Tag: writing

Some Do Math, Some Plan To Write

Keith McNulty starts his day, every day, by solving a math problem:

Every morning before I start work I tackle a math problem. I schedule 30 minutes to solve this problem, and if I don’t succeed I stick with it the next morning and subsequent mornings until I have solved it and I am ready to move on to the next.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/start-your-day-math-keith-mcnulty-eqsye/

He does it for a variety of reasons, all of which he mentions in the rest of his blog post, but in the main, he does it to exercise his brain, and to give him the confidence to start the rest of his day.

I’m totally on board with the idea, except my plan is to write a blogpost here on EFE to start my day. And the reasons are the same – it is to exercise my brain, and to draw interesting connections across different things I’ve been reading or thinking about, and to give me the confidence to start my day.

And when things go well, I wake up knowing what I am going to write about, and how I am going to go about it. Those are the good days.

But there are other days, such as this one, when I wake up without knowing what I am going to write about. And then it is a case of reading blogs and articles, bookmarked tweets and conversations on WhatsApp and Signal, and multiple cups of chai or coffee, and the hope that inspiration strikes.

Sometimes it does, and we’re off to the races.

But on other days, I might read about something that depresses me.

Maybe I will read about the inevitability of World War III. Or I’ll read about the many mistakes that all of us did during the pandemic. Or I’ll read about a war taking place in some part of the world, or about the hubris of some politician somewhere… as you can imagine, there is a long list of topics to choose from if I want to read about something that depresses me. The trick then is to quickly read something that cheers me up, but this is, alas, a trick I cannot always perform.

But worst of all are the days when I just don’t feel like writing. Not because I’ve read something depressing, and not because I don’t know what I am going to write. I just don’t feel like writing.

It happens to the best of us!

And so what should one do on days such as these, when inspiration just won’t strike?

Well, one could choose to give up and not write for today. Or one could keep going through unread blogs, until one comes a blogpost written by one of the best of us. Who just so happens to have written a post about, well, not being able to write:

I remember getting stuck on a plot problem while writing my second novel. I just couldn’t sort it out. I tried everything. Walks. Swims. Crosswords. Even rounds of golf. Seriously. Nothing. This was a devastating block. Finally, in despair, I started a diary, a journal, into which I poured all my frustration. It went something like this.

“Dear Diary, I am mad. Hopping mad. I just can’t solve this problem. I have to get x to do y without z knowing. I have tried making sure that z is out of the way, but that doesn’t work because …”

On and on like that, typing furiously at this diary, until …

“Of course I could always do something mad like have x go out of the house late one night and … oh my god, yes that would work. And then a could tell b that y was not there and z would be none the wiser. Actually that would make complete sense and I could…”

The details are irrelevant, but the point is I solved a writing problem by writing. If you see what I mean. I couldn’t solve the problem by talking to myself, by muttering curses, by walking or approaching the 5th green with a nine iron. But I could solve it by writing about it. Priming the pump if you like.

So maybe writing only happens when you are physically producing the words, whether by pencil, biro, pen or keyboard.

Maybe.

https://stephenfry.substack.com/p/words-words-words

Far be it from me to correct Stephen Fry (the horror of the idea, even, let alone actually doing it), of course. But based on my experience of having written this post, and the enjoyment I derived from having read his, I would recommend removing the final word from the excerpt above. For that is how writing happens!

Maybe.

The Best Essay Has Quality

I’ve never once written an essay about a footnote I read in another essay. Or at any rate, I do not remember doing so. But the fourth footnote of Paul Graham’s latest essay is worth the exercise:

Sometimes this process begins before you start writing. Sometimes you’ve already figured out the first few things you want to say. Schoolchildren are often taught they should decide everything they want to say, and write this down as an outline before they start writing the essay itself. Maybe that’s a good way to get them started — or not, I don’t know — but it’s antithetical to the spirit of essay writing. The more detailed your outline, the less your ideas can benefit from the sort of discovery that essays are for.

https://paulgraham.com/best.html

My dad taught me to write essays this way, back when I was in the third standard. I used to make an outline of what I was going to write about, and then I used to write out the essay. Eventually, I got into the habit of writing out the outline and then the essay during my examinations as well, and for many years, that is how I wrote.

