The Beauty and Benefit of Regenerative Studying

Digging into any subject yields fascinating results

The amazing Austin-based band Little Mazarn, whose music I have loved for many years now, released a new EP, Election Results, last week. Like everything Little Mazarn has done over their decade of playing together, it’s poetic, poignant, touching, and, for me, exceptionally engaging. With Lindsey Verrill playing banjo and singing, Jeff Johnston performing on a remarkable electric saw, and, of late, Carolina Chauffe adding guitar and vocals, the band’s music sounds like no other. Here’s the backstory on the new release as Little Mazarn’s leader, Lindsey Verrill, tells it in the liner notes:

On November 5th and 6th, 2024, Little Mazarn had some studio time booked and went in to start a follow up album project to Mustang Island. It was a beautiful time of year, we had some fresh songs in the mix, and our friend Jolie Holland was in town. What could go wrong? Needless to say, things did not go according to plan. The heaviness of the American election results crashed through the studio door and landed right on top of us in our merry music making.

This EP is the result. After some tender listening, we decided these recordings needed to stand alone from a moment where things were very heavy, but we didn’t allow ourselves to be crushed. We made art, we were together, and we did manage to have some laughs. Now a year later, this message rings truer to me than ever. Though much has been taken, much abides.

We each, of course, have different ways of dealing with despair. Lindsey Verrill crafts lyrics, strums her banjo, and sings. I start studying.

For me, studying—whether it’s reading books, mindfully focusing my attention on a particular pattern over time, listening to talks online or in person, or spending time engaged in personal reflection via journaling—is, and always has been, central to the way I live my life. When I need a boost, I crack open a book. If I’m feeling down or confused, overwhelmed or out of sorts, 20 or 30 minutes of studying is almost certain to turn my mood around. Studying, I can see now, feeds both my mind and my spirit, and more often than not, it benefits our business at the same time. So, while many people think of studying as a burden they left behind when they finished school, I see it as a blessing that will be with me for the rest of my life.

I’ve never really framed it as such, but in recent weeks, I’ve begun to see that studying can be a regenerative process, a way to boost our own energy while putting ever-increasing amounts of good out into the world. I’m not talking about the kind of studying driven by grades or fear of failing that so many of us struggled through in school. I’m talking instead about studying as a way to get my own mind moving and to then actively share what I’ve learned with others in helpful ways. Studying that benefits me, the studier, and also the people and products that are part of our ecosystem. Studying that, rather than sapping energy through caffeine-fueled all-nighters, can now be framed as a fun activity to help with self-management, inspire new ideas, and give us the energy we need to stand up for what we believe in, even in the face of enormous pressure to fold our cards and retreat to a safe corner. The new Little Mazarn album is really a great example. The musicians took their despair and turned it into a different kind of election result, one we can listen to and learn from at the same time.

I am, by this point in my life, “intuitively” inclined to study, probably through years of neuroplastic shaping of my brain. Here’s a bit of evidence for the way studying is woven into my routines. It’s true to life and, in truth, a little hilarious.

I’m pretty sure it was about 10:30 this past Saturday morning when the penny fell out of my pocket and landed square in the center of the brushed suede of my Doc Marten sandals. My first thought was how cool the copper looked against the black of the shoe. My next thought, seconds later, was that I really knew next to nothing about pennies and probably would be wise to start studying them. Then I laughed out loud at my strangeness. With everything going on in the world around me and a long to-do list on my yellow legal pad, pennies were definitely not a top priority.

Most people, I’m fairly certain, would simply have picked up the penny, popped it back in their pocket, and gotten on with their day. I, though, am more than a bit odd. It used to make me feel estranged. Now it mostly just makes me smile and then get back to work. So, low priority as pennies were, I started looking up more about them about 20 minutes or so after the coin appeared atop my sandal. Within a matter of minutes, I was magically transported into the world of monetary history and the culture of coin-making. It didn’t take long for my mind to start spinning like a coin on its side—so many mental roads to go down for far more in-depth study. It turns out there’s a history major’s treasure trove of cool stories to tell about these little copper coins. Here are a few highlights of my brief foray into “pennyology”:

