I’ve been feeling a strange tension lately – I’m working on my book, INTROSPECT, and I’ve been feeling stuck – it feels too big. I’ve been tweeting as “usual”, but it doesn’t feel right, tweeting feels too small. So I think the smart move to do is to write wordvomits again. My next few wordvomits will be freestyle essays that are attempts to capture the spirit of what I think should go in the book.
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INTROSPECT is a very ambitious book. Probably irrationally, stupidly ambitious, but it’s something I want to do anyway. I know that I won’t be able to do full justice to the still-somewhat-vague idea in my head, and that I’ll likely have to rework and update the book periodically throughout my life. It’s my white whale. I hope to ship a version of the book that’s acceptable to me in the coming weeks, because I need to get some version of it out of my system so that I can move on with my life.
Interestingly, working on the book has challenged me to confront myself and to confront the material in the book, which is a guidebook to effectively self-confrontation. It’s been frustrating and agonising in several ways, but it’s also been clarifying. While I do sincerely believe that I’ve gotten pretty good at what I call Introspection, there are rough edges that get revealed, imperfections in my process.
Some of this is simply a matter of the “communication is lossy” problem – there are things that are genuinely quite clear to me, that I struggle to convey in simple language that makes sense to other people. This is worth working to make progress on, because while I’ve helped a bunch of people over conversations, being able to help people without being personally present is something that scales. I’ll be able to help a lot more people if I can bridge some of the communication gap with effective writing. This requires a level of writing skill that I am working towards but do not quite have yet. Writing INTROSPECT has made me a significantly better writer already, but still not quite as good as I want to be, to achieve this goal (of helping people get onto a path to resolving their personal issues).
So. Let’s talk about the idea(s) in the book. One of the central themes is “learn project management”, which kind of surprised me, because I don’t really think of myself as a good project manager. Again, it’s all so meta – if I were a really great project manager, I would have finished the book already. Why haven’t I finished the book? Partially it’s because I haven’t scoped it properly. What does it mean to scope something? It means to articulate what the objective is. The more clearly verifiable the objective, the easier it is to tell whether or not you’ve actually met it. (And the less likely you are to waste time and energy waffling around in confusion.) The Manhattan Project and The Apollo Project are two grand examples of projects with very clearly defined objectives: “develop a functional nuclear weapon”, and “land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth” respectively.
Simply writing about this makes me question the objective of my own comparatively tiny project, “write a book about Introspection”. Why am I agonising over it? Writing this down now makes me realise, alright, I haven’t actually defined my desired outcome(s) properly. I don’t just want to write a book, I’ve written multiple iterations of the book and remained dissatisfied. Clearly there are some more specific outcomes that I want that I haven’t articulated. Well, one obvious one is that “I want the book to be really helpful to people”. Helpful how? I want them to, upon reading the book, feel encouraged, more confident, less afraid, have more clarity about how they’re going to face the challenges in their life. I’ve shared bits of the book and I’ve gotten validation from readers that they would find it useful – a lot of the book is based on material that I’ve already written in Twitter threads and spoken over conversations with people, so I don’t doubt the quality of the material, or my ability to produce the material.
But for a long time I didn’t quite like the structure of the material. This became doubly clear to me when I glanced earlier today at one of the earlier versions of the book, which to me looks juvenile, sophomoric relative to what the book currently is. I have in my mind a vision of a well-architected, well-structured book that doesn’t waste time, doesn’t waste space, that in fact artfully uses time and space to deliver searingly resonant material that lingers with the reader. I don’t want people to read the book out of curiosity or courtesy and then forget about it weeks or months down the line. I want fragments of the book to linger with people for life. I don’t think that’s an unrealistic goal, considering the effect that I’ve managed to have on some people with my tweets alone. And here I spot an opportunity for precision: can I expect everyone to care about the book that much? Of course not. No book achieves that. Even the best books of all time are mostly ignored by most people. So I need to have clarity about who exactly I’m helping, and how. And here it’s clear to me that, obviously, I should be writing for a younger version of myself. If I can help that guy, I can help many people.
Alright, let’s now take a glance at the current state of the manuscript. The latest version – which is a selective extract of the previous version – is a short and incomplete 37 pages. I’m now very happy with the introduction, which I think captures the promise of the book very well. What needs to happen next is that the book needs to deliver on that promise. When I started writing this post, I thought I would have to expand on the chapters. But now that I’m writing this, I realise that’s not quite the right approach. I am now satisfied with the promises I’m making, I now need to make sure that I deliver on that promise. And the book does deliver on those promises but in a rather roundabout way, because I haven’t updated it yet. So what I’m going to do over the next few wordvomits is expand on the promises. I make 4 big promises, so I’ll take 4 wordvomits to do it.
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Writing this post also reminded me that I need to make a blogpost for “communication is lossy“. That was useful.