Okay so this is going to be a new kind of vomit, inspired by my twitter threads. I’m basically going to pick a tag, and then go through all of the posts in that tag – and use this post to “thread” those posts together.
0052 – should you motivate yourself by comparing yourself with others?
“When I read books, I often stop halfway to write because I start having thoughts that interfere with my enjoyment of the book. It’s almost like I can’t read without getting involved.”
“I believe in the value of re-reading things. You’re never the same person twice, so approaching the same text again is a good way to figure out where you’ve been and how you’ve changed.”
“When a dust has been kicked up, I think clarity comes from deciding what you want to focus on. Everything is a mess, sure – so what do you want to do next?” I want to diminish human suffering and increase human well-being, and I want to do this so I can feel like I’ve earned my seat at the table of humanity. And make great friends along the way.
Conditional self-esteem is unhealthy.
0241 – revisiting “on purpose” from 2009
Did I not do a single “review your stuff” word vomit between 0052 and 0241? Seems unlikely. But I’m going to keep going.
In 2009 I was somewhat obsessed with this idea of becoming some sort of badass. I think I’ve since learned that badassery, like happiness, is incidental – it happens while you’re busy doing other things.
I also thought that I ought to worry about getting other people out of their boxes, but really, that itself was a sort of box for me. It’s interesting to contemplate how and why I was so obsessed with other people. It’s probably a natural social thing.
0363 – revisiting the origin of @1000wordvomits – I want to be a better version of myself
I started this project because it seemed like I would learn a lot about myself, and about writing as a craft. I imagined it would give me some sort of legitimacy and street cred. I want to be like Wait But Why, Aaron Swartz, Ray Dalio.
“I don’t want this project to be 600,000+ words of me saying I wish I slept better, I wish I did my work, and I wish this and I wish that. The time for wishing is long past. My writing has to reflect that.”
0383 – review your principles regularly
- I want to minimize unnecessary fear, uncertainty and doubt
- I want to never feel sorry for myself, never feel needless guilt or shame
- I want the freedom to be spontaneous
- I want people to feel safe around me; that with me they can be themselves
- I want to work on interesting problems (follow my curiosity)
- I want to be able to keep to my word
- I want to get rid of my Ugh fields
- I want to get better at the project management of delivering on my obligations
I should follow up on these with next steps.
0385 – schedule revisions for learning through repetition
I like sleeping well, meditating and meeting people for conversation.
Spaced repetition is important in learning. Was thinking about this in the context of learning the guitar.
“I need to revise every day. I need to revise my daily revisions every week, and revise my weekly revisions every month. I need to do this more than others – without it, I lapse into a general-wilderness-wandering lifestyle that doesn’t always serve me well.”
“If I had done 1 vomit a day, I would’ve been 90%+ done by now, instead of 38.5%”
0418 – do periodic reviews at multiple timescales
“I’ve been writing word vomits pretty regularly because I want to be done with them as quickly as reasonably possible.”
“It’s important to make sure a review task fits the context – major life reviews can’t be daily or weekly. You want to be able to look at each review and see actionable steps that need to be taken.”
“Check your personal todo list every day. Why am I not already doing this? Maybe I’m not sufficiently precise about what exactly I need to be reviewing.”
There’s something I’m missing here about experiencing and enjoying the utility of reviews…
0489 – take memories of yourself that you like, and make them more vivid
“I’ve been cleaning and tidying up my house. I’ve been moving all books and papers into the study, which is now a centralized place for all books, papers, bills, everything. It feels great.”
“I’ve also made progress in cleaning out my Workflowy. All of these things make me much happier.”
“It’s so interesting and beautiful to be able to reimagine and re-witness old conversations, old struggles and challenges, and to see how they should’ve been dealt with differently. It’s clear that I had all sorts of problems that I wasn’t adequately equipped to address or manage.”
“High self-esteem isn’t necessarily a good thing, it can be outright damaging.”
“People who’re constantly seeking validation from others usually have some sort of self-concept that they’re uncomfortable with.”
“Refine and improve your self-concept along lines that direct you towards becoming a person that you’d be happy becoming.”
“Pick and choose things about yourself that you like, and make those things stronger in your self-concept. Recall instances in which you behaved in a way you liked, and make those memories more vivid. Recreate and revisit them.”
0498 – commit to perpetually upgrading your software (Push The Big Red Button)
“I suppose sometimes it feels like I’m not in the right mood. But there’s never going to be such a thing as “a right mood”. And one of the cool things I’ve learned from this writing experiment so far is– if you commit to a process regardless of circumstances (except maybe morbidly critical ones), you start encountering all sorts of different versions of yourself. You find that the way you write when you’re optimistic is different from the way you write when you’re depressed (I tend to question my own motivations, interests, purpose when that happens). You’ll discover that you’re much broader than the person you think you are, and the person you’ll get to know if the data points you collect about yourself are all collected in the same context, same mood, “when you feel like it”. Doing things when you don’t really feel like it is incredibly powerful.”
