Notes On Discipline

I’ve officially set a new PR for the most procrastinated edition of this newsletter. Bold for the third edition, I know. The entirety of this was made Tuesday afternoon.

My fellow procrastinators: I see you and I stand with you.

Mini Musings

Lately, my life feels like a constant cycle of downloading, deleting, and redownloading social media apps. It’s made me really evaluate my own discipline (or lack thereof).

I’ll tell myself I’ll go to 6AM yoga before work and only make it about 50% of the time. I have a sweet treat at the end of the day when I told myself I should cap out on sugar for the day, or skip my end of day sunset walk to watch TV. Sure, sometimes it’s great to go easy on yourself, but sometimes it all feels so….loose.

I read a quote last year that said “flexibility without structure is just chaos” and man, that landed.

Something I’ve adopted to help strengthen my own discipline muscle is a concept called low dopamine mornings.

Stick with me! I know this sounds very Silicon-Valley-Tech-Bro-esque. It’s the idea that you should keep dopamine lowest in the morning — your brainwaves are just transitioning back to consciousness and your neurotransmitters are as sensitive as they’ll be all day. The more dopamine you flood your brain with first thing in the morning, the harder you’ll crash later that day. It’s akin to chugging caffeine first thing in the morning and feeling that dreaded 4PM slump later in the day; except it feels way more detrimental since it coincides with your happiness and wellbeing.

The long: schedule time for chores and activities you don’t exactly look forward to first thing in the morning. Make your bed. Unload the dishwasher. Do your laundry. Finish that chapter of your book. All easy tasks to ease you into the day and make sure you get your dopamine hits in a more organic way, like a walk in the sunshine or a good song on your way to work.

The short: stay off your phone in the morning.

Artiste In The Making

The newest piece I’m working on is a birthday gift for someone in Denver who loves 32nd Ave.

Something I love about running my own art business is I make the rules. That certainly relates to hours worked, how I set deadlines and work with clients, and the more logistical side of things, but in this case I mean the fun side of it all.

The first phase of making any drawing is what I call the “bones” phase, as pictured above. I’m creating the foundation of the drawing in pencil. After that, I take blocks of color (like the gray of the street and blue of the sky in the photo above) and make super broad strokes and blocks of color, then the last and hands-down longest phase: filling in the details.

I have zero clue how any other artist approaches their work. I’ve never watched a YouTube video of it and probably never will. What I do is what I’ve learned works for me.

As I’m getting older I’m realizing there’s endless parallels between art and life.

The Wild, Wild West

Color me humbled after this 14er. It was my first of the season and I was so insanely excited that I did what every single distance runner cautions against: came out of the gates so hot.

I give you, my mile splits—a short story in two parts:

My hiking partner and I ended the hike with an average split of 41:12, all thanks to her pep talk about 1.5 miles in and a subsequent solid pace set after that.

This weekend is the weekend of Momma Sopris and my new goal is consistent mile splits. Sopris is just shy of 14 miles with 4.7K feet of vertical gain, so it’ll be a challenge, but hey! Discipline!

Shorter rundown than normal; I’ll be back next week with a big, fat roundup of Mount Sopris. Here’s a picture of her for now!

What I’m Noodling On

• This video of Bo Burnham talking about colonizing our minds in the age of social media. “By the time you take the time that is needed to think about something to articulate it, it is obsolete”.

• This tweet inspired me to spend some time re-noodling on this article about the Boomerification of Gen-Z

• Palette cleanser: since we have a new Olivia Rodrigo single coming June 30 and Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) July 7, it’s time for me to come clean about my guilty-pleasure remix. There’s 652K views on this video and I think I’m personally responsible for 51K of them

Catch y’all on the flip side!

- McCall

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