New Phone Who Dis

Apple celebrated my birthday weekend by sending me a new iPhone Pro Max. They do this every year after I give them money and send them my old phone. It’s a tradition at this point.

The new iPhone Pro Max is more or less the same as my old iPhone Pro Max but with better cameras and processing power. And a new camera button. And a better Siri (coming soon). Anyway, this new phone has roughly two million times more memory than the Apollo guidance computers. So, there’s that.

Each phone upgrade provides new opportunities to create, be it writing whenever an idea strikes or capturing incredible moments with powerful cameras. So why do I continually feel like what I make doesn’t meet the caliber of my tools? I mean, I’m not planning a moon mission anytime soon.

In 2007, JJ Abrams shared his concept of the Mystery Box. This TED Talk often lives in my head rent free. While there are a lot of great takeaways in there, he has a kind of throwaway line about halfway through:

So, you know, I love Apple computers. I'm obsessed. So the Apple computer -- the PowerBook -- this computer, it challenges me. It basically says, what are you going to write worthy of me? I feel this -- I'm compelled. And I often am like, you know, dude, today I'm out. I got nothing. You know? So there's that.

Honestly, I feel this all the time. The devices I carry are way more powerful than I need them to be. They are filled with possibility and potential to create amazing things.

For example, Danny Boyle filmed the entirety of 28 Years Later on an iPhone 15 Pro Max. This is a $75 million feature film set to release next summer, shot on the phone I carried in my pocket daily for the last year.

Then, there is Austin Mann, whose annual iPhone camera system reviews are simply drool-worthy. This year, he went to Kenya to photograph elephants and lion cubs because why not? His photos are stunning. Mann’s reviews show me what my new phone can do, so why do I feel like I’ll never be able to take pictures that well?

I write just about every outline on my phone, often just after I wake up (like this one) or right before I go to bed -- these are the times my brain is the most free and allowed to formulate new ideas. My phone enables this, and I’m grateful for that feature. But, let’s be honest, I don’t need state-of-the-art technology to take notes. I want to learn to take better photos. And more of them.

While I doubt I can learn an Austin Mann-level of travel photography before next year’s trip to Japan, I do want to learn to take better photos. I want to understand the elements of composition and what all these pro settings mean. Hell, even just understanding what the ProMax file is and why it doesn’t capture the live image format would be a good start. Is there a kind of Duolingo, but for photography?

Technology can inspire us to do more, but at the end of the day, it shouldn’t hinder that creativity. We shouldn’t feel compelled to create for the sake of appeasing our tools and guilty when we don’t, as JJ Abrams described. Instead, we should use the tools at our discretion, even if that discretion is glorified note-taking and feed scrolling. There is nothing wrong with that!

A Note About Writing Requests

The Writing Cooperative is one of the biggest and oldest publications on Medium. Over the last decade, we’ve published thousands of articles written by thousands of contributors from all over the world.

As the owner and editor of the publication, my Medium notifications are practically useless. I get notified for every submission, highlight, note, you name it. It’s a lot. To try and maintain a level of sanity, I’ve set up a pretty comprehensive email rule to send most of these notifications to the trash:

:0:
* ^From:.*@medium\.com
* ^Subject:.*(submitted a story|sent a draft to|has been published|added your story)
/dev/null

This rule deletes just about everything, leaving my inbox with emails about comments on my articles -- in other words, the things I actually care about.

Unfortunately, a new kind of comment spam is plaquing Medium right now and further destroying my notifications.

I get some version of “add me to your publication” daily. Which, fine. I get that people want to submit to The Writing Cooperative. We’re popular, and stories tend to do pretty well. But comments on random posts (or emails sent in reply to my newsletter) are absolutely not the way to make a request.

Frankly, people who request this way tempt me to block them from asking again. Why? because I could not make writing requests simpler. It’s right on the front page of the publication! It literally says “write for us.”

The submission guide is intentionally a long read. The volume of writing requests and submissions I get is enormous, and our standards are high. You know what one of the standards explained in the guide is? Let me draw your attention here:

Requests to contribute via email, private note, social media message, or any process other than the request form below are ignored.

So, this is a friendly reminder that I am ignoring comment spam requests. They are annoying and waste my time. Please do not do that. I only have so much of it to go around.