“So I suppose if I could have the red button do one thing, and I had only one button, it would be this– commit to a daily process of refining my own software, from first principles. Meditate and reflect and act and review. I’ve written this before, I’ve known this all along, and it’s nice to have more data that backs it up, but the data I actually need isn’t “out there”, something that I need to read (though that’s always nice). What I need is to do the work, and use those results as evidence that I can do so much more than what I’m doing.”
0501 – regularly revise your personal narrative and self-concept
“There’s a lot of sciencing that I can still do to improve the quality of my life. One of the slightly frustrating things– which is just another way of saying “challenge that I haven’t quite been able to solve yet”– is that a lot of the things are interrelated.”
“It seems weird at first to think that… after over 2 years of work, almost 3, I still haven’t developed a fundamental routine that maximizes my output. And I don’t mean “maximize” in an absolute, crazy sort of way. I mean just past a reasonable threshold that I know within myself that I am capable of doing, day after day. Let’s call it the 10 pushup threshold. Any reasonably fit individual should be able to do 10 pushups. It doesn’t require some insane force of will, it doesn’t require anything magical.”
“Similarly I think there are some minimum work thresholds that I still haven’t entirely internalized. I still approach my work in a sort of messy, piecemeal way, constantly reinventing everything all over again, over and over. Why do I do this? It doesn’t make much sense.”
“I still need to keep learning to listen to myself better. That’s one of the big lessons of the past couple of years. There’s a certain internal wisdom about the body and the subconscious mind that should be attended to.”
I think the big thing is… I need to learn to see work as play. I need to learn to see it as fun. I remember having a conversation about it with my boss several months ago, and he said something along the lines of, “Dude, I would be disturbed if you found every single thing about work fun. There’s a reason why work is work– some significant proportion of it is difficult, tedious, uncomfortable, annoying, and you’re going to have to learn to deal with that.”
What do I know?
- I know that I have had a lifelong unhealthy narrative around obligations, responsibilities, work and so on. This has made it harder for me to do the work that I want to do.
- I sometimes doubt myself and my motivations and the sincerity of my intentions. This gets bad/worse when I’m tired, depressed, stressed, upset and so on. If I haven’t been sleeping well, haven’t been making much progress, I start questioning myself and wonder if I’m a bad person. At the time of this writing, it’s clear to me that this isn’t the case.
- I believe strongly that it typically takes a narrative to displace another narrative. I suppose there might be exceptions to this rule, or maybe the thing that displaces a narrative is a very different sort of narrative… Framed another way, it takes a new self-concept to replace an old self-concept, and while it’s intellectually possible to appreciate that the self is ultimately an illusion and doesn’t exist, it doesn’t change the fact that we spend our days living in the illusion most of the time.
0502 – set aside time for scheduled personal software debugging
So… It’s another reminder to keep revisiting peak consciousness as often as I can afford to, which is more often than I think. What are the costs and benefits of attaining peak consciousness? There’s a virtuous cycle there– while it’s a little costly (energy-wise) to reach, the benefit typically outweighs the cost.
So… It’s another reminder to keep revisiting peak consciousness as often as I can afford to, which is more often than I think. What are the costs and benefits of attaining peak consciousness? There’s a virtuous cycle there– while it’s a little costly (energy-wise) to reach, the benefit typically outweighs the cost.
So if I’m serious about living a good life, and I’d like to think that I am, then I’m going to have to be more methodical with regards to how I manage my consciousness. How I upgrade my cognitive software. And coupled with that is hardware. To have a good life, you need to have a good software, and to do that you’ll find that it helps to optimize your hardware, too.
“I keep putting them off, perhaps because I haven’t yet felt that each individual review makes much of a difference. I need to track them the same way I track my word vomits. I need to analyze carefully to see what I did right, what I did wrong, what the contexts and circumstances were, and how I might do things better the next time around. I’m too old now to keep dicking around and repeating the same old patterns over and over again. I am so bored of that stuff, I am so amped and ready to be more than I am now.”
0518 – refactoring my personal library
“One of the things I want to do this year is to really start getting to know the books on my bookshelf better. Spend a little time with each one, figure out which are worth getting to know better.”
“I still haven’t gotten through Linus Pauling, maybe because I don’t have enough context about why he’s interesting.”
“I think actually I have been wanting to get some new books to explore, but I’ve been feeling really guilty about that because I’ve basically filled my bookshelves to the brim. And the problem is that I’m not sufficiently clear about what each book is in the bookshelf for. If I knew, then I’d be able to sort and/or prioritize them as appopriate and see where things fit, and whether or not it actually makes sense to get any new books. So I’ve been sort of “deadlocked” in my information consumption because I haven’t gone over my existing collection thoroughly enough.”
