“When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you…
I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can’t always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. And even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don’t have to hide in the valley where you’re safe. But the average scientist does routine safe work almost all the time and so he (or she) doesn’t produce much. It’s that simple. If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea.”
When I first started writing online, there was always one problem I feared most: what to write about.
On the nights I needed to post, I would regularly take a long shower, clean my desk, boil some tea, and take a few deep breathes before sitting down to write, expecting the creative genius of my favourite authors to flow through my fingers and create masterpieces. Of course, this never happened. Instead, I spent many hours slumped in my chair, desperately thinking of a topic, or a way to begin my piece, and growing frustrated that my expectation of what writing should be like wasn’t what it actually was. Compared to being in constant, happy flow, I often had to dig in the mud to find a topic that was usable.
The thing was, this never needed to happen. I had things I could’ve written about. There were just two issues: I couldn’t remember them, and the things I could remember were too elementary to put down.
The solution I’ve since found to this is immediate note-taking and half-finished ideas.
I’ve previously written on the value of taking immediate notes, which is one of the best practices for my thinking and writing. This is important because sometimes a great idea hits you out of nowhere and you have a limited window before it goes away. By writing it down, you’ve captured it for eternity. The idea is more secure written down than in your memory.
From these jottings brings us to this concept of half-finished ideas, which is an extension of note-taking.
The point is whenever you write something down, it becomes a writing stimulus. In your spare time, you read through all the notes you’ve amassed, dwell on them, develop them a bit, until what started off as a single quote or phrase becomes sentences and paragraphs. The purpose is not to convince yourself that it is right, but to explore the idea in more depth. In what ways does this idea not apply? Why is this important? Can you create a story around it? And before you know, what began as a short prompt has become something more substantial.
When I started doing this, my previous issues with finding topics to write about vanished. I just thought about my notes more during the day, such that they were unconsciously processing in my mind, and when I needed to post, I wrote about those.
Don’t get me wrong: writing is still hard and I still need to finish the pieces I’ve started. But by having a bank of half-finished ideas to go off of, I can just decide which of my musings I should complete, rather than pick something out of thin air. They are like little dishes simmering away on a cooktop; dishes I visit every so often to add some flavour, and develop them a little, until they can be presented to the world.
In any endeavour that is important yet challenging, there is usually a moment of despair you encounter after some time, one that nudges you towards the easy route, that reminds you of all your insecurities and weaknesses, and gently suggests that you should take the day off, and perhaps never do this again. Whether it’s heading to the gym, sitting down to study, or learning a new skill, a time eventually arises where at your lowest, most fatigued, you ask yourself, “why the hell am I here?”
The sad thing is, this never really goes away. Your first run will have hard moments in there, and so will your hundredth. The playing field might shift a bit, where you can work harder and longer before you hit this stage, but it still exists.
But while the despair never goes away, what builds up over time is confidence. With your first bit of success, you now know that the feeling of despair is conquerable. It is still very real, but instead of reeling from it, it begins to look a little smaller, something you’ve proved you can handle.
I’ve written 400 posts to date – this is the 400th – and in every post, there is a moment where I feel tired, where I seriously can’t be bothered opening a new page, writing something down, editing, and clicking publish. But the difference from the first post to this one is a feeling of competence. In my first post, it took me two weeks to write a short piece then one hour meditating over whether I should publish. The feeling of despair was ever-present, scary and unfamiliar. Now, after knowing that I’ve faced and overcome this 399 times in the past, I know I should be able to do it again tonight. When you build up small, repeated wins over time, you begin to build a strong track record, and each win is an affirmation of competence.
As Charles Bukowski wrote, “Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”
We all understand that there is a disconnect between book knowledge and lived experience; that the most read person isn’t necessarily greater than the most lived person, but both contain their own wisdom.
Where book knowledge is limitless in its breadth of topics, like history, economics, and medicine, it is restricted by its depth of penetration into the human condition. One cannot claim they have understood love through Anna Karenina, injustice through To Kill a Mockingbird, or courage through Harry Potter. They have seen these themes, perhaps even cried at them, but not felt them the way a heartbreak crushes the soul, or the way hard-earned success elevates one into the heavens.
“So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You’re a tough kid. And I’d ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, “once more unto the breach dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I’d ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms “visiting hours” don’t apply to you. You don’t know about real loss, ’cause it only occurs when you’ve loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you… I don’t see an intelligent, confident man… I see a cocky, scared shitless kid.”
