In this episode, Tim Villegas and I dug into Anne Lamott’s “Bird By Bird“.
You can listen to the episode here:
You can find Tim at MCIE.org, or on LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, or Bluesky.
Full Transcript:
Mickey Mellen (00:01)
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean. They show us how to live and die. That was a little bit from Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, and here to chat today about it is Tim Villegas. So Tim, welcome back.
Tim Villegas (00:27)
Thanks for having me Mickey again again. I’m a two-timer. I think
Mickey Mellen (00:28)
Yes, there you
go. It’s a rare, rare feat to do that. There’s only a couple of people that have done that. So congratulations. So yeah, so Bird by Bird is an interesting title. I’d heard I need to read it and I knew it was a book on writing, but was curious what the title meant. And so I think we’re gonna start with that quote just to frame that a little bit and then we’ll kind of dig in. But from the book Anne writes, she says, 30 years ago, my older brother, who was 10 years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas.
He was at the kitchen table close to tears surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder and said, bird by bird, buddy, just take it bird by bird. And so I thought that was, it really is a great title because that’s really what she talks about the whole book is don’t overthink it, don’t try to have this huge grand plan. Just like, just get started. Just get that first bird out of the way. Just make the first, the shitty rough draft she talks about a lot. Just get something going. So yeah, but.
Tim Villegas (01:23)
Yes, yes.
Mickey Mellen (01:25)
This was your call to read this book or to cover this book today. So yeah, tell me what led you to want to talk about it.
Tim Villegas (01:31)
Yeah. well, a few years ago, I really wanted to get into like the craft of writing. And so I wanted to read more books about writing and bird by bird was always on my list. And when I read it, I realized just how valuable, all the insights were. And it’s really helped me as a writer and just as a, a communicator and
I really wish I would read it more often. Like I think when I read it at first, I’m like, I got to read this like every year because it just reminds me of like, to keep, you know, the, you know, what’s important in front of you. And, and so, yeah. And so when I saw it on your list, I was like, yeah, I want to talk about that. I want to think about that book again.
Mickey Mellen (02:08)
Gotcha.
There you go, good call, yeah. I’ve talked before, I’m bad about not re-reading books and I think I should have a handful of books that I re-read frequently and I don’t and this would certainly be a good one. And it’s relatively short too, I think it’s about six hours on Audible so again, probably roughly about a six hour read for those that read at speaking speed which is about what I do so yeah, it’d be a good one to cover repeatedly. lots of little pieces in here but yeah, go ahead.
Tim Villegas (02:40)
Yeah, you know, I
was going to say, I bet this is a really good audible. So, did, did Ann, does Ann read it? I wonder.
Mickey Mellen (02:50)
I don’t know.
I don’t do the audibles generally, so I don’t know for sure. Yeah.
Tim Villegas (02:53)
yeah, I’m to have to look into that.
so in, I, I actually first got introduced, to Anne Lamott with her more kind of like spirituality and theology books. traveling mercies was one of the ones that got, tagged for me. And I have read parts of traveling mercies, which is excellent. I just really, really like Anne’s writing style. And so whenever I write, I’m like, I tried to channel Anne Lamott because it’s such
Mickey Mellen (03:13)
Okay.
Tim Villegas (03:22)
she’s so personable and authentic and Everything that I want to be when I communicate so Just absolutely love this book and and everything I’ve read from her
Mickey Mellen (03:34)
Yeah, she’s very big on authenticity, which is interesting because I cover Seth Godin quite a bit and he’s largely against authenticity and I think there’s a place for both. His argument against it is that for certain roles in life you don’t want people to be authentic. You don’t want your heart surgeon to be authentic to how his days go. You want him to do his job. But I think when it comes to writing and learning and that kind of stuff, authenticity is critical. So yeah, it’s interesting to of play the balance of those two. But yeah, she talks about that a good bit, about being authentic. I like sort of the dark side of authenticity.
She said, this quote here I love, said, quote, you own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. I’ve always liked that where people think, well, you shouldn’t be so mean. Like, no, if you’re telling the truth about what happened, like they should have behaved better. And I see that with people in corporations and you know, if they want people to say nice things, then do things that are worthy of having nice things said about you. So.
Tim Villegas (04:22)
Yeah. Well, the, so she opens the book, uh, with like the very first sentence is that good writing is about telling the truth, which I think is, yeah. So I, um, I, recently wrote a, um, a blog post about media, right? How we are the media and, that a lot of times what sells or what gets clicks is.
