Monday, January 24, 2022
Back on January 2nd, 2020 I published a little blog post titled Why and How I Blog. The gist of that article was that I was going to be a little bit less afraid to publish blog posts under my real name, publish more often, and take more pride in how I communicate with others. Now, I don't want to retract anything from that blog post, per se. However, I do want to update why and how I blog.
First off, it is still important to me that I take pride in my writing while still ensuring I don't get too caught up in perfectionism or fear of looking stupid. Secondly, I need to differentiate between (A) quick insights that are worth remembering; (B) Longer arguments that I need to spend more time with; and (C) Things that likely never need to be published. As an example for all of these, I could use (A) this blog post as quick insight, (B) my pending blog post explaining what Surlesol is as an article that needs to more robust and persuasive, and (C) a recent post, "Fixing Css Navbar Image Size in Safari,"something that does not need to be published at all (but I will leave it up regardless at this point). Now, there is a little bit of meat in this post that I would like to touch on so that I can remember a bit what has prompted this shift in my thinking. Sometimes a lot of different sources come together to influence us in a given direction. In this case, I want to reference all of these influences in a somewhat public way to note them for posterity and to ensure that I am remembering them correctly.
The big epiphany that I had for myself is that my purpose in life is to learn about self-improvement and to share what I have learned with the world. This is my purpose in life as I have defined it for myself. In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says, "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible." And so, for various reasons, I have taken it upon myself to actually try and define what my purpose in life is. The answer I have come up with, after much deliberation, is to learn about self-improvement and share it with the world, as noted above. This is a perfectly fine purpose in life, I think. Another key insight that I had was that our purpose in life can change (I think this breakthrough was in therapy or something). Our purpose in life does not stay constant. This insight has enabled me to put a lot less pressure on myself to define what my purpose in life is. As I lessened the pressure on myself I just kind of came up with the self-improvement thing after realizing that I'd spent an inordinate amount of time trying to improve myself and that I have been working on a self-improvement app for nearly 5 years now. I think self-improvement is important! This is not the time or the place to elaborate on why, exactly. I will get to that later. But suffice it to say that this has been a good shift in my mindset and has provided a kind of North Star as I move forward.
What does this have to do with why and how I write? My realization that I needed to change how I wrote once more came about after several agonizing weeks trying to publish a blog post on "what is Surlesol" (blog post forthcoming). During this process of trying to explain what my app is, how it works, and why it is important to me I realized something: I had become a bit porous at persuasive writing! And so, as a true self-improvement aficionado does, I set out on improving my argumentative writing so that I would write persuasively about my self-improvement app. Getting the article published was not helped by the fact that my website kept breaking after some serious technical upgrades (adding a CSP and getting to A+ on Mozilla Observatory chief among them). At any rate, I realized that my writing skills had atrophied since graduating college in 2009. It has been a long time since I had written anything requring real actual research and citing sources in a coherent way to change someone's mind. Yes, I think I have a good writing voice. And yes, I have heard of The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. For a long time now I have taken writing seriously. On Writing is another one of my favorite books on writing. An old favorite blog post of mine was economist Greg Mankiw's article on How to Write Well. But there was something seriously missing in my pursuit to become a better writer. I did not realize how shitty my formal writing was until asking an old college buddy that I reconnected with to take a glance at my lines of argument. He quickly sent back a revision with grammar, spelling (jist vs. gist), and other things marked up. I was embarrassed, but in a good way. I knew that I was capable of writing better than this. But was writing research papers something that I had forgotten? Or was it something I had never truly known in the first place? In order to graduate from undergrad I had to write something like a 40 page paper for my Senior Comprehensive Seminar. But even then I remember thinking that I was not cut out for this and everyone was just better at writing research than I was.
Enter How to Take Smart Notes. How I found this book is something of a story in and of itself. I will tell it now as it is important to me at this stage in my journey. Long story short, I was offered the job of something like "Team Lead - Trading Systems Engineering" at a company that I wanted to join. For various reasons, I did not join this company. Specifically, the company did not have an office in the city that my son lives in (my wife and I are getting separated, long story). So, I turned down the offer. However, in the process of researching some things about this company I stumbled across a recommended books section. I am a sucker for recommended books, especially shortlists from trading firms, and I had read all but two on the list (the other being Flash Boys, I should get around to that). The one that caught my eye, just about 2-3 weeks ago, was How to Take Smart Notes. Now, I am only 43 pages in, but already it is revolutionizing the way that I think about writing anything where I am trying to do more than figure out what I think. The whole point and purpose of this blog post is this: I need to write differently depending on if I am writing to figure out what I think vs. writing to convince others to beleive what I think. That the two types of writing are different is beyond obvious to say. However, as I read the book, I realize that I had been doing nearly everything wrong, not just blogging. This point is made clear early on when the author says, "Focusing on writing as if nothing else counts does not necessarily mean you should do everything else less well, but it certainly makes you do everything else differently." (p. 37, How to Take Smart Notes). And now I see it. For a long time I had been trying to use GTD methodology in order to manage my knowledge work. And as predicted in Getting Things Done, my notes had turned into something of an "amorphous blob of undoability." Now, my workflow wasn't that bad, but it certainly was "a graveyard for old ideas." The ramifications for this are quite clear to me.
My system for notetaking is my problem. By changing my system I will change my notetaking. By changing my notetaking I will change how I think. By changing how I think I will change my life. This may sound like hyperbole. But if anyone understands the effect of small compounding changes over time it is me. Not to plug too shamelessly, but my app tracks habits and routines that can lead to profound changes over time. As James Clear says, "Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement." It is still very early days, and I have a lot of work to do in order to construct the "scaffolding for my brain" and begin actually seeing the benefits of a slip-box system. I suppose I am just excited for the next steps. By publishing this as a quick insight I hope that I can build on this idea, have an implementation intention that I am sharing publicly (and with my future self), and become a better academic writer again (or for the first time).
In closing, I hope that I will soon be able to publish a little blog post on Surlesol and some things I have learned. Before I do I will clean it up a little bit, make sure the website is not breaking, and then ship it before I start my new job.
Cheers, Steven Ramey
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