Choose Growth Over Happiness

Neera

I love everything Oliver Burkeman writes. From his books (Help, Power of Negative Thinking,
Antidote and Four Thousand Weeks) to his articles in The Guardian and his not-so-regular newsletter aptly titled “The Imperfectionist.”

I particularly like his quote about making choices.


“When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. We are terrible at predicting what will make us happy. The question quickly gets bogged down to our narrow preference for security and control. Enlargement question elicit for a deeper intuitive response.”

This is something I have done time and time again, chose ‘growth’ over ‘complacency.’

This is the reason I have chosen his quote to get back into writing on LinkedIn again. I am challenging myself to write and draw 100 insights with a splash of humor.


Schedule Time For Exploring

Neera

I first learned about the concept of exploring and exploiting from Austin Kleon, who in turn learned it from Derek Thompson’s reports on research into what causes “hot streaks” in careers in The Atlantic. Thompson breaks down the complex idea into three words, “Explore, then exploit.”

As creators, we are either in exploring mode (reading, listening, learning, growing) or exploiting mode (writing articles and books, teaching courses, creating products). We usually have systems for exploiting, but not for exploring.

I have good systems in place for exploiting (ie, writing articles and books) but I have nothing for exploring. My exploring is pretty haphazard, based on whim, and whenever time permits.

I need to schedule a regular time for exploration.

My friend, illustrator Sue Clancy of A.M. Sketching sits each morning with a cup of tea and her sketchbook and sketches. Nothing in particular, whatever fancies her at the moment. And with her sketches, she usually has very insightful comments. Austin Kleon also has a daily exploration process of writing and drawing in his notebook. Then he publishes them.

I need to incorporate sketching and daily publishing into my routine. Both sketching and reading are forms of exploration and publishing brings accountability.

Sketching is crucial for creativity. It keeps your hand moving and hence engages your creative brain. That’s why Lynda Barry insists on “keep moving your hand.”

We focus too much on what we create rather than what we think through the act of creating. I have been journaling for twenty years; I am still exploring the same ideas. It takes a lot of time for things to come to fruition.

What we need is a system for collecting things and a system for going back through them. My website is a repository for my published work (exploitation). And my Knowledge Management System is a repository for my exploratory work.

For people who are thinking of becoming writers, it’s a rough road. Learning to write is a process that goes on throughout your lifespan. Exploration is a very important part of your daily schedule. The ratio of exploration to exploitation needs to be at least one-to-one. If not, two to one. You need to do an insane amount of reading to get good ideas to percolate in your head. Stephen King writes for three hours in the mornings, then he reads for the whole afternoon. His famous quote is, “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write.”

There is a lot of garbage out there. Part of a creative person’s job is to become a creative refinery. When you are exploring, you are making connections, fusing ideas, refining, and explaining. So I think part of our job is to make sense of all that we consume and pull out the good stuff. Dolly Parton said, “Figure out who you are and do it on purpose.”

Writing is tough, very tough. You can’t sustain it for a long time if you are not having fun. And exploring is fun. One way to bring fun back to your writing is to schedule time for exploration. Preferably every day.

Want To Boost Your Creativity? Make A Mess.

Neera

There might be benefits to having a tidy desk but creativity is not one of them.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that working at a clean desk may promote healthy eating, generosity, and conventionality, but messy deckers excel at creative thinking and at generating new ideas.

Messy-desk successes include Mark Twain, Frida Kahlo, Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King Jr, Susan Sontag, and Steve Jobs. 

My productivity is directly related to order – order in my surroundings and order in my day.

But that order goes out of the window when I am working on a project.

At the beginning of a project, my surroundings need to be really tidy. But as the project progress, clutter builds up. By the end of the project, everything is out of place. I then spend days bringing order back into my surroundings and my life.

Famously disorganized Albert Einstein said: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

Divergence and convergence

Neera

On Day 10 of the first draft of my book Productive Writer (which I announced I will finish in 10 days) frantically cutting out the stuff I had so painstakingly written just a few days before. Normally I would have agonized a lot over “killing my darlings,” but after having written four books, I now know that it is part of the process.

I started off by collecting and writing several techniques, stories, ideas, and suggestions over the years. There is a concept called divergence and convergence. As creators, we play the balancing act of divergence and convergence all the time.

If you look at the process of creating anything, it begins with an act of divergence. We look at hundreds of possibilities and consider as many options as possible. We begin gathering inspiration, expose ourselves to new influences, and explore new paths. We are diverging from your starting point.

Divergence is the classic brainstorming stage — whiteboard covered in sketches, the writer’s wastepaper basket filled with crumpled-up drafts, hundreds of photos laid across the floor.

The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas. It is spontaneous, chaotic, and messy. There is no way you can plan when you’re in divergence mode, and you shouldn’t try. This is the time to wander.

As powerful and necessary as divergence is, it has to end. At some point, we must start discarding possibilities and converge toward a solution. Otherwise, we will never finish anything.

Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs and decide what is truly essential. It is about narrowing the range so that you can progress forward and end up with a final result you are proud of.

Convergence allows our work to take on a life of its own and become something separate from ourselves.

The model of divergence and convergence is so fundamental to all creative work, we can see it present in any creative field.

