What I’ve Learned So Far

Question #1: Are you writing?

• If “Yes” . . . Woo-hoo! Keep it up!!
• If “No” . . . GET WRITING.
• If “Sorta” . . . Proceed to Question #2.

Question #2: Are you doing something that feeds your writing directly?

• If “Yes” . . . Woo-hoo! Keep it up — but don’t forget to get back to the actual writing soon!
• If “No” . . . Cut it out and GET WRITING.
• If “Maybe” . . . Proceed to Question #3.

Question #3, a.k.a. The Grand Clarifying Question: Could an uncharitable or disinterested observer reasonably characterize what you’re doing “Pursuing an Internet fetish” or “Displaying the traits of a hard-bitten Internet hobbyist” or “Internet-enabled couch** potatoing”?

• If “Yes” . . . Unhook the connection and GET WRITING.
• If “No” . . . It’s quite possible that you’re avoiding writing some other way, or simply lying to yourself; in either case, close the browser and GET WRITING.

~

* I was gonna do this up as a proper boxes-and-arrows flowchart, but then I became extremely frustrated with Microsoft Word’s capacities to produce same. Then I started to go all gung-ho on it, keep pounding away despite the frustration, etc. Then I realized I was just wasting time. Thus, this textual version.

** Or chair, bed, coffeeshop, etc. as appropriate.

Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about.

–John Greenleaf Whittier
“Snowbound,” 1866

~~~

So, okay, at no point were we snowbound during our week’s stay in Amarillo, but we did have cold weather and a good bit of snow, not to mention crackling fires in the fireplace.

For all the fun we had, though, it’s good to be back by our own hearth — even if Austin weather means we never use it. Now on to other projects . . .

You don’t have to be a fan of golf, much less a golfer, to appreciate this long (5,000 words) Jaime Diaz profile on Tiger Woods.

The year of living dangerously

The piece focuses on the ways that Woods has grown as a player and a person during a couple of tumultuous years in which he lost his father to cancer, welcomed the birth of his first child, and won a fresh truckload of golf tournaments. The way Diaz tells it, the story can be read as a clinic for many of the concepts of excellence I’ve been wrestling with in my own mind and on this blog.

I won’t annotate the whole article, but if you’re interested in mindset, deliberate practice, and related concepts, read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Too many of my friends have been like me, using perfectionism as a shield to keep them from accomplishing what they could. This is the simple formulation I’ve come up with to combat the disease of perfectionism in myself:

• Don’t worry about “perfect”.
• Don’t even worry about “good”.
• Just focus on “better”.

Possibly I’ve read something like that somewhere — it certainly reflects plenty of reading that I’ve done — but I’m not sure I’ve ever boiled it down for myself in quite such simple terms.

The simplicity, the clarity, is what’s liberating, but maybe it deserves a slight exegesis:

• We want things to be perfect, even though rationally we recognize that perfection always lies out of reach.
• We excuse perfectionist tendencies, and endless procrastination, because we don’t want to put forth anything that might not be “good” (by whatever nebulous standard) in the eyes of the world.
• All along, we ought to be focusing on “better”. Make the situation better. Make yourself a little better. Improve your skills, your house, your team, your art, your thoughts, your life. A little. Any.

But do it now.

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Addendum: Bruce Mau gives another excellent reason to “Forget about good”.

Marc Andreessen conveys a great answer to the classic — typically unanswerable — question that fans ask writers, artists, and other creative types: Where do you get your ideas?

Applied note-taking taken to a whole new level

His post reminds me, by the way, that Al Hirschfeld developed the skill of making small sketches in his pocket while sitting in the audience of Broadway shows.

One of my goals over time has been to promote more comments on this blog. My favorite blogs — e.g. John Scalzi’s — regularly have great conversations among the readership and with the host in the comment threads. This blog has managed that a few times, but only a few.

I’m thinking of all of this because the most sustained piece of writing I’ve done today came in the comment thread of this post on my business blog. It makes me wonder how many people will see it there, and whether I should bump it up to the status of a full post (or quote myself and point back to the comment thread etc.).

Any comments (!) on what to do do over on the BIZ blog, or to promote blog comments here, will be gratefully received.

Actually, I started into this yesterday, when I posted half a dozen items to my work blog.  But today is the first day that I’ve hooked up my own laptop to the DSL, ergo this is the first day that I have easy access to my usual bookmarks, Bloglines, etc.  (Yes, I’m too lazy to remember all the passwords to use from other computers.)

So now I’m left with this:  even after my usual wanton skipping of RSS feeds, I now have . . . let’s see . . . 88 Firefox tabs open!  Not counting my blog dashboards!  Woo-hoo!!

Now, let’s see if I can cut this down to size . . .

And it fits into just — three — words!!

Done is Good

In fact, this leads to those super-simple, yes-or-no litmus-test questions that are soooooo annoying to the procrastinator / perfectionist, but so very helpful for, you know, accomplishing anything:

• Is this helping me get closer to Done?
• Is this something worth getting Done?
• If I keep doing what I’m doing, when could I expect to get this thing Done?

And so on. Okay, my fellow creative types: make your own variations on the theme! Feel free to share!

(Thanks to John Scalzi for pointing out this one.)

Nothing is more dangerous than the certainty that one is right. Nothing is potentially so destructive as the obsession with a truth one considers absolute. All crimes in history have been the result of fanaticism of one type or another. All massacres have been carried out in the name of virtue, of true religion, of legitimate nationalism, of proper policy, of right ideology: in short, in the name of the fight against somebody else’s truth, of the fight against Satan. The coldness and objectivity so often held against scientists are perhaps more suitable than fervor and subjectivity when it comes to dealing with some human matters. For scientific ideas do not generate passion. It is rather passion that exploits science to support its cause. Science does not lead to racism and hatred. It is rather hatred that calls upon science to justify its racism. One can hold against scientists the ardor with which they sometimes champion their ideas. But no genocide has yet been committed for the triumph of a scientific theory.

–Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life

The best things in life really are free. In this vein, I’ve given myself a lovely Christmas present: permission to write books as my #1 job.

From the outside, this probably won’t look like much, since I’ve already been working in this direction as part of my schoolwork and the various aspects of my professional work. But from the inside, it makes a big difference: I’m not doing all the other things *instead* of writing books or even *en route to* writing books, but rather as PART of writing books.

Expect fewer posts here, and more posts that tie directly into book projects.