Janice Greenwood

Almost every afternoon, my boyfriend and I take our dog, Pali, to the dog park. It is fascinating to watch her with her doggie friends, particularly because she’s not friends with all of the dogs. Some of the dogs she chases through the mud and grass, exuberantly playful. Some of the dogs she just sniffs and passes by, hardly noting their existence. These dogs seem to feel the same way about her, too. And then, inexplicably, there are dogs she doesn’t get along with at all. They’ll both stand each other down, baring their teeth, growling. Sometimes we have to pull them apart.

Why is my dog friends with some dogs, and enemies with others? Why is she drawn to some, and predisposed to ignore others? The mystery of my dog’s friendships are as mysterious as my own. Why have I been drawn to some people at times, and not to others? Why have I been friends with the people in my life?

The mysteries, the joys, the pains, and the challenges of friendship are issues at the core of Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman’s “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close.”

Sow and Friedman write about the mystery of why we become friends with some people and not with others. They describe it as “an initial ZING! Feeling. It can’t be forced, and that’s why it’s so magical.” It’s a kind of platonic attraction. Anyone who has experienced the blossoming of a close friendship knows what I’m talking about. “It’s hard to articulate exactly why you’re attracted to someone. You just are.” The rarity of the connection is what makes it so special.

Human friendships, unlike doggie friendships, are highly complex. A true close friendship has the power to shape the two people intimately connected in its bounds. Sow and Friedman argue that the strongest friendships are often forged when two people are a little lost in their lives. The unfolding of the friendship becomes the growth of two people. “As humans, we are all thoroughly shaped by the people we know and love.” Sow and Friedman write that they have often forged their deepest friendships at times of transition in their lives. I find the same true for myself, having made some of my closest friends after breakups or moves to new cities.

Our social connections can push us—either in new directions, or more robustly in the direction we were already heading. I found out about “Big Friendship” through the Greener Reader, my Hawai’i book club. I have a stack of books to read that goes from the floor halfway to the ceiling, and after I finished my M.F.A. in poetry I lost all taste for assigned reading. I have to admit I often find myself failing to finish book club selections. But it’s January, and one of my New Year’s resolutions was to try to keep up with the Greener Reader’s club list. I figured it would be nice to talk about books with flesh and blood people (even if over Zoom) for a change rather than my usual hoarse shouting into the vast silence and anonymity of the internet.

We become like the people who surround us. Our friends can map the course our lives will take. What was most fascinating about Sow and Friedman’s book was the idea that the friends we have will, in many ways, dictate the kinds of lives we’ll live, the kind of people we’ll become.

And indeed, I have been shaped by my friends. There are friends I made passively, some who led me on side-paths; and then there are friends I actively sought who became my companions in surfing New York swells, who pushed me into the ocean on days I didn’t want to get out of bed, who didn’t think I was crazy when I said I was going to pack my car and move to Hawai’i. (Thank you Tati. I have a bed in the living room waiting for you when you and Dan make the move.) We also expanded our circle of friends together. Tati introduced me to her active New York buddies, and I introduced her to my Rockaway dolphin pod (yes, there is a pod of dolphins in New York). 

Shine Theory

Friedman and Sow went viral for their “Shine Theory” idea, which is the idea that women, and people in general, are better off seeing one another as “collaborators” rather than “competitors.” In “Big Friendship” Sow and Friedman describe the origins of Shine Theory, defining it best by showing how it has worked in their friendships and lives: “We came to define Shine Theory as an investment, over the long term, in helping a friend be their best—and relying on their help in return. It is a conscious decision to bring our full selves to our friendships and to not let insecurity or envy ravage them. It’s a practice of cultivating a spirit of genuine happiness and excitement when our friends are doing well, and being there for them when they aren’t.”  

Rather than seeing the world competitively, Sow and Friedman argue that women can prosper and grow when they see the world as collaborative. “Shine Theory asks that we replace our impulse of competition with one of collaboration.”

Friedman and Sow distinguish Shine Theory from networking. Networking involves connecting with another person for the express purpose of advancing one’s career. This isn’t Shine Theory. Shine Theory is about forging genuine friendships which form the basis of mutual support, sharing of information, and resources. Sow and Friedman write: “Shine Theory often takes the form of sharing resources, contacts, and opportunities.”

There are all kinds of gate-keepers in our society. There are book editors in the literary world, CEOs in the business world, collectors and gallery owners in the art world, and more. Sow and Friedman explain that “together, we became skeptical of gate-keepers and decided we’d get further if we helped each other.” When we think about success, it is important to think about the gate-keepers of that success. At the end of 2020, the New York Times published an article titled: “Just How White Is the Book Industry?” The Times gathered data on books published between 1950 and 2018. 95% of the books published between these years were written by white people. 85% of the people who edit books are white. And the heads of the “big five” publishing houses are all white. Homogeneity in publishing leads to homogeneity in what gets published and the loss of unique voices. We need Shine Theory more than ever in the literary world. Otherwise, marginalized voices sometimes get placed in literary ghettos.

Sow and Friedman write: “The organizing principle of expensive private schools, for example, is that powerful people get more powerful by building close bonds with each other over several decades.”

It wasn’t until I graduated with my M.F.A. that I first got the creeping feeling that when it came to getting published, who you were, who you knew, and who you were connected to mattered more than the quality of your writing. Let’s just say as a shy young woman, from a low-income background, graduate school felt more like a process of watching myself spiral into thousands of dollars of student loan debt, while navigating an academic and social culture I struggled to understand and for which I had no mentor to guide me. I didn’t do very well at networking at Columbia University, nor did I do a good job of asking for help; I spent most of my time trying to not have a nervous breakdown. I know others who felt the same.