• During Revolutionary War times, all kinds of European coins were used in what is now the U.S.
• Indigenous Americans had their own methods of making “coinage” for trading purposes. In this part of the country, the Ojibwe people commonly used cowrie shells as currency.
• In 1787, over a decade after the big Independence Day of July 4, 1776, the colonies made what were called Fugio cents. Designed by Ben Franklin, the two sides of the coin captured the paradox of the creation of any democratically oriented organization. One side read, “We are one,” while the other warned, “Mind your business.”
• In 1792, the new U.S. mint in Philadelphia began making pennies similar to those we use now for the first time. Lady Liberty was pictured on one side. The coins were 100% copper.
• In 1857, a flying eagle landed, taking Lady Liberty’s place. Pennies went to 88% copper and 12% zinc that same year.
• Abraham Lincoln’s profile was placed on one side of the penny in 1909, a little over half a century after he was murdered.
• In 1982, the same year we opened the Deli, one-cent coins became 98% zinc with a thin copper coating on the outside. Maybe we could have called our business “Zincerman’s”? Or perhaps titled the business plan for the Bakehouse “Pennies from Leaven”!
• If you find yourself close to Colorado Springs, consider visiting the Money Museum there.
• Sadly, next year’s batch of pennies is scheduled to be the last.

Oh yeah, I can’t continue here without pointing out that a cover of “Pennies from Heaven” just happens to be the fifth track on the new Little Mazarn record. The original song, I know now, was written in 1936, with music by Arthur Johnston and words by Johnny Burke. Back in the middle of the Great Depression, pennies falling from heaven was, after all, a wonderful fantasy. A number of famous vocalists have recorded the tune, but the version I love most from that era is by Billie Holiday. She recorded it 89 years ago next week, in a New York City studio on November 19, 1936. For context, Holiday was performing in an era when concert halls and the country at large were still strictly segregated.

My point, though, is not about pennies. It’s about my proclivity for studying and what happens to my head in the process of engaging in it. As you can probably tell, I can get energized by studying just about any subject. Sure, it’s more interesting to engage with things I’m already passionate about, but even subjects that I’m essentially oblivious to—in this case, pennies—can turn out to be fascinating, too. The more I learn, the more I lean in. Studying can, in a very short time, shift my energy from down to almost elated.

To illustrate the point, I’ll share here that my despair in the days following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022—comparable, perhaps, to how Little Mazarn felt a year ago last week as they read election results—turned into what I now conceive of as Deep Understanding of dignity and a concerted long-term effort to evoke a real-life “Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace.” My studies, of course, didn’t stop when the pamphlet came out, which is why my continued engagement with Ukraine and its language, culture, and history has led me to imagine apricots as a symbol of dignity and democracy recently. All of which, I can see now, evidences the excellence that regenerative studying can contribute to our companies, communities, and countries, and to our own quality of life at the same time.

I’ve always just assumed that this pattern—struggle, study, and then put new learnings to work in lasting, constructive ways—is part of who I am, but I didn’t take it as particularly relevant for anyone else. When I look around at the world now, with all this in mind, it’s pretty clear that nearly everyone who gets to greatness has done a lot of studying, each in their own unique way, to get themselves to where they are. Studying for people like this isn’t exhausting; it’s a big part of where they get their energy from!

The subtitle of poet and writer Jacqueline Suskin’s wonderful book Every Day is a Poem is “Find clarity, feel relief, and see beauty in every moment.” What Suskin describes is exactly what studying in this regenerative way has done—and is still doing today—in my life. It helps me to see what’s happening around me, inside me, or both. I definitely feel relief as I begin to learn. Keep studying, I’ve told myself 10,000 times over the years, and the answers will become clear. And sure enough, they almost always do. Studying has, without question, helped me see the beauty that’s already all around me. Regular and regenerative studying has given me many, many metaphorical pennies from intellectual heaven. And while the cost of studying can be high if you’re in grad school, studying can be done elsewhere, on the fly, for mere pennies—by borrowing books from the local library, watching videos, and listening to podcasts online.

Jacqueline Suskin says of her own work and life experience, “To be able to look around and find beauty and inspiration in every little thing, that’s what makes me a poet. I want to show anybody that they have that in themselves.” Her statement is inspiring, in part because, as you might already know, I’ve been studying poetry over the last couple years. More to the point of this piece, though, I’m inspired because what Jacqueline Suskin posits about poetry is what I’m suggesting about studying. Done in a regenerative way, as I’m framing it here, it helps to remind anyone who’s interested that with a relatively small investment of time, we can raise our own energy levels, see beauty everywhere we decide to engage, and find inspiration even in something as mundane as a simple one-cent coin.

