The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 384 - Writing

Transcript:

Pete: Hello, Jen.

Jen: Hello, Pete.

Pete: I don't know if you've noticed, but James Clear seems to be doing the rounds in the podcast sphere.

Jen: Yes, I have noticed that.

Pete: So James Clear, author of one of our favorite books, Atomic Habits, has reappeared in my podcast feed on about twelve different podcasts, talking about his book and concepts from it, which is all about habit building and formation of habits. I guess it's great timing because it's sort of towards the start of the year, when we're recording this and when these episodes that he's releasing are coming out. But he said something pretty casually, not necessarily about habits, but actually about writing, that stopped me in my tracks. And I want to bounce it off you and maybe (just maybe) recommit to a habit of writing on my blog.

Jen: Okay, let's see if twenty minutes from now you're ready to recommit. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: You can tell the hesitation in saying that on this podcast. I'm like, what am I going to commit to? So, I'll give some context. I have a blog on noodlescratchers.com, it's called. And for maybe five years or close to, I wrote a weekly (and at one point, twice weekly) post on there, which was designed to help leaders think differently about the way they lead. And about two years and seven months ago...

Jen: Hmm, I wonder what was going on in your life around that point.

Pete: Right around the exact same time as my son was born, coincidence, I decided to take a pause from writing and focus instead on our podcast, my other work, and adjusting to life as a dad. I haven't recontinued that practice of writing. And I've told myself a bunch of stories as to why I don't need to, or shouldn't. And then, James Clear came along and said something on this podcast that I listened to, that got me thinking and rethinking about whether I should reinstigate this practice of writing.

Jen: Oh, I can't wait to hear what this is.

Pete: Okay. So he was interviewed on Shane Parrish's podcast, which was the one I listened to. I mean, like I said, he's on about fifteen different podcasts at the moment, it seems. And Shane Parrish's podcast, I'll link to it in the Box O' Goodies, it's called The Knowledge Project. It's an amazing podcast. And they were talking about habits and atomic habits and concepts from the book, much of which I've heard before. And then, he started talking about writing. Or more to the point, Shane started asking James about his writing practice. And I'll paraphrase this completely, but this is what I recall from it. James Clear said something like, "People always say writing is really hard. And it is. But it's because it's hard that it is so beneficial. That the process of me wrestling and grappling with thoughts and ideas and concepts that I've read and consumed and putting them into writing, that hard filtering process is the process that makes me a better thinker and a better leader and a better author and a better human." And he said, "The really simple metaphor I think about is, going to the gym to lift weights is hard, but the process of doing that makes you stronger or fitter. And in the same way, I think about the process of writing is hard. And in the same way, it makes me a better thinker and a better leader." And I thought to myself, "Touché, James Clear, touché. When's the last time I went to the gym for my thoughts?" And that is as far as I've got. I heard this yesterday. I knew we were recording today. And I was like, "Maybe I've just been called out." Maybe we could make a case that this podcast is a version of writing for us, which I do think there's some truth to. This is a bit of a gym for our thoughts. But I do wonder if there's something I am missing. And I wonder if you feel this, too. Or something I have forgotten that comes from sitting down to write something once a week.

Jen: Wow. I have a lot of thoughts popping off right now. So the thing that I'm immediately struck by is the fact that I went to the same place you went, which is, "Well, we talk as our version of writing." But there's a difference between writing a first draft, which is basically what this podcast is, and writing to get to a point where you're ready to rewrite, and then rewriting to the point where you're ready to get to a draft that's ready for someone else's pen to edit. So as I'm thinking this through, I am calling myself out for the fact that I, like you, do a lot of out-loud thinking, but maybe there's a next step to sharpen the thinking and further clarify what the point is.

Pete: Yes, okay. It's funny you said thinking out loud, because I just wrote that down. As you were sharing, I thought, is the difference something like...this is so meta, given this is what I'm literally about to do. Is the difference something like thinking out loud versus asserting something? Asserting something being, "I've thought about this a lot. I've written about it. Edited it. Questioned it. Poked holes at it. And now, I'm ready to assert this idea that I think might be true." And I hold it lightly. And I'm not so stubborn that I think that this is an absolute truism, because I have enough humility to go, "I don't know everything." Like all of that, of course. But an assertion feels like it's a little more edited, thought through, processed, than a thinking out loudism, which I think is what we very much do on this podcast, to which I think there is a huge benefit in doing.