But not a single blogpost here on EFE has been written in that fashion, and for the last decade or so – maybe more – I’ve given up on the habit of first creating an outline.

These days, I sit and I start writing. I have no idea where the essay is going to go, or if it is going to go anywhere at all. The act of writing raises questions, ideas and related concepts in my head, and the essay takes itself there.

I’m not claiming that this produces good essays. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. What it does do, for me, is it helps me think through whatever it is that I am writing about.

And I wish this happened rather more frequently, but every now and then, it also helps me figure out what I want to write about next. That is, the act of writing doesn’t just help me answer questions that arise as I write, but when I’m on a roll, it helps me generate new ones as well.

Ad that is why that footnote resonated ever so much. Because I agree today with the point that Paul Graham is making in the fourth footnote of his essay: creating an outline is antithetical to the spirit of essay writing. Not knowing where you’re going, and figuring it out as you go along is a good way to write an essay. Or to live life, for that matter.

This reminds me, as do so many things, of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

In my mind now is an image of a huge, long railroad train, one of those 120-boxcar jobs that cross the prairies all the time with lumber and vegetables going east and with automobiles and other manufactured goods going west. I want to call this railroad train “knowledge” and subdivide it into two parts: Classic Knowledge and Romantic Knowledge.

…

Romantic Quality, in terms of this analogy, isn’t any “part” of the train. It’s the leading edge of the engine, a two-dimensional surface of no real significance unless you understand that the train isn’t a static entity at all. A train really isn’t a train if it can’t go anywhere. In the process of examining the train and subdividing it into parts we’ve inadvertently stopped it, so that it really isn’t a train we are examining. That’s why we get stuck. The real train of knowledge isn’t a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It’s always going somewhere. On a track called Quality. And that engine and all those 120 boxcars are never going anywhere except where the track of Quality takes them; and romantic Quality, the leading edge of the engine, takes them along that track.

Pirsig, Robert M.. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (p. 254). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

You shouldn’t write to show others what you know. You should write to learn what you know, to learn what connections can be made between what you know, and to understand what you don’t know.

But the bottomline is this: you should be writing.

Please, write!

How Might I Be Wrong?

Nobody does it better than Tyler Cowen, and it’s not even close.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the extremely difficult art of asking the question that is the title of this blog post, and then answering it by writing about it.

There was a post over on MR recently titled “Will Milei Succeed in Argentina?”. In the very first paragraph, Tyler points out that he (Tyler Cowen) wants Milei to succeed.

I give him a 30-40% chance, which is perhaps generous because I am rooting for him.  Bryan Caplan, who is more optimistic, offers some analysis and estimates that Milei needs to close a fiscal gap of about five percent of gdp.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/01/will-milei-succeed-in-argentina.html

But the rest of the post doesn’t lay out reasons for why Tyler is right to root for him, or why Milei might succeed. It is, instead, the exact opposite. Tyler asks the much more difficult question: why might Milei fail?

You may or may not agree with the rest of Tyler’s post, and about his take on whether Milei will succeed or not. The real lesson to take away from here is the point that Tyler is forcing himself to ask, and answer, the most difficult question of them all for a writer: “What is the best possible argument for how I might be wrong?”

And this is a really, really difficult thing to do. Say, for example, that you are opposed to PM Modi. Your task is to write about ways in which his policies have been good for India, and will be good for India in the years to come. On the other hand, if you are a supporter of PM Modi, your task is to write about the ways in which his policies have been bad for India, and will be bad for India in the years to come.

You could take the easy way out and do a round-up of what other people (on the other side of the fence) are saying. But that’s not the point – that simply shows what other people are saying. Worse, supporters and detractors have a way of confidently expressing hopeful assertions. The causal pathways are often missing from their analyses – it isn’t so much an expression of ways in which they might be wrong. Rather, it is a statement to the effect that “if x materializes, I will have been proven to be wrong.”