“I also just want to quickly remind myself that I actually really did enjoy spending time holed up in my study, with the air conditioning on and the sunlight coming through, just sitting around poring through books. It’s a cheap pleasure that I’ve been neglecting.”
0526 – revise and refine your personal algorithms (they’ll set you free)
“When you play a game such as Borderlands or Diablo, your character starts out with practically nothing– maybe a really crappy pistol or dagger. You start out in a really crappy region, too”
“I wanted to meditate on the fact that I often get stuck in old patterns, old routines, thinking old thoughts, remembering old gripes. We know that we literally live in the past by a few microseconds because of the way our brains work, but I also literally live in the past of a few years. I’m haunted unnecessarily by my younger self. The books I wanted to read then. The people I hung out with then. The habits I’ve had since then.
It would be the equivalent of playing Borderlands or Diablo, and constantly going back to the older parts of the map, using old weapons and fighting old enemies, just because it’s familiar, simpler, easier.
“if I spend Visa-26’s time doing Visa-18’s quests, then by the time I get around to doing Visa-26’s quests I’ll be Visa-35 or something. So it’s a constant catching up. I need to let me go.”
“So the first month of 2016 is over. I’ve done a few good things. I’ve met some friends- I remember 4 specific meetups in particular. I’ve worked out, broke a PR or two, even went for a (crappy) run. I watched a couple of good movies and even an entire TV show with the wife. We had a couple of dates, which were pleasant. Woke up early a few times. Didn’t read any new books, but did some re-reading. Kept track of maybe half of the things I wanted to keep track of- diet, books, Internet habits. I think I spent a little less time on Reddit and Imgur and FB. Had a productive and challenging meeting with the boss. Feeling challenged in a good way about the month(s) ahead.
What didn’t go so well- I didn’t read or write as much as I would’ve liked. I feel like I could’ve been more productive at work, which will be my 3rd priority this month after health and writing. I’m going to try and publish a vomit every day for the month of Feb. I’m going to be out of the country for a week so that means I’ll have to do double the writing in another week.”
“I’d like to read less crap and spend less time responding and reacting to crap. To tend to my ‘mind-garden’, to build relationships with people that make me happy. To eliminate obligation-debt. To be more disciplined, and yet to avoid the trap of fetishizing it. I think I spent a lot of time in that trap. Feeling anxious and guilty about not meeting unfairly high standards, and then collapsing and giving up altogether. The challenge is the same as always- baby steps, incremental progress. To have manageable gradients rather than an insurmountable, discouraging cliff.”
“I recognize that fewer things deserve my time and energy. Earlier on the Uber ride home I was scanning through Facebook for a few minutes and I noticed things that, 3 years ago, I would have tediously responded to. Take the latest current affairs in Singapore– that a 14 year old teenage boy committed suicide by jumping to his death after being accused of molesting a girl, and being questioned for 3 hours by the police. I don’t know the details. I don’t know what actually happened. I know that it’s complex and complicated. And I know that people are emotional, hurting, upset. I know that there are political points to be scored, essays to be written. But I’m not going to be getting involved in that. It’s not that I don’t care anymore. I do. But I now recognize that it’s much better for me, and by extension, for the people I care about, and everything else that I want to achieve, if I start by focusing on the things that I can make a substantial, lasting difference to.”
0587 – begin the day with a review, not social media
“Facebook feeds have basically replaced the morning paper, and to some degree, after-work drinks. My parents used to ask “why are you on the computer all the time” – but they read the papers every morning too.”
“Screens are getaways for people who can’t afford better. Judging people for wanting to get away from the bullshit of everyday life is a special kind of shitty, IMO.”
“Anyway I’m done with this morning’s shitty commute. Looking forward to the TL;DR comments. I probably wouldn’t read this either if it appeared on my feed. But this is what I enjoy doing when I’m crushed against other humans. I’d like to make a living as a writer someday.”
0608 – commit to reviewing your calendar
“I was doing a calendar review yesterday (I know it because I put it in my calendar). I went to the start of 2016, and then scanned through my days week by weeks. I didn’t always keep great records – sometimes I’d have weeks at a time where I didn’t fill in anything, and can’t exactly be sure of what I did.”
“It’s also a little shocking how short a year really is. It seems like a long stretch of time when it’s laid out in front of you. But you’re going to spend a third of it asleep. You’re going to spend large chunks of it eating, showering, using the toilet, walking from place to place, and so on. The reality of it seems to be that after everything else, I only have a couple of hours – maybe up to 4 hours – that I can reliably count on to be productive with. And when I look at my calendar, I see that I wasn’t nearly as productive as I wish I was. And I don’t even think I was as productive as I assumed I’d be. That’s the scary part.”
