Again, and Again, and Again
The beauty of the work working on you. AND: Was Nietzsche some proto-Redditor? The loaded silences in a great documentary. Failure being woven with success.
Welcome to This Week Paul Likes.
Every week, I throw out hits of inspiration—three recommendations, one tip, one quote—from the writers who inspire me, in the hope they’ll inspire you to do your best work.
Subscribe below if it’s your first time to the party. Let’s start with this week’s recommendations.
I Am Dynamite! Good gawd you’ll love Sue Prideaux’s biography of Nietzsche. You’ll see the fragile and sickly and poor man behind the übermensch and likely write as many notes in the book’s margins as I did. Like this one:
If Nietzsche were alive today, would he be a Redditor?
I ask because he was a simp: Putting on a bravado in his books of staring down one’s fate and building one’s life on the model of nobody else, and yet in real life being photographed getting whipped by the woman he loved, as if he were some oxen and she the farmer, a woman he couldn’t directly ask to marry him, either. Nietzsche outsourced the ask to the girlfriend’s live-in boyfriend (!). Which means Nietzsche was, among other things, a cuckold.
(The woman said no.)
Nietzsche was the third point in a separate love triangle with Richard Wagner’s wife, too.
I Am Dynamite! is more big-hearted than Nietzsche’s romantic and sexual timidity. Prideaux’s towering intellect shows the full sweep of Nietzsche’s philosophical influences and how he countered or complemented them in wise and often witty prose. Especially when Nietzsche goes mad, and even later when his writing is grossly misinterpreted by the Third Reich, you’ll come to have real sympathy for old Friedrich.
I loved this book.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin: The film won Best Documentary at the Oscars and deserved it.
A high school teacher in Russia films his students for a period of years after the start of the Ukraine war. The students’ fears and their teachers’ efforts to indoctrinate them—coerced efforts often, but not always—makes this doc propulsive. You come to sympathize with kids and the sad state of Russian discourse and culture, all the things Russians cannot say (but can film).
This is a movie of loaded silence and innuendo and, by the end, bravery.
“Getting a Return on Your Failures”: I’m not above a good self-help podcast.
Ed Mylett brings on the leadership author and coach John Maxwell. To say that failure weaves itself with success is to state the obvious, but the discussion here, where Mylett and Maxwell take it, raises the gooseflesh.
I listened to the episode a second time yesterday.
This Week’s Tip for Longform Writers: Again, and Again, and Again
I needed to listen to that podcast twice. This week I got word from my agent on the proposal for Book No. 4.
He wants me to start over. A rewrite from Page 1.
This rewrite comes after I’ve committed 12,000 words to the page. It should be noted, too, that before this first draft of the proposal I wrote two separate memos to the agent about what it could concern, the second memo being a complete rewrite of the first.
So, if you’re keeping score at home, I’m starting again for the fourth time on this book project.
One way to view what I’m doing is John Maxwellian: Failure is woven with success. Which is true and a message I needed to hear. It kept me from despairing.
Something equally true to the writing life, though, and life in general, is this.
The work works on you.
It’s not just the proposal for Book No. 4. I’m failing all over the place.
I pitched The Atlantic on a magazine piece this week and they didn’t take it.
Last month I launched a new service for my business alongside a partner and we got no real interest.
I have what my ortho calls a “frozen shoulder” and despite months of P.T. and even regular visits to an accupunturist/pressurist, the shoulder is not healed. It may not heal for months more.
Failure is woven with success, sure, but the adage I’ve come to favor is recently, The work works on you.
Alex Hormozi said that, though it’s a close paraphrase of the Apostle Paul. The etymology isn’t nearly as important as what the line means.
It means nothing is wasted. Let’s take Book No. 4.
One way to view the proposal is, Oh shit! I have to start again?? Believe me, I’ve moaned that question. The better way to see it is with each effort, the proposal grows more refined. I’m not starting over so much as taking what I’ve learned from the previous drafts about what is working it and applying that wisdom to this draft.
Everything you do will influence everything you subsequently do.
I came to see this years ago when I edited Wright Thompson at ESPN the Magazine. Wright’s a good friend and a great writer. What I remember even more than the tenacity of our editing sessions is their longevity. Some stories took four, six, eight drafts to get right. He was down for all of it. Wright never tired of the process.
I don’t think he’d phrase it this way but think he’d agree that nothing was wasted. The work worked on him—and me, frankly—until the work was right.
I bear that in mind now. In that way, I took the feedback I got from my Atlantic editor this week, tweaked the pitch, and sent it on to Esquire.
They took the piece.
I love writing for The Atlantic and Esquire because the editors at each pub will not stop. This Atlantic piece took, I think, six drafts to get right. This Esquire piece, my favorite, took eight.
I’ve found the same thing in my entrepreneurial life: Work working on me. That venture a business partner and I launched last month? It failed, yes, but it also provided us data.
That’s not the last time we’ll launch something together. And even if it is, I’ve made a new friend. That’s a win.
There are endless ways that the work can work on you. I repeat it often these days because the more I repeat it, the more I embody it, and the more I see its truth.
If there is a lie about our aspirations it’s that they will be reached when we put in the effort.
Ha! No.
And I say that as someone who falls for this lie all the time.
We instead achieve what we want after some all-out effort and then a failure, and then a second all-out effort, and likely a third, and probably a fourth, and…
Again, and again, and again.
It’s frustrating as hell.
But…
The work works on you.
You get there, eventually.
Quote of the Week: “Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge, but to keep going. It is a little like driving a car at night, in winter, on ice, with zero visibility. You have no choice, you cannot go into reverse, you must keep going forward while telling yourself that all will be well when the road becomes more stable and the fog lifts.”
—Patrick Modiano, from his Nobel-acceptance speech
Have a great weekend, I’ll be back next Friday with another TWPL.
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Book No. 3 is looking like it’ll be out in February 2027.