It would be convenient to say I couldn’t settle on a topic for the newsletter. That would only be half true. The reality is I fill my day with unnecessary things, most of them either on or surrounding my smartphone.

Anyone who knows me even a little knows I am a bit like a Golden Retriever.  I’ll be doing fine, working on something intently and then – ‘SQUIRREL!’-- … … … What was it I was writing about?  You get the picture.

That’s me and my smartphone. It’s a portable rabbit hole I carry around with me like a child with a woobie. And I allow it to suck me down into its depths rather than focus on more important things and people. It’s time I let it go, or at least put it away.

Hey, that sounds like a good newsletter topic. Let’s go with that. (Did you see that pesky squirrel?)

So, this past Saturday, my spouse brought back from the library a copy of Cal Newport’s  Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. “I thought you might find it interesting,” she said.

I’m a big Cal Newport fan, and his previous book, Deep Work, had a profound impact on my decision to reinvent myself from a public relations executive into an academic. So, I opened the book and started reading.

In typical Cal Newport fashion, Digital Minimalism struck a chord. I would read 30 or so pages. Put it down and go do something else. All the while, however, I kept thinking about what Cal was writing. And I would go back and dip into another 30, 50, or more pages at a sitting. He was making sense. More importantly, I saw myself in the people’s stories of smartphone and digital distraction he highlighted to make his points.

The book’s premise is that social media, apps, and the smartphone are sucking value and meaning out of our lives. In fact, these technologies were designed and intended to create a sort of dependency with their users (Think: tobacco companies jagging cigarettes to make them more addictive except with technology; Newport refers to this “attention economy” and its purveyors are “tobacco farmers in t-shirts”). Those companies do that so you spend more time with their technology. More of your time = bigger revenues for them. Our attention (time) on these apps is the product the “attention economy” sells to advertisers. They get rich while we convince ourselves the smiley-face emoji someone added to the last cat video we posted provides us and ours with a high-value.

Newport argues all those little clicks and swipes and likes add up to occupy more and more of our day. At the time he wrote this (2016), it was estimated the average person spent nearly an hour a day on Facebook, alone. Looking at the smartphone habits of my children, my college students, and myself, I suspect that number is multiples higher today, especially when you factor in binging on streaming services. The kicker to all this, Newport writes, is while the attention companies receive extremely high value for your time, you get something that is drastically less in value than something more interesting and intentional you could be doing. In short: we are giving it away, people. Newport’s remedy is to deep cleanse from the crud smartphones and mobile technology has left in our lives – we must detox ourselves.

This need to put the phone down is a big concern in the Nowling home. Our teenagers are on it constantly, and we see the negative effects unfold before us…the lack of attention, the anxiety, the open hostility to differing points of view. This was not how I and my wife grew up.

Lisa said her reason for checking out Digital Minimalism was the hope it might offer some strategies for us to help our kids find more meaning and value with the time they have each day.  I also think she intended the book to spark some inward reflection on my part, and it did.

So, I decided to accept Newport’s challenge and detox my digital life. How can I ask my kids to put down the phone when I can’t do so myself? It’s akin to telling them not to smoke and stay away from drugs while I suck down a coffin nail and pound an Old Fashioned.

Cal makes it very clear this exercise will not work unless you are grounded in a solid philosophy about technology in your life and bound by a set of values and clear rules. He suggests this as a guiding philosophy for our newfound Digital Minimalism:

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support the things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else (Newport, 2016, p. 28).

Newport doesn’t advocate we eschew all online technology, only that which provides low value to our lives. Our online use should reflect and embody our values. To that end, here are my values I will be using as compass points during this exercise:

1. My time is my most valuable asset; don’t give it away for free; get value for value;

2. Human interaction is critical and takes precedence over online/digital activities;

3. Whatever I do must edify me and others;

4. Technology is a tool, not an end for it owns sake; be strategic in how you use it;

5. Give priority to ‘richer’ forms of communication (face-to-face meetings over electronic messages; letters over emails; phone calls over texts, etc.);

6. Create space and time for deep thinking and work (this one of the things I wanted from an academic life that I couldn’t find in PR); and,

7. Be more mindful and present in what I am doing.

With those values in mind, I’ve come up a set of rules to guide the first 30 days of my digital detox.

• No purposeless scrolling or tapping of apps or sites. Period.

• With exception to my immediate family, turn off text notifications. Respond to non-prioritized text messages once a day.

• No constant digital news checking. Read selected digital news sites once each day, flagging longer/in-depth articles for weekend reading when I have more flexibility.

• Use YouTube to build skills (woodworking, auto mechanics), and limit screen time to one video per day.

• No TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels.

• Check and respond to email once each working day, in the afternoon.

• Suspend social media use while in digital detox. Since I no longer need social media for my job, I have just posted and pinned a message on my sites informing people I am taking a 30-day break. They can email or call me if they need me.

