Use your voice

Neera

When I was at the beginning of my writing journey, I was desperate to find my writing voice.

I thought when I will find my voice, I will be fluent, unique, and eloquent. Readers will love my work, and my writing will shine like a north star.

Years passed, and despite my constant efforts, none of this happened.

One day I was reading my old journals when I realized I already had a voice.

It was there all along. It was in the questions I pondered, the insights I gained, and the way I explained things.

You don’t have to find your voice, you already have got it. Learn to use it instead.

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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.

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.

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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.