But with Shine Theory, rather than lamenting my fate, Sow and Friedman encourage action. “When we notice a person seems to have something we want, instead of turning them into an external barometer for how we’re feeling about ourselves, we work to see them as a potential ally.” When I look at the young women who shared my fate who studied poetry, the ones who survived created their own opportunities—they created their own literary journals, made themselves the gate-keepers. Maybe I could do the same. (I recently launched my own small press and published my book—gate-keepers be damned.)

It’s normal to feel jealous from time to time, but Friedman and Sow offer the important reminder that it’s how we react to the jealousy that matters more.

With Shine Theory, each person brings something to the table, and each individual is tasked to ask herself what she has to offer. In “Big Friendship” Sow and Friedman explain it like this: “We were getting tired of waiting for someone older and wiser to help us find our path forward, and so we started to look to our peers to exchange information about jobs, salaries, and obstacles.”

The more we share with each other, the more we have to gain.

Because the book is co-written, it took a little getting accustomed to the chorus of voices at first. The insights about friendship were more profound than the storytelling, but the insights were worthwhile, and I’d recommend the book to anyone looking to make friends, or stay connected to friends, despite life changes and distance. One of our deepest needs is the needs to be seen. Big friendships, when they are worked-on and held close, allow us to be seen. My puppy’s trips to the doggie park are essential to her doggie life, not just because she needs to run, but because she needs to interact with other dogs. She reminds me of how important it is to stay in touch with the friends who have shaped me into becoming the person I want to be.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

There have been many proposed explanations for why sea shanties have recently gone viral. Ever since Nathan Evans released his viral TikTok version of the “Wellerman,” everyone from Stephen Colbert to Rolling Stone to CNN and the New York Times has covered the trend. Rolling Stone called the trend “unexpected” and “unprecedented” and noted that the “Wellerman” was streamed over two million times in a single week alone. Why the sudden interest in the sea shanty? CNN’s AJ Willingham writes, “It’s folly to examine why some things go viral on the internet, and by doing so one risks discounting the beauty of the simplest answer: They just do.”

I disagree.

The sea shanty, according to the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich, was originally a song sung by sailors to pass the time at sea or to “synchronize their labor.” Petrusich writes, “It seems possible that after nearly a year of solitude and collective self-banishment, and of crushing restrictions on travel and adventure, the chantey might be providing a brief glimpse into a different, more exciting way of life, a world of sea air and pirates and grog, of many people singing in unison, of being free to boldly take off for what Melville called the “true places,” the uncorrupted vistas that can’t be located on any map.”

I think there’s something more going on. Yes, we all dream of traveling again, but I think the sea shanty is tapping into a collective social consciousness that has become a little unmoored, a collective unconscious that has literally found itself adrift.

In this era of COVID-19 self-isolation our homes can sometimes feel as claustrophobic as a ship at sea. Here we are, isolated from society at large, and yet often claustrophobically close to our families, roommates, or lovers. Perhaps we have all begun to collectively live our lives like sailors—every now and then seeing the grocery store rise up from the horizon, where we gather provisions for another stint in the abyss.

Virality taps into something in the collective mind. Perhaps we sense the possibility of normalcy not far off in the horizon. Like the watchman of old sighting star or borealis, we have heard rumor of a vaccine that might free us from this collective madness, but it could also just be the glimmer of the moon on the water, a mirage of land and normalcy. There are more viral variants after all.

About That Wellerman

What is it really about “The Wellerman” that really taps into the collective psyche? I can’t help but hear Melville’s Ismael “growing grim about the mouth” fighting another “damp, drizzly November” of the soul. The shanty does indeed speak to another time and place, a world of adventure, travel, a world encompassed by the unknown. Don’t we all wish we could take to sea, and leave behind our little cabins of quarantine?

There are several lines in “The Wellerman” that particularly resonate with 2021. Remember back in 2020, a thousand years ago, when the quarantine began, and we were told we’d only have to do this for two weeks and then everything would presumably return to normal? “The Wellerman” captures this precisely here: “She had not been two weeks from shore / when down on her a right whale bore.” Ah yes, how quickly Fortuna’s wheel turns a two-week voyage into a year. The whale drags the boat on and on, and so we sit in front of our Netflix, dragged through the entertainment abyss. Remember when all this felt a little bit like a refreshing vacation? Remember when we were fresh in all this, thrilled to sit in our socks and sleepwear, watching daytime T.V.? Yes, it almost had the feeling of an adventure. But how quickly even the most daring adventure becomes monotony, as surely all sailors learned over time.

We’ve been long at sea. “One day, when the tonguing’ is done / we’ll take our leave and go.”

What does tonguing mean in “The Wellerman?” According to Royal Museums Greenwich, tonguing is the process of cutting up a caught whale. The tonguers were the men who would butcher the whales when they were hauled from the sea. The song is about how we all long for the workday to end. How we all long for change when we find ourselves in frustrating circumstances.

Sea shanties are “call and response” songs. They are sung communally and community is something we long for more than anything now. If only we could all be in a room full of strangers singing sea shanties.