Mickey Mellen (04:32)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Tim Villegas (04:52)
extreme viewpoints. And so my kind of version of authenticity is telling the truth, but in a way that connects to people. And that is hopefully interesting enough that they pay attention to it. But without the whole, you know, yelling fire in a theater, you know what I mean?
Mickey Mellen (04:54)
Yep, for sure.
Right. Yep. And
that seems to be, what people do to try to get more attention because most people on, especially on social media, are trying to get more eyeballs and you get eyeballs by yelling fire and yelling that everyone that doesn’t like fire is awful and you’re just making it as extreme as you possibly can be. So yeah, that’s good point. Yeah, finding that middle ground is tough. yeah, I think this is where, it’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but this is where truth kind of comes in because people feel compelled to go to the edges for views where their actual truths probably lie somewhere in between. They’re just not willing to say that.
Tim Villegas (05:29)
Right, exactly.
Mickey Mellen (05:43)
Shankar Vadantam on Hidden Brain has some episodes about that, the Hidden Brain podcast, which is fantastic. But he talks about, I think he used the example of like the border in the US. You know, if you think immigration should be allowed at all, but under certain circumstances, then suddenly everyone hates you because you either need to be all against it or all for it. There’s no place for middle ground. He makes the point of, well, no, all should be in the middle somewhere. It’s just, again, that doesn’t get eyeballs and it’s tough to do.
Tim Villegas (05:47)
Mm-hmm.
Right. And, and for the most part, no one is one way or the other. Like once you actually sit down and talk with somebody, it’s very rare that you have such like, like demagoguery, you know what I mean?
Mickey Mellen (06:14)
Mm-hmm.
Yep, for sure.
You mentioned a little bit, I really like her thoughts on avoiding perfectionism. This is something, I know, I think I’ve talked about it here before, Allie and I kind of struggle with, because she is much more of a perfectionist than I am, and I’m probably too far away from it, so having that balance between this is great, which will push to make things better, but I’ll push to get things out, you know, but she talks about how perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and that shitty first draft.
Tim Villegas (06:26)
Mm-hmm.
Mickey Mellen (06:47)
Again, you want it to be perfect and just willing to put it out there, it’s tough. mean, that’s kind of held me back from writing for so many years, but now I blog every day and I know that some of aren’t very good, but I’m okay with it. They’re all just, I consider them all first drafts basically and some I’ll repost, some I turn into a book, some I turn into conversations, but it’s just getting stuff out there to start the conversations and to clear up my head and it’s been great.
Tim Villegas (07:07)
Yes, exactly. And that’s been my philosophy with podcasting for a long time. I feel like as much as I’ve tried to hone my craft of writing, it’s really more about me honing the craft of podcasting. the same principle applies. Shitty first drafts, just getting it out there.
Uh, it doesn’t have to be the same every single time. Like your audience will forgive you. Um, for instance, uh, it’s the holiday season right now. So I’ve completely, um, not, uh, I decided against publishing. publish weekly. just, I decided against publishing the last two weeks of December. Um, because you know, um, it would be like too big of a lift for me. And I think I’m just going to let myself.
Mickey Mellen (07:39)
Mm-hmm.
Tim Villegas (08:03)
Be okay with that, you know? And no one, I have not gotten any angry emails, so. Yeah, yeah, I suppose so.
Mickey Mellen (08:04)
Yeah, that works.
Which is kind of a bummer over way, I we yeah
If you miss an episode of publishing your podcast and no one complains, like, wait, wait, you shall be upset. Come on. What’s going on?
Tim Villegas (08:19)
I know, I know. it’s okay. It’s like, I, think, well, there’s a lot to unpack with that kind of idea, but I think it’s okay to not be perfect. It’s something that I’m definitely learning in my, you know, personal life. So it’s also something that, as professionals, we can, we can really embrace.
Mickey Mellen (08:40)
Yep, for sure. And it’s tough though, because we want to be perfect for our clients and do perfect work for them, but even in those cases you can’t always either. If you can be a little more messy getting things done, messy tends to lead to greatness, but it’s a tough road in between.
Tim Villegas (08:45)
Hmm.
Yeah,
yeah.
