my range is me, and that’s OK.
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Because I was determined to share my book Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, I finished what matters and it’s available right now.
Do you ever feel there’s too many ready-made answers that don’t fit your needs? Me too. That’s why I’m exploring an alternative: ’living questions’. Not quite Rilke, but also not not Rilke. writingslowly.com
#NoteTaking #LifelongLearning #Zettelkasten
Living questions
Living questions
Instead of chasing after easy answers, the poet Rilke urged a young artist to “live the questions”. Sound advice maybe, but which questions really matter, and how can we go about living them?
“I beg you … to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not know how to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer …” – Rainer Maria Rilke
Yes, it’s all very well ‘living the questions’ but which questions are we talking about here? All of them? Some of them? Which ones?
Eleven urgent note-making questions are now finding answers
The strange return of the continuous need to make sense of things
The idea of reading continuous narrative may be relatively recent. For example, the Bible is arranged in many places with a long sequential narrative, and some have seen it as ‘the greatest story ever told’. But liturgical practice, both Jewish and Christian, is to split this extended narrative up into excerpted readings (’the reading’ or ’the lesson’; ’the portion’ or parashah).
The novel, meanwhile, encourages readers to assume continuous reading is the natural way of things, even though many novels even into the 20th century were actually serialised on first publication. Here’s Robert Darnton on the significance of fragmentary reading.
“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your own personality. . . By selecting and arranging snippets from a limitless stock of literature, early modern Englishmen gave free play to a semi-conscious process of ordering experience. The elective affinities that bound their selection into patterns reveal an epistemology — a process of knowing — at work below the surface”
— (Robert Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” New York Review of Books 47 (20)[December 21, 2000] 82, 86).
I note this because these days it feels like the age of fragmentary reading has well and truly returned. Every medium has cracked into splinters. Along with this fragmentation comes a revival of the need for a continuous effort to make sense of an increasingly disordered experience. As a result there’s a great need to work out new ways of knowing.
A question I asked on Hyde’s under/over:
Before we find our own voice, we usually copy our mentors or heroes. Who was the teacher or model that inspired you when you started blogging, and how did following their example eventually help you find your own style?
And here’s software engineer Alex Hyett’s excellent answer.
#indieweb #blogging
📷 🍳Sunday morning is time for shakshuka.
Currently reading: Wise Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life by Frank Tallis 📚
I’m delighted to be featured in Hyde’s intriguing series Under/Over, where bloggers are asked for their thoughts on what they find under-rated and over-rated. I have opinions on Zettelkasten, POSSE, solitude, journalling, pavlova(!) and more. Read on at lazybea.rs.
#indieweb