The sea shanty trend reminds us once again about the importance of poetry—its power to bring us together at a time when we are so far apart, it’s power to capture the collective longing of our culture. I don’t think the sea shanty is a silly inexplicably viral meme. It taps into an authentic yearning within us all.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Ask any two people which poets they admire, and you’ll touch a nerve that rings down to their very souls. Why does Emily Dickinson resonate with me, and Maya Angelou with you? Why Seamus Heaney for this man, or Langston Hughes? Why Dante’s “Paradiso”, or Liliuokalani’s translation of the “Kumulipo”? Poetry, which is often so personal and private, can also be public is so many ways.

It can be read at a wedding to mark the binding together of two souls. It can be read at a funeral to mark grief and to celebrate life at its extreme verge. It can be read at a graduation to signal a beginning. And it can be used politically as well—to mark the end of a war, to legitimize a royal line, or to draw a country together during a difficult time. We expect something different of our political poetry. Political poetry is public and egalitarian, common tender for tender national moments. There is poetry that marks our most sacred occasions, and then there is public poetry, and sometimes, very rarely, the sacred and the political come together.

Political poetry is public in the most public of senses. Unlike the poetry we choose for funerals and weddings, which are intensely personal and are therefore colored by the intensely personal choices of those who choose them, political poetry has the expectation built into it that it should speak for us all, should speak to a whole nation. It must be at once accessible, emotional, and proper. And so, when Amanda Gorman, who is only 22 years old, rose to the task—no—exceeded it, in her stunning poem, “The Hill We Climb,” I found myself proud to live in a nation who chose her as the youth poet laureate, proud of her, and hopeful that we are entering a new era where poetry can be perhaps more central in all our public and private lives.

Yesterday’s inauguration was unique because it followed a violent insurrection on the capital spurred on by the former president himself. Since Joe Biden rightfully won the election as president of the United States, the outgoing president, in an unprecedented move, failed to acknowledge Joe Biden as the rightful winner, spread lies about a “stolen election,” and spurred his followers to violence. The transition of power to Joe Biden is the 46^th time our nation has seen such a transition, but this one was different. If poetry can bind our souls together in the most difficult times, we need it now more than ever—at a time where everything is but certain in our nation. We face a pandemic that is projected to claim half a million American lives within the next month. We leave behind a dark political era of division, deceit, and racial disharmony, spurred on by white supremacists inside the hallowed office of the presidency and outside of it. We need poetry that can touch us all—not just poetry written for academics, or scholars, or literary types—but poetry that can touch the heart and soul of our divided and aching nation.

While Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” is indeed accessible, it is not without rich allusion. She alludes to the words of Barack Obama, whose optimism in the face of our “unfinished” American project inspired him to write in his introduction to “A Promised Land:” “I am not ready to abandon the possibility of America.” To this, Gorman writes and responds: “And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.”

Words can rip us apart, or tie us together. Donald Trump’s words inspired men and women to shatter the windows at the heart of our nation, to spit and shit on the floor of the capital where the mechanisms of the peaceful transition of power were moving, and are still moving, despite him. Gorman writes: “And so, we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.” For so many of us, the last four years have been a national tragedy, a daily trauma to watch our cherished institutions trashed. Gorman reminds us that we are not crushed: “That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped; that even as we tired, we tried.”

What I also adored about Gorman’s inaugural poem was its subtle references to Lynn-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Drawing from the Hamilton songbook, where George Washington sings about stepping aside as president a time when something like that was unheard of, Gorman writes: “Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree.” And with these words, Gorman traces the fine and fragile thread of succession, the humble acts of many men who gave up power in service of the nation’s greater good. Miranda’s Hamilton and Washington sing, “History has its eyes on us.” And Gorman doesn’t fail to include this line in her poem, too. Washington had the foresight to know he didn’t want to be king, and didn’t want to live in a nation of kings. The peaceful transfer of power represents our national commitment to country above ambition.

And Gorman also invokes the words of Maya Angelou who told us she would rise, and we are told that we, too, will rise. And because poetry can make the unbelievable believable, bring hope to the hopeless, heart to the grieving, I believe her.

The promise of America is not guaranteed. We live in a nation built on slave labor, built on stolen land, built on disparities between the wealthy and the poor that run counter to our ideals. It is up to us to own this history, and more than own it, to improve it. Gorman writes that it is “the hill we climb if only we dare it. Because being American is more than a pride we inherit; it’s the past we step into and how we repair it.”

I feel so hopeful for poetry in America. We have a president who actually reads poetry.

We read poetry not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because it gets us through the hard.

When Joe Biden recited lines from Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy,” in one of his speeches, it left me breathless. And when Lynn-Manuel Miranda recited the poem during the evening celebration of the inauguration, it left me weeping. “The Cure at Troy” is an adaptation from Sophocles’s “Philoctetes.” In plain language, it lays out the bare truth. “Human beings suffer / they torture one another / they get hurt and get hard.” There is compassion in these lines for those who have hurt us.

Things fall apart. “But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.” Poetry has this power. In so few words it can at once reminds us of the great well of pain from which we rise, and still tell us to “believe in miracles.” The miracle, Heaney writes, is healing. Poetry heals.

Poetry, like art of any kind, cannot exist outside its context. No, indeed, it is tied to its context, bound to the circumstances of its birth just like we all are in our ways. But poetry can also at times exceed its context. I think of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” and I think about Shakespeare’s soliloquys, which transcend the bounds of the plays for which they were written. Will Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill I Climb” surpass the circumstances of its creation? Only time will tell. I will say this—she has given me hope as a poet.