“I should be writing a vomit as quickly and early as I can before my mind gets cluttered with other information that I wasn’t actually interested in.”
“I have made a lot of grand promises and gestures over the past decade, and most of them have not worked out. So I know that I cannot grand-promise my way out of it. I cannot spend my time and energy looking forward indefinitely. I DO have plans – I’ve had them for years. The thing is not to focus on the long-term but to focus on what I’m doing right now in service of that long-term goal. It’s not necessarily short-sighted to focus on the present. I think there’s a limiting belief there that I need to correct. Something about the distinction between being long-sighted and short-sighted. I’d like to think that I’m long-sighted but I’m really short-sighted, and I’ve been avoiding things that I think are short-sighted but would actually help me achieve my long-term goals. It’s all about each boring brick, one by one.”
“I chronically underestimate things. I underestimate how long it takes to write a word vomit. I overestimate how much time I have. I underestimate how much time I spend when I get distracted by things. I overestimate my capacity to do things. I need to write these things down in more concrete, examinable terms and then really internalise what that means to me. I’ve been navigating using flawed instruments that have consistent, systematic errors about them. So they’ve been leading me away from my destination, reliably.”
“I need to make better decisions. I need to make decisions faster. This is so that I can achieve my goal of being more free. Freedom has a price. It’s worth paying. I need to redo my assessments of my own effectiveness and efficiency. I need to do this every single day so that I develop it. It’s like a muscle. I have to use it over and over so that it becomes a thing. I have to write on my whiteboard that this is a thing. I have to set reminders so that this is a thing.”
0625 – consolidate your thoughts
“I feel a slight increase in mental clarity after finalising my thoughts on a project that I want to work on. I know it seems counter-intuitive that a new project might be mind-clearing – the reason this works is that the project draws upon existing raw material in the junkyard of my mind. It’s kind of like one of those puzzle games where you have to connect the dots – I just figured out a way to get rid of a lot more dots in smart, elegant way that makes sense to me, and so I’m quite proud of that.”
“I was thinking that I’d really like to do a sort of “Operation Clean Slate”, and really wipe out as many things as I possibly can. I’m sitting in my study now and looking at my thick stack of books and I’m wondering how many of them I’m ever actually seriously ever going to read. Probably less than half. Maybe less than 25%. Why am I keeping so many around? It’s just this weight of obligation that’s a little too much to bear after a while, seriously. And I’m also thinking of all the remaining detritus (this is my new most reused word) that’s lying around – my notebooks from my teenage years. Haven’t I taken pictures of them over and over again? How many times do I have to do that? Why don’t I just get rid of them? I suppose I want to have them kind of represented in some sort of “one touch” format. Meaning… I want to get, at a single glance, all of whatever I wanted to get out of 2010, 2011 and so on. Kind of like a really good summary that’s evocative and makes me think. I think I was overly fixated on making that public-facing, which again isn’t really necessary. I can really just do it right here in Evernote. I could start by having a notebook for each thing, with separate notes for the sub-parts inside it. Once all of those are done, I can get rid of the thing. Then, I can see how I’d like to consolidate the notes. In a sense every book is a sort of book of book of books, in terms of how the information is organised.”
“That’s another thing I’ve learned while going through my massive trail of vomits. That everything should have a comment for later. That’s how you have decent code, too, right? You’re going to forget what you were up to so you want to remind yourself and leave waypoints and signposts for yourself.”
0628 – review your stuff hyper-regularly and do a little bit every day
Books: “Afterwards, my wife and I spent some time in our study. We had just cleaned it out, so we put all of our books on the floor. It was quite an interesting experience, and one I wish we had experimented with earlier. It’s something that Marie Kondo recommends – put all your stuff out on the floor, and then touch it with your hands and see if it sparks joy. I didn’t exactly follow that formula – rather I used different colored post-its to sort them into different categories – books I love, books I WANT to read, books I’d LIKE to want to read, and “#shrug”. I’m eliminating a lot of the #shrug books, as well as many of the “I’d like to want to read this” books. I might give some of them away, and maybe keep the top 20-30% of the “want to want to read” books.”
Frequency: “there’s definitely utility in going through things over and over again. I used to feel bad about this, and so there would be a considerable length of time between each review. If I wait too long, I’d have forgotten a lot of whatever it is that caught my attention and interest, and so each new session ends up feeling like I”m just re-doing what I had done the last time. And it feels very wasteful, like there’s no progress. I suppose a close analogy would be – it’s like going to the gym once every 3 months and feeling really unfit and weak each time, like you didn’t make any progress and like you shouldn’t have bothered at all. Your feelings and observations are correct, but the conclusion is misplaced. You SHOULD have bothered, you just should’ve bothered in much smaller amounts at a much higher frequency. This is what I want to get better at.”
