Doing beats talking

I’ve always paid lip-service to productivity- it’s mostly an attempt to convince myself to be productive. I figured that if you think about it and talk about it long and hard enough, eventually it seeps into your pre-conscious, the same way other external ideas tend to creep into our mind. It’s humbling to realize how slow the process is- and this is the part I think most people struggle to grasp, myself included.

Persisting through failure

How do you get good at something? You gotta keep doing it, even if it feels like you’re not really going anywhere. You have to persist through failure, and have faith in yourself and the universe- that it’s possible, and you gotta stick with it long after everyone else gives up. Sure, there are all sorts of things that you can worry about, but the most important thing is to keep doing it. (Exceptional cases: When you overheat, and it damages your health and/or personal well-being in the form of injuries, unhealthy stress or other negative social consequences.)

Let’s play devil’s advocate for a while- it’s important not just to do things, but to do things right- an it’s not enough to do things right, you have to be doing the right things. Right.

Iterative learning

What a mess! Where do you begin? What if you do more harm than good? That’s where trial and error comes in. 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 try variations of what does. That’s the wisdom of nature, and it appears to have been successful throughout all time. (Of course, we’re overlooking silent evidence- we can’t learn from nature’s failures, because they simply aren’t around for us to take stock of.)

Human progress is limited and retarded by our refusal to experiment- to try alternative methods and perspectives.To stick with what we believe is right, out of habit or dogma.

Working online at Starbucks is bad for me

I stuck to a fairly consistent (and ineffective) writing schedule for quite a 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 had to buy their drinks- it was a false kind of busy-ness that wasn’t getting anything done. Denial sets in- I tell myself that I was distracted, that it was a one-off incident that won’t happen again- and tomorrow will be better. It won’t. There’s a part of me that simply wants to laze around, and it’s had far more practice than my ambitious, hardworking self when it comes to persuading me to act a certain way. If I’m not paying attention, Lazy Visa bullies Hardworking Visa into submission. So it’s necessary for me to meditate, to focus, to pay attention, and to intervene when necessary.

Writing in notebooks is good for me

Serendipity delivers, as usual: I happened to start writing in my notebook during one of my lessons or breaks when I was in camp. It was more out of boredom and impulse than any specific intention. I started with my usual habit of taking stock of my life- my finances and other pending tasks. I was in the mood, so I started rambling- and before I knew it, I had written 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 been interrupted mid-page or mid-thought, so I’d return to it later, and each time this happened, I found myself continuing, sometimes digressing on a tangent- but always on the move. It was, and still is, pretty startling to witness- because it challenges the assumptions that I had subconsciously developed about the amount of writing I can actually do.

It’s also a little upsetting, because it means that I have been limiting myself all this while. I 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 afterwards, because of the cognitive dissonance it created. This was the first time in her long life that she acted in defiance of the voice in her head that told her she couldn’t do it. What did that mean about everything else in her life? Had she been living in fear of a failure that was never to be? Had she been missing out on all sorts of beauty and happiness because she didn’t have the guts to defy that little voice?

I’m still young, and I’m guessing most of you are, too. And even if you’re not, hey, whatever. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that you can’t do something- not me, and especially not you.

I wrote faster than I transcribed (because distractions?)

Another uncomfortable realization hit me late last weekend. (Er… I wrote this a long time ago, so the chronology of events is blatantly inaccurate.) I had been ‘scrambling’ to update my posts- yet I wasn’t able to transfer everything from ink to pixels. Why? I’ve always believed that I can type faster than I write, and this holds true if I’m either writing or typing whatever someone’s dictating to me.

Generating content, I assumed, takes more thought, and therefore more time than mindless copying. So why is it that I wasn’t able to copy, in several hours of comfortable time, what I had written in far less time, sporadically spaced out, while I was under pressure to do other things? 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 songs and poetry (fail one, lah) in the middle of a hectic exam period. There’s something fishy about all of this, and I’ve let it go uninvestigated for far too long.