Christy Tennery-Spalding | The Downside of Never-Ending Self Improvement

Srini Rao: 

Christy, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really psyched to be here.

Srini Rao: Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. I found out about your work because you wrote in and I think that there are a number of things about what you did that were really relevant to the times we are living in from sort of the work around activism to what you called self care all of which we will get into.

But before we get into that, I want to start by asking you where in the world did you grow up and how did where you grew up end up impacting the choices that you've made throughout your life and your career?

Christy Tennery-Spalding: I grew up. in the Washington, D. C. area. I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of D. C., so I grew up close to a political town, but never really felt like I resonated with what was happening in what was ostensibly my hometown.

I still identify D. C. as my hometown. And yet, being there, you are, you're drawn, whether you like it or not into having a political opinion about things from a pretty young age, because While neither of my parents were political, they didn't do anything related to the government or anything related to anything political lots of my friend's parents did.

And so you're drawn immediately into having an opinion about big things in the world from a pretty young age. And so for me, growing up near DC was formative because that's where the power holders were. And from a young age I recognized myself as someone in opposition to a lot of those power holders, but it also provided me an outlet for kind of practicing what would later become my belief system and my identity as an activist.

So I wasn't allowed to go to the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 because I was 16 and I wasn't allowed to do things like that by myself, but I went to rallies in Lafayette Park and Went to protests at the Chinese embassy around the occupation of Tibet and was protesting police violence in the Clinton administration.

So to me, that was, that really set the stage for everything that was going to come, was being in close proximity to power in that particular way.

Srini Rao: Yeah. I think it's interesting that at such an early age, you not only formed strong opinions about things that you believed in, but you chose to take action on them.

And what it comes to mind for me is there's a movie that Michael war made called where to invade next, where he goes around to different countries and he looks at various social policies and so his whole thing is I'm going to bring who These ideas back to the United States. This is my invasion.

And one of them, of course, was the one that really stood out to me was college tuition. He goes, I believe to Estonia, where college is free. And the thing that struck me was he actually said anytime in any of these other sort of Westernized countries where you know, politicians or anybody in power.

Makes a tuition hike or tries to do anything like they tried to actually institute tuition in Estonia and the students took to the streets and they were having none of it and then he flashes to a seen it looked like the UCLA campus and he said what happens every time we have a tuition hike in America, which has been happening endlessly.

And he just flashes to students sitting idly doing nothing which is amazing because to me, I'm like, all right, if you want this to end, I'm like every college student in this country should just stop going to class for. A week, and they have the power to organize that. And so what I wonder is why is it that you see so many people who have strong belief systems are so convicted about something yet do nothing about it?

Christy Tennery-Spalding: I think a lot about this because I'm an organizer. And so I'm interested in kind of the mechanics of participation and how we get people involved and really the way that we get people involved is two ways. The first is to make organizing so enticing that people not only want to participate, but they want to come back.

For me, the way that I create an enticing, organizing atmosphere is making sure that people feel super safe, really informed. Empowered and as though they are a an important part of the process. So as an organizer, I try not to treat anybody like just another body in the street or another cog. Everyone there is really important.

I build an organizing model around informed consent. So when you show up to an event that I've helped organize, you know what you're getting yourself into. You're going to be kept in the loop. Nobody is like keeping you in the dark about anything that's going to happen. And you're empowered to make decisions based on that.

But the other thing that I think holds people back from not participating is not feeling like they have a political home, not feeling like they have a group of people whom they trust who are helping them to shape a political future together. And that's one of the things that Really inspired my move to the Bay Area was being growing up near D.

C. I felt like there was a lot of access for me to participate, but I didn't feel like I had a political home there and I went out and got one for myself. I went to college in San Francisco. That was the only way that my parents were going to let moving to San Francisco fly was I had to go to college.

So I did that. But I immediately got off campus and was looking around Who are the people who are doing interesting things here who share my belief system? And the people I met during college... Doing environmental activism, doing human rights work here in San Francisco, they're still my best friends.

15 years later we're in each other's weddings were each other's housemates. We when dinner parties were a thing, we would do that. We. And we're not just activists together, but we're really a family. And I think that is, that's a real barrier for people when they don't know anyone else who's participating.