Jen: Okay. Wow. Wow. Wow. Because now, here's where my brain's going. To write. What does to write mean? So one could write a blog post, for which the expectation of the audience is not that high in terms of like the amount of time and detail and research and fact-checking that you would put into a blog post. There's a sort of agreement with the audience that this is casual writing. When I think about what it takes to write a book like Atomic Habits, that is a fully researched, fact-checked, cited piece of work that is very much James Clear's IP because of how he says it and the way he frames it and the metaphors that he uses. But like the amount of not only thinking but researching and testing and experimenting that had to go into creating that work is so significant. So, it feels like writing exists on a spectrum. And on my end, I'm very much at one end of the spectrum. And that is not the book that is on a shelf at Barnes and Noble, on every end cap. Which, I was at a Barnes and Noble recently, and that is what's going on with James Clear.

Pete: He's everywhere. I mean, me neither. But I do wonder if there's a version of writing that is...I mean, I know there's a version of writing that's useful for me, that I haven't been doing as much of in the last two years and seven months. And so for me, I'm trying to think about what was it when I was doing it and what could it be if I commit to reinstating it. It's a practice of filtering all of the things that I consume into some sort of thoughts. I used to think about it, once upon a time, as a practice of not dying. And what I mean by that is proving to yourself that you can share an idea and nothing bad happens and it's okay.

Jen: Wow. That is not what I thought you meant. Yes.

Pete: I feel like so much of the reason that I personally wouldn't share something, in written form or otherwise, is like a fear of what other people think. I'm like, "Oh, but they might hate me." I mean, I'm being very hyperbolic when I say I'm not going to die. But I mean, nothing bad happens when you ship something. Or maybe someone says, "I didn't love that one. I preferred your other one." And you go, "Great, that's fine." So, it was almost a practice of proving to myself that putting things into the world is not as traumatic as you might build it up to be in your head. But I also think there's something in the practice of thinking and processing the things that you consume. There's a really fascinating moment where Shane Parrish asks James a question about his writing practice, and James Clear starts talking about his reading practice. And about two minutes into his answer, I was like, "Did he mishear the question? Did he not hear 'writing'? Instead, he heard 'reading'?" And then, after he went on this sort of riff about how he selects the books he reads, he said, "Essentially, what I realize is, the more I want to activate the things I read, the more I need to write in order to do so." And to me, this linked back to the episode we did on books recently, where I was kind of like thinking out loud about, "How do I select books? How do we select books? How do you activate the learnings that you get from these books?" And what I kind of took from his riff was the process of reading then enables you to write, and the process of writing then enables you to read. They kind of work in concert with each other in a really nice way,. Which got me thinking, I've read a lot of books in the last two years and seven months. Have I accurately distilled how I feel about them into writing? Absolutely not. Have I shared some of the ideas on these podcasts? For sure. But is there another way I can kind of hone my thinking on them? Again, this idea of going back to the gym as like a mental gym of processing all of the wisdom that we like to consume.

Jen: Okay, well, now my brain's going in a different direction, Pete. So, thank you for this adventure in brain land. It's like another spectrum is writing for personal processing, like journaling, versus writing to share with another person. And then, I'm sure there are sharing with one person versus sharing with a wider audience, sharing with people who know you versus sharing with people who don't know you. Anyway, it's interesting how my mind is just always jumping to having to share it. And I wonder if I am robbing myself of the option of just writing to write.

Pete: Yeah, writing for your own benefit. I mean, a bit like what we've talked about with this podcast, which is, I would do this podcast even if no one listened, because it helps me in all these other ways. That, I get to learn from you. I get to think out loud and question my own ideas, and hear some of yours. And the process of doing that enables me to be better at my work and better in my life. And the fact that people listen and send us questions and engage with us is an amazing benefit, but it's not the point. We don't do this trying to create a podcast that makes millions of dollars and has hundreds of thousands of listeners, because it doesn't. Although, if there's hundreds of thousands of listeners out there wanting to tune in, please feel free to tune in. But it's not the point. And I wonder if writing is the same. I think there's a temptation to go, "If one needs a writing practice, one needs to write a bestseller or one needs to have a hundred thousand people subscribe to a blog." But actually, what if it's just that you had one leader, in my case, in mind? And instead of writing them an email when they write me a question, I could write the email, but then I could also write a blog post about the idea, thinking about that person in mind and putting it into the world. And if people engage with it, awesome. But also, it helps me clarify my thoughts.

Jen: Yeah. Okay, I want to go back for a second to the initial idea that you shared, which is that writing's hard. And because it's hard, it's beneficial. But can we just unpack for a second, what is it about writing that is hard? What makes that hard?

