I just read this post at Scott Adams’s blog. In it, he argues that ideas have no value because stupid-sounding ideas can work well and that what really matters in any case is the execution of the idea.

I won’t dwell on this being a contradiction since his argument that ideas have no value IS an idea which he is presenting as having value. Instead, let’s look at why his attempts to show that ideas have no value are all wrong.

Movies are good or bad because of execution, not concept.

The problem with this statement is that a huge chunk of execution in movies is inherently ideas-based. Executing a good script is about assembling a thousand good ideas together. What should be the subject? How do we establish the characters? What should she say here? How does the plot twist?

Scott picks a few implausible-sounding ideas for a successful creative project and says that the execution is what made them succeed. But the execution he points to is comprised almost entirely of other, more detailed ideas.  “A stick comic,” sounds dumb. “A stick comic put online and aimed at the massive and eager-to-love-and-share geek culture that values wit and humor above drawing ability,” sounds much less dumb.

Moving on to another argument.

Even outside of the movie realm, ideas generally have no economic value whatsoever, except in rare cases such as when a patent is issued.

How about the idea to bring Steve Jobs back to Apple? Or what about the idea that Coca-Cola should be in a unique bottle to verify its authentic product from the glut of impostors at the time? I think that the assembly line was a pretty good idea. Ronald McDonald was a good idea, at least for McDonald’s bottom line.

I’ve long been fascinated by the common human illusion that ideas can be sorted into good and bad, when all experience shows this not to be the case.

It is a good idea to wash your hands after touching raw chicken. It is a bad idea to touch an open flame. It is a good idea to be polite to your friends. It is a bad idea to bet the mortgage on black.  Human experience (a collection of ideas, by the way) shows the exact opposite of what Scott is claiming here.

You’d be hard pressed to come up with an idea so bad that it couldn’t succeed with the right execution.

I can do that, easily.

Here’s a bad idea that could never succeed: a terribly produced, poorly acted, depressing, generic, impersonal, and boring movie about the Titanic that costs a billion dollars to make.

He’s closer to right here, though:

And it would be even harder to imagine a great idea that couldn’t fail if the execution were left to morons.

But boy does he undercut his main argument. If ideas have no value, why do we need anything other than morons? In fact, shouldn’t morons have an equal shot at doing something great since their lack of idea-power is immaterial?

The truth is that good ideas are incredibly valuable. The problem is, we’re often wrong about which ideas were the good ones until we can better appreciate the details.

Frustration is the nemesis of self-discipline. With enough frustrating diversions and disappointments, even the most determined people will find themselves needing to recover their resolve or, more likely for us mere mortals, throwing our hands up and walking away.

And yet, some people seem more succeptable to frustration than others. Many have hair-trigger tempers while some have an almost otherworldly patience and tolerance in the face of obstacles.

What is the secret of the person with such a high tolerance for annoyance and inconvenience? Why do others of us blow up at the slightest things?

Getting Frustrated

If we think about what it’s like to be frustrated or to witness someone become frustrated, we’ll realize the important factors:

• something interferes with our expected experience or our intended course of action
• depending on the kind of person, this may be immediately frustrating or not
• even the most patient people are driven to frustration after repeated or protracted antagonizing events
• this seems to accelerate–the same person will react more severely to the same event when already irritated than they would in a less agitated state

If you just imagine a typically frustrating scene, these characteristics are easy to see. Waiting to be seated at a restaurant, for instance, is always worse when they set your expectation lower than it turns out to be. Some patrons grow more frustrated more quickly than others, but everyone will grow irritated after being told incorrectly multiple times that they are about to be seated without it ever happening. And this will all be even worse for the person waiting in line who is dealing with something else that is stressful–an uncooperative child, low blood-sugar, or the time-pressure of having somewhere to be after the dinner.

Breaking It Down

So if those are the factors in our frustration, what are the components? What’s actually happening?

1. We have an expectation for how things are going to be
2. We exert ourselves, undergoing some measure of discomfort, in order to gain greater benefit given the expected future state
3. Things turn out differently for whatever reason
4. Our discomfort now might go unrewarded, we face a net loss in our happiness
5. Until we reinterpret the events and reset our expectations to account for the new balance of discomfort, work, and expected payoff the new situation presents to us, we find ourselves in a position of expected unhappiness compared to where we were recently
6. But if the target moves again before we can formulate a new reason for tolerating the discomfort, our rational self gets worn down.
7. If this continues to compound, we become severely frustrated, possibly even quitting the situation or task

There are several studies that suggest that our willpower is a resource that depletes when used–like gas in a car. When we test our patience or discipline, it runs low and then needs some time or some other method of recovery.

