Category: Inspirational

Embrace the suck

Neera

When I was learning to draw, I read a phrase somewhere, that was weird but powerful. “Embrace the suck.”

I instantly knew this will be my new mantra.

In order to become good at our craft, we have to, not just accept but ’embrace’ all the weird, annoying, inconvenient emotions that come with the creative process, including fear, self-doubt, vulnerability, and shame.

Moving through fear and other negative feelings requires accepting that they are normal and a natural part of the creative process.

Fear and self-doubt are trying to protect us. But in doing so, they also stall us.

Whenever I am stalled (like I am now) I set myself a challenge and then force myself
to create, no matter how bad.

I tell myself, ‘Let me create some rubbish.’ And then force myself to draw or paint just about anything. Or to write about anything.

That gets me going. And in no time, I am producing decent quality work. Stalling is part of the creative process too.

Embrace it and keep going.

Seek bigger problems…

Neera

We humans can move mountains, build miles-long tunnels and can land on the moon, but not fix the little things around us.

We put up with little nuisances – a broken door handle, a fused fridge bulb, a leaking tap because these are not big enough problems
to demand our attention.

The smaller the problem, the least motivated we are to solve it. The bigger the problem, we roll up our sleeves and get on with solving it.

That’s why seek bigger problems, you will be inspired to solve them. And aggregate the smaller problems and set tackle them in one go.

When everything else fails…

Neera

“When everything else fails, just tell your story. That’s what makes you unique. Isn’t that why you fell in love with writing in the first place? To tell your story.”

I stare at the above lines I had scribbled in my notebook years ago. I don’t know whether I wrote them, or I copied them from somewhere. But today they are speaking to me directly.

What story can I tell today?

I pulled out a pile of notebooks from various drawers and boxes at the start of the year with the intention to get rid of them. I pick one, go through a few pages, wondering if there is anything I can salvage in there, and stop in track. How can I go past such profound insight?

“There is an unbelievable amount of noise in the world,” I had written underneath that quote, “It’s everywhere. Social media, television, streaming, apps, ads, music devices, and screens. It’s hard to focus on anything in a meaningful way. So hard to find direction, especially in writing. Rather than contributing to that noise, why not tell stories? Your stories?”

I am doing a storytelling course, with Dan Manning. He has mastered the art of personal storytelling. Last week he asked us to make a list of ten stories from our lives. I listed fifty. Some were just ordinary everyday stories such as When I didn’t buy Rayban sunglasses or When I skydived but then there were really painful ones, How a slap on the face stripped me of self-confidence for life and the Humiliation I felt after a pathetic presentation at work. These stories were like scars on my soul, painful and ugly. But writing about them lessened the pain and helped me move on.

Find your scars and write about them. Reflection is a great tool for writing. That’s why writing is considered a form of therapy. It can help you view the trauma of an incident from another perspective.

Reflect on your life and see the scars, then write about how you got them. Easier said than done, I know. But once you start putting one word in front of another serotonin starts peaking and you’re reminded why you wanted to write in the first place.

At the end of the day, we all want to tell stories. Our stories are our connection with the world. They tell us that we are not alone.

Write about your struggles and about your achievements. Where are you in your life and how you got there? What price you had to pay? Who helped you? Talk about your mentors. Writing about the people you look up to is a great way to solidify the lessons they taught you. We are not here just to entertain others but to extend ourselves.

Writing is meditative and constructive and there is no comparison to the feeling of finishing a writing project. Sure writing and resistance go hand in hand. Resistance only wins if it succeeds in “not letting you sit.” Once you put your butt in the chair and write the first sentence, you win. I started this letter with a single sentence I found in my diary. The whole story developed from there.

One of many things Lynda Barry has taught me: “If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page, as neatly and slowly as you can, and things will come to you.”

“Going through the motions” is the writers’ great secret for getting started. Austin Kleon wrote in his book Steal Like an Artist, “If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.”

Get your pen moving, and something will come out. It might be trash, but it will be something.

