The List You Didn’t Know You Were Keeping A while back I gave myself a small project. One artist a month. Neil Young for a month, then Bowie, then Prince. First album to last, in order, start to finish. It wasn’t research. I wasn’t trying to become an expert. I just wanted to actually listen to something properly, the way we used to before everything became a shuffle of thirty-second previews. And it gave that year a shape I can still remember. I hadn’t thought about it in ages until this week’s podcast guest described almost exactly that idea, and then took it a lot further. Ravi Gupta is the author of The Invisible List. He spent years as a school principal and superintendent in the Deep South, obsessed with how his students and teachers were learning. Somewhere along the way, he realized he’d stopped learning anything himself. So when he left that job, he made a rule. Treat every year like a school year. Pick one thing, a skill, a passion, the thing you’d normally call a hobby, and spend the year going from beginner to intermediate or beyond. Screenwriting. Surfing. Powerlifting. Tennis. Cooking. A novel. What’s an invisible list? Ravi describes it as all the things you quietly carry around and never do. You watch a show and think, that’s basically the screenplay I always meant to write. You overhear a language you wanted to learn. You walk past people playing a sport you always wanted to try. His point is that these don’t just sit there harmlessly. The longer they go unaddressed, the more they chip away at how you feel about yourself. His moment came at a wedding. People close to him were genuinely worried about him, and at the same time he found himself watching a couple salsa dance and counting how many times he’d started learning salsa and quit. That combination was enough to make him change course. Someday is a hiding place We talked about why we push things off. Ravi’s answer was simple: fear. Fear of looking stupid, or of finding out we can’t do it. So we file it under “someday,” which, as he put it, usually means never. His antidote is to shrink the task. If you’re writing a novel, don’t think about the 80,000 words. Think about the twenty minutes you can sneak in this morning. He borrowed Hemingway’s idea of just writing the next true sentence. And on looking silly? Nobody’s watching as closely as you think. Everyone’s busy with their own stuff. There’s an old line that we overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in ten. Ravi had a lovely reframe for this. If you’re 43 and dreading 50, that’s not seven years of getting older. That’s seven new things, seven new groups of people, seven chapters. Being bad at something is the fun part This was the bit I didn’t expect. We tend to think of being a beginner as the awkward, embarrassing phase to get through. Ravi sees it as the best part. Early on, you get wins almost every day. In his first two weeks of surfing, he went from never standing on a board to actually catching a wave. Later, the progress gets slower and harder to see. The beginner stage is where change is fastest and most visible. The washing machine Surfing ended up being the year that changed him most, and not for the reason you’d guess. When a big set of waves holds you under, surfers call it the washing machine. Ravi’s instinct at first was to fight it. Thrash, claw for the surface, burn all your energy. That, he said, is how people drown. What actually works is relaxing. Let it move you around. When you surface, take stock. If there’s a gap, go for it. If not, take a breath and let it take you under again. He said that lesson followed him out of the water and into everything else, including his work. “Don’t panic” is useless advice to someone who’s panicking. What helped him was having lived through it, and having a story to come back to when things got tense. I loved that. It’s basically nervous system regulation learned the hard way, in cold water. “I don’t have time” I asked the obvious question. What about the person with kids, a demanding job and bills? Ravi’s book is full of people dealing with far more than most of us: people going through cancer treatment, a woman with lupus who couldn’t leave her house and taught herself to paint, a man in his seventies who took cooking classes after his wife died so he could cook for his friends. He also pointed to Stephen King writing in a laundromat, and Toni Morrison getting up before her kids to write. Some years are “anywhere, anytime” years. You fit it into the margins. Other years, when life opens up a gap, are the ones for the big all-in stuff like surfing. Presented by Manta Sleep: That Toni Morrison detail stuck with me, because for most of us the time for the invisible list comes out of the edges of the day. An early start only works if the night before did its job. You might remember the issue where I told you about backing Manta Sleep on Kickstarter a decade ago. I’ve worn their masks ever since. They’re sponsoring this issue, but the money went the other way first. The mask has proper eye cups, so it blocks out the light completely without pressing on your eyes. Mine lives on the headboard, and when the sun comes up earlier than I’d like, I reach for it half-asleep. I’ve since added their earplugs, and my son has his own kids’ mask. It’s the reason he slept on our flight to London. If you’re planning to steal an hour back from your mornings, it’s worth starting with the dark. How to actually start Ravi’s advice surprised me, because it isn’t “start tomorrow.” Write your list. Then pick a start date a few weeks out, ideally one that means something to you. A birthday, an anniversary, the first of the month. Use the time in between to prepare. Read a couple of books by people who’ve done it. Line up the videos and podcasts now, so they don’t become procrastination later. Find a coach or a community if you can. Set a rough goal for the year and break it into smaller ones. That way, day one is just about showing up and doing the thing. I’ll be honest, I’m already working on mine. I’ve always wanted to try surfing, though living in New York doesn’t exactly make it easy. Ravi did point out you can go out at Rockaway in a wetsuit but that might be a stretch for me! So here’s my question for you this week. What’s on your invisible list? Hit reply and tell me, or comment below. The Invisible List is out now wherever you get books. You can find Ravi on Substack here and on Instagram. Get full access to Jamie MacDonald at www.jamieliveswell.com/subscribe