• No entertainment apps except for the NY Times Crossword and Wordle.

• No phone on the nightstand; I just ordered an analog alarm clock. How OG is that?

• Except when needed, my smartphone stays in my satchel.

• Electronics between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. Quiet time afterward, unless the Lions are on.

I am on day two of this journey.  We shall see how it goes. But am committed to making this change in my life. I must. There are too many important things left to do and only a finite amount of time in which to do them.

Share your experience with de-digitalizing your life in the comments. I’d be interested to read about them.

Tomorrow.

One thing that held me back from making my switch from PR to academia was tomorrow.

I worried about making more so I could do the things I wanted for my family and myself.  There was always more freedom, more excitement, more security tomorrow.

So, when I started thinking about whether I should radically change my life, I couldn’t get past tomorrow.

What would I do?  How would I take care of my family? What if I fail? What would people say?

I found help in Stoics, those Greek and Roman philosophers who were focused on how to live life in tune with the balance of nature. Not trees and birds, but nature as the proper (natural) function of a thing. Living according to nature is their definition of what is good. People should pursue it.

For the Stoics, reliving what happened yesterday or contemplating what might happen tomorrow  takes a person away from the present moment. And the present is all that matters to a Stoic.

Life is brutally short. It makes no difference if you live 50 years more or 50 seconds. The same outcome awaits us all. However many years we have on this rock amounts to but another brief instance in the totality of the universe. You will tie yourself in knots worrying about the tomorrows that are to come. Your only chance of slowing this inevitable march to oblivion is staying in the present moment.

Stoics are blunt like that, but they are also pragmatists.

They taught people should expend energy and effort only on the things they control.  You control what you are doing at this very moment, how you act, how you treat others. All you have is this moment, nothing more. Yesterday is now a story you can tell. Tomorrow is an infinity of possibilities. Only right now is real. Maximize your effort in this very instant and then do it again in the next instant. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

I think of this approach as “getting small”.

There was a time in college when I was in a bad place. Life was not going how thought it should. My refuge from this was to bury my head in my studies.  Feeling bad? Go study. Pissed off? Hit the books. This is what I mean by “getting small”. I reined in my world to what was happening right now, and the things I could do about it. I didn’t have any money. No car. No girlfriend. What I could do, though, was study.  This is what the Stoics are getting at.

Which takes me back to what I wrote about in last week’s newsletter – learning how to say “No”. To make a change, we need to stop ruminating about the stories of the past and fretting about the endless “what ifs” to come. We have to say “No” to those pointless activities. The Stoics referred to this as avoiding unnecessary things…and thoughts. (Believe me, this is a never-ending process filled with many starts and stops. Fortunately, those failures only last an instant.)

Focus on this very moment. Make small changes because that’s all you have time for in this instant. It might be impossible to see, but those small changes — victories, really — add up.

That time in college that was so full of turmoil also ended up being the period in my young life when I reinvented myself from a barely average student to an excellent one. Now it is a story.

Get small. Focus on right now. Make better decisions in this instant. Leave tomorrow to tomorrow. Before you know it, you will be telling the story about how you reinvented yourself.

No!

There, I said it.

It’s hard for me to say “No” because I’ll say “Yes” to just about anything. Just ask my Ph.D. adviser. “Most of my students have a hard time coming up with one bankable dissertation topic,” he told me one day. “You come up with a good one every couple of weeks.”

That’s faint praise, for sure. But he’s right. I can’t say “No”.

Yet being able to say “No” is a crucial first step in reinventing yourself.

When I decided to go back to graduate school, I was not looking to get a leg up in my career. I had pretty much topped out. It wasn’t a bad place; in fact, I was where a lot of people wanted to be. I was confident I could do it long time.

But deep down, in the place where you can’t help but be honest with yourself, I knew I wasn’t happy. If we think of a balanced life as one where you have to make deposits into your soul to be able to make withdrawals later on, I was leveraged to the hilt. Something had to change.

So, I said “No”.

At first, it was “No” to an equity offer which required me to take a loan from the company I wanted buy into just so that I could buy into it. Maybe it was a good deal, but it didn’t make sense to me at the time, and it still doesn’t.

This was a big deal. I wanted to own a PR company, and I had just turned down an opportunity to do the one thing I went to that company to do. I know, smart, right?

But this decision to say “No” to one aspect of life forced me to scrutinize other aspects about my career trajectory. If I wasn’t going to own a piece of the action, then what was I doing there? It was a completely salient question.

I said “No” to other things as well, like being gaslighted, to the recurring cycle of being agency poster child one day and pariah the next, to refereeing the sibling rivalries in the office, to kissing the asses of horrible human beings just because they were clients attached to fat monthly retainers.

