SMALL NEXT STEP

August 3rd, 2022

This post is dedicated to Dr. Emily Balcetis, connect with her on Twitter: @EBalcetis

The process of writing and creating Tinkered Thinking has lead to a great number of things I never expected. Certainly the discovery that occurs with writing has yielded far more than I expected from my own feeble mind, but there are also things about the structure of Tinkered Thinking and the basic premise I outlined at the beginning that has generated things I never expected.

Before Tinkered Thinking it was a dream of mine to write a book of fiction. I was very much on that path and working quite diligently toward it (perhaps too diligently) when I experienced a debilitating intellectual shift. I gave up fiction writing and started teaching myself how to code. But after a number of months I simply missed writing as an activity. I’ve always loved playing with words, swapping them out, rearranging them and marveling at the lyrical magic that can be achieved. So many discoveries in writing are much like picking up a scrambled Rubik’s cube and turning it over and finding one side completely finished, and then turning it over again and finding that the whole thing is somehow solved. Substance seems to arise out of nowhere with words. And it’s been a perennial curiosity: where are all these words? They certainly aren’t on the page. That’s just text. And it doesn’t exist in the air, that’s just sound waves. I suppose they exist in the mind, but what a cop out that feels like: it’s not much different from the hard problem of consciousness; it’s a bit like asking: where is the person in someone’s brain? There isn’t a neuroscientist on the planet that can’t honestly do anything other than answer the question with a shrug. 

In a similar way, certain things emerged from the project of Tinkered Thinking that still have me scratching my head. The Lucilius Parables, Volume I, for example. There was never a plan to write a book. There was just a curious challenge to see if I could write a different short, impromptu essay every day. And when the official “launch” (it had no official launch, it was just me trying to meet a deadline with regards to coding the darn thing), it seemed that 7 days of whimsical non-fiction was perhaps… well I feared it would get a bit tedious. And so I came up with the idea of doing a short story once a week. Once a week? In my prior life as fiction writer, I would spend whole days on single sentences and paragraphs often took weeks. One short story a week was ambitious in a completely novel way that honestly gave me a bit of trepidation. But my debilitating intellectual shift had also equipped me with just the right flavor and quantity of nihilism to say hell with it, and just run with the idea.

It wasn’t until a year later I realized I had quite a pile of stories - and a surprising number of them weren’t half bad. It was only then that I dumped them all into a new word document to see what the word count was, and lo and behold, I realized only then that I had a book.

Who accidentally writes a book? 

The question sounds absurd, and the answer is mundane to an equally ridiculous degree: someone who is more focused on just writing everyday - that’s who.

Turns out there’s a nice bit of research around this phenomenon. Dr. Emily Balcetis has studied motivation, particularly with regards to visual perception, and she’s discovered that performance increases when a person’s focus is more narrow and specific. This occurs, for example, when a sprinter is focusing on a tiny patch of clothing on the runner in front of them. 

But it also happens in a less visual/physical sense. Focusing on writing everyday is far more narrow than trying to focus on writing a book. One is a massive, somewhat incomprehensible task. The other is very relatable, and therefore doable: sitting down for a few minutes to write TODAY, is not horribly difficult. And when this is repeated for enough days in a row, a book simply emerges at some point - by design or by accident.

The moral of the story is that giant projects only proceed by the small next step that we can feasibly concentrate on. In fact, it’s best to try and forget about the finished product as much as possible.

PS. For the record, there is a second volume of Lucilius Parables that will be released shortly, and a third volume is also already written...by accident, of course.

KNOTS

August 2nd, 2022

Where and why does tension exist? In the body we think al tension is bad, likely because many just have too much of it. But no tension would likely be equally negative, just in different ways. In the complete absence of tension we would end up doing nothing. Without the tension of hunger, or the need to connect with another person, we’d all likely become so enlightened that civilization would come to a halt. Tension, and the knots we traditionally think of as bad, are necessary in order to move forward. It’s similar to the way that walking or running is really an act of throwing ourselves out of balance by subtly falling forward.

Another way to think about it is how knots can be important structurally. For example, on an old sailing ship made of rope wood and sail, knots were fundamental. Knots held the whole thing together, and without the knots, it was just a pile of rope, wood and sail that would go nowhere.