I’ve been playing around with AI language models over the last month and the results are astounding. Within seconds, chatGPT can chat with me just as a human would, generate a 5000 word essay on any topic imaginable, and create reasonable short stories with minimal prompting. It is fair to assume that soon enough, the quality of chatGPT stories and essays will rival those of the best writers on earth.
The question is then, why even write? If you can give this model a few prompts and a writing style, it could write your blog or your book in a fraction of the time with amazing precision. The time saved could lead to more productive tasks that AI cannot (yet) automate, or for leisure. Writing may soon enough find itself relegated to something akin to cooking over a fire or writing letters: an anachronism.
Or perhaps writing will be something that one does not for the result, but for the process. Those who write as a means to an end might happily never write again. But for those who find pleasure in the clarity of mind that only writing allows, in the satisfaction of creating and editing your own words, in the effort of refining your piece into something worth sharing, as the struggle is the reward, this art will still remain.
I have a friend, which for his privacy I’ll call Ara.
Ara is one of the best conversationalists I know. When he talks, he has a way of making you feel interesting, and invites you to speak more, as though he is fascinated by your story. Even behind his back people speak highly of him. I think that’s when you know you’ve truly touched another’s world.
One day I asked him how he made people so heard, and he essentially said two things:
Make the other person feel interesting
Encourage genuine vulnerability
Ara loves saying a phrase: that’s interesting. It’s so subtle, but works because it does two things. First, it shows the speaker that he is paying attention and interested; a verbal nod similar to a “mm-hmm” or a “I see”. Second, it affirms the reader that they themselves are someone worth listening to. It is a stamp of approval on one’s character and makes them stand a little straighter, for being interesting makes one feel special.
I used to love saying “tell me more”. But since, I’ve realised that what this misses from “that’s interesting” is the second point: the mark of approval on a person’s character. Both phrases express interest and encourage further discussion, but the difference is “tell me more” doesn’t doesn’t necessarily make you feel special. You could tell a computer to tell you more information on Wikipedia – it is a command, not an affirmation. But “that’s interesting” is an immediate observation on character, which feels nice. And as Maya Angelou observed: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Ara also fosters an environment of genuine vulnerability. In a conversation, he listens very carefully to understand your viewpoint and asks questions along the way. And once he understands, he shares his honest opinion, which is generally one that has considered everything you have just said. And in doing so, he shares a story, or says something absurd in such a plain manner that it makes the reader comfortable to share quirky ideas of their own. He makes it clear that everything you get from him will be an honest opinion, but he will accept you regardless what you say, because he himself is weird. It fosters a non-judgmental environment and allows the speaker to be themselves without hiding behind a mask.
I’ve found that these two things: making a person feel interesting, and letting them speak openly, are keys to touching someone’s world. By building one up, and letting them be their best self, Ara is a beacon of light to those around him. Around Ara, people stand a little taller, laugh a little louder, share a little deeper. And in a world where people fight for attention in conversations, and push and shove to get their point across, if you can make people feel interesting and heard, you might just be able to change the world.
“When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
In my first week of year 8, there was a standardised mathematics test that all incoming students needed to do. The point was to sort us into groups: the highest scorers would be placed in a class with higher scoring students and the lower scorers would be placed together. Thinking back, it was a ridiculous system, but being a competitive person at the time, knowledge of this test consumed all my attention, and I studied nonstop for it, which I found out was essentially the year 7 maths curriculum. I wanted to do well.
When the results came out, I had scored 98%, which put me in the top class. I was thrilled for a moment, but only a brief moment, because when I began speaking to friends who had also made it in, I realised most of them barely studied. There were even a handful of students who said that their teachers didn’t even tell them about the test until the day as a means to avoid preparation. Two of them scored 100%.
That day, I began to realise that there was a disconnect between effort and reward. Where I thought the game looked like this:
The game in reality looked like this:
This is when I first realised two things. The first is the law of diminishing returns: the idea that beyond a certain point, the benefits gained from something decrease for the same amount of effort. The students that studied just a little bit for the exam did well enough to beat most other people, and studying an extra 10 hours didn’t make a difference. Once you studied enough to get to the top, you were in.
The second is that some people do very well at exams with seemingly minimal effort. This is where terms like “genius” come from; the people that seem to understand concepts immediately and soak up knowledge.