“I want to remind myself to revisit everything – all the basics – at a much higher frequency. Ideally I should be doing it every single day. Every single morning and every single evening. There are only a few basic things in life that I need to care about. Breathing, posture, hydration, diet, sleep, exercise, social relations, work done, todo list, goals, chores, bills and so on… it can sometimes seem like too much to bear, but when I’m writing myself a word vomit every day, it becomes clearer that actually it only seems too much because I haven’t sufficiently broken things down into bite-sized components that I can deal with at my own time, at my own leisure.”
Squats: “Also I just simply have this silly habit of taking way too long to start doing anything. The way around this might be to just circle around the task itself – and have a sort of ritual or routine for the circling. I find myself thinking now about how I instinctively do a bunch of fast, deep breaths before doing heavy squats. There’s something about it that calms me down, that seems to give me the strength I need. I wonder if I could just do it without – like just breathe normally and start squatting. I think it could be done, but a part of me feels like my core might not be braced tightly enough (I’m pulling this stuff out of my ass) and I might get injured or something. I guess I could experiment with lower weights and see how it goes. I don’t know.”
“revisit your shit over and over again so that it remains fresh – that way you can pick up where you left off and actually start exploring new territory. Set aside a short amount of time to do it. You don’t need to spend hours and hours on a thing each time you do it. Just pay attention to how it feels right now, to have published one word vomit per day of 2017. “
0654 – do reviews regularly so you can have more fun
“I have a sprawling to-do list that’s just full of things that I haven’t gotten around to. This is an interesting challenge and opportunity. Some of these things are dated and I should just say no to them. But really what I need to do is to get to a meta-level. To recognise that I’m trapped in a box, with my limitations keeping me in, and that I’ll have to carefully examine my situation in order to transcend it. I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to get to “inbox zero” with a bunch of todos. So I need to find some better way of feeling happy and fulfilled. It has to be a measure of flow, a measure of progress, a rate of change sort of metric rather than an absolute one. I know I need to be writing every day. If I’m not writing, I’m stagnating, and if I’m left stagnant, I start to get a little… decrepit. It’s not a good look, and it doesn’t feel fun either. I want to have fun. Life is short, we should all have as much fun as we can before we die. And to have really great fun, we have to be imaginative. All the “lots of fun in the short term” options are uncreative, and often destructive.
How can I have more fun? I find myself thinking about my guitars, which are hanging on my wall, that I haven’t really touched in a while. I find myself thinking about the youtube videos that I want to make. I’ve made a couple of videos recently – they’re really just word vomits in video form. I want to do this partly because I think it’s such a shame I don’t have more videos of myself from the past – there’s something that gets captured in a video that mere writing and photographs can’t quite capture. And also I want to get more comfortable speaking to an international audience. I want to get better at communicating, at being understood. Doing this on more than one medium definitely has its uses. I don’t intend to be a famous YouTuber – I just want to get into the habit of publishing videos of myself. Maybe at least one a week? I should do one tomorrow. Adding a todo for that now.”
“It’s funny, how hard it is to maintain this habit. On a daily level I think I just tell myself that oh I’m so tired, I’ll do it later, I’ll do it tomorrow. But then it doesn’t get done. And if I’m not doing regular reviews of my everyday life, then how do I know if I’m getting better at living the life that I want to be living? Some people might do this without writing, but just by reflecting and meditating. I think I could use some of that too. What am I waiting for? I don’t want to obsess about this too much – the point is to act. “
Self-sabotage: “Sometimes I wonder if I deliberately make my own life a little difficult because some part of me feels like I need to suffer, atone for my sins. It seems a little far-fetched in writing, but think about how sometimes people who’ve been abused, continue to seek out new abusers to abuse them. It’s sad, silly, all of those things. And yet I am like that in my own way. That’s just a bug of the human mind. We’re only sort-of conscious. We’re only sort-of able. We have to accept that, and integrate that into our dealings with reality.”
0665 – keep going, do reviews and improve yourself
“One thing I want to get better at is partitioning my writing in a way that is presentable. That means being more reader-centric. I unshackled myself from being reader-centric when I first started this project back in 2012, because I was trapped in a very performative sort of voice. I was writing with too many words, and my sentences were overwrought. As I write this, I can sense quite clearly that I have a superior sense of rhythm now. I don’t make palatability a priority in these vomits, because the original intent was just to get everything out of my head. But I think now it’s time to revise that.