What we’re looking for is this instead: “Here’s why I don’t think x will materialize. Here are my reasons for thinking what I do, and here are the ways in which I could be wrong, and for the following reasons.”

This is really, really hard to do (trust me). But the more you force yourself to do it, the better a thinker you are likely to become. I try and do these exercises every now and then, and the reason I don’t post the results of such exercises very often is because a) I avoid doing this as much as possible b) I’m not very good at it when I do get around to doing it (if you’re itching to point out the causal link between these two, I’m way ahead of you. Go away.)

So hypocrisy alert aside – I don’t practice what I’m about to preach, you see – do give it a try. Ask yourself how you might be wrong about your model(s) of how the world works.

Good luck, because you will need it.

Ethan Mollick on Leaping (And/Or Waiting)

I learnt about wait calculations today. Or rather, I learnt that’s what they’re called. I have been doing them my entire life, but we’ll come back to that later.

What is a wait calculation?

This paper describes an incentive trap of growth that shows that civilisations may delay interstellar exploration as long as voyagers have the reasonable expectation that whenever they set out growth will continue to progress and find quicker means of travel, overtaking them to reach and colonise the destination before they do. This paper analyses the voyagers’ wait
calculation, using the example of a trip to Barnard’s Star, and finds a surprising minimum to time to destination at a given rate of growth that affects the expansion of all civilisations. Using simple equations of growth, it can be shown that there is a time where the negative incentive to travel turns positive and where departures will beat departures made at all other times. Waiting for fear future technology will make a journey redundant is irrational since it can be shown that if growth rates alter then leaving earlier may be a better option. It considers that while growth is resilient and may follow surprising avenues, a future discovery producing a quantum leap in travel technology that justifies waiting is unlikely

https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/decision/2006-kennedy.pdf

If you wanted to travel to the star nearest to us, should you leave today or not? You might think the correct answer is obviously yes, you should leave today. But ask yourself this (ridiculous but illuminating) question: should you have decided to start swim to the United States from India the month before we invented ships capable of such crossings?

Makes rather more sense to just wait for a month and jump onto the ship, no?

Ethan Mollick asks if we should write a book / design a presentation / discover a new element / <insert task that can be done by AI here>, or wait until AI becomes good enough to do this task for us instead.

Which brings us to AI. AI has all the characteristics of a technology that requires a Wait Calculation. It is growing in capabilities at a better-than-exponential pace (though the pace of AI remains hard to measure), and it is capable of doing, or helping with, a wide variety of tasks. If you are planning on writing a novel, or building an AI software solution at your business, or writing an academic paper, or launching a startup should you just… wait?

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-lazy-tyranny-of-the-wait-calculation

He gives two examples from his own professional life where he thinks he should have waited, because what took a lot of blood sweat and tears (or significant effort, at any rate) took AI not all that much time, not really.

And that, of course, is true for a lot of us, across a lot of tasks that we do in our daily life (present activities included for both you and I, by the way). AI can, and does, do the task of reading and writing blog posts, so why should I bother writing this, and why should you bother reading it? We could have waited! Or rather, we could have asked AI to do these tasks for us.

So which tasks should we do, and which tasks should we wait upon, or delegate? Ethan Mollick says that the answer to this question in turn depends upon two other questions: “how good?”, and “how fast?”. How good is (or will be) the AI, and how long will it take for the AI to become that good?

The troublesome bit is that we just don’t know the answers to these questions, because of how rapidly AI is developing. Ethan Mollick develops a better, richer framework in his post, and as always, you should read the whole thing.

But of all of his excellent questions in his framework, my favorite one was this one:

Does it create a learning trap?

That is, choosing to let AI do something for you robs you of the opportunity to learn how to do it yourself. And in the world of learning (which is the corner of the internet where this blog locates itself), why would you want to give up on the opportunity to learn?

So if it is your 5000th presentation, or your 20th book, or your 400th academic paper, well ok, you may want to let AI write it for you. But if it is your among your first efforts in the field, maybe give it a shot yourself?

As with everything else in life, there’s lots of asterisks and conditions and what have you’s. But in my limited experience of having tried to get AI to do things, having tried it yourself first is the best way to write better prompts. Skin something something game and all that.

