Regular Reveries 31: New Year, Writing Weekly, Play, Conversation, and Question vs. Answer
Happy New Year! I hope it will be better than 2020 and that the pandemic will be over soon. The bar is very low. Hopefully, life will get back to normal as the majority of people get vaccinated.
This week's article
Is writing regularly the right thing to do to improve your writing? I try to answer that question in this week's article.
Content candy
I loved reading Simon Sarris' article about the role of play in knowledge work.
It's easy to get carried away with taking notes while not sharing any ideas with others. This means that there's no feedback, which is a crucial part of deliberate practice. This trap can be avoided by sharing notes more.
Too much note-taking is pernicious: it feels like doing something, while also giving you an excuse to endlessly delay putting forth your own thoughts until you have all the pieces.
Rather than collecting and storing thoughts, the deliberate practice of knowledge, the expression of creativity that comes from play, necessitates sharing nascent and feeble ideas.
Something to think about
"When is the last time you had a great conversation? A conversation that wasn't just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture?
But when you last had a great conversation, in which you overheard yourself saying things you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost, and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you onto a different plane, and then, fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing afterwards for weeks in your mind?
And I've had some of them recently, and it's just absolutely amazing. They're like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul."
John O'Donohue
Question for you
What do you like more: a great answer or a great question?