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Question: Why Do All My Ideas Turn Out Differently Than I Thought?

28 May

A reader writes:

Every essay I’ve ever written turns into something else entirely. Also, I notice I often sit down thinking I’m going to blog about one thing, and it goes somewhere else. I know this is normal, but is there any way to make it less maddening?

One way to think about ideas (and this is a direct outgrowth of my book) is to remember that they are part of your body. Even though we have this natural separation between mind and body (what Yale psychologist Paul Bloom calls “common sense dualism“), your thoughts are indeed biological.

Ideas live on oxygen and amino acids and blood sugar. They are less “in” your head (as if your skull were some kind of storage facility) but “of” your head. They are you in all your you-ness.

Can we say the same thing about the work?

Sort of.

You can feel very attached to your short story about a 19th century pineapple baron, or feel a deep personal investment in your photo essay about the fallacy of “clean coal,” but the work exists outside your body. It exists on a page or a canvas or a screen, not to mention in the mind of the person who is appreciating the work. Atoms other than You Atoms are involved.

When your work starts to get away from your ideas, that’s good. That’s your creative mind searching for ways to turn that idea—that little slice of you—into a piece of work that another person can understand and relate to.

I would be more concerned about the person who writes in with this question:

I have these ideas that I keep circling around. I turn them over, and look at them from all angles, and review them over and over and over again, but they never go anywhere. Am I crazy?

Is that who you want to be?

In Praise of Freedom, SelfControl and “Outside Strategies”

18 May

I recently reviewed a book for Mother Jones called THE EMPATHY GAP by Loyola University philosophy professor J.D. Trout. Even though I kind of made fun of Trout and his book (TEG contains great information, but has, in my opinion, debilitating tone and voice issues), there is one story from the book that I cannot escape.

It seems that Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport used to have a messy men’s room problem, especially when it came to the urinals. Dudes would go in there and, despite their European sense of history, pretty much wee everywhere.

Dutch airport officials could have launched a public service campaign urging people not to be such inconsiderate slobs. They could have come up with a slogan and a visual grammar for their campaign, and printed a bunch of signs that only a few people would read, and fewer still would act upon.

Instead, they tapped into an insight about male behavior: if we can aim for something when we pee, then we’ll aim for it.

Enter the urinal fly.

By simply putting a decal of a fly in the urinal, airport officials drastically reduced waste. More importantly, they were able to make this happen on a subconscious level. People didn’t have to walk into the bathroom and think, “This time I’m really going to work on my splashback [their term, not mine].” Instead guys just mindlessly aimed for the fly.

This is the genius of the “outside strategy.” You don’t have to make people smarter/better than they are. Instead you design scenarios that extract greater benefits from the cognitive tools they already have.

Which brings me to Freedom and SelfControl, two computer programs that also act like “outside strategies,” only this time for the information-addled attention network in your weak, sagging brain.

For the longest time, if I really (and I mean really, really, really) wanted to get work done, then I would go to the government documents section of the University of Minnesota’s Wilson Library. Why? Because the U of MN doesn’t allow wireless access to strangers. Because I’m unlikely to waste time browsing through microfiche from the Kennedy administration. Because no one else goes down there, which means I can’t even people watch.

Big love to the U of MN and Wilson Library, but you can image how this situation was less than ideal. With Freedom, I get that government documents experience anywhere. Freedom turns off only the networking component of my Mac. I can still use Scrivener (itself worthy of a post) and Word and iCal. But no e-mail, no Facebook, and no [sniff] DCWYTBMA.

To say that it’s changed my life is an understatement. After a few weeks using Freedom, I discovered that the book browsing and the people watching really weren’t the problem. It was the internet. The @#$%! internet. As long as that baby is “off” then I can get a lot done.

Best of all, I don’t have to engage in energy- and time-consuming internal battles. I don’t have to force myself to concentrate or get mad at myself when I can’t. The program does that for me, leaving me free to do what I’m in this game for in the first place: the work.