I have given my life to poetry, studied it in graduate school, spent years writing, and then not writing it, spent years only reading it, weeping it out. I can’t think of a better time to be a poet in America.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Jaron Lanier’s short and sweet “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” doesn’t offer much in the way of shocking revelations about social media. Much of what he says, most of us already know. Social media is addictive. It gives us that easy dopamine rush whenever we post, like, or scroll. It is destroying politics, if not society itself, by pitting us against one another, forming divisions, and appealing to the lowest common denominator emotions like anger, rage, jealousy, greed, and revenge. Movies like “The Social Dilemma” and “The Great Hack” offer similar and convincing arguments for deleting social media (or at least limiting one’s use of it), with Lanier even making an appearance in the former. You can get the gist of the book by watching both of these films back-to-back.

Lanier’s arguments include: (1) social media takes away our free will due to its reliance on algorithms that not even the social media companies fully understand, (2) social media harms our mental health, (4) social media turns us into bullies, (5) and social media obfucates our understanding of the truth (an argument that Lanier expands upon in other points). Lanier also makes the argument that social media’s economic reach leads to greater income inequality between the rich and the poor.

I want to more closely evaluate these points:

• Does social media really take away our free will?

Lanier makes the argument that the algorithms used by social media trap us into consuming content that will keep us engaged. Because content that keeps us angry and sad is more likely to keep us engaged, we are more often fed content that makes us angry, sad, contentious, and depressed. When we use social media, we become trapped inside a system whose goal is to make money. And the system makes money when we are upset, contentious, angry, and sad. Lanier argues that “what might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.” The addictive nature of social media makes platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, more like slot machines, occasionally giving us a dopamine hit, but more leaving us with experiences that lead to greater depression, anxiety, and lower quality of life.

• Does social media make us meaner?

Social media doesn’t just take up our attention and time, it turns us into people obsessed with gaining attention (the likes, the followers, the retweets). Because content that makes people angry, sad, contentious, or depressed often gets the most attention, people are rewarded for creating this kind of content. In Lanier’s view, quitting the machine is the only way to avoid the cycle of consuming and creating depressing content.

People are rewarded for being assholes on social media, so social media makes people act more like assholes. Or, worse, they act nice and kind in ungenuine ways. Either way, for Lanier, social media doesn’t foster genuine human connection. If social media is a kind of addiction, the people locked into the system behave like addicts. “They are selfish, so wrapped up in their cycle that they don’t have much time to notice what others are feeling or thinking about.” I found myself trapped in this cycle myself, checking social media more to see how many likes I got than to actually find out what other people were posting or thinking. I know from casual conversation that I am not the only one who has had this experience.

Lanier argues that social media makes us less connected. On social media, we’ll never have enough followers, never look good enough, never say the perfect thing, never match up. There are better ways to connect with our friends and with each other.

Donald Trump is the social media president and the ultimate symptom of our cultural sickness. Look only to our recent world events rife with conspiracy theories and plots to overthrow the government. Would any of this have happened without Trump? Probably not. But I also don’t think any of this would have happened had we had Trump but no social media. Lanier argues that social media ultimately backfires on progressive social movements, because its algorithms, while working to bring progressives together, also work to bring together counterrevolutionary forces that radicalize racism and bigotry.

• Does social media destroy the truth?

Lanier points out the fact that social media is rife with illusion. We follow fake accounts. Fake accounts follow us. Virality defines truth. Polarization becomes a kind of epistemology. Fake news gets promoted, while investigative reporters and news agencies go broke. If truth is undermined, then what each of us says on social media is also undermined. When artists, journalists, and writers have to optimize their content to reach a wider audience on social media, they often have to make their work simpler and less nuanced. We lose touch with subtler forms of art, writing, and creation in the quest for virality rather than meaning. Misinformation gets spread much faster than the boring truth.

Because we don’t share a common experience on social media, Lanier argues that we cannot empathize or connect with each other. Scrolling on social media is not like going to a sporting event, a religious service, or support group. Each person on social media is stuck in his or her own echo chamber.

• Does social media lead to income inequality?

Social media companies make money off your data. We know this from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its fallout, but Lanier points out subtler ways that social media companies make money off its users. Google translate may be one of the best translation tools out there, but it is so good because it mines the translations that millions of Internet users put on the web. Because users don’t own their data, algorithms, AIs, and tech oligarchs can continue to make money off our free labor while the average person lives in a more economically precarious economy. The average person is told that any day they’ll become obsolete even as they provide free labor to the very systems that someday may make them obsolete. Social media companies only make stars and influencers rich, but very few people actually make it to that level. So many of us are playing the slot machine and losing.

• “Social media hates your soul.” -Jaron Lanier

Lanier’s final argument is metaphysical and epistemological. If we connect with one another through social media, we are connecting to each other through empathy-devoid mediums. The epistemological principle that drives social media is that “virality is truth.”

Will I Delete My Social Media Accounts?

The above arguments are ultimately convincing, but what’s more fascinating to me is that despite the fact that I know these things to be true, I still keep my social media accounts. I don’t often post, but sometimes I do. On Instagram, I don’t often scroll through my feed; I use the search and discover bars to see what’s happening in the world. I know that this still results in me feeding my data to the algorithm, but choosing not to use the feed gives me more control and exposes me to fewer advertisements.

The illusory sense of connection is what makes social media so dangerous. I can’t help but feel slightly paranoid while on social media. Perhaps this is the true “insanity of our times:” to feel like everything and everyone is fake or selling something or otherwise working for the CIA? It’s easy to curate a fantasy life online. The more someone posts, the less likely you know about them. In fact, I’ve met people in real life who are nothing like the personas they present to the world online. This, in itself, isn’t necessarily problematic, but it is problematic when online interaction largely replaces in person, face-to-face contact. Statistics indicate with glee that teenagers are having less sex. I don’t think this is a good thing. Teenagers are having less sex because they aren’t talking face-to-face anymore.

