I feel like I take too long to come up with ideas when I’m trying to write something (even if it’s just casual, like an email) ...
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Asher Nitin, Physician, artist, athlete, student of Christian theology, classical violinist.
Updated 5h ago · Upvoted by Aishwarya Nair
So, this is you.
And this is your brain right now. Let’s say you know two things and can draw one line connecting them.
You want to draw more lines between things. But you only know two things. You connected them in the most direct way possible. Do you want to connect them a different way?
Try to approach the same objects from a different angle. Straight line connections are more a science thing. So study the arts. Ideally,learn to play classical music on an instrument like the violin.
Why the violin? Because it’s much harder to play than the bongos. Why classical music? Because classical music covers the entire emotional spectrum.
Pop, rock, rap, country and heavy metal cover limited sections of the emotional spectrum. Dubstep covers no section of the emotional spectrum. (Dubstep was invented for the listening pleasure of plankton.) Club remixes are a step above dubstep. Don’t mix music. Learn to make music.
Once you’ve learned to feel like an artist, you can join the same two objects using something other than a straight line. You can think direct connections and feel indirect connections.
But there are only so many connections you can make between two things. To make more connections, you need more things in your brain.
So get more things into your brain.
But wait. I have limited time and energy because I also have a job and a family.
So be selective about the things you let into your brain. Let in things that will make your brain grow. Keep out things that will make it shrink.
Things that stimulate your brain will make it grow. How would a thing stimulate your brain? By demanding it perform tasks.
Books do that. When you read a book, all you get is information. Your brain has to translate that information into visuals, sounds, textures, and temperatures. Then your brain has to combine these to create thoughts and emotions. That’s a lot of work.
TV doesn’t do that. When you watch a motion picture, the visuals, sounds and textures are given to you. The soundtrack in the background cues you on the emotions (the background music tells you what to feel and when).
So watch less TV and read more books. (TV includes most audiovisual media. Books include most of the written word.)
But wait! There’s tons of written stuff. Should I read everything?
Do you have infinite time and patience?
No!
Then read for survival. Read the things that have a high chance of helping you; things that are reliable. You will need a reliability filter for that; a filter that will strain out poor-quality writing.
Use the Lindy Effect as a reliability filter. The Lindy Effect is the observation that ideas and technologies behave the inverse of people and objects.
With people and objects, life expectancy is inversely proportional to life lived. If you’re ten years old, you can expect to live another seventy years. If you’re ninety years old, you might expect to live another one year. The same goes for your car or phone. The longer you/some object has existed, the less longer it is likely to continue existing.
But for ideas and technologies, life expectancy is directly proportional to life lived. The longer a technology or idea has been in use, the longer it will remain in use. The floppy disk and the CD were invented two decades ago and are going extinct now. The table and the spoon were invented more than two millennia ago so can be expected to be around another two millennia.
So: do you think it’s smart to own digital copies of your books on Kindle instead of hard-bound paper copies?
Since we’re talking books, note: books behave like ideas. Books that are discovered by a single generation are called bestsellers. But books that are discovered by one generation and then independently rediscovered by multiple later generations are called classics. Should you be reading classics or bestsellers?
Should you be reading Fifty Shades of Grey or The Iliad? People were discussing Fifty Shades last year. They aren’t now. People started discussing the Iliad around 800 B.C. and have continued to discuss it down the ages to that Troy novel Adele wrote in 2000 A.D. and that Troy movie Hollywood made in 2004 A.D.
If the Iliad was relevant three thousand years ago and is still relevant today, what is the probability it will still be relevant three thousand years from now?
So should you be a fan of E. L. James or Homer?
And since we’re talking Homer, let’s talk about why history is so important. But before I explain why history should matter to you, look: this is a well-ordered brain.
To set a brain in order, you need to have a meaningful system of categorization. In fact, in neuroscience, we now define intelligence as the ability to create meaningful categories. Why? Because creating connections is easier if you have a meaningful place for everything. If you have a place for everything, when new information comes in, you will know where to put it. And some new information might have to go here:
How do you decide what goes in the bin? Build a bulls**t filter.
Use basic science knowledge as a BS filter for anything that claims to be scientific. If it says it is science, but completely contradicts the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology, it goes in the bin.
Use history as a BS filter for the news. History is basically news that passed through the BS filter. All the things that people in the past talked about that didn’t matter has been forgotten. The things they talked about that mattered have become history. So reading the news without having a good working knowledge of history is basically doing this.