A Little Journal That Changed My Life

Neera

Years ago, I came across the idea of keeping a gratitude journal.

Dutifully, I bought a small spiral notebook and started writing three things I was grateful for

They were not big things, but little things like the yellow rose in my garden, the air-conditioning in my car, and a new pair of shoes that were sleek and comfortable.

That practice didn’t last for long.

I stopped and started several times.

Years later, when I was going through a bad patch in life, I stumbled upon the spiral notebook while going through my closet.

Rather than chucking the partially filled notebook into the bin, I opened it and started reading the entries.

Half an hour later, I was sitting on the floor, leaned against the closet, tears rolling down my eyes.

There were so many good things that happened in my life, and here I was agonizing over the little stuff.

Rather than feeling like a victim of fate, I saw how many blessings it had bestowed on me.

A gratitude journal may not seem a big thing while you are writing it, but over time, it becomes a powerful reminder of all the good things that happen to you.

I still don’t write in the journal every day. But it has got a permanent place on my bedside table and now and then, I pick it up, and jot down the three things I am grateful for.

Image by the author

If you haven’t got a gratitude journal, I strongly urge you to start one.

It will change your life.

Want to take your writing to another level? Subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

The First Principle Thinking

Neera

In 2002, Elon Musk began his quest to send the first rocket to Mars. He ran into a major challenge right off the bat. After visiting a number of aerospace manufacturers around the world, Musk discovered the cost of purchasing a rocket was astronomical—up to $65 million. Given the high price, he began to rethink the problem.

So, he asked himself, what is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then he asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the price he was quoted.

Instead of buying a readymade rocket for tens of millions, Musk decided to purchase the raw material at a fraction of the cost and build his own rockets and SpaceX was born. Within a few years, SpaceX cut the price of launching a rocket by nearly 10x while still making a profit.

Musk used first principles thinking to break the situation down to the fundamentals, bypass the high prices of the aerospace industry, and create a more effective solution.

First principles thinking is about acquiring knowledge about a problem or a thing by knowing its first causes by decomposing it into its most basic elements. They are the first causes. The final cause is about the purpose that the things serve.

“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of?

The normal way we conduct our lives is to reason by analogy. We try to find out what other people are doing or by asking if has it been done before. With first principles, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there.

How can we utilize first principles thinking in our life and work?

Let’s look at cooking. There’s a big difference between knowing how to follow a recipe and knowing how to cook. People who know how to cook understand the basic principles that make food taste, look, and smell good. They have confidence in troubleshooting and solving problems as they go—or adjusting to unexpected outcomes.

That’s what Julia Child, the renowned Frech Chef, did all her life. Rather than just following the recipes, she understood how every element of French cuisine worked.

If you can master the first principles within any domain, you can go much further than those who are just following recipes.

Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” It is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further.

It is a fancy way of saying “Think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like, What are we absolutely sure is true? What has been proven?

The first principle thinking requires you to dig deeper and deeper until you are left with only the foundational truths of a situation. It is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibilities.

Break down things into smaller levels and then make something completely different from it. That’s what Bernard D. Sadow did. For centuries humans have been carrying their stuff in bags. We have had trunks, leather bags, and suitcases. They are heavy to lift and carry. Then in 1970, Bernard D. Sadow used the first principle thinking and came up with the idea of adding wheels to them. Now nobody carries their suitcases at airports anymore, they wheel them.

Rather than the ‘monkey see, monkey do,’ approach, apply the first principle thinking to solve your problem:

  1. Identify your problem.
  2. Dig deeper and deeper into the problem, breaking it down into its most essential concepts (the first causes).
  3. Reassemble them from the ground up, thinking of all possible ways they can be reassembled (the final cause or the purpose they serve).
  4. Choose the best solution.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” — Richard Feynman

Notes On Boredom

Neera

We are so scared of being bored these days.

I come from a time when there was no TV, no internet, and no smartphones. We had long summer vacations but nowhere to go. We hardly had any toys, very little reading material, and no video games.

