"Resist absentminded busyness"

January 5, 2016 8:05 PM

The great Maria Popova, whom I shamefully admit I had never heard of before, posts 16 Elevating Resolutions for 2016 Inspired by Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds on her Brain Pickings blog. She's a phenomenon and a machine: her wikipedia entry describes her working style (in part) as:

Running Brain Pickings takes over 450 hours of work each month. Popova reads hundreds of pieces of content a day and anywhere between 12-15 books per week. From this, she posts the best to her blog and Twitter feed. She spends anywhere from three to eight hours writing a day, publishes three articles a day from Monday to Friday, and tweets four times per hour between 8am and 11pm Eastern with few exceptions.

She was featured also on yesterday's On Point on NPR. I particularly like her charming and well-considered "umm" before most of her answers.
posted by anothermug (36 comments total)

450 hrs/mo is 15 hrs/day, every single day. No way is that happening.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 8:18 PM on January 5, 2016 [8 favorites]

Wow. That is just spectacular, and just what I needed. Thank you so much for introducing us!
posted by eggkeeper at 8:22 PM on January 5, 2016

450 hrs/mo is 15 hrs/day, every single day. No way is that happening.

Yeah, the hours as provided in the pull quote don't add up. I'm sure she works hard and long hours, but reality needs to intrude at some point.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:31 PM on January 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Resist absentminded busyness"

Heh - my problem is resisting absentminded idleness.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:37 PM on January 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

450 hrs/mo is 15 hrs/day, every single day. No way is that happening.


Well she could be counting the double hours. Consider this example: I spend an hour writing tweets AND reading a book. When I count the hours worked for that day, that writing/reading hour counts as a double hour.

The key is to spend enough time working double hours. Then you can get to the point where your actual time expended is only, say, 160 hours but your total claimed hours are much higher.

Imagine still further that you also count your triple and quadruple hours. That can put you at 450 hours worked a month every month in a little under 100 hours of work.

An alternative to this is if you just spend 450 actual hours working while also accelerating the rest of the earth to a significant fraction of c, in which case you can easily work 450 hours a month from the perspective of the earth's reference frame.
posted by durandal at 8:47 PM on January 5, 2016 [15 favorites]

The key is to spend enough time working double hours. Then you can get to the point where your actual time expended is only, say, 160 hours but your total claimed hours are much higher.

you work with my lawyer, don't you?
posted by j_curiouser at 9:10 PM on January 5, 2016 [27 favorites]

I want to like Brain Pickings, but I don't. It comes off as cheap repackaging. I know she doesn't mean to come off like a tacky motivational speaker who puts quotes from "great thinkers" at the beginning of their PowerPoint presentations, but that's the effect. It's like Upworthy for liberal arts majors.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:11 PM on January 5, 2016 [47 favorites]

I tend to think of it as TED Talks: The Blog.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 9:39 PM on January 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

Yeah, the "VERB ADJECTIVE NOUN" format of the resolutions got to me, as if enlightenment could be boiled down to a phrase.
posted by zabuni at 10:04 PM on January 5, 2016

450 hrs/mo is 15 hrs/day, every single day. No way is that happening.

"Regarding hours, actually – to anyone who knows me, questioning how much time I put into what I do would be laughable. Brain Pickings is not how I make a living – it’s MY LIFE, Felix."
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:32 PM on January 5, 2016

A very determined human being, and making her mark in a big way. She's admirable, seems to me. She's chosen full-out full-on life, little or no couch time, go go go go.

I would not be able to live that life-style, and I do not think I'd want to. When is the walk with a friend? When are the laps in the pool? When is the nice bike ride on a chill morning? When are the languid Sunday mornings in bed after love, dappled with sun coming through the windows, the bitter tang of hot coffee on the tongue, white sheets draped over you and your lover?

But -- uh-oh! -- it seems that she is dishonest. On page one of her blog, displayed prominently, is a side-bar entitled "donating = loving" with the following text underneath:
"Brain Pickings remains free (and ad-free) and takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and write, and thousands of dollars to sustain.

