I often pay lipservice to productivity, and I’ll be the first one to acknowledge it. It’s mostly in an attempt to convince myself to be productive. I figure that if you think and talk about it long and hard enough, eventually it seeps into the non-conscious part of your mind- the same way other ideas do, like “I’m fat”, or “I’m stupid”, or “I’m ugly.” If we bombard ourselves (and each other) with something long enough, we start to believe it, and we start to become it.

It’s humbling to realize how slow the process is. (Bonus marks if you can see why it necessarily has to be that way!) I feel that this is the part that most people don’t really grasp. (I’m still struggling with it all the time, but at least now I’m conscious of the struggle.) How do you get good at something? You gotta keep doing it, even if it feels like you’re not really going anywhere. You’ve got to persist through failure, and be naive (this is what Steve Jobs was talking about when he said “Stay Foolish”) enough to believe in yourself and in the Universe, that it’s possible, and you gotta stick with it long after everyone else gives up. Sure, there are all sorts of details that you can worry about- but the most important thing is that you keep doing it.

We often read about people who overwork themselves, or overtrain, and get injured- and I think a lot of us procrastinators use that as an excuse to avoid doing too much. What if we get sick and tired after we pursue this newfound passion? Perhaps it would be wiser not to pursue it too much.

Doing things is not enough, we have to do things right. There’s no sense in doing things badly or poorly, right? We could be making things worse. Isn’t the first rule of the Hippocrates Oath to do no harm? Well, surely we can do no harm if we do nothing!

It’s not enough to do things right, we have to do the right things. What’s the point of being really good at something that’s completely obsolete, useless and irrelevant, or even harmless? What if I study law, and in five year’s time humanity’s heuristics develops at such an amazing rate that everybody’s capable of resolving their problems without legal advice? What then?

What a mess! Where do you begin? What if you do more harm then good? What if what you thought was a good idea turns out to be a bad one? It’s all too complex, once you start you can’t stop, it’s swirling chaos and the intelligent choices seem to be madness or apathy.

Stay foolish. Take the first step even though you can’t see the rest of the staircase. Perhaps you will fail. In fact, you will most probably fail. Accept that failure. Everything that is of value in this world emerged through a lengthy process of variation and selection- good ol’ trial and error.

Fear of failure was a valid fear about ten thousand years ago, when failure probably meant certain death. These days, most failure is survivable. And we can actually take steps to ensure that- to “robustify” ourselves against failure. Financially, that means having savings, an emergency fund. It’s a concept that also applies emotionally, and in other frameworks and systems. Live your life expecting to fail your way to success, and you will succeed.

You have to try a range of things, and pay careful attention to what works and what doesn’t. Then you eliminate what doesn’t work, and you try variations of what does. (Da Vinci preached this method, long before Darwin noticed that it happens in nature, too. Consider it the Wisdom of the Gods, or whatever you’d like to believe in.) Human progess today is greatly retarded by our refusal to experiment, to try alternative methods and perspectives. Men and women who have dared to do so have always been rare, receiving little support from their peers until AFTER they’ve made their mark on our species. Now is the time for us to change that.

I don’t adopt tese principles nearly as well as I’d like to, and as broadly as I believe I should. I stuck to a fairly consitent (and admittedly) ineffective writing schedule for a long while- I’d set aside several hours of time to write, and often stare into space doing nothing. I usually did this at Starbucks, so I’d have to spend money to do it, too. It was a false kind of “busyness” that wasn’t getting done, and I was too comfortable to acknowledge it. (Sometimes I think the problem with our times is that failure isn’t painful enough- so we contend with mediocrity.) Denial sets in- I tell myself that I was distracted, that it was a one-off that won’t happen again. (It inevitably does.) There’s a part of me that simply wants to laze around, and it’s had far more practice than my ambitious, hard-working side when it comes to convincing the council in my head of how I ought to act.

Serendipity steps in to save the day, as usual. I happened to start writing in my notebook during one of my breaks or lessons while I was in camp. (That’s right, pen and paper. Old school, bitches!) It was more out of boredom and impulse than any specific intention. I started with my usual 90-week-project induced habit of taking stock of my life (ALERT: Hey, it’s become a habit! Wowza!)- my finances and pending tasks. I was in the mood, so I started rambling- and before I knew it, I had writen over ten pages of content. Not all of it was well-thought out or concise- in fact, most of it wasn’t. I’d typically be interrupted mid-page, or mid-thought- so I’d return to it later, digressing on a tangent every time, but always on the move.