Your brain becomes a rubbish dump. There isn’t order. Anarchy is the order of the day. Naturally, people with brains like these will spend most of their time like this.
C S Lewis said that a man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the student of history who has lived in many times is immune to the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the media of his own age.
If you use history as a BS filter to process the news, your brain will work like this.
People with brains like this will spend most of their time like this.
That reminds me: philosophy and religion. As an atheist, are you better off reading Richard Dawkins or Friedrich Nietzsche? Who has been around longer? As a theist, are you better off studying some cult invented in the last decade or studying Christianity? Which has been around longer? As someone interested in Jesus Christ, are you better off reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code or the New Testament? Which has survived longer?
Since I mentioned the New Testament, I should probably point out that the apostle Paul was talking about BS filters when he said this:
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Philippians 4:8 (King James Bible)
Remember that. Because when you choose what will live tomorrow over what is popular today, you might sometimes be alone in your choices.
Being alone isn’t bad. Loneliness isn’t being alone. It’s being surrounded by the wrong kind of people. You are less alone when you’re with a book that will live longer than you. You are more alone in the midst of a crowd of people you don’t know.
If you do this long enough, you will learn an important truth about people. I’m going to whisper it now, because most people will find this highly offensive. “Shh. Most of what most people know isn’t worth knowing.”
But more importantly: now you know what you really need to know.
Now you know more things. Things that will live for a very long time. Things that are worth knowing.
Start connecting them.
Every which way.
You’re still thinking direct connections. Now feel indirect connections.
Wait. You’re saying ‘think like a scientist’ and ‘feel like an artist’. You make it sound easy. I’m trying. But it isn’t easy.
Of course it isn’t. It’s a skill. Like a game you play. You get better with practice.
What about talent?
Talent does not exist. The best scientists and the best artists know deep down that it all comes down to smart hard work. Thinking is a skill. Feeling is a skill. So tell me, how do you learn to be good at a skill?
Um…
By first learning to be bad at it.
But I’m already bad at stuff. That’s why I’m asking.
So first get comfortable with being bad at stuff, in the presence of people who are good at that same stuff. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And then learn from them.
But what if they won’t teach me?
What if you won’t let them? What if you’re try to make them comfortable with you…
…instead of learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable around them? Why don’t you stop trying to impress them and let them impress you?
I’m already impressed by them.
Not fully. You haven’t seen the best parts of them. If you want to say something meaningful some day, shut up…
…and stop talking.
Astronaut Chris Hadfield once said this: When you enter a new environment, you will almost certainly be viewed in one of three ways:
As a minus one: actively harmful, someone who creates problems; or
As a zero: your impact is neutral and does not trip the balance either way; or
As a plus one: someone who actively adds value.
Everyone wants to be a plus one, but proclaiming your plus-one-ness at the outset guarantees you will be perceived as a minus one.
So when you enter a new environment, aim to be a zero.
This isn’t easy. Find out all the ways you can mess things up. Then do none of them. Get in no one’s way, but make it clear you’re available to help and eager to learn. Stand in the corner but make eye contact.
Listen quietly. Agree silently (by nodding and smiling) not loudly (and breaking their flow with your vehement appraisal).
Your sentences are unnecessary. They know they’re right. They don’t need your confirmation.
Ask questions instead. Intelligent questions. Never ask someone to explain something you could easily look up on your own! That’s lazy and narcissistic. If they use a word you don’t understand, write it down. Ask them to spell it and write in front of them. They will love it. You’re proving to them you’re actively engaged in an unobtrusive, independent manner.
Most skills worth learning are learnt in the most unimaginative way possible: copying the masters. I learned this as an artist. Want to think like Michelangelo? Stop trying to think like him. Work like him. Copy his work. Meticulously. In the process of working like him, you will automatically end up thinking like him.
I’ve said this before: the most powerful force on Earth is not intelligence, or ‘talent’, but a long discipline in a single direction. If you are on time, each day, every day, and you patiently take things apart to understand them then put them back together, you will own it. And you will get good at it.
You’ll get smooth. (Do you remember what this looked like before?)
You’ll start making connections that you missed out on before.
You will smooth those out too. And you will begin to see patterns.
There are a lot of myths out there about intelligence.
Myths about the memories of chess players, for instance. Chess players have amazing memories when it comes to chess positions. That’s it. Their ability doesn’t transfer across domains.
Myths about Sudoku and mind game websites like Lumosity. Playing a lot of Sudoku makes you really good at just playing Sudoku. The same goes for the games on websites like Lumosity. Playing those games just makes you better at those games.
