I Tried Maya Angelou's (fantastic) Daily Routine: Here's What it Taught Me – ep. 4

before i start this video i just wanted to say that this was shot a year ago and normally it doesn't take me anywhere near that long to create a video and put it out into the world but i spent a lot of time making sure that this felt right that i was coming at it from the right place that was doing this for the right reasons so far this series diving into the daily routines of creative people that i consider successful that really inspire me has been a bunch of white dudes and you know they come from different countries i've done an italian a spaniard and an american so far but still and while the work that these men really does inspire me i both believe and would like to show that the definition of success does not just belong to the white man i find maya angelou crazy inspiring and the more that i learn about her the more i am blown away both by what she did and who she was i found her writing especially about the black experience incredibly eye-opening and furthermore her lifestyle offers an alternative to the unfortunate hustle culture that we see today this video is meant as a celebration of who she was and her life's work i hope you enjoy i'm deeply fascinated by individuals that throughout history have risen up and left an outsized impact in their wake have really changed things for the rest of us especially people in the creative world marguerite annie johnson more commonly known as maya angelou was one of those people we begin with maya angelou over the course of her career she has been known as a journalist an actress a producer a singer a playwright an educator a civil rights activist and much more she has published 11 bestsellers worked with dr martin luther king been honored by several presidents you may write me down in history with your bitter twisted lies you may try me in the very dirt but still like dust i'll rise give birth again to the dream women children men take it into the palms of your hands and so in this latest episode of this somewhat informal series that i'm doing diving into the daily schedules of highly successful creative people i'm going to be trying out the daily routine of the one and only maya angelou oh i'm excited i'm excited about this the poet described her daily work schedule in a 1983 interview which is what i'm basing a lot of this off of i usually get up at about 5 30 and i'm ready to have coffee by six i keep a hotel room in which i do my work a tiny mean room with just a bed and sometimes if i can find it a face basement i keep a dictionary a bible a deck of cards and a bottle of cherry in the room i tried to get there around seven and i work until two in the afternoon if the work is going badly i stay until 12 30. if it's going well i'll stay as long as it's going well it's lonely and it's marvelous i edit while i'm working when i come home at two i read over what i've written that day and then try to put it out of my mind i shower prepare dinner so that when my husband comes home i'm not totally absorbed in my work we have a semblance of a normal life here we go waking up early tomorrow the blues may be the life you've led or midnight hours in an empty bed but persecuting blues i've known could stalk like titus and break like bones so for all of this week i'm going to be taking essentially morning walks to uh the airbnb that i reserved to work this is my modern equivalent of what maya used to do which was to work in hotel rooms same concept though i just got a little room essentially just to work i'm not staying there doing exactly what she did it's a small apartment room on the top floor i really don't need much so i think you're just a little desk i take the occasional break on the balcony area so this is what i'm working with here's the thing that is difficult to capture about maya angelou's life and why it was so extraordinary this isn't really an extravagant or eccentric routine you know from everything that i gathered she wasn't a flashy person it's more so how she lived her life it's the discipline she was extremely disciplined hawthorne says easy reading is damned hard writing so i go to work i realize it is work that i'm going to this is not i'm waiting for the light bulb to go off over my head so dig like i can feel where i'm coming i don't do that i go to work showing up day in day out to do the work that she was called to do whether she liked it or not whether she felt like it or not she did it i think we can all speculate as to where she got that motivation um in an attempt to understand it and or incorporate it into our own lives right but there's this one quote i think that that helps paint the picture if you will there's no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you it feels like it was that sentiment that really propelled her forward okay it is already past three i'm absolutely loving the solitude this space to focus it's very quiet here but i'm starving i haven't eaten pretty much anything since 6 a.m but i absolutely loved having this specific space to work pinned like rope and a gallows tree make me curse my pedigree bitterness thick on a wrangling tongue songs to love left unsung i'm not always the most self-disciplined with myself and therefore i don't usually wake up this early um but it's oh my god it's so wonderful to be in such look how calm it is so calm oh god i love it when there are no cars out and there's almost nobody out and it's already completely light out because it's summer okay so with me i am carrying a pack of cards a bible maya angelou's relationship with religion is actually quite fascinating she herself claimed that she spent time with zen buddhism judaism islam but ultimately she felt that she was a christian trying to be a christian is like trying to be a good jew a good muslim a good friend or a lover it's not a condition you achieve and then you sit back and say oh well i got that i'm cool now you know it's everything you're just back at it and and trying to be it internally dedication is what made maya angelou who she was and it's as apparent in religion as it is with her writing with her craft she likened it to being like a long distance swimmer where you're hesitant for getting into the cold water but once you're in you're in i you not my angelo is quoted for having said life's a you've got to go out and kick ass she was as badass as they come i think today i feel like i'm getting a little bit more in the rhythm so i i'm gonna need a little bit more time to fully adapt to the schedule but it's a strange and kind of liberating feeling to know that the body of today's work is already done and it's not even 3pm it's a huge psychological shift for me i don't usually work this way i try now i don't make it all the time but i try to bring all my stuff here in this studio everything i've got is here and when i leave here everything god will be in that taxi we'll be in the hotel give everything all of them all the time it's great fun and um it is liberating absolutely liberating