They don't know who to trust. They don't know what's safe. They don't know what they're getting themselves into. And I think finding and developing that political home for yourself is such a key part of getting involved in anything, because you don't want to feel like you're out there by yourself.

Srini Rao: Yeah I think the other question that raises for me is I think that, and this isn't just isolated to political movements or activism, but if you remember like when the Parkland shooting happened, why is it that it takes reaching this boiling point before people are willing to take action on something that has been a problem long before that happened?

And that's I wonder that because it's funny it's also in life, people don't do anything until somehow they reach a crisis, right? It's like the person who has a heart attack suddenly decides, oh maybe I should start being healthier now. Yeah,

Christy Tennery-Spalding: I think it's, this is something I think about a lot because I quit drinking a year and a half ago and I and people always expect there to be some sort of really horrific rock bottom story where I woke up in a ditch and, Suddenly re evaluated my life and decided to stop drinking.

And the fact is that wasn't the case for me. I don't particularly need those rock bottom moments in order to decide to change my life. But I think that there is this common narrative that things have to reach an absolutely unendurable point before you're even allowed to pivot. And for instance drinking is such an accepted part of our culture that God if you don't have that crisis point, why on earth would you stop drinking?

And for me, it's it just wasn't serving my life anymore. And it's doesn't make for a particularly compelling memoir, but that was my life. And I think that there is a very similar thing that happens politically where suddenly our collective eyes are opened and people are participating. People who haven't participated before are suddenly called to you.

Be in the streets to participate to donate money, and I think that it's a similar phenomenon, and That's one of the reasons why, for me, having a political home is such an important part of my activist practice, is I don't have to, because of that political home, because of that group of people, I don't have to chase every moment, I don't have to devote myself to every cause equally, I can pick where I want to be and buckle down and do the work, and and not worried that every time there's a crisis, I have to be the person on the front lines. I know that I don't have to do it all. It keeps me grounded and a little bit more centered. But if you don't have that, I think you may end up kind of chasing those moments instead of build, doing the deeper building work.

Srini Rao: I think that the other part of this is you mentioned the word informed consent. And that struck me in particular, because at this point we have anything but consent. Like we, we live in such a divisive world. And at the same time there's no way in my mind that we can actually make progress and find the best sort of version of who we could be without the ability to Talk to people that we know we disagree with engage with people who have different opinions than us particularly as somebody who has the background that you do how do you build that bridge between people with wildly different beliefs?

Because I think that one of the things that we overlook in my mind is context, right? Like the way the media portrays it is like every person who ever votes for Trump is basically a racist white redneck. And I think that if you actually look closer at circumstance and situation, that's not like on the surface, that might seem to be the case, but it's not entirely true.

I think that it's easy to come to that conclusion without doing any digging. And as you Probably imagine you could probably know exactly where my politics fall, given that I went to Berkeley. I like live in the Bay area, but at the same time, I think that one thing that I've been very mindful of is looking at the books that I read and also seeking out viewpoints that I know I will disagree with.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: I would say that I spend more of my energy activating the people who agree with me, but who aren't taking action yet. To me that is a better use of our, or a more efficient use of our time and energy. than arguing with your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. Because you're probably not going to change that person's mind.

I think what I always try to remember is to leave the door open where no one is irredeemable. You're allowed to believe whatever you want and at the end of the day, you're also allowed to change your mind And so no one is irredeemable if folks decide to join whatever it is that I'm doing that's amazing and fantastic and at the same time My role in the movement is not building those bridges.

My role in the movement is upskilling the people who Agree, but are maybe intimidated to participate or are looking to take on more risk or are looking to become a part of something more meaningful than what they've already been doing than like phone banking from their house, for instance. And that's my role is playing is almost playing kind of hostess and educator for the folks who are agree and are looking for more.

And I'm, again, I've lived in the Bay Area since college I don't have a ton of people in my life who like virulently disagree with what I believe I, I came from a fairly progressive family, and so to me, my energy is on those folks Who were like the people you were describing earlier where they really believe in these things But they don't know where to start and they don't know how to participate so there's a another component of this that you know, I wonder about which is you know We know that we have these problems.

Srini Rao: We've had them for decades. Most of them are not news to anybody Many of these, you could things that have happened in the last year or two, you could have predicted 10 years ago and even I always harp on the student loans because it's a problem I have myself, but I'm like, okay it doesn't take a genius to figure out.