The best advice Lanier has to offer is often the most obvious, but in a world where the addictive nature of social media can hijack the conscious brain, it’s worth repeating. He writes: “If, when you participate in online platforms, you notice a nasty thing inside yourself, an insecurity, a sense of low self-esteem, a yearning to lash out, to swat someone down, then leave that platform.”

We are not brought together by social media or the internet. We are brought together when we physically go out there (or Zoom) with other people on a one-on-one basis. Real-life is always better. We are an isolated people, and it’s not just COVID-19 that caused it. Watching Instagram videos of people surfing in perfect blue oceans is fun and entertaining, but it’s no replacement for actually getting out there and surfing.

Lanier concludes his book with the following: “You don’t need to give up friends: Email your friends…You can still get news online…read news websites directly…look up local culture and events.” Alas, on the last point, given our pandemic times; still, the points he makes are good ones. It made me truly want to investigate what I imagined social media brought into my life and to see if there were alternative ways to achieve those needs.

I think the strongest argument that Lanier makes is that social media makes us unhappy. We compare our lives to the lives of others. When we feel “less than,” we are more likely to make purchases that will make us feel better, or make decisions manipulated by advertisers. Ultimately, the best outcome that come out of the darkness that social media has brought into our political, economic, and social lives is this: the knowledge that we need to approach social media with the same kind of media literacy we approach other types of manipulative media—like television advertisements—with skepticism and caution.

Update (4/22/21)

I took a little time today to look closely at Lanier’s arguments and write through some of the ones that resonated the most with me. The article above has been revised to reflect that re-engagement. I also spent some time approaching social media the way addiction experts often ask those addicted to think about the thing to which they are addicted. One of the key questions that comes up is this–is social media adding anything to my life, and if it is adding anything to my life, is what it is adding more valuable than what it takes away? I’m not so sure. I need to think on this further. Until then, I’ll continue to meditate on this book, and offer updates if and when I do decide to quit social media for good.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

James Clear, in his helpful self-help book, “Atomic Habits,” invites his readers to imagine an ice cube set on a table. The room is very cold; in fact, the temperature in the room is zero. Imagine every hour the temperature rises by one degree. For hours, the ice cube doesn’t melt. A person watching might wonder whether the effort of warming the room is having any effect on the ice. She might wonder whether efforts at warming the room are futile. She might not even feel much of a difference in the temperature of the room. After all, a slow change in temperature is not very noticeable. But then, in the hour the room reaches 32 degrees, the ice cube begins to melt. She might think that the change happened immediately, but the change was the accumulated result of all the hours of warming that preceded it. The metaphor is apt when it comes to thinking about legal content writing, a field in which I’ve worked for over nine years. Posting a piece of legal content writing to the internet is like putting an ice cube in a cold room. As you post more content to your website, and create internal links, the room warms up, but you might not see or sense the change for a long time. It can take months before you start to see a growth in traffic, more inquiries, and results.

Too many people post one article to their blog or website, don’t see the results they are looking for, and give up. This is no different than putting an ice cube in a room where the thermostat is set below freezing and expecting it to spontaneously melt. Legal content writing success requires more than just one action executed every now and then. It requires the consistent habit of posting strong legal content writing on a regular basis.

For James Clear, good habits, when repeatedly executed, have the effect of slowly leading to positive changes. Clear claims that repeated small improvements are what lead to success, breakthroughs, and change. Sudden changes like those initiated during the time of New Year’s resolutions are bound to fail because they are often focused heavily on goals, and not on the daily systems that will allow those goals to be realized. Big goals may be ambitious, but if they don’t have systems to back them up, they are doomed to fail. Posting one piece of good content to your website isn’t a habit, it’s a single action. Forming a good content writing calendar and then sticking to the plan of posting regular legal content writing can create the kind of habits that lead to growth, change, and results.

“Atomic Habits” it not a perfect book, but it is a helpful book and therefore fits its genre quite mightily. At times Clear offers platitudes disguised as measurable systems. I have terrible difficulty with his idea that one should strive to improve by one percent each day (more on that later). Yet, for its flaws, “Atomic Habits” also contains some helpful ideas for improving habits and reaching goals. We tend to be obsessed with immediate results, but Clear’s system doesn’t promise overnight success nor breakthrough results right away.

No, a strong system according to Clear, is a system built to endure, a system that accepts the reality that improvement takes dedication and time, and most importantly of all, it is a system that utilizes methods that are realistic to implement and achieve. For those of us who have been working hard at the same thing for years with seemingly slow success, Clear’s book offers some solace. Maybe we haven’t quite reached our version of 32 degrees Fahrenheit to melt the ice. Time will tell.

James Clear is a proponent of the idea of “the aggregation of marginal gains.” He doesn’t believe in breakthrough performances or overnight successes. Instead, he holds that what we call “breakthrough performance” and “overnight success” is really, like the melting point of an ice cube subject to steady heating, the tipping point that happens when a person keeps at something for a long time, looking to make small improvements on a regular basis. 

The Flaws with the Idea of Improving by One Percent Each Day

Clear advocates for the idea of trying to improve one percent each day. In a book that is otherwise excellent and rife with specificity, the one percent improvement idea reads as insightful but is more a self-improvement platitude disguised as measurable goal.

