all the writy stuff, not including /now.
-
pain
there is nothing to writing. all you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
— Ernest HemingwayI have no process for writing, hence I don’t even call myself a writer anymore. it mostly happens almost by mistake.
when I think of writing, the first word that comes to my mind is pain. for me to actually write something, it has to grow in my mind and overwhelm me so much that I can’t keep carrying it around — I just need to unload it. doesn’t mean it’s easy to do that by any stretch. talk about choosing pain to avoid even greater pain.
one other way I can end up writing is when it starts out on its own, little and harmless. I don’t even have the intention, but then buttons keep pressing themselves, and an hour later I’m left with a page of something. if that something keeps living on its own and demands that I feed it, I keep going with it. that’s it.
at all other times I don’t even think of writing. the blank page fear is foreign to me.
pain, on the other hand, nags.
—
-
Prague
first time I came to Prague in 2009, I was sooo underwhelmed. it seemed like a smaller, cheaper, simpler version of St. Petersburg1. almost like a village.
only later I found out that Europe does not favor big cities, and Prague was no exception. but the first impression was there. instead of a brochure “vibrant european capital” I found a town with a very compact historic center, sleepy short streets, modest Vltava river, and generally nothing to do after seeing all of it.
we moved here in 2013, and it took me a few years more to start appreciating Prague — precisely for the above reasons.
Prague is walkable. Prague is casually engaging. Prague is forgiving to unplanned routes and is best explored that way. Prague can offer the big city lights AND an escape from them, depending on the turn you take.
even though I knew perfectly well that I would never become a local, for the first time in my life Prague felt closest to home.
- but then there’s no place on earth quite like St. Petersburg. admittedly, the comparison was a bit unfair. ↩︎
—
-
opinions
I’m not informed enough to have a strong opinion on this — how often do you hear that?
how different would our society be if people were not trying to fend off uncertainty with the illusion of knowledge?
- how would state propaganda work?
- what would social media influencers talk about?
- how do politicians get elected now?
- would twitter collapse?
- do we take the responsibility of making decisions with insufficient data? or do we search for some other escape?
when you think of it, borrowing opinions is both an ancient survival mechanism and one of the biggest hurdles facing human society today. instead of fighting symptoms with counter-opinions, we must challenge the very culture of easy opining.
I start by telling my kids “I don’t know” more often. I try to get words like assumption, verify, bias into their vocabulary.
How do you do it?
—
-
harry potter and the dreaded todo list
a book nobody wants to read.
teacher: kids, who do you want to become?
kid 1: an astronaut!
kid 2: a rock star!
kid 3: I want to go to the grocery 5,000 times, wash dishes 12,000 times, barely meet 600 deadlines, and spend my life wondering where it all went wrong.if movies / books / stories / gossip were like real life, who would want to spend money on that? we are suckers for good stories because they allow us to temporarily escape the cages we build through negligence. a path to a lesser goal is so clear our legs walk it on their own. all while our heads are happily constructing complex dreams, narratives, and unlikely situations we want to find ourselves in.
the world doesn’t care about narratives; it debunks them one by one. your life doesn’t want to be a story; you miss its essence while anxiously searching for one story after another.
happiness isn’t something hollywood can show you. you don’t get to discover it until your 10th try. and then it turns out to be in the place you neglected all along — yourself.
do I have a point? I don’t know. this doesn’t have to be a story.
—
-
stop
starting up is praised. everybody encourages you to start something new — a business, a hobby, a relationship.
rarely does it even get acknowledged that for a new start you usually have to stop something first: quit the job you hate, break up with a negative person, let go of life-long fears. the most difficult part gets little attention.
stopping is important but tricky, because most starts in life are unconscious. picking up bad habits is easy; little compromises are invisible; urgent over important feels natural. stopping, on the other hand, requires alert and going against the flow. when you need to stop something and it’s hard, it may mean there was an easy start in the past.
finally, you don’t only stop to start something again. stopping is a practice; it’s a cure. getting rid of something to make room is a good deal in itself. removing things that no longer make sense brings clarity and insights you don’t get otherwise.
starting is about dreams, enthusiasm, impatience, pivots, impulse.
stopping is about reality, reflection, acknowledgment, analysis, conscience.
stop more often than you start.
