I’ve been trying out this new voice-to-text app on my phone, and it’s pretty fun. It’s not 100% perfect, and it takes some practice to use properly, but I can already see myself using it in the shower to capture my shower thoughts– which will in turn make it into my vomits. So I’m pretty excited about that, that’s probably going to allow me to write a lot more than I’m currently writing.
I’ve also been thinking about how I want to keep better track of all my conversations. I suppose in a large, bulky sense that’s one of the functions that this 1000 word vomits project fulfills– I run out of things to say, and I go hunting for conversations that I’ve had so that I can pull them out of my head and onto pixels. Why do that? Ultimately it’s meaningless, but it feels like being able to do that effectively over and over again will allow me to shorten the gap between thoughts and ideas that accumulate in my head (largely courtesy of other people’s ideas and perspectives, other peopel’s work) and the output that I create. After all, you can’t write what you don’t know, can you? You can try and imagine things, but you’ll have to do your research, and you end up remixing everything that you take in. And everything is a remix.
I’ve been writing word vomits every day for about a week now, and it feels good again. It’s interesting to ruminate on this. I wrote almost every single day in the month of July, and I told myself that I wanted to make August a perfect-streak month of writing every day. But somehow I just didn’t feel like writing, and so I didn’t. And then September came, and I didn’t write very much for the first half of it either. But now I feel like I’m back in the game. And what I’m most proud of is the fact that I’m not beating myself up for my lack of progress in August. It feels like the break was somehow necessary for me to refresh my mind, to regroup.
I still don’t know what I’m going to be writing about over the next year. And similarly, I need to make my peace with that. I need to stop worrying that I need to have some sort of grand design, or grand plan. Moving forward will primarily be a function of me following my inner compass.
Oh yeah, this is what I was thinking about that I wanted to write about. At some point– around 2010 or so– I thought that I wanted to write a personal development blog for people who’re skeptical of personal development. Because I was always skeptical of all the feel-good platitudes and grand proclamations– I was sure that most of the people doing those things were either deluded or farcical, either naive or pretending. And yet I knew that I didn’t want to be depressed and cynical and taciturn. So I tried to come up with my version of self-improvement, but on hindsight that stuff was kind of formulaic. I was just regurgitating the work of others. And in a sense I know now that we will always be regurgitating the work of others– just that the repeated process of regurgitating begins to reveal patterns of choice, and it’s patterns of choice that reveal our unique perspectives and personalities.
I abandoned the project eventually, and I guess I switched to writing about local politics. And then I abandoned that, and have been focused on writing for work– content marketing, problem solving, technical stuff for things that I wasn’t directly concerned about. (Part of a writer’s toolkit requires him learning to care about whatever he’s been tasked with writing. Everything is interesting if you examine it closely enough. At the same time, once you find something tremendously interesting, you still need to figure out what is interesting from the perspective of the reader– because they aren’t interested in you, they’re interested in themselves, and what you and your experiences can do for them. That’s just how life is, and we can’t really escape that fact as far as I can tell– drastic bioengineering type stuff notwithstanding.)
I find myself thinking about TED talks by Anthony Robbins and Brene Brown, and how masterfully they crafted their messages for the TED audience– high-achieving, skeptical people. They got them to empathize with their BS-detectors, helped them agree that they’re all highly-accomplished, and that life still sucks sometimes, and they talked about their own experiences of hardship and frustration, and how they personally overcame it. There’s a lot to be learned from those TED talks, from how those people had the audiences eating out of the palms of their hands.
So where do I go from here? Does the world need another personal development blog? I grappled with that question before, and back then I found myself thinking, well, as long as you’re contributing in some way, as long as you can accelerate the development of what you care about, that’s good enough. So I was thinking that even if I was going to be saying the same thing as everybody else, I was going to be saying it to a group of people who might not have heard it before. I’m not sure if I was completely satisfied with that answer then, but I think I have a better answer now.
The world doesn’t need “another personal development blog”. We can’t and we shouldn’t try to serve the entire world all at once. The only person I can truly, truly serve is me. And the cool thing is that nobody is totally, absolutely unique– I mean, we are, but we all also have at least a few things in common with a few people in the world around us. The magic of communication wouldn’t be possible otherwise. We have at least some things in common with others.
So all I can do is to write the blog that I wish I had encountered. A blog that is sensitive to my challenges, my needs, my frustrations. To light a better way for people like myself. And even then, I think the most important thing is still to serve myself– not to look backwards too much and get obsessed with helping people back there (sorry, JC retainees who keep emailing me), but with helping myself NOW. Writing what I need to read NOW in order to take myself to the next level. This is possible because I am forgetful, and I don’t always carry my most important insights with me. I need to evacuate the truth-in-boxes and internalize them. That’s the goal. That’s the plan.