Go Slo
Sam Spratt, Corita Kent, and The Virtue of Retraction
Dear Readers -
A couple of days ago the artist Sam Spratt shared this post:
Sam wrote about how he is intentionally trying to build his life and work around periods of furious energy and output followed by breaks for retraction and reflection.
The post is worth reading because, in usual Sam fashion, it is well written and thought provoking.
But more so, it is worth reading because his core message is not just about him. It is relevant to all of us across many domains: Work, play, fitness, money, romantic partnerships, and beyond.
Exert and Retract.
Today I am going to ignore the first part of the equation: Exert.
Why? Because that is the part of the equation that gets all the attention.
10 tips to increase your productivity
How to lose 10 pounds in 10 days
How I make $25,000 per month
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How I learned to increase my reading speed and double my ouput
These are, weirdly, very normal sentences that we all come across every day.
Less covered by the internety writing cabal (of which I am a part) is the second part of the equation: Retract. That is the part I want to briefly sermonize about today.
Which brings me to the image in the background of Sam’s photo…
Sister Mary Corita was a nun.
After 30 years with the Los Angeles Immaculate Heart Convent, she left to become Miss Corita Kent, artist.
She moved to Boston and began a prolific and inspiring second act producing colorful silkscreen pop art.
Some of her more renowned works include the 1985 Love Stamp she designed for the postal service and a 150-foot-high natural gas tank in Boston.
She also created luke 2.14, 51, which I love and which is hanging behind Sam in the photo he shared (and also in my daughter's bedroom).
The story behind this work is funny.
“Go Slo!”
Supposedly, Corita sent this message to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963 after reading that the first lady, Ladybird Johnson, had been telling him to slow down.
Corita thought that there ought to be a more elegant way of telling the President to slow down, and so she created this piece for him.
As one reviewer notes: “The text implores us to ‘Go Slo,’ but, as the color suggests, we shall proceed with this proclamation joyfully.”
Here’s a thing I believe:
By pursuing slowness, inefficiency, or even inaction, you can increase your odds of success and happiness in many key areas of life.
Investing
Be a slow buyer, and an even slower seller to maximize your long-term wealth and spend more time focusing on what’s really important.
Work
By “retracting” in the words of Sam, you can give yourself the space you need to recharge and reflect so that when you are working, the work is better. But perhaps more importantly, intentional retraction can help you sort out whether you’re working on the right thing. Breaking the intertia of a given direction is one of the hardest things to do, and if we’re constantly just exerting in that direction, we never are able to evaluate whether we’re actually going the right way.
By replying slowly or not replying at all A) you get fewer emails and B) problems solve themselves, and old emails that you would have spent time replying to become irrelevant.
Ideas
Often the best ideas come not from light bulb epiphanies, but from long, slow hunches that slowly develop (h/t to Where Good Ideas Come by Steven Johnson)
Fitness
No single workout makes you fit and healthy. A slow and steady commitment to moving your body over multiple years is where you find true fitness.
Eating
Food tastes better if you go slowly and notice each bite. And it tastes even better if you slowly spent the time to prepare it yourself (bonus recipe we loved recently)
Even Video Games
A few years ago Deep Mind’s Alpha Star soundly defeated human players of StarCraft II, a game of infinite possibility and incomplete information that is more complicated than chess. Amazingly, Alpha Star performed fewer actions per minute than the human players. As with GO, the AI developed new long-range strategies never before seen.
Today is a perfect day to consider a micro retraction.
Take some time to journal and free write about a topic or problem that has been on your mind.
Go on a device free walk.
Lay in a park and do nothing.
Whatever you do today, try to go a little more slo than usual.
In service,
Monty