i haven’t finished goldratt’s book yet but i’m still thinking about bottlenecks and writing. lets recap. i want to professionalize my operation, in the best sense of what that means to me. this means following up on what i previously realized in 2014, that if i want to be a professional creator then i am going to have to be more deliberate about my inputs. that means i want to read more. i want a clearer constant stream of fresh inputs that i find compelling.

arguably my best essay of all time so far is ‘are you serious‘ (2023), and the striking thing to me about this is that i’d been talking about seriousness for years prior. 2020, 2019. so it’s quite clear to me that if i write any good essays later this year, or in the coming years, it will involve things that i’ve already been writing about for years. i’ve been hesitant about looking back. but looking back i think is an important part of quality inputs for me. because i pretty much always wrote about things that i felt was compelling about the time. my writing suffers when i try to force myself to make something compelling when it isn’t compelling to me in the moment. there’s some ‘soften the ground‘ that comes in here… but even that smells a little of scarcity mindset. it’s like i’ve grown afraid to believe in myself, to trust in my nose, and i get all hesitant and nervous about trying to do justice to some of my big ideas. I think that whole enterprise is a trap, similar to what john mayer said about, i paraphrase from memory– “trying to write a song about the whole universe– it’s too vast, you can’t manage it. but write a song about a cup of water, and look into it, and it turns out the whole universe is in there.”

(it’s kind of strange how some of my most foundational influences are people who i don’t actually pay much attention to, whose work i’m not particularly obsessed with, etc. john mayer and haruki murakami fit in this group. they just shifted my deep views of creativity, in passing)

i believe in that. in fact i think it’s truer and more powerful than i have allowed it to manifest in my work. i want to believe it more thoroughly. what does that mean? well. I think my blogpost “why were you late” is a great example. it’s a small story. I should worry less about grand narratives and focus more on small stories. which is another way of saying, make things more people-shaped.

should we return to bottlenecks? what is the bottleneck to this current piece of writing? I always think that a wordvomit should have at least one interesting thing in it that i’ll likely want to revisit later. that’s my criteria for myself. what about my criteria for a substack post? well it seems I have several different criteria. i had a minor breakthrough with the trenchcoat essay format, where i realize that if I put in 7 interesting things, the odds of a reader getting something interesting out of the post seem higher to me. but i don’t necessarily want to only be doing trenchcoat essays. I want to get to a point where I have a weekly cadence with my substack posts. why? because every week i don’t publish something is a missed opportunity to connect with my readers, build a relationship with my readers. i understand this intuitively with tweets. but tweets are easy to write. and if someone doesn’t like a tweet, they can scroll past it quickly. and they don’t necessarily form a poor impression.

hypothesis: i seem to be living in fear of this inflated sense of how much my readers would be turned off by a mid essay from me. is this true? i don’t think it’s true. it’s a tempting suggestion to offer up since it fits the shape of what might be true. but i think i’m afraid of something more intimate. i’m afraid that I would be turned off by a mid essay from me. that feels more… narcissistic? to say? and i think that sets off something somewhat alarming for me, yes, this is a tender spot for me. i don’t want to be a narcissist, or if we discard that language because it’s so murky– i don’t want to be self-obsessed. and this gets tangled up with… having standards.

i need to have an honest and conversation with myself about my standards, my expectations, my process. i’m reminded of the experience in some racing video games where your car goes slower if you go off the road, and maybe your controller vibrates or something, you face resistance. i feel like i’ve been off-road for most of the past two years. i’ve been outside the win_loop.

so yea another way of talking about all of this is that i’m looking to get into win_loops for my substack essays, and for my FAN2 update, and for my marketing consults. i’m just so fucking ready to start winning again, man. and if you wanna win you have to know what the victory conditions are.

suppose i were to design a game for myself with my blog. i know that for 1000wordvomits, the victory condition is to cross 1000. but what about my for my main blog? an idea i’ve been toying with is the idea that every blogpost should link to at least one other interesting thing. In one of my recent substack drafts (beauty of continuity) i started threading together blogposts from my blog, to try and weave together a denser tapestry. i believe that this is at least part of the answer to the problem of notesprawl. so… yeah. i think if i’m not making much progress on the front-front, then i might as well start weaving things together and make some progress in the back. and i’m confident that the process of doing it will connect some dots and unearth some stuff that will likely have interesting consequences.