What is your prime faculty?

On writer's block, prolific output, and figuring out what you are actually built to make.

GMM you

This weeks I am suffering from some SERIOUS writers block. That is a tricky thing to deal with, when you have a rule to get something out every week.

So I will just start typing right here, leveraging he pressure of the looming deadline, the pumping of the heart, the sensations in the body indicating a looming disappointment on oneself.

You're watching me generating here, going to try to keep this raw, so forgive any spelling errors.

Let’s talk about getting shit out.

Putting todays writers block to the side, the chronicle is going well, but I'm currently in the worst production slump in my life when it comes to video - getting them out is pulling teeeeth. It's quite uncharacteristic really, because historically I've produced a LOT.

There is about 300 videos listed on the FFF YouTube channel, I  have a hard time believing that I made that many.

And it’s not really the first video project of mine, back in my early twenties, we did an (initially Macromedia Flash (Wikipedia) based) show called Knappnytt, with a cat providing cultural commentary in Swedish.

It was  vulgar and immature and therefore got massively popular and hit the front page of the Swedish YouTube on regular basis, and we produced over 50 episodes, one per week during peak production.

Video: MPJ in his early twenties acting and doing shitty parkour

Another really old thing I did was 8AMSharp, which was an experiment in just getting shit out - we met bi-weekly at 8AM on Saturdays (and by “we” I mean basically anyone that wanted could show up / bring a friends) without idea, script or anything, and the same evening, we should have uploaded a finished movie to YouTube. Most of them were horrible, but I still think that 15-years ago me is adorable in this one (and it has English subtitles for some reason):

Writing like you're running out of time

When I was active on Quora I wrote over 750 answers, many quite meaty and that is how I built my first significant following on the internet, and was Quora Top Writer in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, with answers were republished in Forbes, Daily Mail, and The Independent.

I’ve overall been incredibly active writer through most of my life, always kept a blog here and there, getting stuff out. When I saw Hamilton the first time, my favorite part was these lyrics from Non-Stop:

Why do you write like you're running out of time?
Write day and night like you're running out of time

Why do you write like it's going out of style
Write day and night like it's going out of style

_How do you write like tomorrow won't arrive?
How do you write like you need it to survive?
How do you write every second you're alive

_Every second you're alive
Every second you're alive

Alexander joins forces with James Madison and John Jay to write a series of essays Defending the new United States Constitution, entitled The Federalist Papers
The plan was to write a total of twenty-five essays
The work divided evenly among the three men
In the end, they wrote eighty-five essays in the span of six months
John Jay got sick after writing five
James Madison wrote twenty-nine
Hamilton wrote the other FIFTY-ONE!

So cool! By the way, if you have not seen Hamilton (Disney Plus), you cannot truly appreciate Shirley Wu’s amazing Interactive Data Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton and then you have doubly missed out.

Momentum, my ladies and gentlemen. Momentum.

Where am I going with this?

Not exactly sure, we’re flowing. At this predicament of extreme procrastination it is crucial to not stop and ask for direction, typing at this point is like that shark that has to keep swimming to breathe.

Is that an actual shark, or am I just remembering some Snopes shark? I cannot really find out because I do not dare CMD-tab out to google, fearing that I would break my flow, and this chronicle would fail.

When we were making Knappnytt (and also another video series that is too embarrassing to mention and I wouldn’t know how to find the material anyway) I always said to the team “Think of Settman”. This was referring to Peter Settman, a prolific TV producer in Sweden whose production company Baluba has produced Eurovision in Sweden multuple times, and is behind a tremendous amount of TV.

I honestly don’t know much about Peter Settman but I have this image of him, a symbol. The thing I imagine about Settman is that he doesn’t really do art, he was just very consistent at getting things out.

I imagine him being that guy who goes home to an editor that is struggling the day before deadline with pizza and cola and finished it up, because he is the kind of person that always delivers.

Not always the best stuff, but I always imagined that when you order a TV show from Settman, you know that you will get a bloody TV show.

So that was the idea, always get an episode out.

Always get something out.

Get one out.

Keep on swimming. Keep on moving.

Maintain movement.

ADHD protip: “Don’t sit down or you’re doomed”

You cannot see it in the text, but right between this line and the one before it, I was for a minute or so, hitting the letter “a” and backspace back and forth, to the beat of Zulu by Stephan Bodzin just to keep my fingers moving, a bit like how Starcraft professional players just keep the APM going.

Just keep hitting commands, keep the momentum.

I find this to be a big momentum problem when introducing any LLM into my flow. It's like how adding online tooling breaks flow when you are commuting, but to a much bigger degree.