As a result, I began hanging out with these people; the ones that studied just to get by and had time to do other things. Efficiency was everything: getting enough for the A on the report card, and maybe higher if you were lucky. To give your all into studying, to ask excessive questions in class, was considered cringe. Passing effortlessly, and treating it as not a big deal, was being cool.
But upon reflection, I’ve found that there is more to this mindset than simply being “cool”; there is an emotion tied to it: fear. After my embarrassment from the year 8 sorting exam, I vowed never to be seen as a tryhard again. I feared the social judgement of giving it my all and potentially the same, or worse, than a person that studied less.
When your goal is just to get by, you have an excuse for not doing as well as you could have. You never really tried.
And crucially, this led to me developing a toxic mindset when it came to achievement. If I didn’t succeed, it wasn’t because I was less smart, it was because I didn’t work so hard. Being lazy gave me an excuse to underperform. It made me think, “It doesn’t matter if she or he did better than me. It’s because they work so hard and have no life.” My knowledge of diminishing returns made me apathetic of the few that worked extra hard to be the best student they could be.
But since befriending top achievers in multiple domains, and seeing how their mind works, I’ve realised I was wrong. There is an intrinsic vulnerability in giving it your all – what if it isn’t enough? what if you fail? But the thing is, it doesn’t matter. The point is that giving it your all is rewarding in itself.
I will leave this piece with an excerpt from a speech by Richard Hamming, a mathematician whose work has had tremendous effects on computer science. There is more I wish to explore on this topic, but they will be saved for another day.
“Well I now come down to the topic, “Is the effort to be a great scientist worth it?” To answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, “Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together,” or if it’s a woman she says, “It is as good as wine, men and song put together.” And if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying to participate in those moments of discovery. They’re always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared to go out and ask those who didn’t do great work how they felt about the matter. It’s a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.”
Recently, out of curiosity, I read a sparknotes summary of one of my favourite books of all time: The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. I read through it, hoping to rekindle some of the emotions I felt when reading the full book, but found myself disappointed. Although the main takeaways were there – the summary was concise, and there were even details that I hadn’t picked up upon reading myself – there was a certain magic lacking in such a short form abstract of the book. It felt like blending a perfectly good dinner and drinking it as a shake: the ingredients were technically there, and it might be faster to digest, but the flavour was lost.
After reading the synopsis for some time, I felt frustrated, not feeling the magic I remembered. I then opened the book and started reading for myself. And that’s when I realised the problem with sparknotes.
There are two basic parts to any good story. First, there is a conflict that must be addressed: a question, some sense of foreboding; the tension that keeps you curious. Second, there is the takeaway: the moral, what you remember from the piece; the lesson that reshapes your life.
The problem with sparknotes, and plot summaries by extension, is that it often neglects the conflict part of the story. In the process of being succinct, it rushes to the takeaway, the moral or plot twist you tell your friends about, and ignores the details that made the takeaway important in the first place. A moral like “recognise when you have enough” falls flat on most people. But when you turn that into a novel like The Pearl by John Steinbeck, with a plot and drama and emotion, suddenly you have a wonderful story.
Take this sparknotes summary of the first chapter of The Brothers Karamazov:
“Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, usually called Alyosha, is the third son of a brutish landowner named Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, who is still famous for his dark and violent death. The narrator tells the story of Fyodor Pavlovich’s life. As a young man, he is known as a loutish buffoon. He owns a very small amount of land and earns a reputation for sponging off other people.”
It’s a fine summary; the main points are there, and most literary critics would agree with this description of Fyodor Pavlovich. But compare that summary with this passage from the actual book:
“Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovich, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men’s tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district…“
What does this passage have that the summary doesn’t? For one, it gives us a better picture of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s character: where the summary simply states a“loutish baffoon”, the book itself describes him as a “strange type… a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless”. It then further shows that though he began with nothing, he became very wealthy at his death, despite his apparent incompetence. Immediately, we wonder how a man who is so senseless and poor could amass such amount of wealth in his life. We are drawn into the story: we become curious. When these details are missing in the summary, we lose interest in the greater lesson at hand.
The problem with summaries is they skip the conflicts that make a book interesting and skip straight to the takeaway. Without the contradictions and tension that one can only build with detail, we simply don’t care. It is far more memorable to imagine Fyodor Pavlovich’s vicious, senseless nature in front of us, and to picture him curiously dying with riches, than to imagine a “loutish baffoon”.
The magic of reading lies in the process of caring deeply about a question, becoming curious about it, as the author intended, then realising the wisdom hidden in the text. To skip the question is to skip the answer entirely.