So, what goes into this sort of regenerative studying? For me, more often than not, it’s reading, but for others, it could be anything from time spent learning to play a musical instrument from a master to sitting and meditating. For athletes, it might be watching game film or studying the history of whatever sport they engage in. It could be taking a class at BAKE! or beginning to learn a new-to-you skill you’ve long been curious about. The list is, of course, endless. If you’re in doubt, pluck any single subject out of this enews and spend 10 to 20 minutes learning as much about it as you can. Let me know how it goes!

I’ve realized in recent weeks that all of these regenerative acts of learning, when they’re done well, create more energy than they take. Did I put a lot of time into studying and defining dignity, figuring out how to practice it, and then publishing all my learnings in a pamphlet? Of course! But that time has, without question, radically enhanced the quality of my own life. And over the last few years, it has improved the quality of life for many thousands of others as well. If I were to track that studying in the form of dollars and cents (profits and pennies?), I’m sure I’d find that I got an incredible return on my investment. Heck, even my 15-minute foray into pennies the other morning made my whole day better!

I now know that regenerative studying, done well, is a life skill. It’s something that helps to elevate the quality of what we do every day in a wide array of ways! Here are eight lessons I’ve learned from studying, reflecting, and working to better understand what it means to me to practice regenerative studying in this way:

1. The energy we bring to our studies has a huge impact on what we get out. Nearly 20 years ago, my longtime friend, the energy teacher Anese Cavanaugh, taught me the import of setting one’s intent before entering any interaction. The intent is, consciously or not, going to end up being reflected in the outcomes. In “What Is It Worth?,” a wonderfully worthwhile essay in last winter’s Southern Cultures, Libby O’Bryan, co-founder of the small Asheville, North Carolina, craft company Sew Co, shared:I believe objects hold an embodied energy that is cultivated as it is being created. Objects can be made with renewable, regenerative materials, as opposed to ones ravaged from the earth. Objects can be made with caring, attentive, respected hands as opposed to oppressed, disgruntled labor. These objects hold a memory that we can feel when we engage with them.What O’Bryan writes, I believe, is the same for studying: What we learn holds the embodied energy that we had when we were studying it. If the studying was done when we felt pushed or under pressure, like someone walking a forced march, the odds are high that nothing really good is likely to emerge from our engagement with the learning materials. A box on someone’s to-do list would have been checked, but the much more important box inside of them, the place where the learnings are stored and later put to use, would still be empty. By contrast, if our energy is open, eager, curious, and rich in wonder and awe, wonderful things are far more likely to come from it.
2. The process is a big part of the point. I’m with writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who says, “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” It is, I realized this week while writing, the same with studying. For me at least, it’s as much about traversing the challenges of the route as it is about really “finishing.” Mindfully appreciating the positive feelings that emerge from the learning is, in this context, almost as important as the learning itself. The good news is that we don’t have to choose one over the other.
3. Study with purpose. Jacqueline Suskin writes, “I also understand that I have the power to transform my experience into one of import by way of perspective. Poetry helps me with this process of understanding.” Same goes for studying! It’s a lesson I learned a long time ago from reading the autobiography of the Russian-born anarchist Peter Kropotkin. Over the course of his 78 years on the planet, Kropotkin studied relentlessly. The results of his studies showed up in a plethora of publications: He authored a dozen books, close to 50 pamphlets, and hundreds of articles.Kropotkin’s two best-known books are probably Mutual Aid, which was published in 1902 (the same year the Deli’s building was built), and Memoirs of a Revolutionist, which debuted three years earlier. The year before Memoirs came out in book form, Kropotkin agreed to have pieces of it published monthly in The Atlantic, which was then billed as “A Magazine of Literature, Art, Science and Politics.” From September 1898 until September of the following year, 11 different essays detailing Kropotkin’s life story came out in the magazine, making their way to a rather wide American readership.Kropotkin would have celebrated his 56th birthday the week after the third installment arrived on newsstands in early December of 1998. That month, The Atlantic also included essays by naturalist John Muir and author-poet Julia Ward Howe. What Kropotkin—a trained scientist, a writer, and a well-known anarchist—wrote really resonated:Our father gave us very little spending money, and I never had any to buy a single book; but if [my older brother] Alexander got a few rubles from some aunt, he never spent a penny of it for pleasure, but bought a book and sent it to me. He objected, though, to indiscriminate reading. “One must have some question,” he wrote, “addressed to the book one is going to read.”I believe Kropotkin’s brother was correct: If we start studying merely for the sake of telling a teacher that we did our homework, the odds that we’ll learn a lot are low. If, on the other hand, we study because we are truly curious, because we are eagerly seeking new insights, or because we are, as Kropotkin was, open to intellectual exploration, the odds that something good will come out of the work go up significantly.
