Why it’s so difficult for me to write
Writing is hard for me and that’s exactly why I want to do it.
Why?
Because it’s literally the medium (outside of video and music) that can convey ideas, convince souls, and move mountains.
I picked up Marshall McLuhan Unbound off of a recommendation from David Perell and the opening line hit me:
The printed word is an arrested moment of mental activity.
Something about this is just so enigmatic. It’s huge. Writing down what you’re thinking right now irons out the ideas you have, and eventually will allow you to share that idea with others. That’s part of the human experience, no?
Nat Eliason and doing hard things
This is a bit of a reflection on why it’s so hard to write (for me). I was reading Medley 267 from Nat Eliason. And highlighted the following quote.
I want to write, to get better at it, to share my ideas and thoughts with people that care. But there seems to be a jam that doesn’t allow me to write them.
In retrospect, I may have made the project bigger than it should have been. I think about the overhead of posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Maybe the solution is just to write on Medium, and hit publish.
It may not be fully proofread, but it’ll at least get a small chip hacked away with every swing of the axe.
David Perell and how to turn notes into stories
David, in a separate e-mail explains his note-taking, integration, and e-mail writing process (the e-mail is a weekly e-mail he calls Monday Musings). He writes (on his process):
Quick Notes. Writing comes alive when you capture details. But when you’re doing things, you want to minimize the time you spend on your phone. Therefore, I have a page where I capture 2–5 word notes that will spark my memory whenever I sit down to write extended paragraphs.
Paragraph Notes: 1–2 times per week, I sit down at my computer to capture the highlights of my experiences. I write about anything that resonates without regard for how useful it will be down the road. Whenever a bullet point resonates, I expand it into a paragraph-length description.
Publishing. Monday Musings is a weekly forcing function to clean up my ideas and distill them into a sharable format.
A few things here I really love:
- David writes, you want to initially minimize the amount of time you spend on your phone. If you’re taking notes all the time- you’re not paying attention to the outside world. This initial synthesis method of bringing in information from the outside to ‘storage’ is huge. I’ve followed Austin Kleon’s recommendation of carrying around a little Field Book.
- I also love how he expands bullet points when he sits down at his computer. I’ve begun to hop back into Roam a little more, to accomplish this. But something about the physical digital divide still gets me. I really love the tactile feeling of having and writing in a notebook, but it’s just so much more time to RE-transcribe that from paper to digital. (still TBD on how to solve this)
- Lastly, I love how writingMonday Musings is a forcing function (for him). He’s set this cadence for himself and I think that’s what I’m lacking, and probably need to schedule something like this.
I also think the last reason was that I initially started writing, so I could get more practice, and for some reason in the midst of this journey — I started doing it for others. I got caught up thinking about what type of content would stick, and tried making it into a ‘marketing exercise’.
It’s not.
So, in boxing this #90DaysOfProse exercise- I’ve reset and will write for myself rather than others.
Music I was listening to while writing this
This is day 18 of my #90DayOfProse challenge