Yet, I don’t remember being bored.

We played outdoors, invented games, and were extremely happy to sit around and do nothing. Being idle was not a taboo and the term ‘bored’ was rarely used.

The trouble is that we live in an age in which we never get the chance to be bored. All the entertainment we could ever dream of is at our fingertips, waiting on the phone in our pocket.

I think the time is ripe for us all to recognize boredom as the delicacy it is. Here’s a quote from Leslie’s piece, How Boredom is becoming anything but boring:

I think boredom is almost a luxurious thing, a decadent thing. To allow yourself to be bored is almost like a pampering thing. I think boredom might make a comeback. I can see a boredom ranch: ‘Come here and be bored!’

Austin Kleon wrote in Steal Like An Artist:

Take time to be bored. One time I heard a coworker say, “When I get busy, I get stupid.” Ain’t that the truth. Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts — it’s so boring. I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maria Kalman says. “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.” Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.

He stole ‘stare at a spot on the wall’ from psychologist William James and turned it into an exercise in The Steal Like An Artist Journal:

Image Source

Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness, says, “When you pay attention to boredom, it gets unbelievably interesting.”

Meditation can be considered an extreme form of boredom, yet everyone knows its benefits.

Henry David Thoreau used to go for long walks in the woods, something that could be an extremely boring exercise was his source of daily inspiration.

David Sedaris used to write on the back of the placemats in the IHOP in his hometown of Raleigh while waiting for food. It played such a large role in David Sedaris’s collection of diaries, Theft By Finding, that the publisher used it as promotional postcards. (The New Yorker published an excerpt with the title, “The IHOP Years.”)

Notice the circling of letters in the words WANDER and WONDER.

Wandering (physical or mental) leads to wondering.

Image Source

Here is what others are saying about boredom.

“The best way to come up with new ideas is to get really bored.” — Neil Gaiman

“I’m a big believer in boredom. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything.” — Steve Jobs

“Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.” — Peter Bregman

“I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding, or entertaining me.” — Scott Adams

“Boredom is your window… Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.” — Joseph Brodsky

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.” — Albert Einstein:

Boredom is the birthplace of genius. —

I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. Boredom opens up the space, for new engagement. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are. — Slavoj Zizek

Boredom is what used to be called idle time.

We all need idle time.

To wake up in the morning and have that feeling that the whole day is yours. No morning rush. No usual cleanup. No tidying up to do. To slow down. To do absolutely nothing.

Being idle is frowned upon in today’s society. We are so much under pressure to keep doing something all the time that we have forgotten the importance of idle time.

Contrary to the common belief that the ‘idle mind is the devil’s workshop,’ the idle mind is the germination ground for ideas.

Creativity thrives on boredom

Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters on Life

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity.

Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.

In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, and possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.

But it is Tom Hodgkinson who has tackled the subject head-on in How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto. He starts with:

In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher, Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn’t allow us to be more idle.

He replied: I think the reason we don’t organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, “idle hands are the devil’s tool.”

In other words, institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that’s almost a substitute word for idle, “malcontent.”

Essentially, we are all kept very busy . . . under no circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents of your own mind.

Freud called introspection “morbid” — unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, possibly neurotic, and potentially pathological. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world. He goes on to say:

“Idleness is a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous.”

Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in ‘An Apology for Idlers’ (1885)

Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.

Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.

A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.

Let the children be bored at times

Victoria Prooday, a world-renowned educator, and motivational speaker, writes about modern-day parenting and the impact of a high-tech lifestyle on a child’s nervous system. According to her we should let children be bored at times and don’t feel guilty about it.

“By constantly entertaining our kids, we are stealing their childhood and creating major obstacles to their future success. We are not allowing them to learn to tolerate quiet times and discover ways to overcome boredom. It is still reversible. Let them be bored at times and don’t feel guilty about it.” — Victoria Prooday

Hope you allow boredom into your life.

Some other related articles:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/what-does-boredom-do-to-us-and-for-us

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-boredom-is-anything-but-boring/