Slow Burns

Tiago, tell me about slow burns.

Slow burns is a way of working that I teach that you can only do if you have a second brain. And I contrast slow burns with what I call heavy lifts. So what I notice is people, when they take on something new, whether it's a project at work, whether it's a personal project, a side project, maybe they want to put on an event, they want to start a podcast, they want to start a blog, they want to do a side gig, they do it like a heavy lift. They're like, oh, I'm going to set aside, you know, multiple days, I'm going to take the whole weekend, I'm going to take this whole month. They block off these, these big spans of time. And sometimes that's necessary, sometimes you do need a heavy lift. But, you know, as life goes on, that time gets more and more scarce. You know, maybe you have kids or you get married or you have a dog, or you have a house to take care of, or you just get older and you don't want to spend the entire weekend on some crazy heads down project. That kind of heavy lift time gets more and more scarce. And so slow burns is kind of the opposite. Instead of this intense, focused, all out kind of sprint, you collect things in the background and the place you would collect these is in your digital notes, right? So I'll use an example from my life, which is our wedding. Lauren and I got married last April, and we knew we didn't want our wedding to be a heavy lift. We had seen some of our friends be, I mean, honestly consumed by their wedding for a year or more, you know, obsess over every little detail, took up all their free time, distracted them from other priorities. We really wanted our wedding to be easy. We wanted it to be carefree. We wanted to be able to enjoy our friends and our family. So starting more than a year before we got married, we just started collecting little ideas, little snapshots from Pinterest, from Facebook, from, you know, magazines. I'd be sitting in a doctor's office and there's not many times that I'm looking at wedding images. But hey, I have 15 minutes here in the waiting room. Why not just flip through this thing and take a photo of something I liked? Friends and family, of course, have many opinions. So some of them you write down, maybe others not. You're just slowly gathering, collecting. And then when the time came to actually put on the wedding, it was honestly the easiest thing ever. I think we probably spent total actual focus time no more than five Hours, maybe over the course of two weeks, we just sat down and instead of, oh, what do we want our wedding to be? We just each looked through our digital notes and said, okay, we want it to be this kind of location, this kind of colors, this kind of aesthetic, and this kind of schedule. It was honestly kind of staggering how little work our wedding took. And the impact of that is not just save time, it's that when we had our wedding, which was in Mexico, people flew in from all over the world. We were so present. There was nothing to worry about. There was no stress, there was no anxiety. We had a talent show. Both of our families, there's a lot of artists and performers. So the night before we did, instead of a rehearsal dinner, we did a talent show. Several people, in fact, a majority of the guests stayed like most of the week. We were able to just sit back and enjoy because the work of putting on that wedding was spread over more than a year, rather than concentrated in this very short, stressful time.

So you're telling me that work can be the same way? Something that I thought would be a one year project could be a five hour project. I can, through my daily consumption of sitting at a doctor's office, being on an airplane, I can just collect ideas. And then when the time comes to actually execute a project, just in the normal course of my life, I can turn these big, grand, crazy, intimidating, heavy lifts into projects that are fun to execute, not so stressful and actually better executed because I've done the work before.

That's exactly what I'm saying. And I know it can sound hard to believe until you've seen it or experienced it. It's something that doesn't seem feasible. But you can, you know, intellectual work can be done at different times. It can be spread out over time. It can even be distributed. You know, you can pull in the work of others, the thinking of others. It doesn't have to be done by you in a certain place, at a certain time, within a certain span of time. It can be sort of spread out. And that allows your experience, like you said, to be better. It allows the whole thing to be more enjoyable. It allows you to be more spontaneous, more creative, take bigger risks, all these.

Benefits so I don't have to deal with the stress and the anxiety of all of these ideas. Tiago, I just have so many ideas and I now will have a system to manage it. And I can breathe deeper, sleep better at night. How will I feel from these slow burns?

That's really it. You know, this is Another myth of the artists that I want to destroy. My parents are some of the most creative people I've ever met. They're also some of the most relaxed. They are not stressed out. They're not these tortured creatives. They're not working late into the night. They're not working on weekends. I mean, I grew up with a very different model of creativity. Just looking at my parents going on vacations, relaxing, spending time doing arts and culture, spending a lot. My parents are some of the most social people ever. They have some sort of party or dinner or book club, like five nights a week. And they don't feel like they have to sacrifice what is sometimes called the finer things in life. Right. Just because they want to also live a creative life. Those things are not opposed to each other, and they're not for me either. I think that the key is just to structure your work differently. And you don't have. I mean, it's kind of this thing. If you don't have any collected material, then, yeah, you pretty much have to stress out. You have to panic and go into crisis mode. But if you do have this rich treasure trove of creative raw material, you really don't.

So you're giving people this. This life of abundance of, you sit down and you have so many things that you can pull from. So rather than having to be this researcher, this scavenger, it's like this perpetual gold rush of you go to the mountains in Northern California in the mid-1850s and you're scavenging for gold, and hopefully you find something, but chances are that you won't. Now, you can sit down and you can have a kingdom of ideas in front of you. And instead of trying to scavenge, you can just be an editor. And you can take all the images, examples, insights, facts, ideas that you have collected, and you can be an editor. You can take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and compile things together. And then you go from a wedding being one year to just five hours.

Correct. I think a good analogy is switching from being a hunter. You know, a hunter is hungry. They need to eat. Within a few hours, they have to find something. They get desperate, they get afraid. Like a predator. Maybe a predator is a better analogy. When actually you want to be a scavenger. And it's interesting. Scavenging works when your environment is rich. Right. On the African savannah, you can't be a scavenger. If there's a drought and there's no game, there's no food, you're kind of gonna suffer. But if you look at the world we live in, is it a world of scarcity or abundance? It's so clearly a world of creative abundance. I mean, just open up your laptop, look at your phone, listen to podcasts, go on YouTube. We're living in a creative explosion, like a creative supernov. You don't have to do any extra work to go find these creative sources. Just pay attention. Open. I like this phrase. Widen the lens of your attention. Open the aperture of your attention. Just look around, notice what is going on around you, what is already flowing through your senses and your brain, and suddenly you're going to realize, I'm rich, I'm creatively wealthy, and I don't have to do any extra work.