01
Writing is a tool for discovery.
Don't know about a subject? Start writing. Ask questions. Find answers. Get meta. Ask questions about the questions. Play devil's advocate. Eat a snack. Take a shower.
Each question is like a stop on a road trip of inquiry.
As you repeat this ☝ process until your eyes bleed out (it’s common) you form a map of the territory. This is a good thing. Maps are helpful. They shrink reality into tangible bits. You have to strike a balance. Not enough bits, they aren't useful. Too many bits, they’re not usable.
But maps have two drawbacks.
They’re not the real thing. A map of Santa Monica is not the same as the cool breeze you feel walking down the Promenade. It’s not a smokey freeway. It’s not the line at Trader Joes. It’s like a movie inspired by true events, but not the event.
Maps require constant rediscovery because reality = change is constant. So you have to trackback some 50 miles to move forward again. In other words, you have to unlearn.
One problem is that once we know the territory it becomes hard to unknow the territory. Or, as Sir Patrick Stewart is fond of saying, "once you've seen everything," well, you can’t unsee it.
This relates to the Curse of Knowledge.
The problem is that once we know something—say, the melody of a song—we find it hard to imagine not knowing it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us.
This creates "enormous information imbalances."One symptom of this imbalance is miscommunication. For example:
You say X but mean Y, someone else says X but means Z. Or worse yet, you say some crazy hash-looking statement like:
“73f9977556584a369800e775b48f3dbe but mean f2e80a7219bcb74d20049963116b96e9”
And then the other person is like 🤯 and for a variety of reasons goes along without asking questions. And you go along thinking they understood what you meant when you said it.
So weeks later during a check in:
You:
How's it going with "73f9977556584a369800e775b48f3dbe?"
They're like:
Oh, "73f9977556584a369800e775b48f3dbe", it's good, yeah.
But we all know that “73f9977556584a369800e775b48f3dbe” is not good to go. For we know (since we're the audience and can assume omniscience) the other person said
"73f9977556584a369800e775b48f3dbe"
But meant "6311ae17c1ee52b36e68aaf4ad066387"
And of course, that's disastrous.
The problem when two people have different maps is that they're not aware of it. It's a space between the notes kind of thing. Invisible. We're creatures that like to observe the world with our 5 senses.
So what do we do?
Enter Suzuki.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few" Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryū Suzuki
Adopting a beginner's mind = drop our expectations and preconceived ideas.
If ☝ is true:
1. How do we drop our expectations and preconceived ideas so that possibilities open up? What are the actual practices?
2. Under what circumstances do these practices succeed? Fail? And why?
These are some of the questions I'd like to explore in this newsletter series. In the meantime, do you have some practices to share?