You can only keep lending money out for so long and not getting it back until there are systemic consequences. It's I don't need to be the treasury secretary to figure that out. And I was a C minus economic student. So I guess the thing that I wonder is why, despite knowing that we have all of these problems is the actual process of change, something that takes so damn long, like, why do we have to create so much suffering in order to finally get people to wake up and Because here's what I think about power brokers that you speak of, like Nassim Taleb with this amazing book called skin in the game.

And he actually points out to what he calls the Robert Rubin problem, which is treasury secretary is making policy that has no impact on that his life or anybody surrounding him so they don't really have skin in the game. Like they're making policies that affect people. But they themselves don't deal with the consequences of any of that.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: Yeah, I think the why does change take so long? It's if I could honestly answer that question, I, would have stopped climate change by now and would have ended police violence and all of these things. It's such a big question. And for me, I think a big piece of it is that we spend so much time, I think, picking at the surface of the problems and we don't get deep.

Yeah. And we don't look at what is the root of all of this. And so for instance you look at climate change and it's taking shorter showers and using different light bulbs and the fact is, the UK Guardian reports that 100 corporations contribute 71 percent of carbon emissions. So my light bulbs don't matter.

In the grand scheme of things, but we're kept busy doing all of these little cosmetic changes instead of really getting to the root of things and holding accountable the people and the corporations who should be held accountable and really holding their feet to the fire in a meaningful way instead of nibbling around the edges, which if you try to nibble around the edges, it's going to take you a whole lot longer to eat the pizza.

Srini Rao: Yeah, so we're as we were talking about before we hit record and one of the most unusual times in history, something that probably you and I both never thought we'd see in our lifetime. And you were just telling me that you're having to tell a three year old they couldn't go outside if the air was good, or he's asking you if you could go outside and this is probably yet another question that doesn't really have an answer, but I I think like deep down as much as I wanted to not believe in such a pessimistic viewpoint, I just couldn't shake the sense that as I was watching things unfold over the last probably five or six years are we moving towards a point of massive civil unrest?

And I think we're now at that point. To some degree, I think the only thing that's really kept it in check is the fact that we're all quarantined and stuck in our houses. But a damper on my political participation, for sure.

Yeah. So what are you so this is like a big question.

I realized I'm basically asking you to solve all the world's problems, but how do you get out of a mess that is. Of a scale that's this big that's one component of this question. And I think the other thing that I always wonder about now, I think obviously about a lot of things through the lens of media as a media creator.

And from your vantage point, what do you think, Is my responsibility as a media creator. What do you think the overall general media's responsibilities? Because the thing is that yes, we don't have the CNN level audiences that like an Anderson Cooper does, or but the thing is we individually are all given a sort of a platform and a microphone.

And in a lot of ways, we are our own media company. So I wonder, what do you think is the responsibility of people who create media? I'll tell you what I think my responsibility is as. As a content creator. And I have this conversation not just with myself in my own individual work, but also in the collective work that I do is What is our role here?

Christy Tennery-Spalding: And for me, I would say for the last 10 years or so. The answer to that question is Getting people to stretch their imaginations to imagine something that is not just back to normal. That is not just status quo, but that is so spectacularly beautiful and liberating and empowering. That again, it's irresistible.

And so I think about this a lot with the uprisings that have been taking place this past summer around racial violence and police violence in our country is we now have a whole bunch of new people who are imagining a world without police. And when we stretch our imaginations beyond what we used to think was.

possible or what we intellectually thought was probable to like, what do we really want? Not just what's the most feasible, logical solution, but if you had like your wildest dreams to imagine a political future for ourselves collectively, what would that look like? And really encouraging people to stretch into Believing in that.

And so for me, I'm my kind of genre for the last 10 or 15 years in activism has been climate justice and indigenous rights And for us our approach has been pushing this conversation to the left so that we're dragging the mainstream along with us and we're creating a new left flank over and over again of connecting climate with capitalism, connecting climate with human rights and starting to make these connections in a way that.

We're asking people not just to imagine more fuel efficient cars, because that's not really that exciting. At least that's not that exciting to me. It's about reimagining an entirely new future for ourselves.