Question: How Do You Manage Ideas?

18 Mar

A reader writes:

We probably all have a million ideas for things we could write or produce. How do we know which ones are worthy of our time and attention?

I used to write down every idea. I carried around an Ampad Reporter’s Notebook (Gregg ruled, please!) that I special ordered from a business supply company in St. Paul.

amp25280_2_1-1In my idea-hoarding prime, I might go through two or three pads a month. I wrote down everything:

  • Update Smokey and the Bandit but make it so it’s, you know, good
  • Sci-fi story where humans are second on the food chain?
  • Start magazine that makes The New Yorker obsolete

Then, about three years ago, I stopped.

It wasn’t because the ideas were as absurd, vague or grandiose as the above. The reason I stopped was because I was getting much better at having ideas than I was at executing them. I had a storage closet filled with boxes filled with notebooks filled with ideas, but I wasn’t writing or publishing any more than I did when I first started my career.

Now when I have an idea I do the following:

1. Enjoy it

Ideas feel good. They make me smile and feel smart. Good for me.

2. See if the idea can be re-purposed to fit into an existing project

As writers and artists we tend to circle around and inhabit certain themes. Often a new idea isn’t new at all, but rather another way of getting at something you’re already working on. See what happens when you start thinking about ideas not as “new” but as part of an ever-forming whole.

3. If it doesn’t fit, then I say goodbye

I have three books in various stages of completion and precious little time to work on them. It’s a shame to throw out a perfectly good idea or insight, but these books need my help, not my divided attention.

4. If it comes back and it’s genuinely a new idea, then I ask myself if I really want to do the work

I recently had an idea to do a piece on Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Running Man was on cable and I thought, “Look how far this guy has come. And yet he’s still a punchline. Maybe it’s time for a reappraisal.”

But do I really want to do the work it would take to write that story? Do I really want to try to get access? Or watch all of his old movies? Or become well-versed enough in California state politics?

The answer, sadly, is no.

5. If the idea comes back again, and still can’t be re-purposed, then I have no choice but to work on it

[Sighs] All right. If you insist. But you better be worth it . . . .

Ignoring the Libraries of Congress

24 Jan

Later this month, the latest How Much Information? research project will reveal its findings. The last time HMI presented its data was in 2003, when Berkeley researchers determined that print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced five (5) exabytes of new information in 2002.

If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.

This is how HMI attempted to contextualize the five (5) exabytes. You could argue that you would then need another context in order to understand the 17,000,000 books in the LoC, but you get the idea. Here’s a fire hose of data: take a sip.

Whenever I present this tidbit to people, the reaction falls into one of the following general categories:

  1. Information overload isn’t new. The (loosely defined) information that life throws your way has, throughout history, been difficult to take in and understand.
  2. There is no such thing as too much information. All of this data is a boon for curious, engaged people everywhere—go Internet!
  3. My head hurts. Won’t you please make it stop.

Personally, I vacillate between #2 and #3, although I can see the point of #1. Nature, after all, is filled with signs, signals, and cues. I’m sure that there were Cro-Magnon who bummed on the number of animal sounds they needed to recognize.

But I would also argue that what we’re going through now is different because the 37,000 Libraries of Congress are on top of the general complexity of life. And even if you don’t engage with the new LoCs that are created every year, you know they are out there. All that info creates indirect pressure on you, especially if your job is requires mastery of knowledge, insight, making connections, etc.

In my talk I said it was important for every writer and artist to take a personal stance toward all this new information. My bet is when the next HMI comes out it will say that at least seven (7) exabytes of new information are created each year. Unless the upcoming solar storm season brings down the Web, we’re going to have to reckon with the LoCs.

So I’m going to try a little experiment this month. I’m going to ignore it all. I will still search for information, and use information, but I’m not going to worry it. Perhaps one of you fine readers out there will take it upon yourselves to do the opposite. Then we can compare notes, yes?

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