Mickey Mellen (08:55)
She talks about writer’s block a little bit. I like her thought on that. She simply says, word block suggests that you’re constipated or stuck when the truth is that you’re empty. This is something I work on a lot, trying to write blog posts every day, which is tough because of the block. And again, it’s not a block. I’m not stuck in anything. I sometimes just don’t have anything to write about. And so it forces me to look around and find things to see. And I think I’ve compared it before to a photographer on a photo walk where…
Tim Villegas (09:05)
Mm.
Mickey Mellen (09:20)
If photographers are on a photo walk, they’re just scanning the world of things to take photos of and I kind of treat my life now like a blogging walk in a way where I’m always just looking for what’s something interesting to write about. Again, kind of Seth Godin-ish where I just see interesting things in the world and write about them. know, just the other day, I don’t know if I published it yet, but I noticed when I turned on my car, it’s a Hyundai, it has a big long thing like viewer privacy policy at http://, there’s like a 50 letter URL. I’m like, no one’s going to type that in. but why did they do that? Why did they just buy like HyundaiPrivacy.com or something to direct and you know, just kind of.
Tim Villegas (09:49)
You
Mickey Mellen (09:49)
unpacking little things
like that, like, you know, do they not want people to click it or are they too lazy to buy a URL? So just seeing, know, again, not running empty on blog ideas by just kind of seeing the world around me as potential things to write about, which again can lead to bad posts sometimes. I don’t think that one’s gonna be super exciting, but it’s still interesting.
Tim Villegas (10:04)
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. That’s true. it’s I really like this story that ann talks about in the book about the special olympics meet. Do you happen to remember that at all? Okay, so, so ann goes to a special olympics meet if anyone doesn’t know what that is, special olympics is a I believe it’s like it’s an NGO nonprofit, it gets some funding with from the department of ed I believe and they put on these,
Mickey Mellen (10:13)
I don’t offhand, no. Yeah, sure that.
Tim Villegas (10:33)
These like Olympics meets for individuals with disabilities. and that’s all the way from, you know, elementary school all the way to adults and stuff like that. And so she apparently was going to one, like I think her friend had a child that was participating in this meet and the race is taking place and one of the children falls. and instead, you know, of just like everyone running the race, like the, like the kids helped the other kids up.
And they like cross the finish line together and everyone just, you is like, like clapping and stuff. So it’s not even really about the competition. It’s really just about like kind of going through and, doing life together. and, it’s, it’s kind of like what I, what I like about it. It’s kind of this approach to life and writing. That’s really not, we’re not focused on winning, right. Or perfection. In fact, it could be really.
Mickey Mellen (11:04)
Right.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Tim Villegas (11:27)
You it could be really slow. could be, you know, it could be, not exactly, perfect or, you know, in a straight line, you know? but you’re kind of like, you know, going at your own pace, collaborating with other people, looking out for other people. And I just really liked that imagery and, it, it, that’s kind of, special to me because, know, of advocacy for.
Mickey Mellen (11:37)
Right, for sure.
Tim Villegas (11:57)
individuals with disabilities. And I just was like, there’s so much there to unpack. I thought that that was a really neat story.
Mickey Mellen (12:04)
Yeah, I do like that. I remember it now that you’ve walked through it. yeah, it’s interesting to see where that takes place in the world and where it doesn’t. know, like our meetup that we’ve hosted for 15 years, you’ve been to a few versions of it. And we try to be that way where we’re not trying to be the best or win anything. We’re trying to just like give away our secrets and let people give away theirs and just kind of rising tide lifts all ships kind of thing. really I kind of do the same with my blog. And again, it’s mostly because I know I’ll probably never get money from it really. So I may as well not worry about it. But there’s two approaches when you write online is to.
Tim Villegas (12:14)
Mm-hmm.
Mickey Mellen (12:32)
write in your place and have everything drive back to that or just get the word out there. And so in my case, I published a full post on LinkedIn. I published a full post on Substack. I published a full post on Medium. Wherever people are, let them just read it versus trying to get more page views on my site and get more ad revenue and people worry about getting stolen. Tim O’Reilly talks about obscurity is a greater threat to artists than piracy is. You can worry about people stealing your stuff, but you should be more worried about knowing ever even knowing who you are. And that’s, yeah.
Tim Villegas (12:56)
Hahaha, yeah.
Mickey Mellen (13:01)
interesting place to be, but it also kind of points back to what you’re saying in roundabout way.
