➔ Leadership in practice

For the first decade of his career, David Bowie was busy being someone else.

Whilst most artists spend their early careers trying to tell people who they are, Bowie spent his trying to understand himself. He copied, openly, without apology. But the copying was never the point. Observing was. Each influence was a lens he held up to see what came back. Anthony Newley's theatrical delivery. Lou Reed's downtown cool. Iggy Pop's physical intensity. He was trying on identities and watching how each one felt from the inside.

Hunky Dory, released in 1971, contains songs literally named after his influences. "Andy Warhol", "Song for Bob Dylan," and "Queen Bitch", written as a direct tribute to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. The album cover recreates a Marlene Dietrich pose. He wasn't hiding any of it. He was showing his working out.

"I've always cited who my influences are," he said. "It often amuses me to see bands who lie about who they're listening to. It's disingenuous, to say the least."

What Bowie was doing, without knowing it, was metacognition - observing his own responses as if from the outside. He was noticing what made him lean in and what made him push back. What felt borrowed and what felt true. His emotional responses were the guide. This is what separates artists who accumulate influences from those who move beyond them. The former collect. The latter use what they collect to locate themselves and work out where they need to go next.

In his book, Mastery, Robert Greene calls this the most underrated phase of any creative apprenticeship - the period of deep observation before you begin to build. Most people rush through it, impatient to perform. What Bowie understood was that you can't know what to build until you know what you're working with. He was constructing a precise map of himself.

The thread running through this week’s newsletter is Mastery.

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 Bowie said that Newley, along with Syd Barrett, were the first performers he heard sing pop music in a recognisably British accent, which gave him permission to lean into his own voice rather than flatten it into an Americanised rock sound.

#2 In later interviews, Bowie described his early 70s run as a period when he started to “understand the possibilities of what I could do,” which rhymes with Greene’s shift from passive observation to the more experimental, creative‑active phase.

#3 Greene insists that trying to skip this long observation phase in favour of shortcuts or “natural talent” leaves you a “slave to time.” As the years pass, your apparent brilliance actually decays because you never built the underlying structure.

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

David Sedaris is one of the most distinctive voices in American writing. He went to art school to study painting and sculpture, but when he took a creative writing class to fulfil an English requirement, he discovered something uncomfortable. He wasn’t very good at it.

“No one was a worse writer than me. No one was more false. No one was more pretentious. It was just absolute garbage.”

But what he was good at was noticing things. The way his professor adjusted her glasses before lying. The way his roommate’s voice changed when talking to his mother. But simply noticing things doesn’t make you a writer.

So at age twenty, Sedaris made a decision that would quietly define his career. He would write in a diary every single day.

“At first I had to force myself,” he later admitted. The early entries were “just whining” - complaints about his day, observations with no shape. But he kept going. He’d created a discipline, and the discipline held.

The daily practice revealed a pattern. Every so often, buried in the whining, there would be “a joke, a description, a quote” worth saving. Then something shifted. “It became part of my identity, and I did it without thinking.”

He added a second discipline. He started carrying a notebook everywhere.
“Everybody’s got an eye for something,” he said. His eye was for the absurd detail, the things people say or do that reveal who they really are. The notebook turned that raw material into something he could actually use.

The third discipline came later. He began reading his work aloud to audiences on book tours. He noticed that performing the text revealed “imperfections simply through the act of reading to other people.” The audience became his editing tool.

Sedaris wasn’t born a great writer and didn’t wait around to become one. He built a Discipline Stack that systematically made him one. Disciplines, compounded daily, until they became indistinguishable from talent.

Notes:

#1 David’s diaries now fill well over 130 hand-made notebooks, stored in a locked cabinet, with a separate index running to about 280 pages so he can find stories later.

#2 Habit researchers talk about habit stacking: attaching a small new behaviour to something you already do.

#3 Neuroimaging work suggests that when people perform well‑established habit chains, prefrontal activity (the effortful decision-making bit) can drop by around a third compared with isolated, effortful actions — making the whole stack feel easier over time.

➔ Lifting the lid on what’s happening inside our brains when we do creative work

There’s a brilliant interview with David Bowie in which he talks about the importance of nudging yourself out of your comfort zone. “If you feel safe in the area that you're working in, you're not working in the right area," he said. "Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel like your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting."

There’s so much to love about that idea. The visceral metaphor of your feet barely touching the floor is perfect. But for this story, I want to focus on what he’s really talking about here - Flow. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first defined it in his classic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience as a state of total absorption in which performance feels almost effortless.

When we move towards the edges of our current ability, dopamine fires and activates the brain's Attention Network by dimming everything that doesn’t matter. This is where flow lives. But the key to achieving this state is to find out where that edge is and how far we can push ourselves. We want to stretch, but not snap.

In The Art of Impossible, Steven Kotler talks about the 4% stretch. Kotler has been skiing since he was five. When he wants to perform at his best he finds a chute he normally skis in five turns and tries to ski it in four. One less turn. Not two or even three. Just one. That’s his version of feet just off the bottom. 

For many leaders, the instinct under pressure is to raise the stakes by setting bigger targets, bolder briefs, and adding more urgency. But that's not the 4% stretch. That's a threat. And under threat, the brain abandons creative thinking altogether. Cortisol replaces dopamine. The networks responsible for loose associations, unexpected connections, and peripheral thinking simply go dark.

Bowie knew this instinctively. Too safe and nothing interesting happens. Too far out and you drown. The job is finding the edge for yourself, and for the people around you.

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 When challenge tips into threat, the amygdala responds in around 200 milliseconds - faster than conscious awareness. By the time you know you're scared, your brain has already started shutting down creative thinking.

#2 A ten-year study found that senior executives reported being five times more productive in flow than out of it. The same study estimated that the average executive spends less than 5% of their working day there.

#3 Research by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to a task after an interruption. Each interruption doesn't just break focus - it resets the entire neurochemical build-up required to reach flow.

🔗 Quick links to more stories 📖

The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’ - I’ve just started reading David Epstein’s new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, and I’m really enjoying it. In this extract, he shares how writers like Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust and Maya Angelo used ‘commitment devices’ to help them manage their attention, stay focused, and get their work done. (7 min read)

It’s Never Been Easier to Do Too Much - Still with David Epstein, this is a great read on how we need better systems that help us decide what NOT to do. Subtraction was the thread running through my last newsletter. If you missed it, give it a read. (4 min read)

A great video on creative intention setting - This well-shot and presented video is useful for anyone interested in other people’s systems and processes for managing workflow. A lot of what Mickey is talking about here is Discipline Stacking, as mentioned in Story 2. (21 min watch)

The Mindset Shift That Ended My Sunday Night Dread - “You start each day at zero balance, and everything you do after that is credit, building towards something you choose. When I start my day thinking “I’m behind,” every task becomes evidence of my inadequacy. When I start at zero, every task becomes a choice I’m making to build something.” (3 min read)

Writing Advice Every Writer Should Hear - An excellent conversation with Dave Perell and Anne Lamott that is packed with advice on how to develop a stack of disciplines that produce brilliant work. The story of Anne’s book also featured in my first newsletter. (70 min li sten)

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