Prime Day is here, and while Wal-Mart is copying the idea, I think only Amazon can make a national news story by unilaterally promoting a sale. And while good discounts on some Kindles, other miscellany, and fabled “lightning” deals every 10 minutes may generate some revenue, I have no doubt that the main thrust of the promotion is to drive new Prime memberships. After all, you can still join Prime and experience the fun with a free 30-day trial (or Amazon Student for 6 months free with a .edu address), and Amazon believes that once you go Prime, you never go back.
7 pounds 8 ounces of pure awesome.
Ragnar Kristoffersen, an anthropologist who trains Norway’s correctional officers, quoted in a fascinating NYTimes piece about a different kind of maximum security prison:
He leaned back in his chair and went on. “We like to think that treating inmates nicely, humanely, is good for the rehabilitation. And I’m not arguing against it. I’m saying two things. There are poor evidence saying that treating people nicely will keep them from committing new crimes. Very poor evidence.”
He paused. “But then again, my second point would be,” he said, “if you treat people badly, it’s a reflection on yourself.”
Paul Kalinithi, writing to his infant daughter in his last op-ed before succumbing to lung cancer:
That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.
It’s a rare thing for us to write to the ones we love before we go, let alone to share such poignancy in order to touch others as well. We don’t write meaningfully to each other very much anymore, especially when it counts most. We could do better.
This past week, as Dallas was intermittently “covered” in ice and snow, the hospital was intermittently quiet enough to download and play Alto’s Adventure a bit a lot on my iPhone, a new snowboarding-theme one-touch endless runner with a beautiful, relaxing visual and musical design. Come for the backflips and wingsuit, stay for watching the sunrise over a well-crafted winter mountainscape.
Though decidedly a more zen game, I’ve been reminded of playing its spiritual prequels in my medical past, like Tiny Wings, which helped make a neurology sub-I tolerable during fourth year, and when the frenetic Canabalt helped me ignore the basic sciences.
Oliver Sacks, in his moving NYTimes op-ed about learning that his ocular melanoma has metastasized to his liver:
I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night.
Sacks’ version of “live like you were dying” is exactly what you’d hope/expect, showing his depth and ability to turn his careful consideration and clinical acumen internally, just as he did in his New Yorker essay about prosopagnosia (face blindness). Read the whole op-ed (and the essay too).
“Sudden clear focus and perspective” seem harder and harder to come by in the contemporary era, but I’m adding tacking it on late to the resolution list this year. I still remember first reading and being inspired by Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in high school, probably the two books which most shaped my early interest in neuroscience and medicine. He’ll leave a tremendous legacy.
It couldn’t last forever, and so today is the end of a personal era: Amazon figured out that I’m not a student anymore. Which is too bad, because now I’ll have to pay full price for Amazon Prime. I spent the last year of medical school (and two bonus years to hit three of the maximum total of four) thoroughly enjoying/using the “Amazon Student” service, which is Amazon Prime for half the cost, including their (nowhere near as good as Netflix) bundled video streaming service, free Kindle books, and tons of two day shipping. I first signed up for the six month free trial when I needed some holiday gifts quickly, and I haven’t cancelled since.
Upon receiving the email notification that my student membership was expiring and that I was going to be automatically “upgraded” to Prime, I immediately checked to see if there was a way to use an .edu address or student ID to continue being a student. My choices to confirm my “student” status were:
- A transcript or class list for the current term (must include the date/term)
- A copy or picture of your student ID (must include an expiration date or term)
- A tuition bill for the current term (must include the date/term)
- An official acceptance letter for the upcoming term (must include the matriculation date)
Er, so yeah. They thought this all out. None of that is going to happen.
Amazon may have some questionable/bizarre hardware efforts, but on the retail side, they figured out long ago that if they get you to sign up for prime, you get hooked/spoiled by unlimited two day shipping and then buy basically everything through Amazon.
Researching ways to get things done (or keep New Year’s resolutions) is like scouring the web for distraction-free writing apps when you’re supposed to be writing. Just because its a related task doesn’t make it anything other than procrastination and self-sabotage. I’ve tried Evernote and Day One and Wunderlist and it seems like every other great app that was supposed to fix me. And they’re all great. But I’ve come to the conclusion–and acknowledged the obvious–that no app or process is going make you do something that you’ve been putting off. You have to make you do that.
That said, isn’t there some simple system that will help me keep these goals front and center, something that will help me actively remember the things I want to do without buying into some time consuming “lifehack”? A short while ago, I rediscovered something I read last year on Lifehacker. It’s called Don’t Break the Chain, and it’s something Jerry Seinfeld is famous for on the internet (in addition to being Jerry Seinfeld). It goes like this:
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.