The reality is stranger than you can imagine. Don’t be surprised. Your imagination is a product of your abilities and life experiences. Your abilities and life experiences are a very small part of reality. Reality is therefore always stranger than your imagination; because it is larger than your imagination.
The truth is stranger than the myths. This is it: there are a couple more things you can do to increase your ability to make connections.
Aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise (exercise that induces oxygen hunger) increases functional intelligence. Run. Swim. Jump. We think the evolutionary basis for this is our long history of doing these things mostly when running from predators or running after our food. That was when we needed all our wits about us. So someone who does these things on a daily basis will evolve a brain that will perform well in a high-pressure high-risk environment.
And start doing daily tasks with your non-dominant hand. If you’re right handed, start brushing your teeth with your left hand. This causes you to process objects in new and challenging ways.
At a lesser level, you could learn a new language. It doesn’t help as much as the first two.
That should do the trick. Remember- a long discipline in a single direction. Stay safe and stay true. I’ll see you on the other side.
Oh, one last thing about forming connections. As you do, you will notice patterns. Some of these patterns will repeat across space and through time. Those patterns are deep principles embedded in our world. The knowledge of those patterns is called wisdom. It’s a high form of mental connection.
You said you wanted to be livelier at conversation and quicker at writing. Wisdom would tell you that no amount of lively conversation or quick writing will make an impact unless you have something original to say.
So would you like to say something original?
C S Lewis once said: Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before), nine times out of ten, you will become original without ever having noticed it.
Listen to Lewis. Don’t learn new words for the sake of learning new words. Don’t work on increasing your vocabulary so you can have a bigger vocabulary. You’re supposed to look up words someone used that you didn’t understand. Not learn a new word and look for a chance to use it.
Do you know what happens when you do the opposite: when you use words for the sake of words; and consciously try to be original? You become Amanda McKittrick Ros.
Amanda McKittrick Ros is widely considered to be the worst novelist in the history of the human race. Her works were not read widely, and her eccentric, over-written, “purple" circumlocutory writing is some of the worst prose ever written.
This is Mrs. Ros, staring off into the distance in contemplation of, uh, oatmeal cookies, I suppose.
Her novel Delina Delaney begins with this:
Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?
Clarification: she’s asking if you’re familiar with the northern borders of Ireland.
This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing needlework:
She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.
In Ros' last novel, Helen Huddleson, all the characters are named after various fruits: Lord Raspberry, Cherry Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, the Earl of Grape, Madame Pear. Of Pear, Ros wrote:
…she had a swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed in stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with sapphires of scandals…
For Amanda, eyes are 'piercing orbs', legs are 'bony supports', people do not blush, they are 'touched by the hot hand of bewilderment', a man does not ask for his love’s hand in marriage, he asks for her ‘dainty digits’ in marriage.
Ros became famous because of how terrible she was. A reader sent a copy of her first novel to Barry Pain, who in a review called it "a thing that happens once in a million years", and sarcastically termed it "the book of the century." He was initially entertained, but soon "shrank before it in tears and terror." Pain was a famous author, humorist and satirist. His review banged. Ros became infamous overnight.
Ros retorted in her preface to her second novel by branding Pain a "clay crab of corruption," and suggesting that he was so hostile only because he was secretly in love with her. She believed that her critics lacked sufficient intellect to appreciate her talent, and was convinced that they conspired against her for revealing the corruption of society's ruling classes, thereby disturbing "the bowels of millions". Her "admirers" included Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Mark Twain. Twain considered her first novel "one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time." The Oxford literary group the Inklings, which included C. S. Lewis (the creator of Narnia) and J. R. R. Tolkien (the creator of Middle-Earth), held competitions to see who could read Ros' work aloud for the longest length of time without laughing.
What was Ros’ fault? This: she once wrote..
My chief object of writing is and always hasbeen, to write if possible in a strain all my own. This I find is why my writings are so much sought after.
She imagined "the million and one who thirst for aught that drops from my pen", and predicted that she would "be talked about at the end of a thousand years."
Ros found fame. We all love her writing. For the worst reasons possible.
This world has seen one Amanda McKittrick Ros. That is enough. Don’t become one yourself. Don’t write for your ‘fans’. Don’t try to be original. Write what you would want to read but does not yet exist. But want the right things first.
Want to understand the world before you want to say something about it.
Want to understand people’s pain before you want to make them laugh.
Want to understand what people struggle to understand before you demand they listen to your opinion.
