Here’s another funny pattern: Whenever I explain why I don’t feel like doing something, or how I’ve decided that I’m going to stop doing something, I often get a surge of renewed interest in doing it. Most recently this happened for me with chess. I literally wrote a twitter thread about how I couldn’t enjoy traditional chess very much because the outcomes in one game cannot directly affect another. Tweeting is preferable to me, because building a body of work is something that compounds over time, and you can reference other material that you’ve written before. Shortly after I wrote about that, I found myself curious to play chess again, and I’ve played over a thousand games on chess.com since.
I can think of other examples of this… when I say I’m going to organize my notes, I tend to waffle around. But if I say I’m going to delete notes… well. I’m going to try right now. I’m going to delete 5 bullets from my [[substack drafts]] roam page, just because… and… done. I didn’t just delete 5 bullets, I ended up reorganizing a whole bunch of stuff, probably for the better. Much to think about.
Yess, I see this pattern too! I say something and change my mind and end up doing the opposite. I'll sometimes say I'll skip lunch when someone asks but 15min later I'm hungry and end up having something anyways.
I think this might be related to your expression "plans are worthless, planning is priceless". I'm starting to think that planning is a proxy to load context into working memory so you can then see what needs doing. Maybe saying you'll do something is also a proxy to load context into memory
Fun read :) Felt quite disorganized while reading, but then it all came together in the last section in a nice way. I encounter a similar pattern to the one in this post in my writing all the time that I'm only slightly paranoid about, it goes like this:
When the writing is good, it feels effortless. The writing that feels hard, and cumbersome, and attached to details, and step-by-step always afterwards seems forced and rigid and lacking something. So is there any point in writing when it's hard? Or must one only wait for inspiration to strike?
I agonize about it. I must write -- but if I'm not already writing, is it not the right time? But somehow I must choose to start writing at some point...you get the idea.
I feel like the middle-ground I've come to -- and which you seem to also end up advocating -- is like, yes, you must force yourself to write somehow, whether its as part of an era, or This One Weird Bedtime Trick, but when you sit down to write, you have to be totally unbound to any particular thing. You have to just write what feels right. There's a symmetrical forcing of chaos on order: yes I will write at this time, but by god I am going to write whatever I feel like writing.
A good strategy for writing more, but one that fails often when confronted with longform content I find. So it goes.
exactlyyyyy, too much top-down before enough bottom-up
> I guess when I had the idea of doing an essay ‘era’ titled FRAME STUDIES, I got excited about the hypothetical possibility of changing the frame with every post. And maybe that’s something that can be assembled at a later stage, but my experience has been teaching me that you need to keep some things constant in order to really experiment. If you change every single variable in an experiment, you don’t learn anything. In fact, you typically want to isolate one variable at a time!
Are you familiar with the youtuber Jreg? He often talks about frames and frameworks, and made a masterpiece of a video that I love, right around Covid. This is a 15 minute video, which is far too much time to make you waste before getting to the point, but it really is a great video, and it has a father-son framing that you might find interesting, since you're a new father. (Uhh, the video's got explicit language, don't watch it around your kid.)
The part of the video that really reminded me of the passage quoted above, is the following, at around the 11:27 mark:
"What I want you to do is find a framework that you think will work for you, and then I want you to commit to it and work within it. Whether it ends up being the one you die with, isn't important. What's important is that by adopting it and working within it you are learning."
(Ironically, my "frame", referenced at the start of this comment, of more bottom-up, and less top-down, is somewhat at odds with committing to a frame. I'll have to figure that out.)
I resonate with a lot of what you described, especially your insights around the "elegance" of a system/process not necessarily translating to its *effectiveness*
This may be slightly tangential, but you (rightly, imo) emphasise the utility of tangents, so here's something I wrote in my journal last month and have found useful to return to occasionally:
"Constraints ALWAYS create Affordances... But! By becoming NECESSARY, they Destroy more affordances than they Create...
You may always Constrain the PROBLEM-SPACE! But you should only ever do so insofar as it helps you SOLVE THE PROBLEM!!
As soon as you RESTRICT yourself to those Constraints alone, you become *incapable* of solving any problems which happen to *require different constraints!*"
I think you're right on the money with the approach of having a "light grip" on any system that's working, tight enough to make good use of it, but loose enough to shift to something else whenever necessary.