In any case, it seems like persisting in the face of extreme frustration is an uphill if not impossible battle. We can push forward, but taking a break, a deep breath, or some time away from the problem seems to be the only way forward once a certain level of frustration has been hit.

Perhaps frustration is the feeling that comes from being low on will-power fuel in a hurry, and maybe the tendency to quit when super-frustrated is a kind of safety-mechanism to prevent us from running critically low on whatever physiology-gasoline is at work.

Fighting Back

Whether it’s hardwired for us to quit or not, it’s clearly better to just avoid getting frustrated than to try to tolerate frustration, at least in most of our daily activities (the exception being something like athletics, potentially).

Based on what I spelled out above concerning the nature of frustration, it seems like the best ways to avoid it would be to lessen each of the factors responsible by counteracting them:

1. Have less specific expectations when possible
2. Be more willing to embrace the possibility of the unknown and unexpected
3. Try to find some pleasure in the work itself, not just in the payoff
4. Practice framing experiences in a positive light to more easily reinterpret changing circumstances into something beneficial
5. Respond to rapid-fire changes and obstacles by slowing down when possible as these will be more likely to red-line your frustration level which, as I’ve suggested, is an accelerating process likely to spiral quickly
6. Make an effort to reduce the likelihood of something unexpected happening (ie. proper planning, contingencies, etc.)

I’ve found that being aware of some of these ideas helps me diffuse potentially frustrating situations, and now that I’ve thought through it more thoroughly, I’m eager to try to take that further. Do you find this consistent with your experiences?

Up until now, my writing has been governed by whim, almost entirely. I have written when I’ve felt like it, when a thought struck me, about whatever seemed interesting enough at the moment, and was satisfied with my writing when it felt right.

Having decided to develop writing as a practice, I can’t just wait around for the mood to hit me, so I need a new, more reliable source of motivation and a better method for picking my subject matter as well.

Motivation and Purpose

My main impetus for writing right now is as a tool to aid in thinking. Writing helps me solidify my thoughts, strengthening my understanding while at the same time exposing the rough edges, gaps, and room for additional exploration. So as a tool for deepening and reinforcing what I’ve already got, it is tremendous.

Moreover, writing is my favorite way to develop new thoughts. It gives me an easy way to capture disparate ideas, connect them to each other, examine them more closely, and ultimately synthesize it all into something I can hang on to and revisit later.

It’s also a creative and social outlet. A way to have fun, to make friends, to tell stories, to share with others and gather feedback.

Picking a Topic

So those motivations also serve as a touchstone for what topics to treat and the priority to assign to them.

If something is problematic and I need to think it through more deeply, it makes for the best topic. That’s what these past three posts have been for me. If something has me struggling or stuck, writing about it is one of my best weapons for making progress and gaining ground.

Ideas that I’ve given a lot of thought and about which I care deeply make for the next most useful choices. My interest and motivation on those issues is high, and getting clearer about my thoughts and discovering the open ends will help move me out of the same few bits of ideas and evidence and into deeper examination and further learning about those issues.

Topics and ideas which are interesting but to which I’ve given less attention round out my priorities at the moment. These are questions or issues that I’d like to explore but haven’t done much thinking or reading about, or which are still relatively new or unknown to me.

There are also plenty of topics that are less important to me but probably easier and more fun. If I find something funny, irritating, or what to make some small commentary on something, for example.

I’ll be keeping running lists of ideas for writing that fall into these categories, and if the muse is absent, I can just go to one of the higher priority items and get to work on that.

Not Entirely Muse-Independent

The process of determining the organization of my writing, the style, and other literary elements is one that is going to have to remain the domain of my whim for at least a little while. So instead of letting that be a big hurdle, I’m willfully permitting myself to write dryly and simply just to ensure that I’m at least accomplishing my primary goal of practicing writing and working through problems and thoughts. If I let myself be too concerned with that as of now, I might find myself getting nothing done at all.

As I get more practiced, I’ll be able to spend more time and attention on making the style better and the presentation of the content more interesting. For now though, I just want to focus on developing a strong habit of using a good process to think, organize, and communicate something of utility and substance.

In my previous post, I described my neurotic writing process, but really, it was an experiment. I wanted to write something and observe the process I went through. Writing about the writing process itself was a natural approach.
I stared at the blank cursor, and then typed, “I stare at the blank cursor.” That sparked me to write a few more sentences, so I wrote, “This gives me some momentum and sparks me to write some more.”

I ended up simultaneously observing and describing my flawed writing process, and afterward, I looked at what I’d written and tried to separate the wheat from the chaff. In all that noise, what were the useful steps that allowed me to move on bit by bit toward something I was happy with?

