Organized Chaos

I was listening to a podcast by Seth Godin on Spotify, a series he named Akimbo, which I find very interesting. In one of the series, he talks about writer's block. He says there's no such thing.

I listened to that one twice.

And then in another one, titled Hitsville, he talks about people who have made a hit (whether it's in the arts, or business or anything) and that the hit was a surprise. That after the fact, you can look back with analysis and claim that you _knew_ or _understood_ the process, but you really didn't.

And the proof that you really didn't is in it's un-repeatability. You can't automatically do it again.

Preparation and Research

It begs the question of why not just jump into it and do it, without direction or hesitation. Organized chaos. Thinking and planning get in the way. Analysis paralysis. And at the end of the day, all that thinking may marginally improve the outcome, or even more likely, deaden it. Dull it. Make it uninteresting and boring.

Procrastination

Was invented by someone who felt guilty sitting doing absolutely nothing and then looking back and seeing that time had just passed by. This is why people look at old photographs and remember a time when they were really productive, doing so much stuff in eight hours. Now barely remembering a few months ago. The past few years have gone by really fast and I feel time moving even faster, like being caught in an undertow, or the centrifugal force of being sucked down a drain, though this one is in a huge ocean. You cannot get out, but you need to keep moving. If you need to remember what happened yesterday, you should look at photographs, which means you need to take very many photos, or you won't remember a thing.

I heard it stated very well in Lee Child's first Jack Reacher book, Killing Field. That memory is like a bucket which when you are old it's filled up. So that you will remember everything in the bucket, stuff that happened years ago, but you cannot put anything new into the bucket.

The Myth of Planning

And so planning is a myth. It was Sam Harris who gave a really good talk on Free Will. Or rather the fact that free will does not exist. You cannot think of something before you think it, so where does it come from? If you cannot think of something, before you think it, then where is the free will to think of what you need to think of?

Things just appear in your mind, and so your only option is to observe them and then allow your mind to think of them - and you don't know what you will decide or how you will think since you cannot pre-think anything. It's quite complex, but it made a lot of sense to me. An aha moment. And it answers the question about planning, that it's impossible to really plan ahead. You just have to sit down and allow the activity to take place. You cannot predetermine the outcome.

You cannot predetermine the outcome.

Hence the notion of organized chaos. You can tell yourself that today I will sit and finish these tasks that I have put aside and not done. That's the plan. And then write down in your diary, scheduled time slots in the day when these activities will take place. And then attempt to sit and do them. And perhaps they are well defined, so you know the outcome. An brilliantly written letter. A grocery list completed. An interview with a candidate for a position in your company all done. The lawn mowed and raked. And this blog post all done. The list can be worked through, but it's the process that cannot be determined. I did not think that these words would be the words that I would be thinking and writing, and it's only now as I write them that I see that they make sense. I did not order the writing, it happened and as I worked through it, I wondered if I would get to the conclusion of the organized chaos that I was thinking of writing about. It was an idea, but there was little to determine the content.

In conclusion

Planning is necessary to list the things that you need to do. However, over planning can lead to paralysis, and you just have to dive in. When I started this blog years ago, the idea was to write something interesting, and in trying to write interesting work, the necessity of writing boring work was unacceptable. But it's part of the process of getting something interesting done. The boring pieces must happen. And waiting for the muse to show up, with their intelligent suggestions may mean that you never get that plane off the ground, fearing failure.

Just take off already.