Our bodies are similar. There are tensions designed into its structure that allow it to function properly. But we’ve also evolved not to feel tension unless something has gone awry. Perhaps in such a case it should be given a different name, though the semantic malapropism is forgivable because it’s so intuitive - when something is wrong with a muscle it quite literally feels like a knot has been tied inside of it.

But a semantic malapropism can garner a meaning that propagates backwards. We can come to think of all knots as bad, which is a pretty big mistake. Knots can be incredibly useful as long as they are thoughtfully placed.

It’s perhaps worth stretching the analogy a little further and extending it beyond the body and into the mind. We all have emotional and mental hangups. And a hangup is quite a lot like a knot in the body. It’s useful to wonder: is a mental or emotional hangup a good thing? Perhaps its a short term way of dealing with some event or another unfortunate whim of life. Perhaps it holds things together in a time when otherwise such things would fall apart? And do the knots stay tied longe than they are useful? Are there lingering knots in body and mind that if finally untied are shown they no longer hold anything together?

DANCING & DICTATING

August 1st, 2022

Left to our own devices with a challenge wholly within the bounds of our own agency, we can become benevolent dictators - controlling our own actions, deciding how to proceed, pivoting on the whim of discovery and progress.

But when paired with another person, or a team, we are thrust into a different kind of game, requiring a different kind of agency.

With a solitary task, a new discovery often inspires a quick assumption about its meaning. This is something we can test, investigate and iterate on. But when others are involved we don’t necessarily react with the same investigative pliability. Nor often do we even realize that our interaction with others is a different kind of game, one to get better at and apply the same kind of iterative, curious testing. No, with other people we assume rigidity. We are quick to grow cold, bitter, and pass judgement.

Strange that we don’t do the same when locked in solitary concentration. Certainly frustration can and does arise when we are left to our own devices, but it’s a much quicker road to walk in order to discover that the frustration is our own doing, and not the animated design of some inanimate project. (Perhaps this is why coding can be so bloody frustrating in the beginning… because a computer seems more like a living thin than an inanimate object that we manipulate)

The project of others is not one of dictating, as how we often approach it - no, when it comes to others, be they family, friends, coworkers, strangers, enemies and allies, it’s more like dancing. It’s a matter of accepting the movements of others as part of the game, and reacting in a way that isn’t acquiescent, but complimentary - with an edge. Most teams are imperfect and as a part of such teams we seek to push the team in a certain direction that is more in line with how we’d steer if the whole damn project were our own. But this betrays what it means to collaborate and work well as a team. It’s perhaps universally safe to assume that any team could benefit by having it’s weakest aspects addressed and taken care of. Sometimes this is the most menial and mundane of task, and sometimes that means stepping away from the desired role of a leader in order to make sure the boring chores are done. 

The true teammate is a chameleon - the person on the dance floor who can partner up with anyone, of any skill level and make both look fantastic. The teammate adjusts to the needs of the team on the fly, recognizing that the project at hand is better handled by the team if the question of how to best integrate the team is first and always addressed. The best team mate is a kind of leader who can even recognize when it’s time to step off the dance floor while someone else thrives in the spotlight.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: INSPIRATION HACKER

July 31st, 2022

A bullet sliced the skin of Lucilius’ shoulder, but he paid it no mind as he ran as fast as he could. The edge was nearing as bullets cascaded past him all around. He strained for every ounce of speed from his legs as he vaulted off the edge, reaching as far forward as he could.

Below, the tracks rushed toward him and then blurred as the train emerged from the tunnel, hurtling forward. Lucilius smacked into the roof of the train, instantly tumbling back as the immense speed of the train ripped forward beneath him. He scrambled for a hold, his hands flailing. A few fingers caught an edge and the instant hault wrenched tension all up his arm and Lucilius cried out. But he was alive, and he quickly ignored the pain and breathed as he held on. It was only a moment as he heard the whir of blades, even with the wind rushing past him. He looked back just in time to see the helicopter emerging over the ledge he’d lept from, it’s Gatling gun beginning to spin again.

Lucilius let go, letting the wind slid him back, and he fell between cars just as bullets began peppering the train’s skin with holes. He fell onto the connection knuckle and it was only the hydraulic break line that caught him from falling into the blur of track below.

