“Learning is Doing is Being” and Other Mind Hacks

I don’t have much trouble expressing my ideas, but sharing with the world usually doesn’t happen. I sketch a fresh thesis or argument in a rush of excitement, but usually that’s where it stays. Eventually the thought isn’t exciting anymore and I drop it.

Recently I found a couple mind-hacking pieces of writing that feel like they might change this.

Writer’s Block

Sasha Chapin – If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying:

Perhaps you’ve complained before that you don’t have anything to write about. That your “mind has gone blank,” that you don’t have any ideas.

I don’t believe you. I know that you have mental contents, right? Your mind is constantly moving. You’re always producing judgments, attitudes, opinions, emotions, melancholy, malaise, anger, and so on. You have things to write about. What you do is just put the things in your head on the page, in basically the order they naturally occur. Flip over the rock in your mind, type about the beetles.

If you don’t want to do that, it’s because you’re not comfortable with the notion that these are the things that you actually think. You would prefer to have more sophisticated opinions, or, maybe, more reasonable opinions.

Spot-on. We unconsciously inhibit ourselves from expressing what we really think because our inner critic is unimpressed, and it can be a lot of work to actually justify an opinion with facts and reason. But writing the bare idea is often how we have to get started. Writing is the brain’s hard drive, the heavy construction machinery that builds skyscrapers and cities. Trying to build a great idea in the 21st century without writing is like trying to build a skyscraper with just a shovel.

I’m Still Learning

Susan Fowler – I’m Still Learning:

Okay, so now back to my life: In my life so far, I’ve had a bunch of different “jobs.” I’ve been a physics research assistant. I’ve been a software engineer. I’ve been an editor. Now I’m a novelist and screenwriter. And one of the things that, I think, has allowed me to jump between these various things is that I don’t draw a distinction between job training/career training and hobbies. When I talk to people about what I do, and who I am, etc., I try to phrase it in ways that make sense; for example, when I worked at the Times, I’d say, “Hi, I’m Susan, I work as an editor at The New York Times and I write screenplays and novels on the side, and I play the violin and ride horses for fun!” But, in my head, it actually looks like this: “I’m learning how to write novels, I’m learning how to write screenplays, I’m learning how to edit, I’m learning how to play the violin, I’m learning how to ride horses, I’m learning mathematics, I’m learning physics, I’m learning about my place and role in the world, I’m learning how to dance, I’m learning…” and so on. In my head, I’ve stopped caring about the distinction between career and study and job title. In my head, it’s all the same: learning is the same as doing is the same as being. I am a writer because I write. Writing is learning. Learning is doing. Doing is being. (emphasis mine)

While versions of this idea have a long history, this particular formulation really got my attention. I felt it going viral in my brain: when I did math problems as a student, even in kindergarten, I was being a mathematician. When I wrote book reports, I was being a literary critic. When I grappled with thinkers from Plato and Descartes to Dennett and Hofstadter, I was being a philosopher. Like a universal acid, Sarah’s idea burned through my mental walls between learning, doing, and being. She wrote a few sentences about how her brain works, I read those sentences, something inside me decided they were right and true, and that triggered a cascade of reinterpretation that made my brain work more like hers.

One solid, settled plank of my worldview is that people are very diverse, their brains work very differently, and each person has to figure out their own way to be what they want to be in this world. But that doesn’t mean we are alone – we still have a lot of power to transform and empower each other through our ideas. The right mental tricks can make seemingly very hard things easy. 1999 + 3999 becomes a lot easier with the right mental math trick, so maybe publishing becomes a lot easier if you think of learning how to write, actually doing writing, and being a writer as basically the same thing.

I hope this piece touches other minds. But even if no one else reads it, it’s okay. I’m writing because I wanted to learn to be a writer and that’s how you do it.