I feel like most of what was in my head is now out. This statement is probably not factually accurate – but it feels accurate because there’s just so much material here. I have written down my thoughts, but I have not really taken the time to read them. As a result, I find myself repeating my thoughts over and over again, which is boring. To make progress, I’m going to have to re-read my thoughts. To edit and consolidate. This stuff is ‘boring’ compared to the heady feeling of just writing like a maniac. But I had also said in a much earlier vomit that I didn’t want to fill up my vomits with non-stop drivel. I want my vomits to reveal progress on my part. I am my own arbiter here. I am writing to satisfy myself, to please myself, to win myself over. So if I feel that something needs to be done before I can continue writing like a maniac, then I need to do it.”
Two Minds: “I have been in two minds over what exactly needs to be done. A part of me felt like I should pause the entire project and just switch into editing mode. And I think I definitely did that for a while. But it became clear that editing the material en masse was going to be an endless task. If I had stayed on that path, I would’ve gotten anxious and frustrated. That will not do for the context of a personal project. This project is supposed to be challenging, but it’s also supposed to be rewarding. I can be a little bit of a masochist, but I’m not going to be insane about it.”
“So what next then? I’m going to have to do two things at once. I’m going to keep writing at a steady tempo – 1 a day would be good. And then I’m going to have to make reviews a part of my everyday process. My god, I’ve definitely said this at least a dozen times. What stops me from doing it? I know – I probably have some sort of deep rooted issues, maybe from childhood, that keeps me from doing it. My brain keeps coming up with elaborate excuses for avoiding the truth about the necessity of reviews. So I need to sit with myself and do some therapy with myself and really just made daily reviews a serious, critical part of my every day life.”
0667 – revisit, review and re-reference your work
- Pattern recognition and tagging. Once I’ve started editing blogposts, I begin to notice certain patterns.
- With a lot of my “reflection” type blogposts, there’s often some sort of direction, action or next step. I find that when I make the title a ‘directive’ – something to do, it somehow becomes much easier to remember what the post is about, what my train of thought is.
- There are other “types” of blogposts, which are becoming clearer as I improve the titles. I have a class of blogposts tagged “bugs”, which describe ways in which I systematically get in my own way. These are things that I need to develop an intimate understand of, and have methods to fight against. I don’t have an immediate directive for these, since the wrong directive might even do me harm. But I want to have all of these in a tidy little list so that I can revisit them.
- Other tags include…
- ‘truths’ – these are vomits that attempt to capture something about reality that I think I need to remember or understand
- status update – these are vomits where I take stock of how I’m doing at a given point in time. Each is a snapshot of my life; in aggregate they should reveal some interesting constants and changes
- As I write these, it becomes clear to me that my current set of tags is still suboptimal. I need to keep editing and tagging my posts. I don’t yet know what the optimal set of tags will be, but I trust that as I keep editing them, and keep identifying patterns, I will find superior ways of tagging things.
- Consolidation. This is the important next bit that I haven’t gotten to yet. Once I start seeing patterns in my tags, I’m going to “merge” or “chain” my older posts in new ones. I have repeated myself about dozens of things. I want those sets of posts to be allowed to merge and coalesce naturally, so that they’re all connected. Right now, I have 666 dots in a big pile on the floor. I’m trying to look for connections. I believe that the final result will be a rather pretty network of links. There will be some central nodes within the 1000 word vomit project that subesquently “fan out” and link to all the other posts. Some posts will render entire sets of previous posts ‘obsolete’ – which is a good thing. Those posts will be ‘relegated’ to ‘sources’. I estimate that I really only have about 20-30 things to say, and maybe even those could be compressed further.
0683 – if writing is important to you, write
“if writing is as important to me as I say it is, why don’t I have a precious, fixed time every day saved just for writing? How much would I have written already, if I had to write a vomit every morning when I woke up? Every night before I went to bed? What if I had to write a vomit just to “unlock” my computer, or to use the Internet? Would I have completed my word vomit project already? I think I would have.”
“Which kind of brings me to the latest conversation I had with my boss – we’ve really been having the same conversation for years now, at a regular monthly interval. The theme is always the same – how can I do better? How can I grow and learn and be more tomorrow than I am today? I know what it takes, intellectually. It takes planning. It takes some will to execute on those plans. That much seems obvious. The hard and messy part is learning to cope with failure. Failing gracefully, and recovering quickly and well where possible.
I often feel a sense of superficial relief when abandoning my plans. When I go into the dark playground. This is a misleading feeling, and I need to rewire my brain to feel differently. Abandoning my own plans usually leads to frustration, missed deadlines, missed obligations, unease, discomfort, failure.
I was talking with another colleague about how to calibrate feelings of frustration. I notice that sometimes I experience more “tension” when I”m doing something difficult, but I do feel better about it these days. I’m not panicking or overwhelmed anymore – at least, not as badly as I used to. This is progress.”