Maybe the one percent better idea works if you’re trying to achieve a short-term goal like losing weight, where results can be measured, but what does it mean to become one percent better at writing, or art, or happiness? And what happens when we measure weight loss in the way we measure compounding interest? Clear notes that if we improve by one percent each day, at the end of the year we’ll have improved about 37%. This is great if we’re trying to go from 300 pounds down to 189. But would we want to continue improving one percent each day after that? Would it be realistic, or even healthy? And is improving one percent each day in the context of weight loss actually healthy either?

I found myself wondering whether the goal of one percent improvement was even appealing. Did I really want to measure the quality of my relationships in terms of percentage points?

I know I’m taking the advice to an extreme. The point Clear makes is that “productivity compounds…knowledge compounds…relationships compound…stress compounds…negative thoughts compound…” One cannot expect overnight results or even linear results. In a book that is largely to be taken literally, the one percent better idea may be too literal for its own good.

This is a case where the platitude cloaked in mathematical and scientific language might be taken more seriously than a platitude cloaked in metaphor. However, the misuse of the idea of measurable results can lead to more hazard than help in this case. Striving for improvement is one thing, striving for measurable improvement in areas of life where measurement may be difficult is doomed to fail.

Sometimes the simplest measurement is best. When it comes to legal content marketing, I advocate for posting one or two high quality articles each month. And when it comes to the writing itself, commit to writing 250 words a day, or hire a legal content writer to get the job done. Slow, steady, quality work is better than the occasional burst of inspiration followed by an 8-month-long fallow period.

The Myth of the Overnight Success

Still, Clear has some excellent ideas and there is much to be gained in reading this breezy book. In a society focused entirely on outcomes and results, the myth of the overnight success is our fevered dream. We fail to look at the means by which a person achieved success and focus only on the goals. Goals have an endpoint. Systems are about process, and can be a lifelong practice.

Clear notes: “Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.” Consumeristic and capitalistic culture privileges the outcome, and fails to look at the journey. Clear encourages his readers to evaluate their values and consider what kind of life they want to create, rather than focusing overly heavily on goals. In other words, Clear can tell you how to create new habits, but he’s not too worried about telling you which habits to set. Goals are highly personal.

Clear’s discussion of the science that underlies habit formation is fascinating.

Habits are built when the brain receives a cue, which leads to craving, which leads to response, which is followed by a reward. We hear the message chime ring on the phone, we want to know who is texting us, so we check our phone and see a nice text from our significant other and are rewarded. Clear asks his readers to evaluate everything they do in a given day, and then to link a new desired habit with something done every day, like checking one’s phone. It’s a simple hack, but I found it quite productive.

So, if you want to start meditating daily, you’ll be more likely to do it if you associate it with something you also do daily, like putting your tea kettle on the stove. Added bonus, is the tea kettle can be your meditation alarm. Clear calls this “habit stacking” and the idea was revolutionary for me because I found myself wanting to set new daily habits, but struggling to implement them. So, now, when I compulsively check Twitter, I follow up my doom-scrolling with sending a text to a friend I haven’t talked to in a while. And when I find myself indulging in reading the latest horrifying headlines, I follow it up with spending 15 minutes reading a book I want to finish so I can read 100 or more books this year. And to avoid procrastination, I pair drinking my cup of tea or coffee with a good two-hours of legal content writing or working on my own personal writing projects. The association is so strong that I don’t drink coffee or tea unless I’m writing.

“Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one.”

Clear encourages his readers to redesign their environment for success. In other words: make it easy to make the good choice. He encourages readers to link desirable things with things that must be done, but are less desirable, like watching tabloids only while riding the exercise bike, or by linking social media scrolling with the desirable, but more challenging task of making a phone call. Clear writes about designing a life that makes it easy to accomplish your goals, because there will be easy days, where everything is working, and tough days. And “on the tough days, it’s crucial to have as many things working in your favor as possible so that you can overcome the challenges life naturally throws your way.”

Perhaps this is the most useful point the book offers: I found ways to build new habits into my life, rather than trying to change my life to fit new habits. After all, Clear notes, “Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.”

Clear got me motivated because I realized the bar to massive change didn’t need to involve big changes, but could be accomplished by a number of relatively easy smaller ones. I finally cleaned my desk because I realized that an environment designed to promote work would lead to better work. I found myself spending less time reading the news and scrolling on social media. I felt better as a result because I found myself talking more to friends and meditating more. I drink my coffee and I get my work done.

I got more work done, not necessarily because I worked harder, but because I finally was working smarter.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

I was introduced to Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry at a formative time in my poetic development. I’ve been spending a great deal of time thinking about my poetic development; in a month, my first book of poetry will be released out into the world. I’ve never been more terrified, and relieved. The words are no longer inside me. They are out there. All of this has gotten me thinking about Elizabeth Bishop again, particularly her ability to pressure the ordinary into transcendence and to transform the mundane into art. The act of writing a poem is an act of elevating the language (an ordinary thing) into something extraordinary. A poem itself can do the same thing. Poetry is the act of elevating the mundane into transcendence. The art form takes its origins in song and liturgy; it is, at its finest, a form of prayer. We see this quite notably in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Fish.”

I was introduced to Bishop’s work as an undergraduate at the University of Florida. Bishop is an easy study. Her Complete Poems fill a single 276-page volume. Where most poets’ complete works span many volumes, Bishop’s modest collection of collected poems are a precious commodity. Reading the poems can feel like finding a jewel excavated from the rough of living. Each poem bears the pressure of what can be poetically said (because in Bishop’s world, so much depends on her reticence), and therefore a single poem can often encompass multiple poetic themes. Where other poets reserve thousands of pages to cover the themes of life and death, Bishop reserved for herself a mere 276. Each poem more fully bears the weight of its theme.

