I’m Mike Vardy, and I help people build a better relationship with time — not by controlling it, but by working with it. Through my writing, courses, and community, I explore how intention and attention shape a more meaningful life — one rooted in the original idea of productiveness over productivity.
Moving, or being moved?
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Hello Reader, I’d been looking forward to VisionQuest for a long time, and the first two episodes didn’t disappoint. No spoilers here, but they left me with a realization I didn’t see coming. When you build for long enough, you can end up with a full record of what you did and no felt sense of what it was all for. All the parts, none of the thread. I noticed it in a small way this week. One idea for a story made me feel more alive than weeks of output had. The next day the feeling was still there, buried under everything I’ve built and feel I have to keep running. Then I noticed what the story was about: a creator who never does the thing, because something else always seems more urgent. Sometimes we write the warning before we realize we need it. I’m bringing that into this month's Lantern Lyceum, alongside two books written by men who knew their time was short. Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture asks what you’d say if this were the last time, and who you’d really be saying it to. Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life? says your real strategy isn’t what you say matters. It’s where your time actually goes. It’s called The Last Lyceum, because it’s the last one I’ll hold on YouTube. (Not the last Lyceum. Just the last one there. I’ll explain why on the stream.) It happens Wednesday, October 14 at 9 AM Pacific, live on YouTube. Click here to be part of The Last Lyceum If you’ve been to one this year, I’d love for you to be in the room for this one. If you never have, this is a good one to start and finish on. One question to bring with you: Am I moving, or am I being moved? See you later, |
The Practice of Productiveness
I’m Mike Vardy, and I help people build a better relationship with time — not by controlling it, but by working with it. Through my writing, courses, and community, I explore how intention and attention shape a more meaningful life — one rooted in the original idea of productiveness over productivity.
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 35 | October 31st, 2026 Hello Reader, Happy Halloween. It’s the one night a year we invite fear in on purpose, dress it up, and hand it candy. Tonight, most clocks fall back an hour. Mine won’t. Where I live, the time stays put this year, which is new. So tomorrow the calendar turns to November while the clock on my wall carries on as if nothing changed. It feels like subjective and objective time colliding: the season says one thing, the clock says...
Hello Reader, In 1997, Elliott Smith put out an album called Either/Or. It's quiet and close, mostly one voice and a guitar, and for years I assumed the title was a mood. It wasn't. He borrowed it from a book, Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or, from 1843. Kierkegaard's book is about two ways of living. One drifts from pleasure to pleasure and never commits to anything. The other chooses, and keeps choosing. His point was that the hard part isn't picking the right side. The hard part is choosing...
The Lantern by Mike Vardy Vol. 2, Issue 34 | October 24th, 2026 Hello Reader, Last week I wrote about watching the Foo Fighters play for three hours, and how nobody in that stadium was counting. I’ve kept thinking about what was powering that set. It wasn’t a schedule. It wasn’t a quota. Whatever kept them going that long came from somewhere deeper than discipline. That question sent me back to the name of this newsletter. When I told you why I called it The Lantern, I talked about carried...