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com slash creative. And get 40 off your first subscription. Again, that's mind lift M Y N D L I F T. com slash creative for 40 off your first subscription. Yeah. You alluded to the fact that on your website it very clearly says anti capitalist. And I think there's an interesting paradox at play because you live in arguably what is the, at this point in, Time, one of the hotbeds of wealth which is the Bay Area.

So I guess what I want to understand is what do you mean by anti capitalism? Because I agree that there's no, no way we can continue to thrive in a system where so many people have so much and so many, like a handful of people have so much and so many others have so little.

And I think the Bay Area is like almost a microcosm of the world at large. Having grown up there. Cause I remember even looking at the place that I used to live with a roommate in San Francisco and thinking, I was like, we used to pay 1, and now it goes for 4, 000 a month.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: And easily.

Srini Rao: That let's just get into that whole idea of anti capitalism because obviously you need money to live. And the interesting thing is that money is really in a lot of ways, how we, as a culture, unfortunately measure status and success. It's the. Pinnacle of achievement.

It's the goal that everybody has is more all you have to do is go through the self help section of a bookstore or even go on Amazon. It's six figures in six weeks type of thing. So yeah so where does the anti capitalism fit into all this?

Christy Tennery-Spalding: So for me, anticapitalism is a political framework that I apply to everything.

It's the lens through which I see the world, truly, in terms of what needs to shift. And yes, in terms of money, what I mean by anticapitalism is ending the ceaseless chase of more, the nonstop accumulation of Stuff and wealth and on a large scale. I think that looks like mass wealth redistribution and frankly reparations for black and indigenous people here in the U.

S. Your mileage may vary if you're outside of the U. S. But on a more human scale, what I mean by anti capitalism is detangling our worth and our personal value and our sense of what is meaningful from that quest for more. So in your case, it might not be the quest for more and more money or stuff.

It might be a quest for more productivity, more usefulness, more caregiving, more martyrdom, whatever it is. I think that even if you're not chasing More money endlessly, we're still caught in this capitalist system of believing that we should always be chasing more, even if it doesn't look like money, it could look like busyness for you, but that's still a capitalist value where you are providing gain.

Thank you. Value and profitability to the capitalist system.

Srini Rao: Yeah I think it's funny because that's probably a perfect segue to talk about why I had to reschedule because I think I remember I emailed you and I said, Dan, I realized this and I was sick or something and you're like, okay me of all people, I can't tell you not to reschedule an interview given that I talk about self care.

So I think that makes a perfect segue to. This whole idea of self care, because you're right. I think that my roommate has been doing a deep dive into all things digital wellness. And what we're finding is that, wow, yeah, you're, there's no question. You're right for me.

That absolutely is more productivity, more creative output. Hell, I just finished writing a 6000 word article on the process of maximizing creative output. And so it's yeah. But what I want to understand is the role of self care and how we define it, because to your point, even like you said, it's more time in the gym could be put into that category there's like more weight loss, all of that so where is that sort of balance of self care in the pursuit of more, because even self care could put you down the same sort of put you back on the same treadmill that you're talking about.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: And that's why I'm very clear on my website that what I'm talking about when I say talk about self care is something that is sustainable and has an anti capitalist framework. Anti capitalism doesn't mean that I'm not selling things on my website or compensating myself for my own labor. What it means is that it's not all about more and more.

So one of the things that I saw when I got into The self care world and I came to self care when I was at a crossroads of dealing with severe scoliosis and severe depression and pretty severe PTSD and what I the trap that I initially fell into was what I call capitalist self care, which is like going to all the yoga classes meditating twice a day.

Eating quote unquote really clean, which is a wellness industrial complex way to sell us. Like vegetables that you can grow in your own garden in a way to maximize profit and I fell into this trap of doing all of the self care the way that I had fallen into a trap of trying to be everything to everyone in my activism and it had the same kind of harmful effects of burnout and overwhelm and this gnawing feeling in the middle of the night that I'm worthless because I didn't do everything that was on my self care to do list and I exhausted myself with my own self care and realized that I really needed to be a part of shifting that conversation.

And so what I know about myself is that I have the tendency to overwork. I am a classic people pleaser. I will happily chain myself to a tree for any cause you put in front of me and sacrifice myself for that. And so for me, a lot of times what self care looks is like just lying down and not doing anything.

