I really enjoyed talking with Joel Smith of Just Fly Podcast regarding some new and controversial perspectives on running and learning. Joel has been involved in track and field, either as a competitor and as a coach for over two decades. Click on the the play icon (triangle) to hear our conversation.
Otherwise, click here to get to Joel’s website.
The great Bill Evans on learning, improvisation, pedagogy, the importance of fundamentals… and so much more.
“It was absolutely impossible to play it at the age of twelve… because I didn’t know what to do with this half-page.”
—Valentina Igoshina
We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. —DAVID GRAEBER, BULLSHIT JOBS: A THEORY
“I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets, and I knew their work well and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice. It was only when I read—even in translation—the works of Lorca, that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice—I would not dare—but he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice, that is, to locate a self—a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence. And as I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”
—Leonard Cohen
Bill “Superfoot” Wallace demonstrates how using constraints such as those imposed by a major knee injury can lead to learning and even mastery.
“Play with it, change it, modify it so that it becomes you.”
-Bill “Superfoot” Wallace