If you find any joy and value in what I do, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
MONTHLY DONATION
♥ $3 / month
♥ $7 / month
♥ $10 / month
♥ $25 / month

But Wikipedia gives us the dirt:
Popova has been very vocal about her dislike for traditional advertising, and has repeatedly expressed her pride on being advertising-free:

It doesn’t put the reader’s best interests first – it turns them into a sellable eyeball, and sells that to advertisers. As soon as you begin to treat your stakeholder as a bargaining chip, you’re not interested in broadening their intellectual horizons or bettering their life. I don’t believe in this model of making people into currency. You become accountable to advertisers, rather than your reader.[23]

In February 2013, Popova received criticism on how she championed her site to be "ad-free" and a "labor of love" that requires reader donations to sustain itself, while she covertly received revenue from affiliate advertising from Amazon. Tom Bleymaier, founder of a startup in Palo Alto, California, wrote a post on an anonymous Tumblr blog calling Popova out for her actions. Using his own calculations, Bleymaier extrapolated that Popova could make anywhere between $240,000 and $432,000 a year with these affiliate advertisements.[24]

This received much media attention from sources such as Reuters and PandoDaily weighed in.[24][25] Popova herself responded to the Reuters article written by Felix Salmon in an email where she addressed factual errors concerning the amount of income from the affiliate advertisements mentioned in the Reuters article.

This incident has sparked a more general debate on the Internet about whether or not affiliate advertisements are "sneaky" or "deceptive". Popova has since updated her donation page, in small letters at the bottom of the page, far removed from the rest of the main text, on Brain Pickings to acknowledge the fact that she receives income from affiliate advertisements.

So there's that, which is pretty sleazy/skeezy, seems to me. If she'd just have been upfront with that, or became upfront with it when she got busted, I'd not have (much of) a problem. Everyone's got a right to make a buck, and she does work, hard. But let's not play games about being lily-white and down on ads when she's making a good buck off of them.

Good post, OP -- thanx for posting.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:36 PM on January 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

It's like Upworthy for liberal arts majors.

so… it's Upworthy?
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:38 PM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

16 Cynical Cracks for 2016 Inspired by Some of Humanity's Sharpest Sceptics would be a lot more fun.
posted by Segundus at 11:55 PM on January 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

And probably more enlightening.
posted by Segundus at 11:56 PM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm relieved to see the scepticism about her claims and content here; personally I stopped reading a significant time ago, because I found that in the areas where I have a professional or personal interest, she was posting stuff that had a specific spin or wasn't very good, or were, uh, 'interesting' interpretations of work elsewhere. I do wonder if I've dismissed her unfairly though, or if other people find the content - in areas where they actually have some background - a bit weak?

That said, if the links are accurate about her working style, I'm not surprised. It's the content that one person can read, understand and repost, so it's never going to be as quality controlled as that from a team of people with some background in the material. For some reason I'd always assumed it was a multi-handed site, perhaps because of the volume.
posted by AFII at 11:57 PM on January 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

She's chosen full-out full-on life....

That's funny, I was just thinking the opposite.
posted by IAmUnaware at 3:15 AM on January 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Logo's offputtingly Lecterish.
posted by chavenet at 3:29 AM on January 6, 2016

In addition to making money from undisclosed affiliate links, Popova also curates some sites that would seem off-brand for Brain Pickings.
posted by pxe2000 at 3:53 AM on January 6, 2016

"I never sleep, I don't know why. I had a roommate and I drove her nuts, I mean really nuts, they had to take her away in an ambulance and everything. But she's okay now, but she had to transfer to an easier school, but I don't know if that had anything to do with being my fault. But listen, if you ever need to talk or you need help studying just let me know, 'cause I'm just a couple doors down from you guys and I never sleep, okay?"
posted by Ber at 4:08 AM on January 6, 2016 [12 favorites]

I remain grateful to her for posting about Mad About Monkeys, which is my new favorite book.
posted by ChuraChura at 5:17 AM on January 6, 2016