So yes, absolutely, waiting probably makes sense in some cases. And as the lifetime president of the Procrastination Society, I don’t have much moral standing to say what I’m about to – but the best way to learn is to try and do it yourself first!

On Note-Taking Apps

Google Keep. Microsoft OneNote. Roam. Obsidian. Notion. Readwise.

There are other apps with whom I’ve had, so to speak, even shorter relationships, but the ones above are the ones that I have really and truly tried to use on an extensive basis. Google Keep, as with so many other things Google, is excellent in some ways, but utterly hopeless in others. You’ll never guess what their latest enhancement is, for example. OneNote was very promising, but Microsoft went through a bit of a phase where they had a OneNote app for Windows, and a separate one for Office365, and it just got too confusing for words. Roam was too expensive at 15USD per month, and Obsidian had too steep a learning curve for me. And if you want to talk about steep learning curves, you should try out Notion. Gah.

The latest one that I’m trying out is Readwise, and well, it’s going… ok, I guess. And we all know what that really means, don’t we?

Long story short, none of these have really worked out for me. And that, I suspect, is the case for most of you reading this. There will be some who are true converts and zealots of any one of these, and I envy you. I really do, good for you, really! But whichever one of these you’re selling, I’m not really on the market. And no, that other new new one ain’t for me either, whichever one it is.

And that’s why this article in The Verge really resonated with me:

Note-taking, after all, does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place on your computer, next to email, and Slack, and Discord, and iMessage, and the text-based social network of your choosing. In the era of alt-tabbing between these and other apps, our ability to build knowledge and draw connections is permanently challenged by what might be our ultimately futile efforts to multitask.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian

As always, do go through the whole thing. It is full of fascinating snippets, including the somewhat surprising, somewhat entirely predictable finding that the average time we spend on a single screen before shifting our attention elsewhere was 2.5 minutes. If that seems too long for you, you’re right. That was in 2004. Today’s stats? 47 seconds.

The author of the article goes on to hope (as do some of us, while others are repulsed by the thought) that AI will help us make sense of all of these links that we have been squirrelling away for years. I’m on Team Maybe about this myself. But I really do agree with this bit:

In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might not even be worth trying.
The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian

And that is, in a way, comforting and reassuring. I haven’t failed all these awesome note-taking apps, and they haven’t failed me either. In each of these cases, it just wasn’t meant to be.

The article refers to the works of Andy Matuschak (Google him if you don’t know who he is), who says that the ultimate goal is to think effectively (amen!), and that all of us should really be thinking about two questions.

  1. What practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?
  2. How can I shepherd my attention effectively?

Don’t look to me for the answer to the second of these questions, I have no idea. If you know the answer, help a guy out, will ya? But I do have my own personal answer regarding the first of these questions.

I read a lot. Not as much as some others that I know, and I wish I read more, but I do think I read more than the average person. Some of what I read I find interesting enough to talk about with some people whose opinions I truly value. Some of these conversations end up being friendly arguments, where they challenge my view, and I challenge theirs. Then I have a cup of coffee and think about some of these arguments.

Then I write about it. And after I write about it, I send a draft of what I’ve written to them. Then, if I’m really lucky, we have another argument about the draft I’ve sent them. I think more about this second argument, and refine the draft.

How I would like to tell you that this is how every single post on EFE gets written.

The reality is that all of what I’ve described above happens for maybe one post every month. Those posts, and those arguments stay with me then for a very long time. But the vast majority of the posts you read over here are me reading something, finding it interesting enough to write about it, and well, I write it and you read it.

When the whole process described above works the way it should – that is utopia.

But between living in utopia and not writing about it at all lies a happy medium. Happy not because it is perfect, but because it is attainable. It involves at least one of all those things happening – me reading about something and then writing about it.

So my favorite note-taking app?

It happens to be a blog called EFE. The posts over here are me taking notes on something I’ve read – and that, more than anything else, helps me remember stuff better.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again.

Write.

Write and put it out in the public domain for all to read. Best way to remember something, anything and most everything.

