Matt’s Mix Tape Vol. 132

Hi, I’m Matt Tillotson, and this is Matt’s Mix Tape: essays + links on living a healthy and creative middle life.

This week’s Mix:

• The power of active listening

• The only strength training dogma that matters

• The Beatles and the banality of creativity

• Florida photo

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The power of active listening

Write of Passage Cohort Eight launches next week. While my friend Charlie Bleecker cares for her new daughter, I’m serving as lead mentor for 12 talented and energetic mentors.

How do you build a team dynamic in three Zoom sessions with a team traversing time zones and continents?

Easy.

You choose great team members. Which David Perell and Will Mannon did.

Active listening

Facilitation expert Gwyn Wansbrough taught the mentor team about active listening.

Active listening ensures the other person feels seen, heard, and understood. Focus on the other person. Don’t interrupt. Withhold judgement. Then repeat back what you’ve heard:

• “It sounds like you’re saying…"

• “Is this what you mean?"

• "Let me see if I’m understanding you…"

• When you are done get confirmation, “Did I get it?"

Active listening is great in a learning environment. But also:

• Business settings

• Marriage communication

• Parenting

Any situation where you want to the other person to feel heard and understood.

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The only strength training dogma that matters

The only dogma that matters is the dogma that will get you to show up over and over again.

• Free weights

• Weight machines

• Bodyweight exercises

JT @jerryteixeira

“You can’t build real strength or muscle with only bodyweight strength training, JT, You used to lift!” True, 7 years ago I did. But here I present my 15 yo daughter who has never lifted weights, bodyweight/gymnastics strength training only

It all works.

You can also incorporate two or all three methodologies into your weekly routine.

This week, I replaced my Monday upper body machine workout with a dumbbell routine (single sets, 6 seconds per rep, all sets to failure):

I’d forgotten how much free weights force your body to work on balance and stability.

But: don’t do dumbbell workouts on BOSU trainers. Please.

There are more efficient ways to extract teeth and/or break important bones.

Anyway: the free weights vs. machines vs. bodyweight arguments are pointless.

Keep doing whatever you will keep doing.

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The Beatles and the banality of creativity

The Disney+ documentary “Get Back” is mostly footage of the late-stage Beatles writing an album and performing it live in just three weeks.

It’s fascinating to watch the band slog through a haze of cigarettes and self-doubt as John, Paul, George, and Ringo try to put together one more album.

I’m struck by how unglamorous the creative process is for the world’s most famous rock band. Ian Leslie describes it well:

Its principal locations are drab and unglamorous: a vast and featureless film studio, followed by a messy, windowless basement. The catering consists of flaccid toast, mugs of tea, biscuits and cigarettes. The participants, pale and scruffy, seem bored, tired, and unhappy much of the time. None of them seem to know why they are there, what they are working on, or whether they have anything worth working on.

Creative work requires an irrational belief, with zero evidence, that there’s something worth uncovering today. And there will be again tomorrow.

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This week’s Florida photo

Sunset walk, yesterday.

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Thank you for reading!

See you next week.