“While I’m writing this, I keep getting impulses to open up my browser and start wandering around the internet. This impulse is probably the single most destructive impulse that I have. It has robbed me of years of my life by now. And yeah, sometimes it’s led to fun and interesting things. But most of the time it’s led to frustration and anxiety. And yet I do it again and again. Why? Because it feels novel and interesting in the short term, I suppose.”
“Sleep is always the main #1 issue. I slept stupidly late throughout the weekend. I slept early and well last night. I would like to sleep early and well for the remainder of my life if I can. But it seldom seems like a good idea to plan your entire life ahead. So let’s just try to do this for the rest of 2017. I’ve been fairly disappointed with my handling of 2017 so far – I feel like I should already have written some good essays, already had a goo time meeting some friends, and so on. I feel like I’ve been coasting through the year. This will not do. I need to do more. I know I have a lot on my todo list and I’m procrastinating on it, probably because the deadlines don’t seem very real, they don’t seem very pressing. Well I need to rewire my mind to be able to do things and get pleasure out of them even then they aren’t very pressing. I want to reject the sort of “haha nihilism nothing matters why do anything” perspective. I think that’s not very healthy. I want to be an exceptional person. To do that I have to behave in exceptional ways. I have to have exceptional habits, take exceptional measures, and so on. I can’t let randomness just kick me down the road into becoming somebody that I never chose.”
0689 – do reviews to measure your progress against the ceaseless sands of time
“Daily and weekly updates would be good to do, but a little unrealistic to have to trawl through on hindsight. Monthly updates, on the other hand, seem perfectly sensible to me. On the first day of every month, at 12 noon, Singapore has an island-wide test of our emergency warning system. It’s tested with a pleasant chime that sounds like bells. (The actual use case is for warning sirens, in case of air raids and whatnot.) It’s a useful cue and reminder that a month has passed. And it’s a good moment to stop and reflect on the past month, and the month ahead. After all, if we live to be 80, we only get 960 months. That’s less than a thousand months. And you can discount the first 20 years or so when you’re still figuring out who the hell you are and what the hell is going on. So you get maybe 60 good years if you’re lucky. And I don’t feel very lucky. I feel like I should think about my life as though I’m only going to live to, say, 40. I don’t know why I have that feeling but I just do, even though my father and grandfather both appear to be aging very nicely. My grandfather is in his 90s now. Still, when I am still, I feel this sense of urgency. Like I’m being complacent when I should be moving forward. I don’t want to be in a total panic, I don’t want to be rushing, but I feel like there’s this adjacent reality where I’m moving purposefully. That’s what I want to be. Moving purposefully.”
“So what then? What then? I was watching the video of myself in 2013 and I found myself embarrassed, cringing. I was less graceful then than I am now. I was louder, more obnoxious, more annoying. I’m still generally loud, I suppose, but I think I’ve learned to tone it down over the past 4 years. I think I’ve gotten a little bit more sensitive to the feelings of others. I think I’ve become a little bit more considerate, a little bit more temperate. As I say these words, of course, I find myself flooded with recent memories of instances in which I have failed to meet my own standards. And I cringe again. I still have a lot of work to do, and I hope I will continue to say that for as long as I am alive. I want to be a constant work in progress. That’s what I want to define me. Sometimes I encounter people who I find impressive, but after a couple of years of getting to know them, I find that they’re pretty much stagnant in some way. I’m sure I am too, and the thought troubles me. This is why I think it’s really important to do regular status updates. To keep growing and learning and reflecting. I am 27.5 years old now. I’m thinking back to all the milestone years – 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25. They all felt like important milestones, they all felt like thresholds that I had to cross. And yet sometimes it feels like I haven’t even started. I suppose it will always feel that way. All the more reason to get more focused, more disciplined, more rigorous, and to articulate my development more precisely.”
0712 – review everything with love, and be decisive about what you’re trying to do
“I’ve been spending most of today figuring out a list of all of the movies I’ve watched, and all of the games I’ve played. I’ve also been trying to get a sense of the passage of time since I was born, in terms of current affairs – looking at the wikipedia pages for each year. I want to keep doing this. There’s something cathartic about this. I want to process my Facebook and Instagram feeds. Twitter would be nice too, though that seems a little crazy since I have over 47,000 tweets to go through. I suppose rather than read every single tweet, what I should do is get a sense of what I’ve been talking about by searching through my feed for select keywords. I also need to process my Things todo list, my Evernote, my Google Keep, my bookmarks and my blogposts… and that also includes these word vomits.”
“I want to do blogposts about the places I’ve travelled to. I don’t remember a lot, which is unfortunate, but I think I can piece together something from contextual clues, from pictures, from talking with my wife, etc.