Cutting out the noise and clutter as best I could, here is what I found.

1a/1b: Topic and Muse

The foundation for the whole process was either finding some inspiration to build off of or picking a topic that I wanted to dig around in to find something interesting.

In either case, whether I began with a topic in mind or on the other hand had some interesting germ spring to mind care of a muse, I had to do the other side of that coin next. The energy of the muse needed to be anchored to a topic, or I needed to render some essential spirit out of the raw material that was the subject I’d picked.

2: Think and capture thoughts

Next comes a kind of hybrid free-flowing of ideas and capturing those ideas. Blowing bubbles and catching them at the same time without bursting them. Forward momentum mixed with self-awareness and reporting, recording what was rushing by.

I think my tool here is a kind of outline/free-writing hybrid. My analytical mind usually leads the way, and this lends it self to outline form, but excitement and associations start to flow quickly, and I just type them out wherever I am on the document. It devolves from an outline into a quasi-organized mess, but it turns out to be a more interesting mess than I could have ever forecasted and framed up at the beginning.

As you move on from this step, you’ll find other interesting thoughts and connections. I found it helpful to circle back around and add to this throughout the process.

3. Get clear on why I want to write

It’s not always the same. It may be mostly for me (exploring a subject such as the writing process) or mostly for someone else (trying to win an internet argument, making a joke, looking for link bait).

While it does vary, there’s some consistency in much of my reasons why, and in any case, there’s going to be a lot of overlap. In an internet fight, I’m trying to educate someone else while also giving into to the viceral joy of an internet fight. When I’m writing to help clear up or expand my thinking, I might as well make the writing interesting and clear enough to where someone else might benefit from it or feel invited enough to correct me on some point if they see it for correcting.

In any case, knowing the why is very helpful for the next steps.

4.Narrow the focus

Back in the second step, I let my brain run free. It’s a lot of fun and turns up a ton of fertile material I want to explore, but at some point, I need to bite off some smallish chunk to examine and explore in greater detail. This is where pre-writing starts to transition into writing, I guess.

5. Organize the thinking. Frame the narrative.

Working from the exploded outline from the second step,  I read it over and pick out the parts that are relevant to my new, narrower focus and frame that up tightly. Now I know what I want to say.

Initially, I was tempted to launch into writing at this point, but I think that would be a mistake, at least for me. My thinking brain does a nice job of laying things out for itself, but I don’t think it’s good at telling stories, and as it turns out, stories are what I’m interested in writing–both for my own long-term benefit and for whatever audience I have in mind.  I need to bring it to life if it’s going to sink in. And besides, a big part of this process for me is making my thoughts accessible to others for mutual benefit. Stories are the essence of communication.

So I switch gears and sketch out a narrative structure for contextualizing and enriching the abstract and analytical stuff.

6. Finally, write.

This is still kind of a black box for me which makes me think I have a lot to learn and a lot of growing to do here. For now, I let me knack for writing take over. I just write my story based on the frameworks for the logic and the narrative that I’ve built.

And that’s it.

Comments about my new process

Conceptually, my new process is about segmenting distinct types of mental work that need to be done, letting each part have proper attention in proper sequence rather than fooling myself into thinking I can conjure up the final product ex nihlo.

This being my first attempt at using the new process, I found it more pleasurable and more productive by far. While I think this is better writing per minute (a metric unit, I’m pretty sure) and hope it will lead to better absolute writing as well, the process on the back end has been perhaps even more rewarding. Giving myself structure and freedom in proper turns to think and then explore that thought might be the biggest gain of all.

Though I found this exercise to be very useful, I’m aware that I am reinventing the wheel. This has been covered before and covered well. Still, self-discovery and playful exploration are things I value. It helps me to learn more deeply when I blaze my own trail. If my added perspective is useful for you too, even better.

And useful as it was, there’s still more to explore here. For instance, my final step in the process, the writing step, is deliberately oversimple. I tend to over-qualify and self-censor and get tripped up if I worry about the quality of my prose, so for the time being, I’m going to just leave that step as the black box that it is to avoid getting bogged down and trust myself, leaving the project of improving my prose for another day.

Also, I’m not bound to this approach, and it’s probably not suited to many types of writing. Some days I’ll want to just fire something off. I probably wouldn’t write fiction this way, for example.

As always, any and all thoughts are welcome. Thanks for reading.

-Chuck

I am not an efficient writer, and it’s because I’ve never deliberately practiced writing. My knack for writing has allowed me to do well enough in most situations, but the process is always a disaster and the product is often inferior to what it could be.