4. Use study as a focused way to shift energy. Feeling down? Stuck? Unsure of what to do? In The Once and Future King, Merlin advises Arthur, “When you’re very sad, the only thing to do is to go learn something.” That fits my own philosophy fully. About 10 or 15 minutes of reading, or the same amount of a good podcast or YouTube video, can absolutely turn my entire day around.Whatever seems to be dragging you down is, at the same time, presenting itself as a topic worth pursuing. Anxious about what’s going on in the country right now? Start studying autocracy! Read about resistance! Take a deep dive into the workings of democracy.Jacqueline Suskin asks us, “What would it look like to find inspiration everywhere you look? It’s a sacred challenge to mine the wonder out of every day, out of trauma and pain, out of the mundane.” Poignantly, Jacqueline has found an infinitely amazing way to work that way with her poetry. For me, the solution is arrived at through study. I’ve come to understand that I can study pretty much anything and, within a short period of time, sometimes a matter of minutes, find myself enthralled and fascinated with something I had previously known next to nothing about. Study opens doors to magical learnings.
5. Create a study regimen. No one gets in shape with random workouts done only when time permits. You’ve got to plan, prepare, plot out your time, and practice with purpose in your own way. People who are in school have often been handed at least something of a regimen that they feel pressured to stick to. Once school is out, most of that structure for learning goes away. We can, though, commit to meaningful study time that, just like going to the gym, takes priority and keeps us engaged with intellectual “working out” at any point in our lives.I’ll add that if we believe, as I do, that the healthiest ecosystems are the most diverse, then we would be wise to learn from diverse sources. The fact that free choice drives this learning makes a huge difference. As historian and founder of Black History Month Carter Woodson writes, “​​What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves.” Writing this enews every week has proven to be a wonderful way to keep my study skills sharp—I learn a lot every week, and, in the spirit of regeneration, I hope that I’m able to turn what I learn into insights and frameworks that help others to do the same.
6. Acknowledge the different types of studying. Some work is clearly the result of years and years of deep study and contemplation—the kind that creates a Deep Understanding that reflects “history, theory, practice.” The folks doing this work run ultramarathons of study—lifeworks of remarkable learning. But one can also get a lot of benefit from studying in much simpler, shorter sprints. My foray into “pennyology” took only minutes, but it definitely increased my energy for the rest of the day! What you read in this enews is often the result of shorter bursts of studying. In contrast, the 600-page Power of Beliefs in Business took years to produce! Both have merit, each in their own educational way.
7. Study with purpose. According to Jacqueline Suskin, “The moment we let go of our purpose, our own worth can go away with it. So holding on to purpose is in turn a radical act of self-preservation.” Of course, for many people, the purpose of studying is only to prove to a parent or boss that you’ve been doing what you were supposed to do. This is, I would suggest, kind of the corollary to industrial agriculture. A quick look from the outside would lead you to believe that good things are happening, but a deeper understanding makes clear that land is being harmed, the soil is being drained of nutrients, the topsoil is eroding, and more.Regenerative studying is the exact opposite. It’s done because we decided to do it. It comes from curiosity, freely chosen. It creates new learning. It opens intellectual and emotional doors, entry points we often didn’t know existed. It leads us to cool new places that open up fascinating new possibilities. It creates energy, both in the person doing the studying and in at least some of the people with whom the learnings are shared. Regenerative studying is purposeful, productive, and enjoyable. Rather than being exhausted by learning because someone else made you do it, we can get a big energy boost from regenerative studying. Free choice makes learning fun!Autocrats, I’ll add here, are not inclined to let people have access to unrestricted sources of information. Much of Peter Kropotkin’s life was spent smuggling banned books into or out of various countries—most especially in his Russian homeland. Limits on learning, autocrats naively believe, can keep people in line. In the long run, that never works. Countless people—Kropotkin included—chose prison rather than giving up their freely chosen studies. And books and learning have kept many incarcerated yet independent thinkers alive and energized, even when they were under enormous pressure from prison authorities.
8. Put our studies into practice—adapt, don’t adopt. The point of studying in this regenerative context is not to memorize. It’s to make meaning and make the world a better place. It’s to take in new knowledge, not repeat at a quiz contest what was learned by rote. It’s to learn in a way that adds depth and understanding to what we already knew the day before. It’s to learn from others and then adjust the learnings to fit what we do in our own workplaces.