—
-
bad ideas
great ideas are born out of many bad ideas.
you have to pick 10 ideas that all seem awful, and one of them might just be great.
the problem is that the best ideas often come in disguise. instead of realizing that you’ve come up with 1 ok idea, 8 bad ideas, and 1 great idea — you think you have 1 ok idea + 9 bad ones.
thus the trickiest part about bad ideas is self-censorship. it’s not easy to even write them down, let alone show, discuss, or implement them.
the most difficult part of brainstorming is pretending there are no stupid ideas.
— overheard on twitterthe reason for that is that we are taught to judge and to be afraid of judgment from an early age. combine that with the human inclination to save effort, and you have a recipe for never doing anything interesting.
a remedy for that is practice and attitude. make it a habit to come up with lots of ideas, and don’t label them as “bad”. resourcefulness is a muscle, it builds up over time.
just have many ideas.
—
-
confusion
a common problem is we don’t notice when we are genuinely confused.
parents taught us to be fearless, but never admitted that nobody in their right mind could be fearless. they were setting us up for failure. thus, instead of not fearing anything, we learned to hide fears.
somehow, hiding fear from others became hiding it from ourselves. through the practice of hiding fear we stopped noticing it.
we prefer knee-jerk reactions to confusion: keeping a poker face or smiling, nodding, and jabbing at the next obvious thing without stopping for a second. it became a habit to the extent that self-help writers teach us to “schedule time for strategic thinking“. this is sad because it reveals the autopilot mode that we have to learn to turn off.
so, to practice confusion awareness I started saying things like “I’m confused,” “I have no idea what’s going on,” “I’m lost” out loud. I figured I first need to be more aware of how I react to reality not meeting my expectations.
you can’t fix your wrong reactions to confusion until you defeat the control freak in you. it’s ok to have goals and plans but that requires equal understanding that the world doesn’t work according to your primitive models.
every once in a while, just watch how life unfolds before you. it’s less painful than insisting that it obeys your batch of orders, a.k.a. todo list.
—
-
intuition or data
intuition without data is whatever cognitive bias fits the situation — it feels like a hunch that shouldn’t be ignored. if I don’t understand the gibberish presidential candidates say, I’ll just choose the one who looks less crooked.
data without vision is myopia — it makes sure you’ll only get to a local maximum. you know what to do to climb a tree, but is it the right tree at all?
so, intuition or data is a false choice. good decisions require both. isolating one component is an easy shortcut, while having a holistic vision — constantly tested and refined by accurate data — feels like hard work.
you can only trust hard work.
—
-
to those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.
— Nietzsche, the will to power—
-
my most desired superhuman ability
10 years ago I walked into the kitchen where my team was having lunch. they had a casual discussion of superhuman abilities as I joined them.
somebody asked what my most desired ability was. without missing a heartbeat, I said “learn 10 times faster”. my job as CEO required me to never stop learning, I explained.
when I bootstrapped my software product company a few years before that, the word “startup” was not even a thing in our part of the world. websites were still best built from scratch using HTML templates and PHP, best sources of knowledge were bloated paper books, and sure as hell I couldn’t hire professionals for any role.
my strategy was to find promising novices, figure out what their job was, and hope they’d grow to take control. so, before I could teach anyone anything, I had to half-decently know how to do it myself.
suddenly I found myself learning a myriad of things: from leading a team of developers, to web design, to UI, to copywriting and marketing, to SEO, and to sales. all while drawing shitty product logo images using a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop.
not a small task for a recent computer science graduate. no wonder it always felt like disaster and I thought I’d never figure out all the bells and whistles of running a small software company. turned out, it was only 10% about software.
somehow we pulled through. those first few years cemented one thing in my mind: there was always something to learn. I was determined to learn whatever it takes, even though giving it 12 hours a day, 6 days a week never seemed remotely enough.
—
but then things started shifting. technology change was ever accelerating, strong competition was emerging, and customer needs were becoming more and more sophisticated. one envisioned path arrived at a crossroads of a dozen paths.
before, I knew exactly what to learn, but now I was puzzled. which way to go? what stack of critical knowledge to pursue? eventually, paths were taken, opportunities chosen, mistakes made, and lessons learned. nonetheless, the need to choose never went away after that.
so, if I was asked the same question today, my answer would be “know what to learn”. I can live with the same, human pace of learning if I have the superhuman ability to know what’s important.
—