I watched the video on youtube and it triggered some thoughts.
1: Somebody recorded and replayed his recording of his voice over and over again until the voice was essentially unrecognizable. When you do that, you start hearing the idiosyncrasies of the recording device and the room of the recording rather than what was actually recorded. Somebody did this on youtube too, and you can watch it here.
2: As pointed out in everything is a remix, most if not all artists begin by doing derivative work. You need to learn the language of your domain before you can communicate more interesting and complex thoughts. This reminds me of my experience learning guitar. Learning chords and scales and practicing basics makes learning guitar solos way easier than if you try to do them from scratch.
3: Michelangelo didn’t try to develop an original style, he just tried to make good art. He couldn’t help but be Michelangelo. So aim to make good art. Don’t bother trying to capture your “essence” or your style or whatever you call it- it reveals itself as the things you can’t really help doing when you’re doing great work. Aim to be prolific instead.
4: physical, biological life could also be described as remixed. There’s a process of iteration and selection. There’s a sense of development, even if there’s no such thing as development. A bull or a cat is somehow more interesting than a fly, even though both are equally valid expressions of reality. People with skills are more interesting and attractive than people without.
5: Every single thing that we can do- touch our nose with a finger, have a conversation using the spoken language- everything is a skill developed through practice. Paraphrased from: Mastery?
Remix as much as possible
When I put all of this together while ruminating on the central question of Lifegame- how should I spend my life while I still have it- I realize that I should be creating and remixing as much as possible.
This isn’t a new thought. But I somehow feel more compelled to do it. If you want to experience maximum richness, you have to be remixing intensively. Be it piano or words. You can compound your learning, so you might as well.
Make things accessible
Something I’m learning from work and from just… having written so much, is that if you care about things spreading as far and wide you have to make them as accessible as possible.
You have to get people’s attention from the start, with a good headline in writing, or a good question or statement in a conversation. You have to set up every point and insight, as far as possible, in a way that’s compelling and worth passing on. I have inadvertently done it before in the past with some of my angry writing about Singaporean politics, but even then it wasn’t done very cleverly, deliberately. The point is almost always to provide other people with tools that they can then use for their own purposes. Create and provide samples that they can use in their own mixes.
Word vomits aren’t super conducive to this. They’re too bulky and disorganised. The point of a word vomit is to “run fat”- to take big messy bucket of mind-lego and pour it onto the floor and see what you can put together. You don’t really know what you want or what you’re going to get until you’re at least midway through it, and even then it might be just a primitive, clunky Mach 1 prototype of what you want.
But in the long run, I think once I’m done with all my word vomits, I’m going to focus on reducing all that fat into the simplest, most accessible things I can. I might try to capture everything in aphorisms. Or maybe something in the middle. Maybe I’ll do something like “3 paragraphs”, or “10 sentences”. I don’t know yet. I’ll probably change my mind about this dramatically as I go forward, so there’s almost no point whatsoever in speculating here.
Checkpoints and milestones along the vomits
One of the things my boss talks about is ‘calibrating expectations’- how everything you’re interested in or set out to do is vague to a degree you do not realize until you make it precise. When you start on a project, you need to know that you don’t know what you don’t know. You need to know that you will likely be very wrong about what the intent and purpose of the project is, and you’re going to have to recalibrate that. (One of the important/useful things to do is to seek out people who’ve already done it, and ask them what you’re missing or overlooking. I find myself wondering now what prolific writers have learned from the act of writing excessively. But I’m also fairly certain that there’s no significant downside, so I’m almost eager to be surprised.)
I think one of the things I definitely hadn’t anticipated with high-resolution (meaning I had a vague idea that this would happen, but I’m finally experiencing it for real now) is that I would run into administrative/bookkeeping type problems. I’ve always been a shitty bookkeeper. My approach to anything is to take a random walk. This is highly unsystematic. It has some benefits- I tend to be wittier, quicker on my feet, likelier to discard assumptions to try new things, etc, but I’m also less likely to get very far with anything. Especially things that require rigorous attention.
So I think as I get better at doing word vomits, and as I do more of them, I’m going to learn the virtue of being systematic and consistent. I don’t do it for most things because I can’t be arsed to, because it doesn’t really matter to me whether I do things properly or not. But writing, that’s something I’d like to see done properly. Writing should be good. And for writing to be good, the writer doing the writing has to develop a system around it. There’s no other way around it. Every great writer was prolific. And to do great writing that inspires people, you need to have discipline.