Tim Villegas (13:02)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. yeah, definitely. I think I would, I don’t want to be obscure. I’d rather people, guess, quote unquote, steal our stuff.
Mickey Mellen (13:15)
Right, exactly. Yeah. And
if people are stealing it, that means other people are probably buying it, so it tends to work out pretty well, you know, to a degree.
Tim Villegas (13:21)
Right.
Right. Yeah. Well, writing, you know, right. Like, I don’t think I ever want to, I’m not, I’m not writing to get rich or anything like that. think writing is a lot. so I guess if, if we take Ann’s thought about, know, good writing is telling the truth. it’s also telling your own truth, which a lot of time is therapeutic. So for me, writing has always been a therapy, a type of therapy. So.
Mickey Mellen (13:50)
Yeah.
Now how much writing do you do like by hand versus typing?
Tim Villegas (13:55)
I hate writing by hand. Yeah, yeah. I have a… Hold on.
Mickey Mellen (13:57)
I do too, so yeah.
Tim Villegas (14:03)
pulling on my notebook okay so i have a notebook and just to show you
Mickey Mellen (14:08)
Yes, if you’re listening to this, have the video up on YouTube so you can check this out.
Tim Villegas (14:11)
Okay,
so this is my, I’m showing you that this is my handwriting. It’s pretty messy. Yeah, and what the problem is, and so I just basically, these are my notes and I just, I just write down kind of stream of consciousness whenever I’m meeting with somebody and make like little bullets. And I tried to write as least as possible, like the least amount as possible because I just, I like, do not like the physical sensation of writing.
Mickey Mellen (14:17)
Better than mine, I think.
Tim Villegas (14:41)
I never have. And so typing has always been a lot easier. And where was I going with this? We were talking about if you asked me if I hand yeah, hand write or if I type. Yeah, but I still like to hand write because it makes me kind of like pay attention to what I’m doing. Yeah, I pay attention differently. And I remember things a little bit better too.
Mickey Mellen (14:42)
Right, same.
Yeah.
You pay attention differently,
Tim Villegas (15:10)
And also if I’m typing, I’m focused on perfection. So if I’m like typing something and I misspell a word, I’m like, I got to fix that. You know, whereas if I’m writing, it doesn’t matter. I’ll write like the first three letters of a word and just move on because, because I’m just like, whatever. And then I just know what I, I know what I did because I wrote it. You know, it helps me understand.
Mickey Mellen (15:15)
Right, that’s the rub right there, exactly.
Uh-huh.
Tim Villegas (15:39)
my own handwriting.
Mickey Mellen (15:40)
There’s a lot of thoughts that handwriting helps you remember things better than typing and I don’t think it’s the act of handwriting. People say it’s the act of handwriting. I think it’s, like you said, because of what you’re writing is different. You’re writing a quick summary of what they said, so you’re having to think through what they said and kind of put it in slightly different words because you can’t keep up. When you’re typing, you just try to keep up and so you’re not thinking through as much versus just trying to type as fast as you can to keep up with things. So it’s better to slow down and have that summary. Although it’s tough and I think we’re at a good place technologically now to solve this but…
for a while I wanted to record everything typing so I had everything recorded in case something came up and now we can just record the meetings with video and then we don’t have worry about taking as many notes. We can take more proper notes that are simpler and easier, ask questions and then know that if we ever need the details, we don’t have to write them all down so we can always go back and get the details from the recording later. So that’s been beneficial but that’s a good point. Yeah, but I’ve always never liked the sensation of handwriting either. I I still do a little bit but for the most part, yeah, I’d rather type and put things that way.
Tim Villegas (16:24)
Right, right, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And I, I was just going to say, I use a lot of, voice to text now. In fact, I’ve enabled the voice to text feature on my, on both my, I have a desktop and a laptop now and I, I, I’m like, I’m like, I just don’t even want to type anymore. So I’m, I’m, I’m trying it out. think it’s always nice to have that option. So.
Mickey Mellen (16:38)
So you talked about how, I’ll go ahead.
Nice. All right. All right.
