Tyler Cowen writes,

a number of you asked me what form my practice takes.

What is it that I do, that I am practicing for? I think of my goal as writing essays and books that will stand the test of time. For example, when I wrote Crisis of Abundance, I thought it likely that its analysis of the challenges with U.S. health care policy would still be valid a decade later. It has now been more than a decade, and the book still holds up. With regard to Tyler’s points:

1. I don’t write every day. I try to take one day off a week from the computer. I approach my electronic devices with a fair amount of paranoia–they are out to distract me. Long walks or bike rides take me out of the world of the devices and allow me to think. But otherwise, I do write every day. My blog posts serve one of two purposes. First is note-taking. When I am trying to remember an idea somebody promulgated, I often can find it by searching back through my blog posts. Second is putting out trial balloons for ideas.

2. I don’t think I write so much about views that are diametrically opposed to mine. But I do write about pieces with which I quibble.

3. I also do serious reading very day.

4. I think about the answers that I gave to questions I was not expecting, whether the answers were good or bad. But I don’t have so many speaking opportunities.

5. Other than thinking about firms as cultures, I don’t think I’ve tried as much cultural code-cracking as Tyler.

6. I don’t listen to complex music, but maybe Israeli dancing serves a similar purpose. Each year, the repertoire gets larger and more complicated, so it may also forestall mental laziness.

7. Relative to Tyler, I have fewer in-person intellectual discussions. But I find comments on my blog posts helpful, particularly for my trial balloons. I can tell when something has been widely misinterpreted and needs better articulation or should be discarded.

8. Asking “what did I learn today?” seems like an interesting habit to try to follow.

9. Relative to Tyler, I have fewer intellectual friends. I count that as a weakness, but I don’t do anything about it.

10. I also avoid television, drugs, and alcohol.

11. The closest thing I have to “conversations with Tyler” is my monthly column for Liberty Fund, which is almost always a book review.

12. I used to teach, but only high school students.

I will add the following:

13. I schedule my blog posts in advance. You can gauge that by noting the date on Tyler’s post. My goal is to avoid reacting immediately to anything. This keeps me out of a lot ephemeral outrage events.

14. I don’t read Twitter. I count on Tyler to link to anything really interesting on Twitter. And even when he does recommend tweets, I rarely find them worth blogging about.

15. When I have a talk to give, I take many long walks and practice the talk as I walk. Boiling an entire book down to a 10-20 minute talk is a useful exercise.