Reading Bishop, one always gets the feeling that you’re getting the cream skimmed off the top. Given that I spent over a decade working on my first book of poetry, Bishop helps me get comfortable with the idea that restraint can have value. She has helped me understand that a single poem can indeed speak volumes.

One of my favorite poems in Bishop’s Complete Poems, “The Fish” is an exercise in compassion, mortality, and ultimately, transcendence. The poem begins as an almost overly baroque description of a fish that Bishop once caught. We are invited to luxuriate in her victory. If Hemingway’s old man from the sea were here, I imagine he’d approve. The fish’s “brown skin hung in strips/ like ancient wallpaper.” We are invited to meditate upon “course white flesh / packed in like feathers.” The first glimpse of the fish is almost an object of disgust. The fish is “infested / with tiny white sea lice.” Its “frightening gills were breathing in / the terrible oxygen.” The fish is other. It is other in the way it fails to breathe human air. It is other in the way that its eyes are far larger than the eyes of the speaker, “but shallower.” The fish’s “tinfoil” eyes give the speaker the impression of the fish as an “object” tipped toward the light.

And yet, amid this grotesquerie, the speaker finds communion with the fish when she sees that the fish’s lower lip is scarred by old pieces of fish line. This old ugly fish has survived being caught so many times that the fish line scars are “like medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering.”

Mortality is a lesson in vulnerability and fragility. The fish is dying as the speaker observes it. We are invited to observe its death, in both disgust and awe. And yet, this observation is interrupted. The speaker notices that gasoline has spread an oil rainbow on the hull of the rented boat, and the speaker, turning away from the fish, sees only “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow” before she lets the fish go.

There’s a mysteriousness to the poem, but the mystery was present from the beginning. The air of the transcendent was always there, on the body of the fish. In the battered old wallpaper of the fish’s skin, the speaker sees roses, invoking an almost Dantean transcendence. Was it not Dante who traveled to the celestial spheres, and in encountering God, encountered not a spirit with a beard, but a celestial rose?

And the flesh is not just a bloody mass, but something “packed like feathers” which invokes the almost angelic even as it references the corporeal. By the time the speaker sees the “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow” the reader is primed, almost prepared unconsciously for the marvel. This is a not a fish that can be caught. This is not a fish that should be caught. This is a fish that can only be released back into the transcendence of the deep.  

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Chris Voss was one of top negotiators at the FBI. For years, Voss was brought in to negotiate when the stakes were literally life and death. He’s talked bank robbers into releasing hostages and convinced them to turn themselves in. I expected Voss to give me a glimpse into the high-stakes world of the FBI, but didn’t expect him to literally help me talk my way out of family conflict. In these pandemic times, family conflict can often feel like a hostage situation.

Since his stint at the FBI, Chris Voss transitioned to using his skills in the business world, translating his skills of hostage negotiation to business deals. He has since written a book on the art of negotiation, and he also teaches the Art of Negotiation on Master Class, a streaming lecture platform that offers a perfect blend of education and entertainment. You can learn economics from Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman or learn how to do an ollie with Tony Hawk.

I decided to take Voss’s class less because I was interested in the “art of negotiation” and more because I was interested in getting a glimpse into the world of an FBI negotiator.

I didn’t expect that I’d actually put Voss’s tactics to use.

As we approach the first full year of pandemic and quarantine, I have to admit that my home has started to feel at times like a hostage situation. A little invisible virus that neither my boyfriend, my puppy, nor I can see is keeping us locked inside our homes, away from family and friends. The threat outside is real. If the virus chooses to strike one of us, all of us are likely to fall. While none of us has a pre-existing medical condition nor are we in an “at-risk” group, we’ve read enough to know that even mild illness comes with the risk of everything from lung damage to psychosis (see the New York Times).

I haven’t been able to see neither my parents nor my brothers in over a year. Like a hostage negotiator, I speak to my family over the phone or through text message. Unlike a hostage negotiator, the phone calls this year have often included pleas to my parents to stay inside, rather than to come out.

Having to communicate with family at a distance means that much gets lost in translation. The way you deliver your message can make a difference. Voss teaches that tone matters more than content. For high-stress negotiations, Chris Voss has a voice he calls the “Late Night FM DJ Voice.” It sounds just like it sounds. Voss may have found the “Late Night FM DJ Voice” helpful when luring bank robbers out of Chase Manhattan, but the voice may also be helpful in other scenarios. Examples could include trying to convince family members that they should not leave their homes to visit one another during a pandemic. The “Late Night FM DJ Voice” may also have been helpful to diffuse arguments in my own home regarding undone dishes.

Given that we’re all hostages now, and as a result have all become somewhat socially awkward, fights are common and setting boundaries has gotten more difficult.

I struggled with setting boundaries with one particular family member, who shall remain un-named to protect the innocent. Given that we live in different cities, I’ve had to acknowledge my limitations in being able to help him fully through his own, very real, COVID-19 struggles—I can barely help myself through my own. Mental illness runs in my family; protecting my mental health is a priority; without my mental health, I can’t be there for my family, nor for myself. Setting boundaries is essential. But setting boundaries at a time when the whole world is bound can be difficult.

When I failed to be available, I sometimes found myself subject to this family member’s insults. I found that restating my boundaries only increased the violence of the insults.