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, we’ll see where that is. I’m curious whether it goes in a few years. Whenever we get proper AI assistants that are just like our assistant for us, we say, open this thing, go to that site, and you just kind of tell it what to do and whether when if that becomes more efficient than using a mouse and keyboard. But we’ll see. It’ll be interesting to see. You mentioned that, so the very beginning of the book, good writing is about telling the truth. And then the next part of that is we are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. And so she talks a lot about writing just to understand things. And again, that’s…
Tim Villegas (17:21)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mickey Mellen (17:33)
That’s really why I blog. We’ve talked about that before too. If you want to read it and you get something out of it, cool. But it’s really just for me to help unpack and understand the world and give me better clarity of thought. I heard someone mention the phrase clarity of thought some years ago. I’m like, that’s what I need. Like Steve Jobs, he was a jerk, whatever. I mean, he was successful, but everyone said he was the clearest thinker they ever heard. And that’s what I want people to think about me is like Mickey’s just a clear thought. Not necessarily the smartest or best or winner, whatever that might be. Just clear, knowing what I want, knowing what I believe. And writing is a great way, at least I found, to help get there.
Tim Villegas (18:03)
Yeah, writing really, yeah, it helps me. well, it goes along with what I talked about with the therapy, know, like for therapy for me, is about clarity. It’s like, also it, like, it comes up with, I come with what, what actually I’m actually thinking about and what I care about. and sometimes I don’t always do that unless I’m intentional about really.
exploring a topic or a thought and, writing kind of forces you to do that because, you’re, know, you’re putting words on paper and those words are your thoughts. and then when you write a blog post or you write, you know, an intro to a podcast episode or, for think inclusive, one of the podcasts I produce, I do some reflections at the end. So it’s, it’s like a.
a one-on-one interview and then I’ll do like three reflections about the interview and that also helps me kind of clarify, okay, what did I actually think about what we talked about? And so, and I have to, I have to pre-write that usually. I don’t just off the cuff, not like our buddy Adam where he can just talk in a good way. That’s right.
Mickey Mellen (19:19)
Okay. Right, yeah, he’s good at that, In a good way, so yeah.
Gotcha, very cool. Well yeah, this is fantastic book. I can’t remember even where it was first recommended to me. I was in New York, and I read almost everything on Kindle. When our family goes to New York, we always hit The Strand, one of the two or three locations of The Strand, and I’m like, I gotta buy something. And so I passed by, was like, oh, someone told me I should read this, so I’m like, cool, so picked it up and started reading it in Central Park, which was kind of fun, but yeah, I read.
Tim Villegas (19:36)
Mm-hmm.
That’s great.
Mickey Mellen (19:46)
very few paper books I read and this is one of them which was very appropriate because it talks all about the paper and the rigidity and all that kind of stuff so it’s a good one to read on paper as it goes but yeah fantastic book any closing thoughts for folks that are considering reading it?
Tim Villegas (19:59)
well, I would say the, the, the book and why I want to keep reading it is that the chapters are really short. So you can, you know, just buzz through it. Really. it really keeps the, the book moving. So if you feel like, you just can’t read another book, this is a really easy one to pick up because you can kind of, and also you can kind of jump around. It’s not exactly like.
You have to read it from cover to cover because the way that she puts the chapters, it’s really just writing advice throughout the kind of the whole thing. So you can start at the beginning or you can start at the end and you’ll be able to get something out of it. But the, the premise of the book, which is really breaking things down into small manageable chunks, you know, bird by bird.
It’s such a great life lesson, I just need something I need to remember all the time.
Mickey Mellen (21:03)
Yep, this is one I certainly need to revisit more often than I have, which is why I do this podcast, but again, in six months I need to find a way to bring it up again, so maybe a reread would be great. So Tim, this is fantastic. If people want to learn more about you or find your other podcasts or any of that stuff, we’re gonna track you down.
Tim Villegas (21:18)
Well, I’m very online, so you can find me on the Facebook’s, the book of faces, Instagram threads, LinkedIn, just Google Tim Villegas. I produce two podcasts, Think Inclusive and a narrative series called Inclusion Stories. And I work for the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education. You can find me at mcie.org. And that’s about it. Blue sky. Find me on blue sky. Yeah.
Mickey Mellen (21:43)
Cool, I’ll link all that. blue sky, there you go. Yeah, blue
sky, there you go. That’s where we’re going. So yeah, I’ll link all that in the show notes. Vinny, you wanna track him down? So Tim, it’s fantastic as always, man. Good to see you. See ya.
Tim Villegas (21:51)
All right, thanks Mickey.
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