And if you can figure out a way for me to do achieve my utopian process for all the posts that I write, please do tell!

One Sentence and One Sentence Only

This post is a rewrite of an earlier post, but it is worth writing about it again, for two reasons.

First, it is start of undergrad thesis time at the Gokhale Institute. And second, the point of this post helps people think better, which is always and everywhere a good idea.

What is the post about? It is about being able to describe the point of your work in one short sentence. No conjunctions, no punctuation. In one short simple sentence, tell me what you are up to.

What work? Anything! It could be (ahem) a blog post, or an essay, or an undergraduate thesis, or a PhD thesis, or a movie.

Can you summarize it for me in one sentence?

If you can, you are clear about what you want to do in your work. If you can’t, your own thinking about your work isn’t clear enough.

Try it. It is surprisingly difficult to do, even for a blog post.

How would I summarize this blog post – the one you are reading right now – in one sentence?

Learn the art of summarizing your entire work in one short sentence.

If you do decide to do this, you will very quickly realize that it is torture. You will rebel and revolt and say it is not possible. Imagine me with an insufferably smug look on my face, please. And now imagine me telling you that you must do it.

If, after a long time, you come to me and show me your sentence, but then tell me that this isn’t fair, you really need to tell me more, I will graciously and generously let you write an additional four sentences. These now become the sections in your work.

Now describe each section in one sentence.

Now expand each of these four sentences into four other sentences. These now become the subsections of each section.

And so on.

Particularly in the case of academic work, there is an additional tweak that may prove to be useful.

Answer the three whats.

  1. What specific topic are you writing about?
    Whatever your answer, I will ask if you can make it more specific than that. I will ask you this at least thrice. Whatever your answer at the third time of asking might become the topic you wish to research. But as a thumb rule, remember: whatever your topic, it is too broad to be amenable to serious analysis.
  2. What geography?
    Are you analyzing your topic for a specific geography? Could be a locality, a village, a town, a city, a district. Maybe a state. Just about maybe a country, but you’re making me nervous now. If we’re talking continents or the entire world, I congratulate you, but no way are you getting done anytime soon. But as a thumb rule, remember: whatever your choice of geography, it is too broad to be amenable to serious analysis.
  3. What time period?
    Are you analyzing the entire time period for which you have data available? Or only a specific interval? If so, which one? Why? But as a thumb rule, remember: whatever your choice of time period, it is too broad to be amenable to serious analysis.

Armed with your one sentence framework, and with clear answers to the three whats, you will struggle to do your work. Work just is that hard, now what to do.

But without these tricks, you will almost certainly struggle even more.

All the best!

Here’s the old blogpost, and here’s a wonderful link from it.

A Call for Help Re: Substack

What are the pros and cons of moving this blog to Substack?

This blog will forever be free, so I’m not looking to shift in order to monetize anything. But for those of you who have used Substack (and especially for those of you who have used both WordPress and Substack), what can you tell me that the Internet cannot?

Specifically:

  1. In what ways is Substack better, and in what ways is it worse in your experience?
  2. What are the limitations of Substack?
  3. Particularly for those of you who did migrate over to Substack, how complicated was your experience?

Thank you very much in advance!

Blogging Everyday

I try to blog everyday, and as some of my regular readers might know, I don’t always succeed.

Why do I try to blog everyday?

Many reasons, but here are the top three. First, it helps makes concepts clear in my mind. Second, it instils a sense of discipline. Call it rountine, and I might even accept that it has become an addiction, but in this case, I would say it is entirely worth it. And third, my blog has become my note-taking tool. Increasingly, I end up searching my own blogposts regarding concepts I’m sure I’ve come across before. If it was important to me, I am sure I must have written about it.

There are other advantages – I’ve gotten work as a consequence of writing here, I’ve made friends and I’ve met lots of very interesting people. To cut a long story short, there are many, many advantages and virtually no downsides. You don’t get to be as lazy as you’d like to be, it is true, but people tell me that’s a good thing. Who knows, they may well be right.

There are two people I look up to when it comes to blogging every single day, come rain or shine. The name of one of them is likely to be familiar to many of you – Tyler Cowen, of course.