One afternoon, we had reached an impasse. I would no longer accept being insulted and if we could not talk without insults, we shouldn’t talk. The family member proceeded to let me know we’d never talk again.

“Fine,” I said. “Fine,” they said.

We had become calcified into our own perspectives, unable to see the other side.

Suddenly, I remembered something Chris Voss had mentioned in one of his lectures. Voss noted that “tactical empathy” didn’t mean we had to agree with “the other side’s” perspective, but that we had to take the time to understand how the other side saw the world.

Voss notes, “It’s not agreement in any way…” If you can understand what drives someone, you can change their outlook and decision-making.

Perhaps I didn’t need to agree with this particular family member’s way of treating me, but maybe there was a way I could see their perspective, to understand why they were treating me the way they were. If I could understand the source of the insults and anger, maybe I could get the insults to stop so that we could communicate more effectively.

Suddenly, I recalled two of the early tactics Voss taught in his Master Class: mirroring and labelling. As a last resort, I began mirroring and labelling my family member’s statements. Using tactical empathy to try to fully come to understand their perspective.

It wasn’t just that Voss’s tactics worked—which they did—but it was the speed in which they worked that shocked me. Within a minute, the conversation went from adversarial to collaborative. Within two minutes, my family member had stopped insulting me. Within five minutes, the family member apologized to me.

I don’t think Voss necessarily cared to get to know his hostage-takers. But when it comes to family and loved ones, we can sometimes be oblivious to the people closest to us. Sometimes, a simple change in how we approach one another can not only release us from being hostage to our own habits, but also teach us something important, essential, and new about one another.

In using Voss’s tactics, I learned that my loved one’s situation perhaps wasn’t as bad as he thought it to be. I learned that he would be okay. The amazing part? He realized this as well—from himself. I also learned that my situation wasn’t as bad as I thought. And that I would be okay as well.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Wim Hof, in his new book, The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential, challenges traditional standards of validation. “I don’t need that kind of external validation. If you engage too much in outside validation, you lose the path to yourself. You get off course. Self-love is being proud of yourself by your own lights. What is your best? Move toward that, not the best of your neighbors.”

Easy to say. Difficult to do. The ego is always looking for its jolt of adrenaline, its drip of dopamine.

The road to success on one’s own terms is lonely, fraught with doubt, populated by the peanut gallery of skeptics and critics. Self-criticism is often the most accurate and most painful of all the forms of criticism one can encounter in life.

I have, at various points in my life, set absurd goals for myself, goals I was told I was hubristic to set for myself, goals I was told were impossible to achieve. I think the truest measure of success is defined not by the spotlight, but by what one does when no one is looking. It is easy to be the filmmaker when you’re up for the Oscar, much harder to be the filmmaker when you’re wandering around Death Valley with an iPhone and an idea. It’s easy to be a writer when you have a contract, much harder when no one seems to be reading.

The important work gets done when no one is looking.

The biggest takeaway I get from Wim Hof’s book is the fact that his method was developed over years of study, trial and error, and the natural peregrinations of a person seeking the truth and choosing unorthodox paths to find it. The Wim Hof method may be getting a great deal of press now, but for years, Hof was sitting alone in a frozen pond in the Netherlands, watching his own mind. When people saw him doing this they called him crazy.

Success is not the trophy, but the process. And process is painful. It is fraught with failure and fear, self-doubt, psychological and physical danger. The pursuit of anything worthwhile is lonely. It can be incredibly difficult to extricate one’s ego from it all, especially when the pursuit of excellence requires the sacrifice of so much.

What often looks like easy success is far from easy. The New York Times recently published a profile of Chloe Gong, who has just published a debut bestseller. The bestseller is Gong’s first published novel, but it is the “ninth one she has written.” Whenever I lament the fact that I’m 36 and just now publishing my first book, I think about Gong. Have I written nine books in my life? Have I earned a debut bestseller?

The chorus of self-criticism and doubt can be loudest when external affirmations are not present. Hof urges his readers to keep looking within, to look deeper.

Wim Hof writes: “Back yourself. Care for yourself. Not by protecting your ego, but by remaining present for your being when you feel most afraid, most uncomfortable, or awkward. It will enable you to see others more clearly and with more compassion. Don’t seek to change others; change yourself. Just mind your own mind and let others mind theirs. Show them who you are through your actions, through your conviction. Be clear and transparent, vulnerable. If I cared what others thought of me, I would have stopped going a long time ago. I would have been eaten by the system.”

There’s talent, there’s physical strength, and then there’s a kind of mental toughness that is earned through fear and failure. I don’t think mental toughness is inborn. I think it is earned.

Wim Hof writes on: “I saw that it’s all a state of mind, and that confidence is a form of trust. It’s like a bet you place on yourself. You tell your body what to do, and your body echoes back and says, yes.”

Wim Hof’s book is not a literary masterpiece, but I don’t think it purports to be one. Its core is simple, and instructive; sometimes simplicity is indeed sufficient.

Hof also reminds readers that goals themselves can be a form of external measurement that takes away from the journey:

“I’ve set goals not to break them, necessarily, but to be in that moment when I am one with the reality of now, when the last step informs the next step, when I can only move through as I feel. It is amazing what purpose and conviction can do. Get your heart in it, into anything you do, and if you can’t, then you seriously have to tune in and cleanse yourself to get back on track. You don’t need to venture beyond the Polar Circle or to the middle of the desert to experience this sensation, but you do need to venture beyond your comfort zone.”

The search for external validation doesn’t feed the soul. Something else does. It comes from a place more mysterious and true.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.