I hold back in my writing. I hear in my mind the objections of readers about why they can’t commit fully and passionately to a creative life. Their day jobs and kids and sacred evenings watching TV. And I fool myself into thinking I’m writing for them.
Meanwhile, I’ve repeatedly done crazy and weird things to make creativity central to my existence. I’ve spent money originally meant for retirement, turned down lucrative and prestigious job offers, and moved to another country and started from scratch a new life in a new language.
And I’m still such I pussy I think to myself, “Nah, I can’t write that. Norm McNormie can’t dream of taking a pay cut from his $250,000-a-year job.”
Sadly, I’ve been trying to be reasonable so long I can hardly access the passion with which I once could have told you how I really felt about the creative life to end up where I am.
And it bothers me there are others who might live more creatively if only I spoke up and set an example.
For those readers, take my best relay of the faint message I can barely still hear from myself decades in the past.
Be violently creative.
Be passionate and uncompromising about the pursuit of your creativity and curiosity. Bang against and break through barriers that stand in your way and guardrails trying to guide you into what’s considered normal, socially acceptable, or even safe or healthy.
Quit your job. Spend your savings. Abandon your family. Live in the forest. Move to a foreign land. Establish an entirely new identity and disappear from anything you’ve ever known. If the image of your lifeless body face-down in a gutter in some alleyway doesn’t seem as bad as you think it should, so long as you got there by giving your creativity a chance, by all means send yourself down the path you fear might lead you there.
If you’re meant to live the creative life, nothing will stand in your way. The “reasons” of the normal are mere excuses.
This is life. Not a dress rehearsal. Your one chance.
Do things and make sacrifices in the pursuit of your creativity that other people think are crazy, weird, even sick.
Maybe others will think you’re a loser. Maybe you’ll genuinely ruin your life. But at least you gave that gnawing little voice a chance to speak up.
Aphorism: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” ―Gustav Flaubert
Book:Eat, Pray, Love (Amazon) is Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir of self-exploration.
Best, David P.S. If you have no idea how to get to there from here, Surround and Conquer.
Some job posts read: “7 years experience with HTML required,” and that is so confusing.
I have more than twenty-five years of experience with HTML. I haven’t done it every day for twenty-five years. That’s just how long ago I started.
Someone with one year of experience could possibly code faster and cleaner than I.
But even if I had coded HTML every day for twenty-five years, how much better could I be than someone who’s been doing it for one year?
Not much. HTML just isn’t that complicated.
I remember reading something by the guys at Basecamp that, paraphrased, said, “You can’t have seven years HTML experience. You can have one year, seven times.”
With AI tools available to us, the list of things that are complicated is shorter and shorter. There’s no reason you can’t know a little of everything. If you knew no HTML, you could have a short conversation with ChatGPT and have a month’s experience within an hour.
All you need to learn something is a problem to solve, the belief you can learn, and ChatGPT.
Don’t have one year of experience seven times, nor twenty-five. When you get the hang of one thing, learn the next.
Book:How to Be Everything (Amazon) is a guide for “multipotentialites,” or those who (still) don’t know what they want to be when they grow up.
If you’re going to be a person who does things, you can’t use that as an excuse. You do your homework again. People who do things know, once you start justifying your failures, you start a vicious cycle.
More insidious than justifying failure is justifying success. That is, convincing yourself a failure was actually a success:
“Nobody bought my art, but I handed out lots of business cards!”
“This book didn’t sell, but I learned a lot writing it!”
“The restaurant isn’t profitable, but we made enough to stay in business another month!”
There are times to find the silver lining. If you’re starting out, everything is a learning experience, failure or not.
But at some point you’re grown up enough to have known better and done better. You aren’t doing yourself favors by reasoning that a failure or even a middling success is actually what you wanted.
It takes discipline to do your homework again, but it takes courage to take a hard look at what’s just-okay, and decide you could do better.
Aphorism: “A succession of tiny paragraphs is as annoying as a paragraph that’s too long.” —William Zinsser
Cool: These golf pants (Amazon) are great for flying comfortably without looking too sloppy.
Best, David P.S. To evaluate success or failure, know ahead of time whether you’re playing a sure bet, or wildcard.
P.P.S. Thank you to Dan Cook for writing about me in the Bone Zone, which I promise isn’t what you think.
As I’ve gotten better at finishing what I start, I’ve run into a conundrum.
My problem going into a project used to be I had no idea what to expect. How long or complex would the project be?
The solution was to start lots of projects. I’d get in over my head on many, but I’d learn from those false starts to make some finishes.
I still often misjudge how complex a project will be. But now I can usually persevere to complete it anyway.
So the project takes more time and resources than I had expected, and I’m often in the midst of one project, thinking of all the others I want to work on once I’ve finished.
When I had finished little, it made sense to start a lot. Analysis would only lead to paralysis.