Her job is basically to make Mefi FPPs for a living, just on her own blog. It's seriously one of the things I wish was my "dream job" - to be able to make a living just getting lost in research holes and making accessible, fun posts about what I found.
posted by divabat at 5:31 AM on January 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

also "omg she dares add her affiliate ID when she links to Amazon THE HORROR" seems like such a small thing to get upset at her over. Metafilter adds their own code whenever someone links to Amazon on here, ffs. It's not like the book costs any more with the affiliate ID on.
posted by divabat at 5:35 AM on January 6, 2016 [9 favorites]

More about the affiliate links situation
posted by divabat at 5:37 AM on January 6, 2016

I love Brain Pickings, and it introduced me to a bunch of writers/books that I wouldn't have found otherwise. I'm a little flabbergasted that it's one person.
posted by Gorgik at 5:38 AM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Resist absentminded busyness
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:11 AM on January 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Non numerantur, sed ponderantur.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:22 AM on January 6, 2016

On page one of her blog, displayed prominently, is a side-bar entitled "donating = loving"

I'm having a scary flashback to Mae in Dave Eggers' The Circle.
posted by aught at 6:33 AM on January 6, 2016

Interested to look through this. Thanks for posting.
posted by josher71 at 7:38 AM on January 6, 2016

The resolutions post is interesting reading, but the striking thing about all of them is that they more or less boil down to "deal with your unhappiness by putting pressure on yourself or changing yourself." Certainly, many of those quotes are insightful, and there's many situation in which the best move is to change yourself. However, when all of them tell you to change yourself rather than putting the pressure on external actors, I get wary. It is convenient for those creating problems for others for people to always think that self-improvement is the key to happiness.
posted by ignignokt at 9:01 AM on January 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

I find it unsurprising that there is no evidence of Maria Popova running SEO scammy websites as linked above, aside from that "screenshot" shared on tumblr by a user named dick wisdom. In my view, the "controversy" surrounding Popova is pretty clearly just another example of MRAs on the Internet finding issue with a woman doing things that they deem "impossible." The screed about her using affiliate Amazon links by Tom Bleymaier, which seems to be pretty widely shared, is just riddled with red flags and dog whistles.

I think the "I work 450 hours a month" thing is a way of saying "this is my life; I'm a creative, a thinker, an interesting person; I share what I learn, and I'm always learning." This is what she spends her life on. Picasso worked 450 hours a month, too, you know; most artists and creatives do - they have a different way of using and thinking about both time and work.
posted by sockermom at 9:17 AM on January 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

they more or less boil down to "deal with your unhappiness by putting pressure on yourself or changing yourself."

I received an entirely different message. I read the quotes to say, "Deal with what life is, by being yourself in the process of creating, regardless of easier-seeming life paths, live and let yourself live while you work."
posted by Oyéah at 10:06 AM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Individually, sure. But when all 16 of them are a form of "deal with your suffering without bothering others" it does start to remind one of gratitude exhortations .
posted by ignignokt at 10:19 AM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Picasso worked 450 hours a month, too, you know; most artists and creatives do - they have a different way of using and thinking about both time and work.

I agree with your first point. No one should care about affiliate links.

But no one can claim 450 hours of work a week, unless of course they claim 'being awake' as work. In which case, I work 510 hours a month.
posted by durandal at 3:32 PM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

It is always fascinating to see how many people on here will dismiss, completely out of hand, any woman's account of her own work and experiences.
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:00 PM on January 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

Also apparently people don't understand hyperbole. Or are you expecting her to show you a detailed timesheet of every hour of her day?
posted by divabat at 5:45 PM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

Picasso worked 450 hours a month, too, you know; most artists and creatives do - they have a different way of using and thinking about both time and work.

The myth of the constantly inspired creative artist needs to die. Most good art is made by people grinding out some kind of office hours or other, then living a life that keeps them happy and sane. There are a few mad and tormented geniuses, but they're not geniuses because they're mad and tormented. Usually it just means they die young and don't end up doing as many things as they might.

Frank is a really good film that everyone should watch but I don't want to spoil it for you.
posted by howfar at 12:51 PM on January 7, 2016 [1 favorite]