Appreciate your work as always, man! Keep it up, and try not to be too hard on yourself 🙏✨
Pathless path was an accidental blog to book but I realized early on I’d need to totally rethink everything as a book. I don’t really think posts ever lead to anything better than collection of posts (which is probably underrated) but can carry a certain curiosity all the way to the starting point of a viable book
yea similar for both of my books, its like they were discovered or they emerged from the many blogposts I had written in the 15+ years prior, and there were maybe some sections or riffs that I reused here and there– FAN in particular used a lot of recent (at the time) twitter threads– but the original blogposts never actually made it into the work directly
yup - same. I think I started to feel the pressure to create better systems for my writing about a year after my daughter was born. I have less time therefore I must optimize. But I just found that my passion for writing was dissolving. I like the internet arts, freewheeling and flowing of ideas. As I started simply giving myself permission to hang out and explore online as "work" I started reading more, writing more and exploring more interesting ideas. Gotta learn this over and over haha
It is interesting when you write standalone pieces with no goal in mind - to notice how the larger structures coalesce on their own. My wife went through my archives recently and collected what she meant was two half written books, and I had not thought at all that those pieces belonged together, but yeah, they did, and something cool happened when you put them side by side. Much better than any book attempts that I have done! We'll see if that goes anywhere, though.
yea i have this emerging theory of fruitful digressions that's like
1. start wherever and freestyle
2. allow yourself to digress whenever you feel compelled to
3. over time notice patterns in these digressions and see them as clues of deeper intentions and insights from the subconscious mind (or whatever else you wanna attribute it to)
these digressions might seem annoying if we're trying to get our original intentions done, but they seem to end up being 'purer' or 'better' or 'more resonant' intentions... if we're open to actually considering that possibility. they're rooted in more genuine, heartfelt compulsions, rather than "I think I should". they're better foundations to build on
after reading "are you serious?" i gained respect for you as a writer and it makes me take all of your work more "seriously" - meaning i have a natural desire to continue reading because in my mind you are a worthwhile source of knowledge and insight
this was another example of an essay that i may not be innately interested in but kept reading because i trust you as an author and always glean insights that are EVEN BETTER than the ones that comes from things i immediately want to read. kinda reminded me of your point about expectations & not needing to have fun but then finding it anyways.
this may be somewhat of a potted reflection but just wanted to share appreciation for your work and the expanded list of things i think about because i am curious of what you have to say even if it doesn't immediately spark my interest - i always get there by the end.
appreciate you and your work! also julie + julia is one of my fav movies
Here’s another funny pattern: Whenever I explain why I don’t feel like doing something, or how I’ve decided that I’m going to stop doing something, I often get a surge of renewed interest in doing it. Most recently this happened for me with chess. I literally wrote a twitter thread about how I couldn’t enjoy traditional chess very much because the outcomes in one game cannot directly affect another. Tweeting is preferable to me, because building a body of work is something that compounds over time, and you can reference other material that you’ve written before. Shortly after I wrote about that, I found myself curious to play chess again, and I’ve played over a thousand games on chess.com since.
I can think of other examples of this… when I say I’m going to organize my notes, I tend to waffle around. But if I say I’m going to delete notes… well. I’m going to try right now. I’m going to delete 5 bullets from my [[substack drafts]] roam page, just because… and… done. I didn’t just delete 5 bullets, I ended up reorganizing a whole bunch of stuff, probably for the better. Much to think about.
Yess, I see this pattern too! I say something and change my mind and end up doing the opposite. I'll sometimes say I'll skip lunch when someone asks but 15min later I'm hungry and end up having something anyways.
I think this might be related to your expression "plans are worthless, planning is priceless". I'm starting to think that planning is a proxy to load context into working memory so you can then see what needs doing. Maybe saying you'll do something is also a proxy to load context into memory
Fun read :) Felt quite disorganized while reading, but then it all came together in the last section in a nice way. I encounter a similar pattern to the one in this post in my writing all the time that I'm only slightly paranoid about, it goes like this:
When the writing is good, it feels effortless. The writing that feels hard, and cumbersome, and attached to details, and step-by-step always afterwards seems forced and rigid and lacking something. So is there any point in writing when it's hard? Or must one only wait for inspiration to strike?
I agonize about it. I must write -- but if I'm not already writing, is it not the right time? But somehow I must choose to start writing at some point...you get the idea.
I feel like the middle-ground I've come to -- and which you seem to also end up advocating -- is like, yes, you must force yourself to write somehow, whether its as part of an era, or This One Weird Bedtime Trick, but when you sit down to write, you have to be totally unbound to any particular thing. You have to just write what feels right. There's a symmetrical forcing of chaos on order: yes I will write at this time, but by god I am going to write whatever I feel like writing.
A good strategy for writing more, but one that fails often when confronted with longform content I find. So it goes.
yes!! thank you for sharing Cara
> premature optimization mentioned
exactlyyyyy, too much top-down before enough bottom-up
> I guess when I had the idea of doing an essay ‘era’ titled FRAME STUDIES, I got excited about the hypothetical possibility of changing the frame with every post. And maybe that’s something that can be assembled at a later stage, but my experience has been teaching me that you need to keep some things constant in order to really experiment. If you change every single variable in an experiment, you don’t learn anything. In fact, you typically want to isolate one variable at a time!