While LLM can be incredible at breaking your writers block, and do brainstorming, and help you with code they are also notoriously unreliable and and unpredictable in speed, and as soon I introduce it somewhere in my creative or developer funnel, it create a point of failure that is very erratic, and throws me off my game. I'm not saying that it isn't worth it, but it make flow difficult, at least until they are more robust.

I find that introducing an LLM into a process is more like introducing people or crowdsourcing than a tool -  it’s expensive and requires a lot of process. It also makes me a bit lazy, I’ve found. It sort of messes with my productivity the way google autocomplete started messing with my spelling when it launched.

What faculty will this atrophy in me?

We are nowadays well aware of the psychological problems of social media, but when it came around, it was just cool, and people that had the foresight to go off it were largely seen as weirdos. Social Media really messed up my attention span.

I noticed the problem too late when I realized that using Vine had given me the ability to become bored 4 seconds into a 6 second video.

... and it’s taking me a long time to repair it to the point that I can read a book.

I wonder what we will conclude that using an LLM a lot DID to us, what part of our cognition atrophied? What got more difficult?

Mnemonics and Mathemagic

I’ve been toying with talking about mnemonics (Wikipedia) in the chronicle at some point. I was really skilled at them in my late teens, I  could memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards for instance, and I to this day use The Major System to remember PIN codes.

I generally have no objection with using my phone to remember most things, but for PIN codes I make a point of using my brain. PIN codes one of those things that you CAN store in your phone, but it is kind of awkward and slow because you really need fast and effortless brain retrieval of them (picking up the phone, opening 1password etc). Not having the skill to memorized a PIN code is a really disturbing thing for me, because it really is not a good use case for the phone, the brain is genuinely better for it.

Thinking about the Major System makes me remember this golden nugget of a TED talk, Mathemagics, beating calculators handily on stage:

At the end of the video he narrates his internal thinking process, and remembers a number by converting it to “cookie fishing” using the major system.

As I'm writing this I am not tabbing out to the video, I am remembering “cookie fishing” from memory. I have not watched the video in many years and I know that “cookie fishing” becomes 77862. I.e. because I know the major system, I can do mental retrieval of a 5 digit number mentioned in passing in a video that I watched 10 years ago or so.

Mnemonics are cool as hell.

Where are we?

Now, I’m feeling that it is probably time to wrap this up, IA writer is counting 1313 words so far. Is that a long chronicle? I think it’s on the shorter side, but hey, it would be nice to get some sleep and forgive myself for this week, plus I have some ferrets to do after this. What is a good length for these, really? What is your preference? What length works well for you and why?

Anyway, if we are wrapping up, it begets figuring out what the theme was here? I will need a subject line for the email. It is definitely related to faculties, is it not? Developing and maintaining faculties.

Making something an extension of you

Oh, that makes me remember a little tidbit from my week - a friend of mine had been struggling to get into programming (or rather, he was constantly falling out of it during his career, re-learning it). I suspected that was missing was that he wasn’t really getting to the level of letting the language become an expression of himself, but just using it as a mere tool to get something done, and as such programming wasn’t really retained.

I made a parallel to musicians, how they practice their instrument to get familiar with it in order to be able to do live shows, and I highlighted the concept of Code Katas (another concept that I have not thought about in many years - here is a beautiful session of TDD in Ruby set to classical piano - the song is (Mariage D’Amour by George Davidson Spotify).

TDD Bouncing Balls kata in Ruby:

It is a very different thing to be able to use something, and to have that thing be second nature. We truly can “feel” words, and I’ve definitely experienced that I’ve dreamt in code during my more active years.

I am currently switching from Final Cut Pro to DaVinci Resolve, and it is sometimes frustrating to lose that second nature effect - the flow just gets lost, and there is a deeper part of me that doesn’t come out because it only does when it get direct access to my fingers without going through my system 2. I.e. like as of writing, my fingers just move automatically, I do not really know what word comes next until I write it.

Wrapping up

I think that in the age we are moving into, it is extraordinary important to think about what faculties we want to cultivate. What is it that we actually want to get GOOD at, what it is that we want to be able to truly wield.

I hope your week is good and that you find an effortless space in what you are creating. If you would like to write to me, hit that reply button - I love hearing from you.

If you don't know what to write, answer me this: What is a strong faculty of yours that you haven’t cultivated enough lately?

I wish you the very best of weeks, remember to pet a dog if you get the opportunity this week, we only get about 4576 weeks and not all of them are guaranteed to feature a dog.

Stay Curious