Eric Tian

The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our attention, and never before has our attention been so violently fought over.

Even now, as I am typing this, and as you are perhaps reading this, my attention is stretched and fatigued, pulled in an infinite amount of directions. This is a suboptimal state to be in.

As Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in Several Short Sentences About Writing:

“But everything you notice is important.
Let me say that a different way:
If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?
It will have to be you.
The authority you feel has a great deal to do with how you write, and what you write,
With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your own thoughts
And the value of your own perceptions.

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself….
No one else can authorize you.
No one.”

A beautiful reminder.

Credits: Austin Kleon

Red team-Blue team is a military exercise where a group plays the role of a competitor and tries to break into their own defences or structures. In cybersecurity for instance, a group of software engineers may try to hack their way past a firewall they created to gain unauthorised access to assets. This attacking group is the red team, and the defence is the blue team.

There are various goals of this exercise, including the promotion of creative thinking and problem solving, but the primary benefit of red team-blue team is to find out if there are any holes in one’s defence and to fix them correspondingly.

Why Dostoyevsky is so good

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been pouring over Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Upon reflection, I’ve realised that one of the reasons why these classics are so compelling is Dostoyevsky’s use of the red team mentality.

In a debate, it’s easy to utilise the strawman fallacy, where one oversimplifies an opponent’s stance to make it easier to attack. In doing so, one makes their own arguments look better – but ultimately, it is a disingenuous form of arguing as the point is often misrepresented.

The highest and most difficult form of arguing is when you take your opponent’s argument and make it as strong as possible (a so-called iron man argument) and still defeat it. This method requires much more understanding of the other side and skill to pull off.

What Dostoyevsky does so well in his novels is he makes the “other side” of his contention as brutally strong as possible, and still defeats it. In Crime and Punishment, the main character of Raskolnikov has every possible reason to murder. He is poor, charming law student and has the potential to do much good. On the other hand, his pawnbroker is a rude, dishonest rich woman who is generally disliked by everybody. Her murder is made as defensible as possible.

But when Raskolnikov commits the murder and spirals into chaos, Dostoyevsky’s point is made in its fullest force -that even though a crime may seem utilitarian or defensible, one’s punishment for a crime is the moral burden itself, and this is irrespective of whether the killing was “right” by any standards. If the murder was portrayed as disgusting to begin with, the same effect could never have been made, for a reader could argue that some murders can be justified. But not here.

Generally speaking, the red team mentality can be seen as an appraisal. If you think you have a strong idea, try putting everything you have to tear it down, and see if it withstands the test. If the red team wins, then you’ve seen its flaws and can work to improve it.

But if the red team fails, despite making the strongest effort possible, then you know you have a strong idea.

One of my favourite games growing up was RuneScape. It’s a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), meaning you control a character that can interact with other characters in the same, enormous world.

RuneScape was great because there was so much you could do. You could embark a story quest that gave you rewards, kill monsters to become stronger, or level other skills like woodcutting or fishing for quality-of-life.

If you play RuneScape, there is always something to be done. Your account isn’t one big pot boiling to a singular goal – there are always little pots bubbling in the background.

The impossible question

One of the most difficult questions to answer is “what do you do?” because it’s impossible for anyone to give a complete answer. Everyone does something; it could be as basic as brushing your teeth, or something unusual like running a marathon.

What people usually mean by “what do you do?” is “what’s the thing you write when a form asks you for your profession?” which is nowhere near the same thing.

Yet in a way, this question is helpful because it reminds us that we are not one-dimensional creatures.

We all have pots bubbling in the background; skills that we have started learning but yet to master. Ideas waiting to emerge and characteristics evolving into something new.

Do not neglect these pots.

Social media occasionally makes us feel like astronomers: passive witnesses in a world beyond our control.

But the world is never out of our influence.

We have the power to empathise; to invent; to care; to remember; to inspire. It is all up to us. Our participation, or lack thereof, shapes the future.

The ocean is large but we are the drops that create it.