And find something worth fighting for. Then throw your life in defense of it. If your life is demanded of you in the defense, hand it over and die with a smile on your face, and you will live forever.
Like this man. The most influential man in the history of the human race.
Born in a crappy country in the middle of nowhere. Country under foreign occupation. Countrymen constantly rebelling. Raised in a lower middle class family. Received a basic education. Worked with his hands as a blue-collar employee in his dad’s business. Was very good at it. Took off and hiked for a bit. Never said much all this time.
Opened his mouth when he was thirty years old. Called out BS where he saw it. Spoke plainly and simply about really important things everyone else was too scared or too deliberately dumb to talk about. Didn’t say a lot. Maybe ten thousand words at max.
The effect these words had was something else.
The poor loved him.
The rich loved him.
Prostitutes loved him.
Black marketeers loved him.
Children loved him.
Religious zealots loved him.
Genuinely curious law experts loved him.
Internal revenue officers loved him.
Domestic law enforcement loved him.
Elite infantry from the foreign forces loved him.
The local leader of the foreign forces was deeply impressed by him.
But he angered some stick-in-the-mud middle management. And he happily paid for it with his life. They killed him slowly and horribly. He was thirty three years old.
Why am I telling you all this? This is why: the most influential man in the history of our species was articulate and quick-witted. But that is not why his words have been handed down through the ages. Anyone can tawk, you see.
He is remembered for his words because hewas his words. And the words he was were powerful words. Words about loving your enemy. Words like forgiveness.
See, it’s easy to tawk about forgiveness. Everyone thinks forgiveness is a great idea, until they have to actually forgive someone.
Oh. Burn.
Look, you don’t have to believe he was the things he claimed he was, or the things we claim he was. That is not my point.
My point is this: if you can say things like that when you’re tired, sleep-deprived, beaten, bloody, hypovolemic, dehydrated, sunburnt, and two minutes away from death, I will spend the rest of my life thinking about anything you ever said.
What a total bada*s.
Speaking of bada*ses, this is about to get rather Taleb. I apologize if this induces acid reflux.
Do you know what the difference is between an intellectual and a pseudo intellectual?
Nothing. They’re both equally odious and useless.
The anti-intellectual is the only true intellectual. The man who doesn’t care what information is in current fashion; but is driven by pure curiosity or utilitarian purpose. I mention this so you know that all the armchair critics in the world are worthless next to the smallest person who actually made something.
I have been an artist nearly all my life. I have never stalked an art gallery with a scarf around my neck and tawked about actual things people made. I have instead complained irritably at the front desk because they wouldn’t let me bring in a notebook so I could make notes.
Look, please don’t use your future ability to sit in judgement of things. If you want to say anything, you must first have skin in the game.
Don’t be a champagne socialist. Or a food critic. Or a stock broker. Or a professor of economics or political science. Don’t read books just so you can quote them and say you read them. Don’t tawk. Don’t play polo. Don’t eat filet mignon.
Be a Bernie Sanders. Or a chef. Or an entrepreneur. Or a village headman or mafia strongman. Only read books that you would want to read over and over. Do walk. Take long walks. Run for your life. Eat pizza.
The connections you make in your brain will not matter if you don’t make connections with your fellow man.
The apostle Paul was a very highly educated man. He came from wealth and received the equivalent of an Ivy League education. His letter to a church titled Romans has generated more theology over the last two thousand years than all the other books of the Bible put together. Impressed? Good.
Because Paul said this:
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
1 Corinthians 13: 1–3 (New International Version)
If St. Paul’s impact on our world means nothing to you, Conan o’Brien’s might. My favorite late night talk show host is very articulate and a quick wit.
Conan had this to say about what he thought were the most important things in life:
Work hard. Be kind.
If Conan o’Brien’s opinion doesn’t weight with you, John Nash’s might.
This is what a brilliant mathematician whose theories won him a Nobel and changed the world as we know it considered the most important discovery of his life:
I've made the most important discovery of my life. The only thing greater than the power of the mind is the courage of the heart. It's only in the mysterious equation of love that any logical reasons can be found. I'm only here tonight because of you. You're the only reason I am. You're all my reasons.
John Nash, Nobel Prize for Economics, 1928–2015 A.C.E.
Nash’s work helped us understand decision-making inside complex systems found in daily life.
And since you said you were slow and dull, while we’re on the subject of John Nash, I will add: a badly damaged mind can still be a very beautiful thing.
So, smile.
Because you are not even close to damaged.
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