All around him the train’s skin was blistering with pops as bullets tore the metal apart. For a brief moment Lucilius considered the tracks below that he’d almost fallen on to. The helicopter would follow the train, even if it couldn’t see him. But the train was moving too fast, there was no way he could survive, tumbling forward beneath the speeding train.

He stood and wrenched the door to the car open and stumbled in as beams of light flicked on within the car from holes punched in from bullets. And then the spray stopped. 

Lucilius tried to listen, guessing the helicopter was angling for a view of him, and as he listened his eyes focused, and slowly he recognized what he was looking at. He rushed forward and unbuckled a giant black pelican case, flipped back the lid and there it was, perfectly tucked into grey foam.

A faint smile began to creep it’s way into Lucilius’ face. He looked up hearing the sound of the helicopter and guessed it had veered around in front of the train, perhaps to take out the engine and stop it.

Just as the Gatling gun began to spin, Lucilius heaved himself up the last wrung on the ladder, getting a clear view of the helicopter out in front of the train. He reached back and swung the rocket launcher up onto his shoulder, bringing his eye and the helicopter in line within the launcher’s eyepiece and pulling the trigger…

“More coffee Lucy?”

Lucilius snapped out of his creative reverie. “Huh?”

“Coffee?” The waitress said with a southern twang. Then she said “Oh crap. Lucy, I’m so sorry, I always try to come check on you when you’re not writing, but you were thinking up one of your movies, weren’t you?”

Lucilius smiled. “It’s ok, and yes, I’ll have more coffee.”

The waitress frowned. “Leave it to me to ruin a brilliant movie that might have been.”

“Oh don’t be ridiculous,” Lucilius said. “It’ll come back to me.”

The waitress looked unconvinced, and she kept her pause, as though to impress upon Lucilius that it was a serious matter that she was giving due gravity. 

“I promise I’ll pick my timing better,” she said as she refilled the cup of coffee. “I just loveddd that last show you wrote. I was so surprised by the ending. Best season finale. Ever!” She nearly squealed.

Lucilius laughed nervously. “That’s very sweet of you, thank you.”

“Well there’s some more coffee for ya to get that brilliant mind going again. Anything else I can get ya?”

Lucilius shook his head.

“All good.”

The waitress left him be, and Lucilius sighed and sat back, looking at the blank paper on the diner table, the pen laid across it, uncapped. He thought about picking it up, he should pick it up. Just let the words write themselves. It always works, he thought to himself. And then, just as the neurons in his motor cortex began their signaling cascade to activate muscles in his arm and hand to reach out for the pen, they stopped. Synapses in mid fire froze, like explosions rendered in resin. The cafe was instantly silent, no one moved.

“Geez is this guy ever going to write anything worth reading. Hooo-leee.”

Lucilius had hit pause on the simulation, bored out of his mind with what he’d been watching. He rolled his eyes, sat back and sighed.

He stretched his neck from side to side.

“Ok, computer, scrap that one. Boot up a fresh simulation, fast-forward 13.787495837398 years and….

…I don’t know…”

Lucilius looked off in the distance for a few moments, bored and unimpressed.

“Let’s…. Remove two grains of sand from Daytona Beach at random, then fast-forward a few decades and see if he’s writing anything worth chucking at my producer…”

BIG EYES & BLINDERS

July 30th, 2022

An optimal challenge is not too difficult, but not too easy. Each day there’s the challenge of what we each do - how much of it we’re going to tackle. How many things are on the back burner isn’t as important as how many of those things we allow ourselves to consider during a single given day.

Trying to tackle every chore, project and obligation in a single day is a recipe for failure. But even thinking about doing that is a recipe for failure. There’s a paralysis that comes with zooming out too far and thinking about everything that needs to be done. We can suffer from having eyes that are bigger than our days; as the saying often goes with stomachs and biting off more than we can chew. 

There’s a mental equivalent, and the warning might go like this: don’t consider more than you can actually get done. A wasted day due to paralysis can quickly become a second day wasted by the same paralysis, and before long, inactivity becomes it’s own bad habit.

We need something like a mental set of blinders. Something to block off the line of projects the back-burner so that we have left waiting in front for the day is a manageable task that can be knocked off the list. Big eyes need to be narrowed if there’s to be any hope of chewing through the backlog, because work is so much slower than imagination.

If anything it’s the imagination that causes that paralysis, and the mental blinders are really a kind of gurdel for the imagination.