The funny thing about light is that despite being bright itself, it also brightens up anything it touches. Overnight, light can transform a dark forest into a starry wilderness; a cold city into a warm district; a starving plant into a blooming flower.

It’s no wonder that Jesus tells Christians that they are the light of the world and to shine it upon others. Light cuts through darkness like nothing else.

Light doesn’t have to mean photons, but can be something generally beautiful; an exquisite sky, a delightful book, or a dog happily wagging its tail. Without fail, I find that if I put myself in light’s way, I get brightened up myself.

As the farmer Thomas Mitchell put it:

“As If we are to cultivate the art of living, we should cultivate the art of extracting sweetness and comfort out of everything, as the bee goes from flower to flower in search of honey.”

From Michaela Coel’s acceptance speech at the 73rd Emmy Awards:

“Write the tale that scares you. That makes you feel uncertain. That isn’t comfortable. I dare you. In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible — for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success — do not be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while and see what comes to you in the silence.”

Silence is the space for new opportunities to burst forth. Just as one does not disgrace rests in music, or sleep in athletes, one should never criticise the quiet, secluded moments in one’s journey, for these periods are catalysts for growth.

Back to the bliss station.

The point of the first draft isn’t to create anything good.

It’s to put as much as possible down; to vomit your thoughts onto a page. If it’s messy or unglamorous, you’re on the right track.

The good work begins on the second edit, and the third, and the fourth, until you end up with something decent. That means the first draft really isn’t that important. The faster you get it over and done with, the better.

When I first started writing, I would get overwhelmed at the blank text editor. My hands would freeze up, for fear of writing something appalling. But the more I’ve written, the more I realise that the faster I burn through the first draft, the faster better work comes.

As Neil Gaiman said in his Masterclass:

“Write down everything that happens in the story, and then in your second draft make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.”

Our first ideas are often undeveloped, naive and simplistic. But luckily, they are not the end product – we can make them better.

These initial thoughts are merely catalysts for refinement. We’ll examine them, see the flaws within, and go through the phases of denial, panic and regret. But then, a second idea will emerge, and this will be infinitely better than the first one.

The point of capturing thoughts isn’t to share them with the world. It’s to turn them into something worth sharing.

James Baldwin: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”

Dani Shapiro: “Books saved my life. In the quiet of a summer afternoon spent in a hammock, of a winter night spent sneaking under the covers with a flashlight, dawned the awanress, slow but unmistakable, that I was not alone. That I was not insane. That my heart was not so very different from everyone else’s. Books made me feel less ashamed. Less weird. They connected me deeply to my own humanity.”

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie: “Books let us know we’re not the center of the universe; the universe has many centers.”

Perhaps the greatest gift a book can bring is empathy: the gift that broadens our horizons, that lets us know that we are not alone.

It is a most extraordinary gift.

Despite being minimally neurotic, being productive is still essential to my life as a writer, reader and student. After some thought, and consulting Ali Abdaal’s twitter thread on his top productivity tips, here are some tips on productivity and time management that I wish I’d known when I was younger.

1. We own all of our time: If you are playing games or doomscrolling, there is no excuse to say “I don’t have enough time”. We are all in control of our time and how to prioritise it.

2. The daily highlight: Write one thing that you must get done each day and prioritise it: everything else becomes secondary.

3. Eat the frog: When you sit down to work, get the most difficult task done first. This will make all the other tasks seem trivial in comparison.

4. To-do lists: The reason things fall through the cracks is often because we have not written it down. Physically planning things is more convincing than simply telling yourself you will do it.

5. Parkinson’s law: Work expands to fill the time we allocate to it. If you give yourself the whole day to finish one lecture, you will inevitably use all that time. But if you give yourself one hour in the morning, you will somehow manage to squeeze it in then. Leverage artificial deadlines.

6. The choice to be satisfied (the most important). If you are a highly neurotic productivity nerd, it is easy to beat yourself up at the end of the day, telling yourself that you could have done more. Instead, you could be satisfied with what you did get done, and be grateful simply for being alive.