In the video below, an author and illustrator, Debra Fraiser, shares her process of creating the book This Is the Planet Where I Live. Watch it to see how clear her divergence and convergence are, that too over five years.

On Day 10 of the first draft of my book Productive Writer (which I announced I will finish in 10 days) frantically cutting out the stuff I had so painstakingly written just a few days before. Normally I would have agonized a lot over “killing my darlings,” but after having written four books, I now know that it is part of the process.

I started off by collecting and writing several techniques, stories, ideas, and suggestions over the years. There is a concept called divergence and convergence. As creators, we play the balancing act of divergence and convergence all the time.

If you look at the process of creating anything, it begins with an act of divergence. We look at hundreds of possibilities and consider as many options as possible. We begin gathering inspiration, expose ourselves to new influences, and explore new paths. We are diverging from your starting point.

Divergence is the classic brainstorming stage — whiteboard covered in sketches, the writer’s wastepaper basket filled with crumpled-up drafts, hundreds of photos laid across the floor.

The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas. It is spontaneous, chaotic, and messy. There is no way you can plan when you’re in divergence mode, and you shouldn’t try. This is the time to wander.

As powerful and necessary as divergence is, it has to end. At some point, we must start discarding possibilities and converge toward a solution. Otherwise, we will never finish anything.

Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs and decide what is truly essential. It is about narrowing the range so that you can progress forward and end up with a final result you are proud of.

Convergence allows our work to take on a life of its own and become something separate from ourselves.

The model of divergence and convergence is so fundamental to all creative work, we can see it present in any creative field.

Towards the middle of the video, she talks about how critical her journal is to her process, how it’s “this active space where a kind of magic happens… it’s not a scrapbook, it’s not a diary, it’s this place.”

For me, that place is my personal knowledge management system (PKMS), which has become the focal point of my book Productive Writer. It is something we knowledge workers can’t afford not-to have. It doesn’t matter what your PKMS looks like, what matters is how it helps you create.

Here is an aerial view of mine.

A graph view of my knowledge management system in Roam Research.

Feynman’s twelve problems approach

Neera

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. He is best known for his groundbreaking discoveries in Theoretical Physics and Quantum Mechanics for which he received Nobel Prize in 1965.

As a child, he already showed a talent for engineering, once building a functioning home alarm system out of spare parts while his parents were out running errands.

He was also known for his wide-ranging, eclectic tastes. During his colorful lifetime, he enthusiastically traveled around the world exploring other cultures and giving lectures. He learned to play the bongo and the conga drums well enough to play with orchestras. He wrote half a dozen books and played a pivotal role on the commission that investigated the Challenger space shuttle disaster

How could one person make so many contributions across so many areas?

Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview:

“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large, they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects while continuing to follow his sense of curiosity.

In the book Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman James Gleick, tells the story of how Feynman once took inspiration for his physics from an accident at dinner:

” . . . he was eating in the student cafeteria when someone tossed a dinner plate into the air—a Cornell cafeteria plate with the university seal imprinted on one rim—and in the instant of its flight he experienced what he long afterward considered an epiphany. As the plate spun, it wobbled. Because of the insignia, he could see that the spin and the wobble were not quite in synchrony. Yet just in that instant, it seemed to him – or was it his physicist’s intuition? – that the two rotations were related.

After working out the problem, Feynman discovered a 2-to-1 ratio between the plate’s wobble and spin, a neat relationship that suggested a deeper underlying principle at work.

That simple observation became the basis of his research into rotation into the equations underlying rotation informing the work that ultimately led to his receiving the Nobel Prize.

When a fellow physicist and mentor asked what the use of such insight was, Feynman responded: “It doesn’t have any importance . . . I don’t care whether a thing has importance. Isn’t it fun?”

He was following his intuition and curiosity. Feynman’s unique approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead.

He posed questions and constantly scanned for solutions to long-standing problems in his reading, conversations, and everyday life. When he found one, he could make a connection that looked to others like a flash of unparalleled brilliance.

I have adopted Feynman’s approach to having a list of open-ended questions. Below is the list of 12 areas I have always been interested in.

  • Writing
  • Creativity
  • Productivity
  • Learning
  • Marketing
  • Storytelling
  • Sketching
  • Fiction
  • Travel
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Human Potential
  • Personal Knowledge Management

I have now created an overarching open-ended question about them. These questions have made my reading more intentional.

  • How to learn and teach the art and craft of writing?
  • What is creativity and how to unleash it?
  • How to be more productive and still live a balanced life?
  • How to learn fast and retain what I learn?
  • How to market myself and my work?
  • How to master storytelling?
  • How to convert conceptual ideas into sketches and how to sketch better?
  • How to master fiction writing?
  • How to travel deliberately?
  • How to embed artificial intelligence in my work and life to help me achieve more.
  • How to be extraordinary and help others to maximize their potential?
  • How can I consolidate all the information I have accumulated and make it readily available to me when I need it?

Surprisingly, it is the last area, “personal knowledge management,” will make it possible to find answers to all the above questions.

For the past two years, I have been building my personal knowledge management system. It is helping me write consistently and prolifically. Now I have added another layer of sophistication to it – Feynman’s Twelve Problems Approach.

It will make my research and notes taking more intentional.

Although the questions might seem mundane but they are relevant to so many people. If I continue to research them and share what I learn, I will not help myself but many of my readers.

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.