I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of questions. My first question is to do with these vomits. Why am I writing these? It’s been a while. We’ve come some way. I started out in late 2012, and the calendar now says 2015. We’re almost 3 years into this, we’ve almost been doing this for 1000+ days. [1] It feels like now is a good time to pause and reflect. At 370+ vomits, I’m over 1/3 of the way there. We’ll be crossing the middle point soon. I’d like to cross it strongly. (But weakly will be better than not crossing it at all.)
I first started the word vomit project with the intention of writing a million words. There were a couple of central ideas to it– one was the 10,000 hours rule of deliberate practice. If I’m honest with myself, I know that I haven’t actually been all that deliberate. My vomits aren’t done in the optimal state of mind. So realistically, the word vomits project is actually the precursor to my actual 10,000 hours project. But it’s pretty clear that writing is going to be my life’s work. [2] But yeah, this hasn’t been as deliberate as I’d have liked. But that’s a useful piece of information. I’m learning something about myself, my abilities, my attitude, my standards.
The simpler idea was just this: That I’d be a different person at the end of writing 1,000,000 words. That I would have a completely different writing style, a completely different attitude and perspective towards words. A different relationship with words altogether. I had already witnessed how my writing had changed after writing a few hundred blogposts, and I wanted to really kick that into overdrive. How far can I build upon this? How much can I level up? I wanted to know.
Also, the project seemed novel and like it would give me some sort of legitimacy and street cred. Here things get a bit cloudy. I’m realizing now that the project isn’t as sexy as I thought it would be, and people aren’t nearly as interested in it as I hoped they would be. I stated to myself that I didn’t really care about anything other than my own relationships with my writing, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that hoped I would somehow get catapulted into importance or significance. I suppose I vastly underestimated how that works, but that’s also another good lesson. To earn that sort of legitimacy, you have to consistently deliver really valuable stuff. I’ve written a few things that have taken off– my vomits about “I didn’t do well because I didn’t study”, my analysis of Mean Girls and my rant about productivity apps all were well-responded to. Yet even those successes– which thrilled me at the time when they were happening, because I was getting all this social validation– now somehow ring hollow. They aren’t particularly compelling, they aren’t particularly meaningful. They just entertained a bunch of people for some period of time. I look at Tim Urban’s work with Wait But Why and I realize that’s what I was hoping to do, but I was far from qualified or able at the time. And I’m not sure if I am now. I want to complete this project before I do anything else. So onwards with this. I’m sort of imposing an arbitrary, artificial constraint on myself because otherwise I wander aimlessly. And I want to train myself to commit, focus and complete the things that I set out to do, because I think that will serve me much better in the long run than short-term opportunism. It’s far less exhausting, too. I’ll be able to follow my own schedule rather than rushing and racing after whatever’s current. When everybody zigs, zag, init?
A couple of times I’m sure I’ve mentioned this feeling that I’m feeling now, which is that my writing leads me to a point that makes me realize that writing can be rather superfluous. What I need in my life is action more so than talk. I’ve rediscovered the writings of Aaron Swartz (and by extension, Ray Dalio) and find that they say almost everything I could possibly have hoped to want to say. And that should be a liberating thing, it should mean that I can move on to writing what’s next. (Granted, I really ought to read and internalize those things before anything else. But hey, this is a writing project and I have to keep writing no matter what. That’s just the deal right now.)
So what do I want now? I want to pay attention to how much I’ve changed, for one. I want to see if this project has been worthwhile so far. Well, has it? Before I even decide on that, I need to ask– why? I suppose it’s because I want to know if I should continue or “quit while I’m ahead”. But I don’t want to quit. Quitting is not an option here. I intend to see this through. So I suppose I want to know if I should continue “as-is”, or if I should make some changes to what I’m doing so that I can make better use of my time. So that this project grows in value to me. I don’t want it to be another 600,000+ words of me saying I wish I slept better, and I wish I did my work, and I wish this and I wish that. The time for wishing is long past. I have to confront my realities. So my writing has to reflect that. Contributing to this project is a privilege, and having the opportunity to say absolutely whatever I want is a privilege, too. I don’t want to waste that. I want to make the most of my time.
The project will continue. I will write a minimum of 1/day. And if I have more time after that, I’ll consider either writing more, or reading back to see what I’ve learned, and then refactor things. And I will do the work. I might be echoing myself but we’ll see at the end of it what has changed.
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[1] Which means that I’ve been doing less than 1/day. What’s interesting is– I’ve been doing 1/day for the past week or so now, and it feels like I’m doing too little. But that’s actually more than I’ve been doing all along. It’s interesting to pay attention to this feeling. Because it means that my fundamental feeling for what progress looks like is actually really wrong. I know this intellectually, but it’s good to have an example to feel it with. Now I can return to this if I need to.
[2] I hope writing doesn’t die as a medium before I do. I’m guessing it’ll stick around.