It was, and still is, startling to witness, because it challenges the assumptions I had subconsciously developed about the amount of writing I am capable of doing. It’s actually really upsetting. I once read a story about a grandmother who lifted a vehicle to free her trapped grandson. She didn’t like to think or talk about it, because of the cognitive dissonance it created for her- she was able to do what she did only because she had, in the heat of the moment, ignored the familiar voice in her head that told her she couldn’t do it. What did that mean about all the other things in her life that she had convinced herself were beyond her capabilities, out of her reach? I’m still young, and I’m guessing most of you are, too. Don’t every let anybody tell you that you can’t do something, not me, and especially not you.

Another uncomfortable realization hit me late last weekend (or the week before.) I had been ‘scrambling’ to update my posts- yet I wasn’t able to transfer everything from ink to pixels in time. Why?! I had previously always believed that I can type faster than I can write. The bare fact is still valid- if you dictate to me, I’ll be able to type what you say about four to five times faster than I can write it. (Actually, my writing is getting more efficient now, so maybe about three to four times.) So why is it that I wasn’t able to copy, in several comfortable, dedicated hours, what I had generated in far less time, while juggling other activities?

It’s a recurring pattern- sometimes I’d have vast amounts of free time and accomplish next to nothing- but I’d end up writing large quantities of music and poetry (lousy one, lah) in the middle of a hectic exam period. There’s something a bit fishy about all of this, and I’ve let it go uninvestigated for far too long.

Long periods of time dedicated to doing creative work appears to be ineffective. Nein- in my case, it is clearly ineffective. It requires a degree of discipline and focus which I (since we’re being honest) neither have, nor can afford to hope for.

So- let’s apply what evolution has taught me- I got to prepare for failure. I should break down my writing into short, intense sessions. That’s what’s working for me when I’m in camp. I could write for 45 minutes, for instance, and then switch to a completely different task- cleaning up my room, whatever. That should keep me on my toes and reduce the odds of me getting too comfortable and complacent.

One should be at the edge of one’s seat when doing creative work. If not, it is prudent to stop, take a micro-break and psyche yourself up into an emotional peak state.

Distractions are another problem- the internet is a wily beast with its tabbed browsing and endless opportunities. We could spend every single second of our lives exploring it and never see a hundredth of what it has to offer. So I feel it’s necessary to take some actions to avoid being swept away by the currents- again, we’re looking at embodying the concept of survivability. I sometimes write directly to my blog- which can be distracting, with all the fun statistics to look at. Sometimes I write on my Evernote, which is sort of like a many-notebooks-synchronized-centrally sort of program- but even hat can get rather distracting, with all its complex organizability.

The best place to write for me, where I’m writing this right now? Notepad. (Shut up Mac users, I’m doing what I can with what I have!) A lot of editing and formatting conceerns tend to pop up as I’m writing. These tend to be valid concerns, but they can end up eating up vast amounts of time by themselves. I might find myself contemplating some grammatical ambiguity in a statement, and get carried away on the all-too-familiar wings of blissful tangential exploration- which i suppose is a manifestation of both the strength and weakness of my personality.

Still, I feel it’s reasonably evident that separating content generation and editing into two reasonably distinct phases allow for much greater output- definitely so in terms of quantity, and it seems reasonably so in terms of quality too- a series of 8’s are worth far more than the 10 that never comes. Phase cycling wisdom strikes again! (Economies of scale, division of labour.) Hemingway says- “Write drunk, edit sober.” I rest my case.

As I write these lines, I must admit that there are voices in my head that compell me to dispute them. Every phrase should be uttered with certainty and wisdom, and steady, consistent effort makes more sense than yo-yoing! (That’s how internet arguments and other small-minded debates begin.) A third, calmer voice rises above the seeming conflict- balance can be achieved. Both perspectives have their values and shortcomings, both are subjective and using either in a rigid or dogmatic sense can be dangerous, unpredictable, and worst of all, boring.