But now that I’ve finished a lot, I need to be more careful what I start. Each project is a commitment of several months or years. As I get older, I have fewer months and years to do all I dream, and less energy to fill a large portion of that time with effortful progress.
Paradoxically, when you can’t finish what you start, you should start more. When you can, you should start less.
Aphorism: “The less secure and confident you feel in the direction, the more surprises and excitement you will have in store.” —Jerry Seinfeld
Book:Youth In Revolt (Amazon) is another modern-day Catcher In the Rye.
Having a good network is powerful. But you don’t build your network in the obvious way.
The obvious way would be “networking.” Go to events, hand out business cards, and scan QR codes.
I wasn’t born in a hip place, didn’t have ambitious parents, and was too feral in my youth to even consider attempting to go to a prestigious university. But I have a great network, though 99.9% of anyone who has helped me succeed, I met after the age of 26.
I’m not a very outgoing person, but I’ve read How to Win Friends, and have learned some basic networking skills. Those are worth knowing. But I’ve never found a better networking tactic than this:
Put your head down and make something other people will respect.
Write a book or write a blog. Build a company or a short campaign. Make something tangible others can look at and see that you care about something and have done something about it.
When you meet someone face-to-face, the old saying is correct, “Be interested, not interesting.” But before you meet anyone, don’t be interested. Be interesting. There is no better way to build a network than to do the work.
Instead of “networking,” put your work on the ‘net.
Aphorism: “It doesn’t take much to be a successful artist – all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it.” —Banksy
Cool: This inflatable neck pillow (Amazon) design is the best I’ve found for sleeping in coach class.
Best, David P.S. I’ve collaborated with Sudowrite to make some AI-powered plugins that improve your writing with my favorite techniques.
You “wrestle” with a problem. You “wring” water from a towel. If iron has been bent, it has been “wrought,” perhaps with a “wrench,” on a car that’s been in a “wreck.”
Wr words are about struggle, and writing is often a struggle.
But it doesn’t have to be. Journaling is writing that doesn’t feel like writing.
You just write what you’re thinking and feeling. It doesn’t have to be good. It probably shouldn’t. Most of what you write in your journal doesn’t seem important.
Sometimes you have a breakthrough, but the true effects of journaling happen gradually, outside awareness.
Book:The Scout Mindset (Amazon) is Julia Galef’s guide to critical thinking.
Cool: The Western Canon Starter Kit is a YouTube series prescribing reading of the most-influential literature of western culture.
While my journal-writing sessions are relatively effortless, there is another type of writing session that is very effortful.
Those are the sessions in which I’m repeatedly hitting mental roadblocks. In which I’m not limited by my knowledge with the subject nor comfort with the truth, but but by my ability to find an insight.
I sense something is there, and methodically approach the subject from various angles. But that source of irony, that contradiction, or that surprising juxtaposition remains elusive.
It’s when I’m regularly doing effortful though not always fruitful writing sessions something else happens. While on a walk or talking to a friend or in the shower, I’ll have frequent aha! moments. Not always about what I’ve been writing about, but about any random thing.
The more hours I spend effortfully forcing myself to write, the more seemingly-random moments of inspiration I experience.
Inspiration is a muscle. You must perspire to be inspired.
Aphorism: “We’re smart enough to invent AI, dumb enough to need it, and still so stupid we can’t figure out if we did the right thing.” —Jerry Seinfeld
Book: Nobody should read Sex at Dawn without also reading Sex at Dusk (Amazon). It’s a less engaging yet more rigorous takedown of the former.
I’ve been journaling for seventeen years now. I’ve amassed quite the stack of full journals.
When I flip through these, I sometimes find something interesting. But most of it is boring, and almost all of it is poorly-written.
But my journaling habit has improved my writing immensely. Mostly because it shows me what it’s like for writing to be easy.
Writing in a journal is easy because you just write what’s on your mind. After enough practice you realize, something is wrong when writing is hard. Sometimes writing is hard because you don’t know the subject. But sometimes it’s because you refuse to acknowledge what’s on your mind.
In this way, journaling helps you practice the most basic but important writing skill: writing what you know.
Aphorism: “Write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.” —Ernest Hemingway
If you want to be a productive person, it seems you should have an elaborate task-management system.
It seems you should choose goals, formulate a plan to carry out actions that will lead to those goals, then execute that plan with your flawless discipline.
But the world changes too fast to stick to a plan, and who among us can perfectly execute what we plan?
People who you think have elaborate project- and task-management systems often merely have an array of habits, routines, and rules that keep them moving in the general direction their goals lie.
Don’t pick the perfect plan, install systems for strategic stumbling.
Aphorism: “You do not need anybody’s permission to live a creative life.” —Liz Gilbert
Cool: These indoor bug zappers (Amazon) are effective at attracting and killing mosquitos in your house.