The other is Seth Godin.

I don’t know for how long now, but Seth has been blogging for easily more than fifteen years at least. And when I say he has been blogging for fifteen years, I mean that he has been blogging every single day for those fifteen years (and probably more). I could look up the exact number, but the point in this case ins’t the statistic itself, it is admiration for being able to keep at it for so long. It’s a habit I admire and envy, and it is a habit I aspire to. And like Jessica Hagy the other day, so also with this post. It is a tribute of sorts, and also a way to introduce some of you to bloggers who I read without fail.

Seth has over the years introduced me to authors, introduced me to concepts, taught me fun ways of thinking about stuff, made me rethink simple math, and above all – and I’ll never be able to thank him enough for this – introduced me to good bread (and do read other posts he has written in honor of Poilane). There’s so much more on his blog that trying to create a list is pointless – as with Jessica’s blog, so also with Seth’s, but even more so. Dip in, and see what catches your fancy.

Above all, though, Seth has taught me three things. He has taught me that everything that I do is marketing. Every single thing. Now, I can tell you that this means I’m not a very good marketer, but the good news is that I have one more reason to try and be better at everything I do. But he also has taught me that marketing isn’t a fad, a gimmick or a thing to be sneered at. On the contrary, it is an indispensable skill.

Two, he has taught me to show up every single day. In fact, the phrase “show up” and the word “ship” I will forever associate with Seth. If you are confused about why a marketer is talking about ships, note that we’re talking about the verb, not the noun – and I’ll reiterate my invitation to dip into his blog. I ship a blogpost daily on this blog – or try to, at any rate, purely because I admire his (and Tyler’s) tenacity and gumption. Read what he had to say about this back in 2013, when he wrote his 5000th (yup, not a typo) post:

My biggest surprise? That more people aren’t doing this. Not just every college professor (particularly those in the humanities and business), but everyone hoping to shape opinions or spread ideas. Entrepreneurs. Senior VPs. People who work in non-profits. Frustrated poets and unknown musicians… Don’t do it because it’s your job, do it because you can.
The selfishness of the industrial age (scarcity being the thing we built demand upon, and the short-term exchange of value being the measurement) has led many people to question the value of giving away content, daily, for a decade or more. And yet… I’ve never once met a successful blogger who questioned the personal value of what she did.

https://seths.blog/2013/06/the-5000th-post/

(And as an economist, that second paragraph is so much food for thought!)

And finally, he’s taught me to think daily. This is related to the second point, but this is important enough to be a point all on its own. You see, writing daily becomes a habit if you do it long enough. But even more importantly, you realize very quickly that writing something daily also means having to think daily. And you’d be surprised at how good we all are at going though the day without thinking. If you don’t know what I mean, I invite you to try and write daily.

Thank you for leading by example, Seth, and for showing up everyday.

Write The Harder Version

Ben Thompson writes a lovely (as usual) essay about the latest Meta-Microsoft partnership. There’s a lot to think about and ponder in that essay, but for the moment, I want to just focus on a part of it that appears in the introduction:

That was why this Article was going to be easy: writing that Meta’s metaverse wasn’t very compelling would slot right in to most people’s mental models, prompting likes and retweets instead of skeptical emails; arguing that Meta should focus on its core business would appeal to shareholders concerned about the money and attention devoted to a vision they feared was unrealistic. Stating that Zuckerberg got it wrong would provide comfortable distance from not just an interview subject but also a company that I have defended in its ongoing dispute with Apple over privacy and advertising.
Indeed, you can sense my skepticism in the most recent episode of Sharp Tech, which was recorded after seeing the video but before trying the Quest Pro. See, that was the turning point: I was really impressed, and that makes this Article much harder to write.

https://stratechery.com/2022/meta-meets-microsoft/

When you’re writing about a particular topic, and particularly if you write often enough, you realize that there are two ways to go about it: the easy way, and the hard way. The easy way isn’t necessarily about slacking off – in fact, part of the reason it might be easy to write is precisely because you haven’t bene slacking off for a long time in terms of writing regularly.