Instead, both perspectives should be accomodated and explored. We should experiment wih one while leaving room for the other. Phase-cycling can be synchronous with consistency- the consistency becomes clear at a broader perspective. Nobody is completely consistent 24/7- there are no straight lines in nature. Yet there are few things more consistent and reliable than the turn of the seasons. (I suppose not, but you know what I’m trying to say.) Always have faith that clarity will emerge as long as you remain persistent and willing to try things differently. (I noticed that this was a fairly common trait among a lot of successful people- Carl Sagan and and double Nobel winner Linus Pauling were both strongly convinced that nothing was beyond them if only they tried long and hard enough.)

The simplistic idea of phase-cycling tends to assume that it’s simply a matter of flitting from one thing to another- never learning or reflecting, and nothing really gets done. The opposite idea, on the other hand, suffers from a lack of movement and dynamism- a kind of stagnation. Neither is desirable- the first is too chaotic to be of any use, the latter is too rigid to be interesting. We seek the middle ground- depth, breadth, compexity.

Generation is akin to lateral thinking- we should worry less about consistency and more about where interesting flaws and failures might lead us. The opposite approach is perfectionist, logical- everything has to work, to make sense. It’s valuable on hindsight, but not particularly effective hen you need to move forward out of an already-explored framework- there’s only so long you can re-arrange what you already have before you need to seek out something more. So while I’m nowhere as clear right now as I intend to be, I recognize that it’s necessary for me to pass through this. When exploring new territory, tentative fumbling is inevitable. (Yes… I know.)

So here’s a promise I’m making to myself- I will not edit my rambles, at least not any more than what feels immediate and natural. If I am in doubt, I’ll leave it and come to it later. (As I’ve been writing this- by copying what I wrote in my notebook- I sometimes find myself trying to explain my thoughts in greater detail, only to find earlier-me doing exactly the same a few lines later. I ought to have a little bit more faith in myself in some ways.) I shall then review and edit them later, and distill the clarity that I desire.

Relief! I don’t have to choose between one or the other- stick around with me long enough and you’ll get a taste of both. Interestingly, I find this train of thought compels me to summarize my thoughts and ideas as succinctly as possible, too. That way, you get a taste of the whole spectrum. That’s a good design principle, isn’t it? If you want something to work for everyone, you have to cater to the extremes, not just the middle ground. Middle ground tells us very little about the depth of the human experience, and is consequently uninteresting.

I need you to do me a favour, please. I can’t do this alone. As I search and skim from one idea to the next, I need to know what’s valuable and relevant. Not all of it will be, that’s simply not possible. I am not a genius of infinite wisdom, even if I sometimes act like one. I’m largely ignorant, and my mind is simply incapable of accurately modelling reality to the extent that I can make accurate theoretical predictions about what works and what doesn’t. So the need for variation and selection emerges- trial and error. I do the variation, you do the selection. Deal? Don’t be shy- think of it as an opportunity for you to get more out of your reading experience here. My aim here is to serve both you and myself, and part of that means giving you what you want. What are the questions you have, what do you want to know, what do you think is wasteful, redundant or superfluous? What do you like, and what do you not?

I write much better when I know that I’m writing for an audience. It’s lonely sometimes to see all these statistics and hardly any responses. I’m at my most excited and animated when I’m in conversation with someone, and I’m trying to help them see something they might not have considered yet, to challenge them with an idea or perspective- or when the tables are turned, and I’m trying to grasp what someone’s trying to share, trying to explore something.

“Incepting” people gives me great satisfaction- it’s like planting a seed. Who knows what may come of it? Perhaps they might never use it themselves, but mention it instead in passing to someone who needed to hear it- and that person, having heard it, goes on to better the world. That’s why I always urgently feel like I need to share things with people. While I still struggle to make the distinction clear (at ultimately, I don’t think there actually is one)- it’s not just about me, it’s more about the ideas that I’ve been privileged to receive. I feel obligated to share them, because they need to be spread. It’s like I’m a mindless host of multiple self-propagating viruses.

You can see why then that I believe that conversations shape the world. A brilliant idea is worth astoundingly little if it is not communicated- ideas need to be kept alive, circulated, spread, shared and mutated in the minds and actions of people. Transmission, reception, modulation, distortion- all of these things are part of how ideas spread and evolve.

So I believe we need more good conversation in this world, in every imaginable sense. That’s something fairly straightforward that I can get behind.