And so I challenged myself, I'm like, how not useful can I be? How like inconvenient can I be? And it's not at the expense of everyone around me. But it's. It's from this place of interrupting what capitalism has taught me about my worth. What do you think capitalism has taught sort of other people about their own worth and how do you uncouple that?

Srini Rao: Because I think it's, this is something that I run across frequently and something that comes up with almost everybody I talked to is I think there's a difference between intellectually understanding it. And then really doing something about it, because if we were able to act on everything we intellectually understood, every person who takes an online course would come out of it having done every damn module in the course and getting outstanding results.

But that's not the case.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: It's definitely not the case. I think it really, it's a very individual and it's a very personal thing and it really does. involve, again, getting to the root of how a lot of us were raised and what a lot of us were taught from very young ages about how the world works, how power works, how value works.

I have a three year old and one of the ways that I am practicing my political imagination while I'm stuck at home is I'm imagining raising a child. Who did not experience punishment or reward or authoritarianism growing up. So we don't use rewards, we don't use punishment. And because I said so is like not a valid answer in our house.

And in watching this play out with him, I really see the ways that quite accidentally, like through no malice because my parents are not malicious. people. They're wonderful human beings. But through no fault of their own, I still internalized so much of that growing up, that the way to be a pleasing person was to please others, to perform, to behave, to be palatable.

And so really investigating Like what the root of that is for you and frankly, I wouldn't have done all of this without quite a bit of therapy. So I heartily recommend that as part of your practice. But it's really looking at like, where did this come from? Where did this belief come from? And for me, I'm like rewiring myself neurologically to be less useful.

To be less compliant. All of these things.

Srini Rao: Yeah. It's funny because you brought up the meditation, the wellness and it just makes me think many of the guests we've had here on unmistakable creative are the ones who talk about those very things and the benefits of them, which that's what I wonder about it is okay.

I agree with what you're saying. There's a sort of self loathing that occurs when you're like, Oh, I can't follow through on my daily routine. I know. Cause I teach this stuff. This is what I teach to the community that I'm in. Where we're talking about how to make ideas happen in the role that all of these things play.

And yet I think you're offering a counter narrative. So what I wonder is. How you take this is where I think I'm going with this is that how do you take what works for you and discard what doesn't? Because I think that the sort of tendency that people have, particularly when it comes to authority figures or people who are quote unquote experts is to treat everything they say as gospel rather than guidance.

And I see this over and over particularly like when it comes to the online world of people who hire coaches and that kind of thing, where they just they take somebody's word and oh, this person does this and I am going to follow this religiously.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: Yeah I see this all the time.

I. I was a yoga teacher for a bunch of years and I certainly have a meditation practice. Okay, I'm a practicing Buddhist and I do my readings and I do my meditations and it's enormously useful to me. The point where I think we run into trouble is where we weaponize those things against ourselves. So when we don't do those, or if we sit down and meditate and can't quiet our mind, then that Creates a story about ourselves where we are suddenly wrong or bad or unworthy or whatever it is.

So it's not that the practices themselves are the problem. The problem arises when we create a whole new story using those practices as the kind of weaponizing force inside of that. So I also don't want to say don't meditate because if meditation works for you. Awesome. I, but I do think that there is a filter that we need to start applying for ourselves, which is like, what is the effect of this?

And it's, for me, it's been one of the most useful parts of meditation is learning to observe things and to see the kind of residue that things leave behind. Endlessly scrolling Instagram leaves behind a residue that I need to go out and buy a whole bunch of shit that I don't actually need because if only I had that yoga mat, then my yoga practice would suddenly be something completely elevated and different.

And the fact is, it won't. I've been practicing yoga again for 20 years. My yoga practice is basically my yoga practice at this point. That's where we've arrived and it's fine, but I do think that we get confused of endlessly consuming this content, endlessly consuming this advice, these suggestions, and then again, taking all of that as gospel and not putting that through the filter of our own lived experience and our own lives and our own.

Beliefs.

Srini Rao: Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true. It's something that I, like I said, I see over and over. So there's one thing I want to go back to you said about no rewards, no punishments no authoritarianism or whatever it is. I think any one of us who grew up in the area that we did had parents who You very clearly established some semblance of authority and there was discipline.