Suddenly, there was more clarity about what I wanted to do by knowing what I didn’t want to do. Getting to this point really helped me fully embrace my move to academia.

Being a scholar and a teacher made more deposits into my soul than they took back. And it’s paying off.

For the first time in awhile I’ve noticed how much more comfortable I am in my own skin. I was driving to work MSU this week and it dawned on me: I am a professor, at a really good university; this is what I do, and it feels right. That falls under the “priceless” category of the old Mastercard commercials.

I couldn’t get to that epiphany without the “No”.

At some level my experience flies in the face of much of the free career advice floating around social media.

We are constantly bombarded with messages assuring us we can have everything we want. We can make six figures working only 5 hours a week. We can build the next unicorn startup and maintain work-life balance at the same time. Here’s a pro tip: you can’t.

And this is what I tell others who call me thinking I’ve discovered the secret sauce to a new career: You will need to say “No” to a lot more things than you say “Yes” to.

It’s hard. You won’t like it at times. People will get mad at you. You will be full of second guesses (This is why I always say “Yes” because I don’t want to face those things.) But you can’t get to where you need to be by saying “Yes” all the time.

“No” helps us make sense of who we are, and what matters to us by showing us who we are not.

I believe we shy away from the “No” because we think a negative action. But we need to avoid seeing it as a value judgement. It is just one possible outcome of the “Yes”/“No” disjunctive. And it’s a powerful discernment tool we often overlook.

Please don’t think I’ve got this figured out. I still say “Yes” way too often. I am very much a work in progress, even at 58. But for the first time in a long time I feel like I am making progress again in a career that is fulfilling to me and others.

I’m not going to lie. My journey has been hard. And it will be hard for you if you decide to say “No”. I’ve had to face aspects about my life and personality I would rather ignore. That’s just part of continuing to grow up.

But I would make the same decision to say “No” that I did a few years ago knowing now that the path leads to a much better place.

Reinvention is possible at any age. I am proof of that.

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It seems strange – some might say stupid – to wake up one morning convinced going back to graduate school to get a Ph.D. is the right career choice for someone in their 50s to make. This is especially true when you have a good job, and you are making real money. But that is exactly what I did.

Let me explain.

I had a great career in public relations. I helped open a Detroit office for a global PR agency, and substantially grew another one.  But I wasn’t happy, and I knew I needed to have a career where I could work well into my 70s. I was at least smart enough to know agency life was not going to get me there.

So, at 51 I became a student again, and I took the first steps at reinventing myself. This Substack is about this journey and lessons I learned in going From There To Here.

Here is being a professor at Michigan State University where I teach strategic communication. And, I am a on the last few chapters of my dissertation which should be (I promise) completed in the next couple months. I am happy.

This path has not been an easy one. There have been a lot of starts and stops, mistakes and do-overs. Those struggles and successes will be grist in From There To Here’s mill.

When I started on this journey there was no map or set of instructions. Sure, I had an academic adviser, a damn good one. But he’s been an academic his whole life. He has not done this. I had sail by the stars and hope there was land over the horizon. There was.

That is the reason I started From There To Here.  I’ve run across a lot of people like me. People looking to leave the corporate rate race – or being kicked to the curb for someone younger and cheaper – but still feel they have something left in their tank.

Maybe they always wanted to start a consulting business (yep, did that). Or they are thinking about going back to school to finish that degree (yep, did that, too). Perhaps they want to rekindle that dream they gave up on 30 years ago (that is me).

Given the uncertainty of our increasingly service-orientated economy, there are going to be a lot of professionals who will want or need to reinvent themselves. I intend for From There To Here to be a guide for those sojourners, a place to learn and to share.

So, what’s in it for you?

Readers can expect reasonably good writing about my life from PR to academia. There will be pro tips and war stories. But I want this newsletter to be more.

For starters, I will be speaking with other people like me. I want to bring my subscribers their stories, too.  I want From There To Here to be an engaged community of value.

The weekly newsletter is free, and it likely will remain so. As I put some miles behind me, I plan to add paid features like special content, coaching, workshops, and exclusive interviews. But that will be a couple months down the road, at least. Stay tuned.

Ultimately, From There To Here will reflect your needs and interests as well as my own. This is how it should be, and it is what I like best about being on Substack. No algorithm. No pressure to feed the beast with clickbait. Just good writing for people who find good writing and stories ends in themselves.

I would love to have you along for this journey. Please consider subscribing.

What’s in a name?

From There To Here is homage to There and Back Again, the fictional memoir of Bilbo Baggins, the main character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. We are all on a journey. This newsletter is, in part, a memoir of the people, places, adventures, and, yes, even dragons encountered on my path.

Thanks for reading, and I’d appreciate it if you left a comment or two.  Brickbats are as welcome as bouquets – just don’t lob them at my head.

Be well. Do good.

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