there's a lady that comes out and waters her plants every day between 8 15 and 8 45 but other than that i'm having absolutely zero human interactions which is fantastic actually to be able to focus on work i've always felt like solitude is necessary to be able to be focused on what i'm trying to create there's another thing that i found really fascinating when researching her life and her work apparently as her work would intensify in these small rooms she would almost physically manifest what she was writing now it could have possibly been because she forgot to eat throughout the day while she was working but it might have also been because she was feeling the pain of the characters that she was writing and so she claimed to have had her back go out her knees aching one time apparently her eyes swelled shut she lived her work you know when you start this early i i just don't feel like i'm in a rush to get to work like i have time i'm not feeling behind on the day for me having a schedule that i can keep up that i can maintain has always been about simplicity it's this idea of like really not trying to do too many things or better put not trying to do too many different things like right now as i try to share my thoughts and shade at the same time there's something really powerful in this idea of simplicity because what does a writer do they're right and of course we all do many other things as well but being a writer is contingent on writing it's unbelievable to me how easy it is to get distracted with other things right but what are you trying to accomplish like that has to be the core question to always come back to i write through the black experience that's what i know i'm talking about the human condition what it is like to be a human being i use the first person singular but i'm talking about the third person plural i'm talking about all of us and in a way um i hope the reader reads and goes through the experiences with me and identifies with me to honor my angelo and her life's work i'm going to be giving three thousand dollars to the bmma which is a black women-led cross-sectional alliance that supports black women-led organizations and increases the visibility of black women leaders i'm going to leave a link in the description in case you want to dive deeper and learn a little bit more about them and i also want to thank the sponsor of this video notion for helping make this possible all right so this video is sponsored by notion which is an extremely powerful tool and i thought i would share how i use it because it's a little bit different i think than most people i mean it's extremely customizable so everybody uses it a little bit differently it's just this incredible resource to sort of pull together ideas and sort of keep track of things if you will so i'm doing a screen recording situation here as many of you guys know i am quite passionate about analog about handwriting about journaling about film photography you know using my hands there are some things that you can't really capture with analog so it becomes useful to have a space to capture everything and keep everything online digitally and there's also kind of permutations where i have used this with the help of other team members and whatnot what i have here is kind of a month by month accumulation of ideas and inspiration and things that are going on so that i can keep track of all these different projects i have happening simultaneously so what i went ahead and did was create a page for july 2021 which is coming right up and start to put together some of the inspiration and the things that i know are coming for me so you get an idea so for example i recently saw i'll create just right now a section just for ideas where i dump things that i've seen things that inspired me and captured my imagination i watched this video recently that somebody sent to me that i really connected with about why you don't need to be exceptional what i'm going to do right now is drop the link right in here and embed the video and this just really neatly and nicely puts this right here this video sparked some ideas for me so i'm just dropping it here and i feel like maybe i could combine it with some other stuff that i've seen one of the incredibly cool things about notion is that it's super customizable all right so really quick before i dive into the next thing i'm going to turn ideas into a heading and then up here i'm probably going to start a calendar so that i can kind of start visualizing the month as well i know i'm going to be heading to iceland which is really exciting so i'll just add that right there stretch it out for the dates that i'm there that helps to kind of conceptualize things so i'm creating another heading here content that i'd like to release maybe right here i'll do like a kind of a to-do list so i'll put here you know for example a q and a with my brother i brought in a screenshot from the video which has already been recorded so that's right there and then my next to-do item you know for content for the month might be you know spanish doesn't make any sense that's for no backup plan i'm just kind of dumping ideas here and i think notion's incredible but it can feel a little bit overwhelming because there's so many features and so many things that you can do and i'm feel totally okay being a little bit messy about it and just dumping inspiration different things i want to accomplish that month places that i'm going all of it so that i can kind of visualize what my july is going to look like on one place and i can do this in a way that i can't necessarily you know on paper handwritten because i'm including images including links to videos and whatnot and so this all this becomes kind of like this sort of central hub that i have for the month of july now the cool way that this can kind of incorporate a team is that i get a little bit of help doing research for a trip and it becomes super easy to kind of back and forth leave comments or receive the information incorporated into my personal setup here it's just really seamless notion makes it easy it makes it easy to keep things looking clean and organized and i found this really helpful i've i've come to really enjoy using this to stay organized if you're interested in checking it out for yourself i'll leave a link to it down in the description below thank you notion for sponsoring this video thank you to all of you guys for watching and i'll see you guys soon

Channel: Nathaniel Drew

Views: 475,706

Keywords: maya, maya angelou, racial justice, race, gender, angelou, civil, civil rights, right, rights, poetry, maya angelou interview, maya angelou daily routine, daily routine, daily, routine, famous daily routine, daily routine of famous people, famous people daily routine, what I learned, studying maya angelou, maya angelou books, maya angelou poetry, focus, discipline, boost, boost focus, boost motivation, boost discipline, 5am, 5am daily routine, 5am morning routine

Id: 1m6ifDhy_6o

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 26 2021