So what I wonder is in the context of something like a kid who's gone off the rails, who's just doing drugs at home or whatever it is, or causing serious problems that have consequences that potentially are reversible. How does, how do you have, how do you deal with things like that with this approach?

Christy Tennery-Spalding: Yeah. I'm not the parent of a teenager yet. So like, All of this could come back to bite me in the ass, for sure. But again, I would really invite you to look at what are the root causes that are creating that? And for me, as someone who used to be a teenager, and used to consume drugs, and used to engage in all kinds of self destructive behavior, the thing that was missing for me was connection.

And what I know for my three year old is that if he's off the rails, it's because there needs to be... More connection happening and it's not always a quick fix in the moment But it's something that where I can look at Total meltdown tantrum and go. Okay tomorrow. I'm gonna need to bake in some like Real connection time where my phone is away.

I'm not thinking about anything else. We're on the floor playing trains In order to create more of this felt sense of connection because that's all we're that's all any of us is looking for and any like off the rails behavior is really just looking for connection and safety and Begging anyone who will pay attention to us for some compassion.

Srini Rao: So this is a personal question out of morbid curiosity. So I think in a lot of ways, self care for many people has gone off the rails in the midst of COVID. It's drinking more than you normally do. I, as an avid snowboarder, basically my exercise routine went to hell once this pandemic hit, because the one thing I love to do, the one form of exercise is no longer an option.

And we got to the point where we noticed that our habits were getting really bad, where we're like eating poorly a lot of things, particularly like just it, all of it just became an excuse to engage in behavior that has Like long term downsides and in the context of what we're dealing with now, when people are stuck at home I'm lucky because I live somewhere where the weather isn't atrocious.

But how do we navigate this now? Particularly when you got just news coming at you all day long. That's crazy and insane. And yet your primary connection to your point to the outside world is often the Internet.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: Yeah, I think it's. I just want to acknowledge that this is an incredibly challenging moment and While I'm not going to endorse any particular behavior that you find self destructive I do want to pause and give us this moment of grace of maybe we don't have to hold ourselves to the same standards as before.

My, my kid was home from daycare for three, three and a half months. Like my self care did not look the same with no child care as it looks with child care. That's just like the reality of my lived experience. That being said, I think we are maybe at a place now where We can start reimagining what that self care looks like for us and being a little bit creative or inventive about how do we bring some of those things that used to be working for us back in and reintegrating them.

So for me, having a movement practice is essential. Again, I live with scoliosis. If I Don't move. My joints turn to concrete. It's like a sad time. And so for me, it's being really creative about, okay, how am I moving my body today? What's the plan? And having something built in where I know what I'm I know what the plan is.

I know what I'm doing. I'm not building it from scratch every single day. So so having some kind of framework around it of this is where we're going with all of this when it comes to human connection. Again, scrolling the Internet endlessly. Doesn't make me feel good. It harms my mental health.

And so I try not to do it. More than I need to. And yeah, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was refreshing the news a whole lot until suddenly I was like, okay this isn't working. We're going to dial this back. And at the same time, I now have it. way more connection. And my son has way more connection with my parents because we do video calls now.

That hadn't occurred to us pre pandemic somehow, but now we do it all the time. And so figuring out, okay, we're living in this new world, at least for the foreseeable. And so what are we going to make of this? And how could we honestly use this as an opportunity to create connection in different ways?

Srini Rao: I think what I really appreciate about your message around this is that it challenges so many of the conventions of personal development literature and what is effectively the ethos of personal development, which is more. Like the Tony Robbins thing of constant and never ending improvement.

You think about that and I remember because I started to come to this realization that I had a guest here who once said like when you have any one thing that determines your happiness or wellbeing, it's basically like betting your entire life on one sort of risky stock as opposed to having what you call the diversified portfolio of meaning.

And yet most of this flies in the face of that diversity. And it's like I said, constant, never ending improvement. Whereas in my mind, I'm like, what we should be aiming for is constant and never ending awareness.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: Yes. I shake my fist at constant and never ending improvement. First of all, it doesn't account for the fact that, and this is my like, buzzkill Buddhist side, but like all of us are going to get old and die.