Jacqueline Suskin says, “The strength of this mind is that it can turn any experience into one of worth, into something meaningful, into an answer or a gift of clarity.” This, in my experience, is exactly what regenerative studying is all about. Suskin says of her poetry work and her project, the Poem Store, “This work is transformative and healing.” That is exactly what I would say is true for me of studying.

The other day, I stumbled into some strong supporting evidence for the veracity and value of all this. It happened when I was talking to a longtime ZCoB staffer. Fionna Gault does great work and brings wonderful, grounded energy to what we do every day. Pretty much everyone has loved working with her over the 10-plus years she’s been a part of the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB). As part of the upcoming Roadhouse renovations, Fionna took on the task of reconfiguring the display cases that hold hundreds of sets of salt and pepper shakers. For context, I’ll say that in all the years we’ve worked together, I can’t remember Fionna ever mentioning the shakers other than to relate that a longtime guest wanted to donate a set, or that another customer had a question. The other evening, though, Fionna was on fire. She started sharing all sorts of cool learnings and at least half a dozen different ideas for how she wanted to organize them more effectively going forward. Here’s what she had to say on the subject of studying:

Being raised by parents who enjoyed studying in a time before the internet allowed me to see the joy that came through exploration and learning. The excitement of studying was the digging, the creative sources, the human connections that could be made. It was truly about the journey, often without knowing where it would even lead.

The opportunity to study the Roadhouse’s salt and pepper shaker collection has been a nearly bottomless pit. Every time I learn something new, I suddenly see something in the collection that I’ve just been looking at for more than 10 years. Having learned what a Van Tellingen is, I can now tell you there are at least three sets in the Roadhouse, and I’ve recently uncovered the patent for the set, held by Ruth Van Tellingen Bendel, and images from some of the books that she illustrated. Now I don’t just see cute little hugging bears on the Roadhouse shelf, I see a woman’s career. With over 2,000 shakers to look at, you can imagine my mind has been reeling!

Small studies like this, I’ve learned over and over again, start stories that later lead to places I would never have imagined existed. Fionna told me the other day that she’s now planning to attend a conference on salt and pepper shakers this coming summer! Who knew? Not her, and definitely not I. But in a practical sense, Fionna’s already-good energy will now be even better still, which impacts our ecosystem in a whole host of positive ways. And the Roadhouse shaker collection, which is already really cool, will soon be better organized and more engaging for guests.

Two or three years ago, my friend Gareth Higgins taught me that we never know where a story will end, especially when we’re in it. Regenerative studying can have positive effects far down the road, effects that we would never have imagined at the time we did the original work. On the same Saturday that that now-famous penny fell onto the top of my shoe, a longtime ZingTrain client texted me a photo of page 1 in his copy of The Power of Beliefs in Business. He’s been having a rough go of it and determined that a short stint of studying might help. He decided to sit himself down and do some reading. His wife, who I knew as well, passed away sadly and unexpectedly five years ago last week. Then the pandemic came. My heart goes out to him and his kids. He’d been meaning to read the Beliefs book for many years but hadn’t gotten around to it until then. Anyway, when he opened the book, he found his wife’s underlines and notes all over the pages. A sad but meaningful spiritual and emotional penny from heaven that studying—mine many years ago, his last weekend—made possible.

There’s a quote from writer Rebecca Solnit on the page my friend photographed for me. I believe it offers a good framing for any sort of study we decide to undertake. The work, Solnit makes clear, is not to find the “right answer” but to find ourselves and to study with purpose while staying open to surprises and unexpected ideas and insights. As Solnit writes in A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from.

Looking back all these years later, I realize that the Beliefs book actually began in ways that were not a whole lot different from the penny plopping down on my shoe. An unexpected finding I stumbled on while reading turned into a life-changing set of learnings. Strange things happen. Interesting outcomes, more often than not, ensue.

On Little Mazarn’s previous album, Mustang Island, there’s a song entitled “The Dark Pleasure of Endless Doing.” In it is a line written by Lindsey Verrill that sums up all this work on studying in a very lovely way:

Wonder and wander be untethered with our only connection to our senses and each other. Even if the path we ride is an endless circle, let us trust.

Study up a storm