Doing so – writing regularly, that is – gives you a way of thinking about what to write – a mental framework that lays out the broad contours of your write-up, a way to begin the first paragraph, and even a nice rhetorical flourish with which to end.

I speak from personal experience – every now and then, I can see the blogpost that will be written by me while I’m reading something. And this is a truly wonderful superpower – the ability to know that you can churn out a somewhat decent-ish piece about something in very short order. Which is why both writing regularly and writing with self-imposed deadlines is on balance a good thing.

But there is, alas, no such thing as a free lunch. The downside of this is that one also then develops the inability to push oneself more. Why bother coming up with a different way of thinking what to write about, and how to go about it? Even if you’ve developed the intuition while reading something that your regular mental framework will do just fine, and it might well be what your audience is expecting from you anyways, you know that you really should be framing it in a different way. Either because that’s really what the subject matter at hand demands, or because you’re somehow convinced that this new, different way will result in a better framing – but you just know it in your bones.

That’s the hard bit: should you then stick to what you know and thump out a piece, or should you take the time to pause, reflect and push yourself to build out a better essay? Should you pursue that contrarian take, even though it might take longer?

And if you have a regular schedule to keep up with, the answer need not necessarily be yes. But I would argue that every now and then, it does make sense to take a step back, allow yourself the luxury of time, and write the more difficult piece instead.

Yes it will take longer, and yes it will be more tiring, but now what to do. Such is life.

All that being said, three quick points about Ben’s essay that really stood out for me:

  1. What is Mark Zuckerberg optimizing for with this move, and what cost to himself and his firm? Why? Weirdly, it would seem as if he is pushing the technology (VR) at the cost of at least the short-term growth of his firm, and he seems to be fine with it. Huh.
  2. Who are likely to be the early adopters of your service, and how likely are they to eventually become your marketers for free is a question that never goes away, but remains underrated.
  3. I’ve never used a VR headset, but even after reading Ben’s article, it becomes difficult to see why this might take off at current costs – and those costs aren’t just monetary, but also about mass adoption, inconveniences and technological limitations. I just don’t get it (which, of course, is a good thing. More to learn!)

Showing Up For Work

I ended up not posting on these pages this past Wednesday.

I’m not proud of it, and I wished I had posted on that day, but let’s talk about showing up for work. The phrase isn’t mine, in the sense that I associate it with Seth Godin. And this practice, of trying to write here every weekday, and post links to interesting Twitter threads and videos over the weekend, is partly because of Seth’s practice of writing daily without fail. And also, of course, due to that other blog that has daily updates, come rain or shine.

And trust me, it is hard to do! I don’t feel quite so bad about not posting for long stretches over the past two years, because there were days where I simply didn’t feel like writing. And I was completely fine with that. But this past Wednesday, it was part laziness, part lots of other things to do, and part logistical issues.

But I should stop wussing around and ‘fess up. These are all excuses, and if I aim to post daily, then failure to post is I not prioritizing this task above all else. Generally speaking, I try to schedule posts a week ahead, and a good Friday is when I have posts lined up all through next Sunday.

But alas, this doesn’t always happen. And so you might see me hunched up over my laptop, a gently sympathetic cup of coffee next to me in a café, typing away furiously to meet my self-imposed deadline of posting by ten am. A bad day is one on which I miss the deadline, and a horrible day is one on which I don’t post at all.

The reason I’m writing this post today, and the reason I’ve spoken at length about my failure this past Wednesday, is because I want to leave you with two messages:

  1. If you write (and preferably post publicly) regularly for long enough, you will reach a stage where it becomes an almost compulsive habit, and that is A Very Good Thing. As Seth himself says, there is no such thing as writer’s block. Just sit and write. Some days will be diamonds and some will be stones, but the point is to first write. Worry about quality later.
  2. If you feel as bad as I do about missing a day, that is An Even Better Thing! But keep at it, and show up for work the next day, and then the day after, and then the day after that. Each day is, as it were, a marginal revolution.

And while you are at it, wish me luck. For today is Friday, and I don’t yet have any posts scheduled for next week.

Ah well, onwards!