Standing everywhere
If you empty yourself of all preconceptions, what's left?
The further I get into this "meaning making" business, the more clearly I understand it’s a moving target. Each “breakthrough” along the way seems like a rather banal insight a few months down the line and, as a result, it’s easy to erase progress mentally. Especially because of how much “unlearning” I’ve had to do. I mentioned last post that I’m adopting an explorer’s mindset, which is clarifying, but what does effective exploration look like?
(This one is a little longer than usual)
I: Clearing Space
I'm either awful at finding my way or extremely good, depending on what you think success looks like. If I look over my notes, in between the many personal development “milestones”, I can find hundreds upon hundreds of ideas for projects. Many of them seem genuinely interesting and somewhat useful but, generally, I feel almost nothing while looking at them today.
(Too) many of these ideas were generated by asking:
What is a piece of software, that I could develop alone, that would be useful to other people and could earn me a tangible amount of money?
I owe this to the time I spent enraptured by the Indie Hackers movement. The stars of this space (Pieter Levels, Jon Yongfook, Danielle Johnson, Dan Rhodes) seem to have it all: a low-maintenance business that earns them (more than) a fair wage and total control over their schedules.
It's not like I've 180'd on this completely, I think making a focused piece of software that improves people's lives is the foundation of ethical, commercial technology development. I also still want financial independence and control of my time. So what has changed?
Well, my perspective. Thinking of projects though the lens of "viable business" and "rapid MVP" consistently produces ideas and projects that, for lack of a better word, bore me. They may be good businesses on paper, but they're for someone else to build. Despite this, my myopic view of financial independence made me feel this was the most likely path to success, so I confined my objections, gritted my teeth and kept trying... and I kept petering out.
Only a select few projects keep my interest long enough to actually finish them1. Strangely, these are by far the hardest2 projects I attempt and yet I have seemingly no issue putting in years of labour to finish them. Yet, I beat myself up over giving up on the stuff that seems easy. Procrastination is a valuable feedback mechanism, if you’re blocked from working on something there’s usually a real reason for it.
I had long assumed I needed to single-mindedly pursue independence and then everything else would work itself out once I had it. That pattern of thought is never correct, in my experience. I realised I was clinging to my approach out of desperation. “Everyone says this is the way to get there…” When I find myself thinking like everyone else, it’s time for a change.
II: Effortless Action
So, yeah, enough of that. It’s the enduring themes in my thinking and work that I'm trying to clarify and bring into central focus, no distractions. As all good engineers do, I started from first principles here:
What am I excited about?
How do I like spending my time?
What do I connect with other people over?
What do I believe is important to change in the world?
How can I broadcast that message to let the others find me?
I've been pondering these questions in some capacity for a couple of years3. This process takes ages, for me anyway, but as I continue to loosen my grip on my old ways of thinking the broader my horizons become. The voice in my head urging me to "pick" the "right direction” is… surprisingly quiet. It's been almost 5 months since I left my job and it's taken this long without external influence to reconnect with why I want to make anything in the first place.
Instead of theorising what I might like to do, I’ve been freely exploring my interests in practice. I'm re-learning to follow my natural curiosity4. I've got a nasty habit of creating mental mountains, imagining the joy of summiting them and then never even setting off. Consistently, letting go of my preconceived ideas brings me closer to effortless action.
So, when I write, I just write. Right?
III: Insight
I've been dragging my feet writing a few posts lately and, instead, I wrote this one. In the past I've ignored that feeling and pushed through, but I re-read Sascha Chapin's Write Faster and immediately saw myself in it. Whenever my voice drifts away from my personal musings into a more "academic" or "intellectual" argument I think it becomes much less interesting to both read and write.
Sure, some of the value of my writing is in the actual arguments and concepts I present but most of it is in the glimpses of my overall thought process. Not that mine's particularly special, rather, seeing someone else's perspective and contrasting it with your own reveals deep insights that are difficult (if impossible) to capture in words alone. This is why I love conversations, blogs, podcasts, twitter etc. where the focus is on the connection between the humans, rather than finding the “right” answers and cementing them.
In fact, I’ve come to realise that this process of deriving insight by studying the way other people think might actually be what I love more than anything. This might seem narrow at first, but all academic inquiry and artistic expression is a response to the conceptual models created by other humans before us.
I’ve always seen “acquiring perspective” as inherently valuable but it seemed like the backdrop to my life, I never considered it could be the unifying thread through all my work. Finally, a real-world example of figure-ground inversion, you love to see it. It seems all my shape-rotating, artistic longing, and philosophising is in service of a higher goal: collecting and generalising perspectives.
IV: Pay It Forward
In typical “me” fashion I’ve already started thinking about what comes next. Whenever I am struck my a moment of insight, my first instinct is to think of how to share it with others. I’ve been told by quite a few people that I would be a good teacher.
I do kind of like teaching, but I can only tolerate teaching attentive, curious students... A.K.A my peers. I've written some tutorials here and there5, but I find that explaining literal techniques feels awkward to me and I am profoundly aware that others can do most of it better. So, what is the one thing I can teach better than anything else? I think it's "how to acquire new perspective and use it to generate insight".
Maybe, after overthinking for so long, I have actually got something useful to say about learning, thinking and thinking about thinking? I’ve long felt that my interests were connected but I’ve never found a suitable semantic frame to accomodate them. Insight-generation might the best umbrella term I’ve come up with so far.
I enjoy work that requires me to be able to stand everywhere. What’s it like from the perspective of a variable in an equation? A particle in a field? A chunk of data in RAM? A monoid in the category of endofunctors? A cell in a body? Or a person, living a different life to me? I can (and do) spend entire days immersed in thoughts like these, training my mental flexibility.
At least, for me, setting off a spark of insight for someone else is insanely motivating. For a long time I only knew a few people who thought this way, but it seems more of them are showing up online every day.
I don’t think these are skills that can be communicated easily. I can’t provide literal directions, nor am I actually an expert, but if meditation has taught me anything it’s that gesturing at vague internal experiences is possible and useful. Everyone has their own context, a mental lattice of their own design. Still, there are generalisable skills for improving the organisation of thinking processes, we’re just not very good at teaching them (especially online).
What am I building towards here? I don't know, but that's kinda the point, I’m going somewhere new. I'm extremely prone to setting a goal and then using my laser-eyed determination to disintegrate every obstacle in the way. So, this is the opposite, the goal is no goal.
Keep learning, keep generating insight, see where it leads.
Until next time,
✌️ Ben
Stuff I’ve been thinking about
📄 callings by Molly Mielke
🎶 Neurotica by Polyphia
🎥 Steve Keen on Lex Fridman (Economics hot-takes)
📚 The Psychology of Money by Morgan Hansel (Finance sane-takes)
📄 The sinister blue sky from interconnected.org
📄 The Locus of Entertainment by Nat Eliason
📄 Hope is a Choice by Liminal Warmth
doublejump, TTS, SoTF, this newsletter, meditation, generative art
i.e. the most creative and mission-driven
Thanks to Twitter (tpot), Substack, Youtube and the internet at large for showing that there were other approaches.
Something I think many people are conditioned to suppress to fit into “professional life”
doublejump and fundamental and some one-off posts
sometimes the perspectives we catch along the way are the goal :D