Pete: I mean, that's a great question. It feels multifaceted. The first thing that comes to mind for me is what I shared earlier, which is that I have to think about someone else consuming it. And if I think about that, I get worried about what they might think. And so, I want to make it and have it represent a certain idea that is of benefit to them. So, there's this self-imposed barrier that I put into writing. There's also just the fact that there's no instruction manual. It's literally just, "Here's a blank page. Go." And that is so overwhelming and hard, sometimes. And I think I can hear Seth Godin's voice in my head, which is, "It feels hard because we feel like we have to write it perfectly the first time." And what's hard is actually committing to writing a crap thing and then redoing the crap thing, and making it better and better and better and better and better over time. There's a friction, an iteration, a process that is somewhat unavoidable. And in a world where we just like to quickly get things done and get them done perfectly, that feels counterintuitive. What do you think? Why is writing hard for you?

Jen: I think the commitment. Not to the time it takes, although that is a commitment too. But the act of taking a thought out of your head and putting it on paper means you're committing to the thought. So I think there's something in that, that I like to question myself. And that feels like, I guess I'm saying I'm somewhat certain about believing myself. But there's something else that just occurred to me, which is...and it's funny that I get very frustrated when I see other people doing this. In my world, it would be like somebody saying, "It's not that hard to be in a show." Where I'm like, "Do you have any idea what it takes to be on stage eight times a week? Like, what are you talking about?" And Pete, you might recall that a couple years ago, I hired a writing coach. And I was like, "Okay, I got myself this writing coach. It's going to make it so much easier for me. I'm going to commit to getting however many thousands of words down in this amount of time." And I sent her, maybe it was like ten pages. And she sent them back to me, and everything but like two sentences were struck out in red. And I was like, "Oh, maybe this writing thing is harder than I thought. That, you can't just sit down and write a final draft. You have to write a shit first draft. And there's a commitment to that." Again, there's that word "commitment". Oh, that's so fascinating. But the commitment to that, of like putting all of this effort in and then needing to revise and revise and revise and revise, I think I kind of got to a place where I'm like, "Oh, maybe I'm just not a good writer." So, that mindset needs a bit of a shift.

Pete: Yeah. And I do think, to your point earlier, there's a spectrum where maybe thinking out loud is our form of writing, because we think out loud in podcast form. Maybe we don't need to have the pressure of it being a perfectly polished draft when we ship a weekly blog post or whatever we commit to doing. That there's a spectrum of, as long as the audience has the understanding and you're clear on the fact that...I mean, it's kind of baked into my title, a little bit, of my own blog, for example, like Noodle Scratchers. It's kind of like, "Oh, here are some things that have got me scratching my head. Here's some things that have made me think. They're not perfect. They're not polished. They're not the answers to the universe. But they are some thought starters. They are some questions. They are some ideas that maybe, just maybe, will be helpful for anyone listening, but are helpful also to me in thinking about them." I feel like I'm coaxing myself into writing again.

Jen: Yeah. It sounds like you are.

Pete: The other big thing that I've just realized is on my mind, that perhaps feeds this, is in a world of AI slop and in a world where AI is so tempting and easy to use for so many things, I have found myself and caught myself getting lazy. And I am paranoid...I'm saying this out loud for the first time. I am paranoid about not using my brain as much. I'm paranoid about relying on an AI model to help me think through problems, rather than thinking through them and wrestling with them first. I've caught myself, so many times, going straight to AI to answer a question or come up with an idea or brainstorm a thought, when I could have done it myself to start with and then used it as a thinking partner down the track. I feel like maybe a writing practice is part of this for me. How do you maintain some level of mental acuity, some level of creativity, some level of clarity in what your own thoughts are, rather than constantly defaulting to producing (which we have all seen so much of) more AI slop?

Jen: Wow, Pete. Wow, wow, wow. I had not expected this to go to the AI direction, but it makes so much sense that it did. Interestingly, over in The Career Collective, which is the online group that I run for Broadway actors, one of the things we talk about is artistry and inspiration as being one of the key ingredients to building a career. That could be a career in any field, not just the arts. Lately, I've started referring to that as the real AI, artistry and inspiration. It sounds to me like that's what you're talking about. The anti-slop movement would be to lean into your own inspiration and your own artistry. The real AI: artistry and inspiration.

Pete: I love that. The real AI: artistry and inspiration. I have a surgery coming up in a couple of weeks, where I'm going to be bedridden for two weeks post. I've been thinking about, "What could I do in that two weeks?" One of the things that came to my mind was, "Well, I guess I could pull out my laptop while I'm lying in bed and start typing, and see if I might be able to bank a few blog posts." If anyone out there is interested or curious, I do have three-hundred-odd posts over there already, but I might just start writing again over at noodlescratchers.com. Come check it out.

Jen: Just so our listeners are not worried, Pete is totally fine. It is a surgery that's going to mean he can't talk for two weeks, so he can't think the way that he normally does out loud. Maybe this is the perfect opportunity, Pete, for you to experiment for two weeks with bringing back the writing practice.

Pete: I like it. Be gone tonsils, and be gone tonsillitis.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.