Derek Thompson

If you're back on a Twinkies for two weeks, it's gone, right?

And you no longer have the fitness.

And so there's parts of life that are accomplishments, and there's parts of life that are more like fitness, where there is no end state, right?

The practice is the end point.

The practice is the practice, yeah.

You write, the things you work on work on you.

And surely it can go the other way.

It can be negative as well.

If you do it the wrong way.

I think about this in terms of my reading.

that whatever I happen to be reading typically has this extraordinary way of like colonizing my thought patterns.

Like when I spend a lot of time reading Twitter, my thoughts get very short and epigrammatic, bumper stickers, axioms, how do I make this as short and simple as possible?

And over parental leave, I was reading more fiction and I was reading Dennis Johnson in particular, Jesus's Son.

And he's an incredible, Dennis Johnson's extraordinarily evocative writer.

And I remember like I was having thoughts that were like in, I won't say in Dennis Johnson's voice.

He's one of the great writers of the 20th century.

So it's not like I suddenly picked it up.

But in almost an attempt to ventriloquize Dennis Johnson's voice.

And I find this happens all the time when I get really immersed in reading.

That not just when I read fiction,