Are you familiar with the youtuber Jreg? He often talks about frames and frameworks, and made a masterpiece of a video that I love, right around Covid. This is a 15 minute video, which is far too much time to make you waste before getting to the point, but it really is a great video, and it has a father-son framing that you might find interesting, since you're a new father. (Uhh, the video's got explicit language, don't watch it around your kid.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYhhUcYN4mw
The part of the video that really reminded me of the passage quoted above, is the following, at around the 11:27 mark:
"What I want you to do is find a framework that you think will work for you, and then I want you to commit to it and work within it. Whether it ends up being the one you die with, isn't important. What's important is that by adopting it and working within it you are learning."
(Ironically, my "frame", referenced at the start of this comment, of more bottom-up, and less top-down, is somewhat at odds with committing to a frame. I'll have to figure that out.)
I'm glad you posted this, Visa :)
I resonate with a lot of what you described, especially your insights around the "elegance" of a system/process not necessarily translating to its *effectiveness*
This may be slightly tangential, but you (rightly, imo) emphasise the utility of tangents, so here's something I wrote in my journal last month and have found useful to return to occasionally:
"Constraints ALWAYS create Affordances... But! By becoming NECESSARY, they Destroy more affordances than they Create...
You may always Constrain the PROBLEM-SPACE! But you should only ever do so insofar as it helps you SOLVE THE PROBLEM!!
As soon as you RESTRICT yourself to those Constraints alone, you become *incapable* of solving any problems which happen to *require different constraints!*"
I think you're right on the money with the approach of having a "light grip" on any system that's working, tight enough to make good use of it, but loose enough to shift to something else whenever necessary.
Appreciate your work as always, man! Keep it up, and try not to be too hard on yourself 🙏✨
Pathless path was an accidental blog to book but I realized early on I’d need to totally rethink everything as a book. I don’t really think posts ever lead to anything better than collection of posts (which is probably underrated) but can carry a certain curiosity all the way to the starting point of a viable book
yea similar for both of my books, its like they were discovered or they emerged from the many blogposts I had written in the 15+ years prior, and there were maybe some sections or riffs that I reused here and there– FAN in particular used a lot of recent (at the time) twitter threads– but the original blogposts never actually made it into the work directly
yup - same. I think I started to feel the pressure to create better systems for my writing about a year after my daughter was born. I have less time therefore I must optimize. But I just found that my passion for writing was dissolving. I like the internet arts, freewheeling and flowing of ideas. As I started simply giving myself permission to hang out and explore online as "work" I started reading more, writing more and exploring more interesting ideas. Gotta learn this over and over haha
It is interesting when you write standalone pieces with no goal in mind - to notice how the larger structures coalesce on their own. My wife went through my archives recently and collected what she meant was two half written books, and I had not thought at all that those pieces belonged together, but yeah, they did, and something cool happened when you put them side by side. Much better than any book attempts that I have done! We'll see if that goes anywhere, though.
yea i have this emerging theory of fruitful digressions that's like
1. start wherever and freestyle
2. allow yourself to digress whenever you feel compelled to
3. over time notice patterns in these digressions and see them as clues of deeper intentions and insights from the subconscious mind (or whatever else you wanna attribute it to)
these digressions might seem annoying if we're trying to get our original intentions done, but they seem to end up being 'purer' or 'better' or 'more resonant' intentions... if we're open to actually considering that possibility. they're rooted in more genuine, heartfelt compulsions, rather than "I think I should". they're better foundations to build on
after reading "are you serious?" i gained respect for you as a writer and it makes me take all of your work more "seriously" - meaning i have a natural desire to continue reading because in my mind you are a worthwhile source of knowledge and insight
this was another example of an essay that i may not be innately interested in but kept reading because i trust you as an author and always glean insights that are EVEN BETTER than the ones that comes from things i immediately want to read. kinda reminded me of your point about expectations & not needing to have fun but then finding it anyways.
this may be somewhat of a potted reflection but just wanted to share appreciation for your work and the expanded list of things i think about because i am curious of what you have to say even if it doesn't immediately spark my interest - i always get there by the end.
appreciate you and your work! also julie + julia is one of my fav movies
wow, what a lovely compliment! thanks Charlotte! also yeah I think Nora Ephron is underappreciated. I'm told she wrote great essays too
Going to bed to write -> scrolling twitter, playing online chess
Going to bed to sleep -> Writing
????? -> actually sleeping
a mystery for the ages