I find myself kinda grouchy about how little time and space i seem to have to do all the things i want. I want to research ancient cities… partially as part of a broader curiosity about how the world works, how civilisations work, scenes, progress, creativity and destruction… there’s so much i want to read but then i get tired
grumpy and frustrated at how i’ve been sleeping so much, weird long hours. but I should be kinder to myself, I am still recovering from covid
slightly tired of doing paragraphing and punctuation and whatnot, i just want to do a braindump
it’s the first of november. did a bit of housecleaning which was satisfying. i’m a bit bored of tweeting. i want to be writing substack essays but i was stuck on that for a while, and I think I need to do more reading and riffing (which is why I’m here in my wordvomits) before I can write some good essays. maybe i should just log off twitter for a bit.
Nah, don’t think about what you don’t want to do, think about what you do want to do. Focus on what you want to see more of. It’s 1am and I’m going to go to bed soon. What would I be happy to have done in my final minutes of the night? I would be happy to write and publish a wordvomit. So let’s do that.
Met a friend a couple of days ago, always a good idea, great to be around optimistic, ambitious, idealistic people and talk openly and freely without having to caveat and be subtle and so on
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what’s on my mind right now?
would like the house to be cleaner – need to talk with S about this
would like to have more money – tidy up marketing blog, write a post, update, tweet about it
What do I want the money for? renovate the house. and I’d also like a suit, some nice clothes. throw out old clothes.
reshuffle my books / libraries to pick the books that i’m most excited about.
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The big/main thing on my mind right now I guess… it’s the meta of all the other things, right. there’s a lot of stuff i want to do. but i have limited time and energy. yes, focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of, that’s 101. 201 would be to learn project management. someone said that the project management section of my book introspect is some of the densest, highest value… lemme quote it directly…
yeah, I agree. I compressed a lot to get this in place. I should maybe write a substack post about it separately, or just write about it more
like, just because I’ve written about it doesn’t mean i’m excellent at it. I’ve gotten better at it, and i’m good at writing, so I’ve done a pretty good job of describing my journey from bad to not-bad, but I want to get really good at it, and this feels like the primary bottleneck in my life right now.
andy grove might say there are two possible bottlenecks, you’re either unwilling or unable, you either need motivation or training. “motivation” here is not as simple as just dispensing some encouraging words (and I’ve spoken before about my frustration with “motivational speaker” as a label), but about managing your psychology, which is The Hard Problem. and then… inability, i feel like… the training I need right now is project management training, which is breaking down big things into smaller things, figuring out manageable tasks, doing them, celebrating the successes and progresses. maybe I should re-read introspect LOL, it’s been long enough that I don’t really remember what was in it, and I’ll probably surprise myself with parts of it
and/but yea thinking again also about the art of dealing with constraints, I know I’ve written about that too but I’m looking to synthesise a bunch of it in a way that is currently useful to me. which, as I’m saying out loud, I realise is what I do for my marketing consulting clients – I pull together a bunch of stuff and I help to present them with something that feels fresh, compelling, manageable, come up with next steps… so a succinct way of framing what I want to do is be my own consultant, ha
so okay, if I were to consult for myself, how would that go? Well, first I would ask my client a bunch of questions. what are you trying to accomplish? And I would say, gosh, okay. I want to write a bunch of essays, for starters. That feels like the most important thing. Alright, are you sure? Well there’s also the question of making money, but I think if I get the essays right everything else should fall into place. Ok, cool. Why are the essays important? Well… tweets are a certain way of thinking, and books are a certain way of thinking, and essays are also a certain way of thinking. I’ve “solved for tweets” and I’ve “solved for books” in ways that I find satisfactory, but I haven’t yet “solved for essays” and it’s been driving me mad, lol. It’s funny because I started out writing essays before I wrote tweets or books. An author friend pointed out quite simply that I probably just need to share my essay fragments with friends and get feedback on it, which I think is definitely correct.
So, what are the next steps? I should write out the fragments and ask people for feedback. Note that I don’t even really need to… make a super big master list, I just need a short-ish list. As I start thinking about piecing this together I find myself coming up with secondary concerns – okay the titles should be compelling, the titles should play off of each other. The titles should be playful, interesting, creative… I find myself wanting to look up a list of my youtube video titles and figuring out what my favourites are
alright so here we are, today’s wordvomit done. if I can do one a day, I would finish the project 184 days from today, in May 2023. Wouldn’t that be nice?