Nate Dickson Thinks...

I see this as I walk around downtown, near my office building. I have so many questions.

Everyone should care, passionately, about something, some cause, some plan to make the world better.

But nobody can care about everything. We all need to pick our battles so that we have the energy to fight them. Find the place where you can do the most good, and commit to that.

I love winter. I love the early nights, the chill in the air, the close, warm feeling of being snug at home. I love snow in the trees and the yard. Winter would be perfect except for one thing:

Driveways and sidewalks.

You can't just not shovel the snow off your concrete. That's not an option as a civilized person. I walk whenever and wherever I can, and when I'm walking in the winters I realize how much public utility there really is in our personal patches of sidewalk. Also, you've got delivery people who need to come to your door, guests, friends, and even me and my family. I need to clear that concrete so people are safe.

So Here's the Actual Lesson

When you're shoveling snow there are a few secrets:

1. If possible, do it when there is still daylight left

Okay, turns out there's only one secret. But it's a potent one. I used to get frustrated, trying to figure out why my neighbor's sidewalk and driveway always looked like he cut the edges with a razor, while mine looked messy, covered in ground-down footprints and tire tracks, and crumbly edges that kept dumping powder back on my driveway I had just cleared. Eventually I would give up and go in, calling it good enough.

Then I'd look back outside a few hours later, surprised to find that it had been good enough. All the powder melted off, all the footprints and tire tracks had softened and I could get rid of them quickly.

The sunlight on wet, dark concrete heats that concrete juuuuust enough to melt snow (unless it's really cold, in which case you're on your own. Sorry!), so if you get the concrete exposed it does a lot of work for you. It doesn't work if you don't shovel, of course. Snow is reflective, so if you don't put in the work you don't get any benefit.

But you don't have to be perfect! Often we are super-critical of our own efforts and see every possible flaw in what we do while idolizing the work or results of those around us. And that can lead us to despair or depression or just giving up before we even start.

Instead if we just get in there and get started, we will get far better results than we would ever have imagined.

Before diving into computer science I briefly studied (human) linguistics. One of the facts they taught us had to do with the number of words in a language and the number of words it took to express something in that language. The more words you have available to you, the fewer you need to express a thought.

Put another way: the greater the range of words from which you can select, the greater the odds of you knowing a single word that expresses the thought you want to convey, and thus the fewer words you need to express your thoughts.

Put another way: the size of a language and the length of a sentence in that language are inversely proportional.

Put another way: eloquence obviates loquaciousness.

Just because I have to be studying doesn't mean I have to be at my desk. Sometimes it's nice to mix school work with a pleasant environment.

Or: Why we think we will eventually figure out faster-than-light travel

Nature: You're basically a prey species. You've got no claws, no fangs, no fur, no real defenses...

Humans: Hey look we sharpened some sticks. Bring it.

Nature: Okay, but you're still really slow and small compared to things like bison and deer.

Humans: We don't need to be fast, there's a bunch of us and we can walk for days carrying our pointy sticks. We'll just follow food until it's tired and then it's stabbity times.

Nature: Okay but you're still cold and probably die in winter.

Humans: Hey look you can use pointy sticks to make fire. And after you stab an animal you can eat the inside and wear the outside. Also, P.S. We used fire to melt this rock and then it turned into a liquid that we poured into some clay shaped like a sharp thing and now that melted rock is a really sharp thing.

Nature: Okay but you're still limited by the animals and plants around you, there's only so many calories to go around.

Humans: Hey look if we get this animal to breed with this animal the kids are bigger and tastier. Also it works with plants. Also we bred the nicest wolves we could find and now they like us. We made enough extra calories to support cuddly house wolves!

Nature: Well, you still can't fly. Ha.

Humans: Hmmmmm. think for a few centuries, build up industry and science and art and math and literature and different forms of government and faiths and cuisine and fossil fuel distillation and finally...

HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW, GROUND?

Nature: At least stay in the atmosphere!

Humans: MAKE US.

Nature: Well stay off of the space rocks, those aren't for you, you're a prey species.

Humans: Sorry can't hear you busy landing a robot on an asteroid!

The steps that brought this to you:

1. I typed this using the Hanx Writer app on the iPad.
2. Then I printed it using AirPrint, direct from my iPad
3. I folded the paper to pretend I had mailed it or something, I don't know. This isn't a project that has a lot of seriousness around it. Then I took a photo of it using my iPad
4. Then I uploaded it to Snap.as
5. Then I wrote about it and shared it on the internet.

There's no real thesis here, no real point. This was just because modern technology makes it easy to do pointlessly convoluted things for fun.

There's that moment when your subconscious nudges you slightly.

“Pen. Paper. Now.”

And that's all the warning you get. So you dig out your notebook and pen and sit down and put the pen to the page...

And something pours out. for the first few characters you have no idea what's coming. And then as the words form you realize that what you're writing is the idea that's been quietly coalescing out of your thoughts and experiences. It formed slowly, like frost on the ground, and when it was ready that other part of your mind told you to collect it before it's burned off by the sun.

The more you pay attention to this little nudge, the more you honor that instinct, the better you get at catching these fleeting ideas. And the more you value inspiration the more of it you will get. The Muses are vain; they only reveal themselves to those that respect them.

To achieve mastery of any skill, the conventional wisdom goes, you have to practice that skill for ten thousand hours. And practice doesn't just mean “do that thing”, it means focus on building that skill.

When we talk about practicing a musical instrument, we've got a good idea of what that looks like. My kids spend half an hour every day practicing the piano, playing songs that their piano teacher assigned them. Their teacher assigns these songs based on their current skill level, and they are calibrated to stretch the students' abilities, to be just a little harder than the students can comfortably play.

And once my kids are done playing their songs, the songs are gone, dissipated into the air around the piano.

But what about practice writing? When I work on the skill of writing, I end up with lots and lots of random little files called things like free write Tuesday, October 30, 2018.md. or random story about fish.md. Or, well, blog posts like this.

Some people, of course, end up with notebooks full of their words. Tolkien famously used the same paper notebooks over and over, erasing them when they were full and filling them again. His son Christopher has spent a lifetime going through those notebooks, figuring out what the erased versions said and publishing those erased stories.