Like there, At the end of things there is no constant, never ending improvement. It's just a, it's an impossibility. For most of us who want to live, a long and hopefully at some point, elderly life our bodies are imperfect and they break down and that's the reality of being human, so how can you embrace that and let yourself off the hook for a whole lot?

Of the other things.

Srini Rao: Yeah. So actually, you may be the person to finally answer this question for me that I have been wrestling with. And it's funny because I'm interviewing a scientist who wrote a book called the molecule of more, which is all about dopamine. But the 1 thing that I we know is.

We need ambition to some degree, right? My roommate said any good society is driven by some level of self interest because if we didn't have self interest, people wouldn't start companies, people wouldn't make, or people wouldn't do anything potentially with no self interest involved. But I think also we're seeing what happens when you maximize self interest to the point of diminishing returns.

So I guess given sort of the nature of your experience and your view on the world, how do you find this balance or this coexistence with fulfillment and ambition? It's super challenging because I I'm that person where I think when I initially wrote to you, I was like, I don't have a book to promote or anything like that.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: And of course, like a month later, I was like, I'm going to write a book in the middle of a pandemic with a three year old. So I, I'm all about yes, anti capitalist self care. And also for me, part of my self care, part of my. what makes me feel good in the world is creating things. I and I create all sorts of things I knit my own sweaters and I create online courses and I made a kid who's pretty great.

And now I'm writing this book proposal and eventually a book. And for me, it is, it's always an act of kind of faith, but also this act of Imagining something in the world that wasn't there before, and I think that's an incredibly human thing. I think legacy is a one of the really beautiful things about being human is leaving something behind and leaving your mark and impacting the people around you, even if it is just your own little Nuclear family.

But leaving something behind that's meaningful. And I think that's what gets a lot of us out of the bat out of bed in the morning. For me it's also imagining a world that is cleaner and safer and more just and where we all live in collective liberation. And That's also an active creation and imagination to

Srini Rao: yeah, it's it's one of those things that I think Ryan holiday had a really interesting way of saying this.

He said like we have this idea that there's this next level and he said, and that's good because he said if nobody knew. If everybody just wanted to be Senator, nobody would run for president. He said, so on the individual or on the individual level it's good because it drives a lot of accomplishment, but he said on the aggregate, it's a lie.

And what people find often is that they, what they've been doing is chasing false horizons. I think that each accomplishment you think is like, Oh, this is going to be the one when this happens I'll finally feel whole and complete. And you always realize that there's something more.

Cause I remember Josh Ratner the guy from how I met your mother actually said, he's like a successful career in the arts is rigged for dissatisfaction. And he said, if you don't have something else that grounds you outside of your accomplishments, it's like a really mental rollercoaster ride.

Christy Tennery-Spalding: Yeah there's so much rejection, there's so much uncertainty and at the same time, I think we see that as a uniquely creative problem, and the fact is that's just being human. We, we think that there is certainty in anything, and there truly isn't, and it's... Again, this is like my Buddhist buzzkill side but when you, to me, when you embrace that like nothing is promised and nothing is certain, that's when I do my most creative work because I'm like, I don't care what people think.

If nothing is promised and nothing is certain, then I'm going to get to work creating the thing I want to create and everybody else can deal with it.

Srini Rao: Yeah I appreciate that more than you can possibly imagine, because I think that there is this sort of huge attachment to outcomes that prevents people from actually getting started with anything in the first place.

This has been really interesting. I love conversations like this because they just they make you think they expand your perspective. And I've really enjoyed talking to you. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews, the unmistakable creative.

What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Christy Tennery-Spalding: To me, what makes something or someone unmistakable is to me, it comes down to clarity and courage. It's being really crystal clear about your perspective and the lens through which you are approaching the world and then the courage to carry that out.

And I think in concert, those to me are the qualities of what makes something unmistakable, And to me, I can spot them a mile away because when someone is unclear or is hiding you can see that you can see that too. And so that's, those to me are the things that I try to cultivate.

Srini Rao: Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your wisdom and insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you your work and everything

Christy Tennery-Spalding: that you're up to? Sure. You can find me at christy tending. com. And I'm on Instagram at Christy Tending.

I'm pretty much everywhere on the internet at Christy Tending. So

Srini Rao: awesome. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.