It’s so simple. It doesn’t involve anything really. You can get a big calendar, but you don’t really have to. You just need some way to see your chain. After you do it long enough, your habits will be ingrained and you won’t even need that (but you’ll still have the satisfaction of seeing the ever-growing representation).
Then I realized that I’ve been using this method for a long time without realizing it. I’ve been posting a story on Twitter every day for five years. With the exceptions of my wedding, some international travel etc, I’ve never missed a day.1 And it works. The single most motivating force behind every night’s story is that fact that there is an unbroken chain of stories behind it. I’ve recently begun using DBTC formally to test out some resolutions, and again I’m continually surprised by how effective it can be given that it seems geared for an elementary school child.
I’m not a big wall calendar kind of guy. I really like chains.cc, which is the cleanest most pleasant website for this purpose. The website is free, and you can of course use it on your phone. For a more native phone experience, the Chains.cc app is my favorite out of all of the options on iOS:
- Clean design with different graphics for each chain
- Easy and pleasant to use and navigate
- Can handle multiple chains, with unique graphics and colors for each
- Allow you to mark previous days when you haven’t had a chance to mark them (don’t cheat!). This a must-have feature if you want to use chains to represent bad habits you want to break.
Goals.io is a little more cluttered but actually more powerful (and free) alternative. It allows weekly goals in addition to daily ones, as well as one time and progressive/nebulous goals. Unfortunately, it doesn’t let you backdate anything so you can’t migrate chains you’ve been keeping on paper or in other apps. Part of me also thinks this flexibility may add too many dimensions to what is otherwise a system as simple as it gets. That said, I do like the idea of weekly goals. Some goals can’t or shouldn’t be done on an everyday basis.
Analog is good though, so I’ve created a minimalistic letter-sized 2014 DBTC calendar that begs to be marked and can be put in a binder, in your desk, or on your wall.
As time marches on, the number of Twitter-based books continues to increase. There’s the crowd-sourced book of clever tweets in Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less; there are the celebrity cash-in’s, like Dennis Leary’s new twitter-feed on paper, Suck On This Year: LYFAO @ 140 Characters or Less; not to mention the countless (and useless) books about Twitter itself (social media, networking, style guides, how to make “friends”, etc etc etc). There is no irony when using paper to talk about the internet in the publishing industry.
However—
There is only one carefully curated Twitter-based creative writing anthology. And that book is On a Narrow Windowsill (Kindle version
During the month of April, I used Nanoism to run a little experiment in subsidized charity, the 2010 Nanofiction Contest (For Haiti). Perhaps “subsidized” isn’t quite correct—as not all donors received compensation—but I think it sounds better than raffle-backed charity or contest charity. Oh, how about incentivized. Yes, perfect.
Either way, writing contests, as a money-making scheme, are as common as companies that only care about profit and hurting the environment. I’m kidding; contests help fund some really great publications. But a quick look at the number of new “genres” Narrative Magazine has “invented” (iStory, iPoem, Six Word Story) to pull in the dough is enough to make me ill. Actually, so is the name iStory. Clearly one of their interns graduated from the “cheap plastic crap from 2004” school of advertising. Incidentally, the term iStory was actually created in 2004 during the first iCan’tThinkofaBetterNameforThis product wave, so someone should have Googled it and read the Wikipedia article. Ahem.
Anyway, how is an honest writer to know what contests to enter? More importantly, why bother paying for them in the first place? The odds of winning might be better than the lotto, but unless you’re getting a subscription or something good out of the deal automatically, it’s still a terrible financial decision for most writers, and probably a dubious one for many publications as well. But for the purpose of raising money for an excellent charity…well you get a platform, and then you leverage it.
So, instead of taking contest fees to raise money for Nanoism itself (which I fully believe wouldn’t have even covered the cost of the prize money), the money went straight to a great organization. As a function of this set-up, people also made a tax-deductible donations by entering. So the money is not simply flushed down the drain, so to speak.
And, as an added lure, donating entrants also received “raffle” tickets which gave them a chance to randomly win prizes from the independent publishing community. I went around soliciting publications I like and/or respect, and to their collective credit, most provided materials for the giveaway. People are good people.
Interestingly, the number of non-donating entries was lower than I would have expected based on our previous contests and Nanoism’s growth over the past year. My explanation is two-fold: 1) A lingering sense of guilt about not-donating that caused some people to feel uncomfortable entering. 2) The decreased odds of winning with only 1 story entry (versus the 6, 11 or more that some writers submitted). I thought that might happen, but I was surprised nonetheless.
The end result is that a lot of writers were excited to enter the contest, felt strongly about the cause (which is good), and felt inspired by it. Because in the end, they weren’t really entering a contest. I gave them an excuse to support Partners in Health, and so they did. We raised $650, which is 6.5x what my wife and I would have given if we’d just sent the prize money directly to PIH, and over 30 people are getting literature in their mailboxes as we speak. A small experimental success.