In NYC, I feel most at home eating Korean BBQ with friends who know me best.
There’s that whole thing that people have smaller apartments in New York than they would otherwise because (1) it’s expensive and (2) you don’t entertain at home, you meet up in the city.
That said, the friends I met up with tonight are the friends who I’ve shared meals with in the comfort of our various homes.
But, like tonight, we’ve shared way more meals together out in the city.
So what does this have to do with writing? Honestly I just started typing (on a treadmill, my other home recently) hoping some connection would come.
I guess it’d be that there is so much value in the tools you know. Yes, you should explore new tools to see if there are any 2-10x improvements out there worth learning.
But if you need to get something done reliably, you shouldn’t try to combine that learning the new tool.
That said, there’s value in using the new tool in an actual meaningful project. Because you can then weigh how well it works in your actual workflow.
So it’s all a trade off in getting something done vs. learning a new tool effectively.
And now, a sloppy transition to a book quote and another point on writing: start with small ideas and build from there
I put Tyson Fury & Deontay Wilder III on the other night, thinking the first couple rounds might be interesting. I ended up watching the entire thing, as it evolved into one of the great modern heavyweight fights.
Sometimes ideas can grow from “oh I’ll jot this thing down” to “oh I’ll revise 100 pages of this”.
From 21 Lessons:
I tried to answer this question in a single tweet. Then the tweet turned into a tweetstorm. The tweetstorm turned into an article. The article turned into three articles. Three articles turned into 21 Lessons. And 21 Lessons turned into this book. So I guess I’m just really bad at condensing my thoughts into a single tweet.
Gigi was trying to answer “what have you learned from Bitcoin?” and it turned from tweet into an excellent book.
Round 1, you start with some tweets to feel things out.
Round 3, you get a nice few paragraphs in, looks pretty straightforward. It’s not.
Round 4, you get knocked down a couple times. But you stick with it.
With each of the next rounds you’re able to keep going. To keep chipping away. You have Resistance in control and wobbly.
But Resistance can get you if you’re not paying attention. So you have to keep showing up, focused.
Keep your hands moving.
Eventually you triumph.
And you hit publish.