Somebody suggested doing a timeline of my “conceptual development” – ie how I have changed the way I think and see the world over time. I think this is a great idea and something I should definitely get to.”
“Someone else suggested that I write my autobiography. That is something that I’ve been thinking about doing, and I think I’ll do it right here in these word vomits. The challenge for that one is figuring out how to frame and chunk things. Having made a list of all of the movies I’ve watched and games I’ve played, I’m tempted to update the review pages for those. A part of me is tempted to do twitter threads for each but that sounds a little overwhelming and exhausting. I need to prioritize actions that are achievable, doable.”
“I’ve been low-key worried lately that I’ve been spending all of my free time playing video games, bumming around, staying up late, and generally not being very productive. I’ve just gotten myself a macbook. I haven’t been checking my email and I feel guilty about that. I’ve only started writing again for a couple of days – I want to kick this engine into high gear and really start shipping content.”
“The hardest part is managing your psychology, everything else is pushing buttons and cranking widgets. I want to make sure that I’m writing every day. Writing word vomits will be a good way to ensure that. I’m feeling a bit self-conscious at the moment because, having not written for a while, I feel a little backed up – like the stuff that’s coming out of my fingers lacks finesse. But this is normal, it’s like going back to the gym after a long break. I trust my subconscious, I know that there’s quality stuff in there – stuff that even I haven’t seen yet, because I’ve been too busy and too tired for too long to apply my own skills and learnings to my own interests. I want to say “all of that is going to change”, but the important thing is really to focus on the daily writing. There is a lot of content in my history spreadsheet!”
“First, get rid of everything that we can get rid of. But that’s “not everything”, because there are things that we believe have value. So what are those things that we believe have value? How do we define that? Value towards what end? I should prioritize whatever is going to lead to me producing creative output. Yeah. I need to produce things that people want to read and share. I shouldn’t obsess TOO hard about that – it should be things that I’m personally excited about writing, too. What am I excited about? Well, to find that out I’m going to have to clean out my Things and eliminate everything that’s not exciting. Then whatever’s left that’s exciting, I gotta start doing the reading and research. Basically I have a lot of research and reading ahead of me. I think I’ll do a tweetstorm about how I’m looking forward to catching Paramore. What else do I feel like doing? What else am I eager and excited to do? I think what’s happening right now is… I’m starting to feel scared, I’m starting to feel anxious, I’m starting to feel pressure. These are things that keep me from doing my best work. So what should I do? I should exercise and I should meditate. I should go on long walks. I should have conversations with friends. When I’m in a muck inside my own head, I know I can get into a pretty decent state – at least temporarily, in a small way – by focusing on being helpful to others. I have a Facebook status from a while ago where I asked a bunch of people to ask me questions. I should answer those!”
0718 – start a spreadsheet and fill it out (4 hours a day)
“The funny thing, the irony, is, that I know that I have many word vomits that articulate all of this already. That I should have some sort of daily practice. That I should review my work regularly. I could be doing this in a calendar, or a spreadsheet, or notes… I just need to PICK ONE and STICK WITH IT. So which should it be? Well, what’s the thing that’s going to be stickiest? When I start my day, what am I going to look at? I think a pinned tab in my google chrome with a google drive spreadsheet is the simplest thing.”
“I would really like to be done with my word vomit project this year if possible. There are 97 days left to 2019. To get there, I’l have to write 3 vomits a day. I know it’s within my capacity to do so. I wrote 50,000 words in November last year while I was holding down a full time job. So surely I can do double that if I don’t have a job. A part of me is like, “nooo, why don’t you write a novel instead…” – but fuck it, would I rather have the draft of a second novel, or have completed this massive project that’s been weighing on my mind since 2012? I would like to be done with the project.”
“I want to start working out again. Keep meeting friends. Start writing for publications. Start getting paid. Keep deleting, editing and cleaning out obsolete notes. I’ve been improving my blog’s categorization slightly – a simple yet powerful realization I had was that I should be framing each category as a “column” for readers – previously I had been framing them in terms of the stage of development they’re in. But no reader cares about that. They want to know what’s in it for them. And I think a big part what I need to learn in the coming days and weeks is how to focus on other people, help other people, sell to other people, be useful to other people.
I guess I also feel like… there’s just so much shit, you know? All my notes. All my vomits. Wow, I should ban myself from the broader internet while I sort through all my stuff. I think that’s why I’m procrastinating. There’s such a massive volume of things to go through – 700+ word vomits!!! that it somehow feels easier to just… sit on twitter and respond to feedback as it comes. I need to stop that. I think it’s time I get off Twitter for a few days. Or, probably better still, stay off Twitter for a few hours each day while I get my minimum work done. Let’s say 4 hours a day. That seems reasonable.”