My typical writing process, one that I imagine many share with me, is as follows. First, I stare at a blank document and its blinking cursor. As I stare, there’s a force behind my eyeballs growing, an unfocused mental busyness as I search for how I might start, what I might write about. Quickly I become aware of the blinking cursor, aware of the mental strain itself, and aware that I’ve yet to accomplish anything. I process those thoughts and return to trying to start writing, forming a loop that repeats several times.

This phase of the production process can last several minutes until, in frustration, I’ll write a minimal and safe sentence that at least points in the direction I’d like to go in. That bit of momentum usually earns me a few more sentences, sometimes even a couple of paragraphs before I stall out again.

This second stalling is probably a fear of commitment because, while a simple sentence and the momentum that follows gets words on the page, there’s no reason to expect that those words will be interesting ones; there’s even less reason to think they’re the best ones.

I read what I have so far. I read it again. Then I either delete it, wordsmith, or sometimes I’ll suffer neither compulsion and I can keep writing.

Once those initial anxieties are overcome, I don’t struggle with paralysis anymore. I can get most of my thoughts down quickly after those initial hurdles. However, once I shift to thinking about style, clarity, and efficiency, my insecurities as a writer pipe up.

I’ll read what I’ve written, trim the many needless words, sentences, and paragraphs, question most of my stylistic choices. I think about how the decisions I’m making in my writing are all ad lib. There’s very little craft to my writing approach, so like an amateur chess player, I have to think through each move. And like a child chess player, I often take moves back. And like a compulsive and anti-social perfectionist child chess player, I take forever to make moves, often take moves back, usually settle on the first thing I tried anyway, and eventually stick with that final choice out of fatigue more so than confidence.

With enough neurotic fine-tuning, I usually can produce something I’m proud of though I suspect that after enough effort has been expended on anything, pride kicks in as a sort of defense-mechanism for the ego.

There’s some variability in all of this, of course, depending on the purpose of what I’m writing, but the interesting point for me is that there is a process to my writing, and that means, as with all processes, that it can be analyzed, improved, rehearsed, and optimized into a better process.

As with many opportunities for growth, this one seems entirely obvious despite having escaped my practical awareness until now. To smooth out my writing process, to gain confidence and to begin to enjoy the process of writing more, I need to practice writing, just like I would practice any other skill.

It’s hard enough to do something valuable in this world, but sometimes the barriers, paperwork, rules, and formalities of getting something done can be beyond frustrating. And if you’re already struggling, it can kill the project.

This clip from The Wire shows a man who’s recently been released from prison. He’s never had a normal job or run a normal business, but he’s in the process of trying to turn things around and trying to help his neighborhood in the process.

I like to watch TV on my own schedule. I do this with a mixture of DVR, streaming from the web, and rentals. This is increasingly common, now practically mainstream, for people to watch shows weeks after they air or even years after they are canceled.

The trouble is, it’s hard to talk with people about shows when you’re each watching it on a dramatically different schedule. It’s harder to even know to strike up a conversation on the topic if it’s not something in the public consciousness in real time the way a show like Lost, for example, is right now. Continue Reading »

Panic is an immanent sense of hopelessness. Because it involves hopelessness, panic tends to discourage reasonable effort.

Frustration is a valid emotional response to the failure of a given cause to produce an expected action.

Discouragement is the result of repeated or stubborn frustrations. Often, these frustrations generalize.

Perseverance is the quality of resisting panic, dispelling frustration, and avoiding discouragement altogether.

The purpose of complaining is to get someone to validate that what you are doing is hard. It’s an emotional and mental outlet and a sanity check all at once.

And that’s okay in some contexts, when it’s a controlled release that is prefaced and followed by a general sense of perspective.

Where it becomes cancerous is when it seeps across boundaries–when we start trying to gain empathy from the wrong people or for the wrong reasons.

Complaints in business work the same way. This article at Online MBA highlights how that same principle applies to patronizing a restaurant which is interesting because I was having this conversation about complaining with some friends last night in a restaurant.

We don’t want to hear about how hard the waiter’s job is or why the food came out late. We go out to dinner to escape problems, not to vicariously share in the problems of the person we are paying good money to.

Trying not to complain is noble but hard. Picking when, why, and to whom you complain does a lot to neutralize the poison and is eminently more easy to do.

It’s fashionable in the popular discussion about business to talk about “fail early, fail fast, and fail often.” This is a more attention-grabbing way of saying that when you’re trying something new, mistakes are inevitable, so there’s no sense in being overly cautious.

I’m currently involved in a “thrown into the deep end” kind of project. I signed up for it for exactly that reason. I knew it would involve leaving my comfort zone, that it would be difficult, and that the steep learning curve would give me the challenge I need at this point in my career. Continue Reading »