I keep talking and thinking about how I can reach a creator state. It turns out, I am the biggest blocker for reaching that creator state (no surprises there). Self-doubt, imposter syndrome, a fear of putting myself out there are all reasons I have been afraid to push more content. Does anyone care? Who cares? I am doing this for me. To push myself beyond what I am comfortable and capable of right now. This is my journey of self improvement.
I have started pushing out more “content” on Twitter. This is my continuous output for thoughts and ideas I have. This is why I am calling it TaaIP or Twitter as an Idea Platform. I am using Twitter (not the other way around) as a way to refine and sharpen my ideas. I have taken the idea from Austin Kleon’s book “Steal Like an Artist” to follow 9 people (and 3 from each one) on Twitter and listen to their ideas and points of views.
I am really focusing on reading diverse sets of ideas (I briefly followed a transphobic person and subsequently “improved” my view of thinking on whether trans people should be allowed to compete in sports of their chosen gender. My view is simply: let them compete, we need more data to determine “fairness” in the future, whatever that may entail.) to draw from. I do not want to be that person who lives in a liberal echo chamber.
One of the mantras of Stoicism is:
Don’t put on airs about your self-improvement
- Epictetus
I very much intend to stick to that. I will make this the one-time justification that I am not creating anything to show off to people about how I am changing. I just want to put it out there for me to be able to say I did. If I got 0 readers that is A-OK with me.
(I have realized I did not even talk about being a “reader” or consumer of content until this point, but I decided not to overuse my delete key and restructure this document. The content needs to come out!)
In my personal, daily journals, I have noticed that I am dopamine-seeking. I have big problems reading the NYTimes, The Hill, Ars Technica, Engadget, The Verge, OregonLive, Instagram (ugh), and Wordle (at least in the mornings). I constantly check for updates of the news. Maybe something new happened in the Ukraine war? Maybe someone famous died? This pleasure seeking I realize now is one way that I put off creation. It’s easier to consume than to create. This is the path of least resistance. Putting my foot down is easier said than done. While I have no solid plan to cut myself off cold turkey, I am publicly acknowledging that I have a problem and commiting to you (my invisible, non-existant reader) that I will commit to replacing this with creation.
By focusing, hopefully I can alleviate a lot of the fragmented thinking (for me this manifests as thoughts not completing and jumping to a different idea mid-thought) I have. This is compounded with non-linear thinking, which seems OK to have at least by the lack of condemnation from this article asking people to use non-linear thinking. That said, maybe I should do something about fragmented thinking as I’m sure the definition being in the APA dictionary means that various psychological issues have it as a symptom.
Oh yes, there was an execution section. Well, I lost my train of thought there. I promise I will execute. Maybe.