A Whimsical Writer

This newsletter is one day late. I wrote three versions, but none felt right. So, I pushed the computer aside and caught up with some reading. As I read, I couldn't help but wonder why my writing was stagnant. I haven't posted anything on Medium in weeks and have been inconsistent with LinkedIn after taking February off. I feel empty and need to fill my creative well. Then, I remembered the concept of exploring and exploiting that I wrote about earlier.

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 years. There is a concept called divergence and convergence.

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.

“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.

In his book "How To Fail At Everything And Still Win Big," Adam Scott, the creator of Dilbert comics, distinguishes people into two categories: simplifiers and optimizers. Simplifiers choose the easiest way to accomplish a task, even if some extra effort might have produced a better outcome. In contrast, optimizers search for the very best solution, even if the added complexity increases the chances of unexpected problems.

“Are you sure you aren’t coming?” asked my husband before walking into the briefing session before his first-ever indoor skydiving. We were on a cruise to New Zealand and just before that, we both stood near the glass dome where an instructor was helping some daring souls to ‘fly’ in a cubicle or tube with high-velocity air blown through the mashed wire floor. Most couldn’t manage to fly.

You can apply the ‘Goldilocks Rule’ to stay motivated. Here is how: Imagine you’re playing a new board game with some friends. The game is so challenging, you can’t even win a single point. And no matter how many hours you put into it, you don’t get any better. Chances are, you’d grow frustrated and want to give up. Now imagine the flip side. The game is so easy, you win every single time without any effort. While your ego may get a boost, it would probably get pretty boring. And you give it up.

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.

Erich Segal was an author, a classicist (the study of classical antiquity), and a professor at Yale, who took a sabbatical and wrote a screenplay titled “Love Story” - a sappy romance between a rich boy and a poor girl. When the screenplay didn’t sell, his agent recommended converting the screenplay into a book. No one expected Segal’s book to sell well. The publisher published just 5000 copies, but one of the 5000 copies reached Barbara Walters - the famous TV host.

Last week I shared with you the technique to write non-SMART goals that are big bold and worthy of becoming the mission of your life. Goals that: come from your soul (and using 3 Questions Technique to find them) so challenging that you are likely to fail at 50% of them self-fueled (some of them ) that you can achieve even when you have lost everything. And asked you to print and frame them. You must be thinking, that is well and good but how the hell I am going to achieve them?