Inversion: My Wild Card Motivation?
I collect motivations. Here are some of my collections:
Losing weight:
look better
feel better
be there for kids
be there longer for everyone
fit into the harness of a roller coaster without needing to exhale
fit into the booth of a pizza place in Cape Cod, Massachusetts
have a “longer” dick
etc
Becoming a better writer:
understand myself
learn faster
communicate better
share ideas that can help the world
be a better father/partner/friend/earthling
get things out of my head
feel the relief that comes from choosing action that I’ve avoided
Yesterday I came across a new motivation to add to that last list. And it realllllly burned me up. George Mack’s essay at highagency.com has this section of how to escape what he calls the midwit trap. He literally used one of mine—“I want to become a better writer”—as the example. Just flip the problem and it becomes clear through inversion. What would I do to become a worse writer? George says,
Do not write
Write inconsistently
Write about things you find boring
He nailed me with the first one and then suckered me with the second one. I know that I have the ability to be consistent with things, but I wasn’t applying it to writing and George Mack somehow knew it. Something about it just felt blindsiding.
I immediately added this to my list of motivations to become a better writer and knew it was the final one I needed. It might’ve been able to be the first one and only one.
As I write this I’m hands-sweating-scared that my brain will apply this technique to something else before I’m ready and then I’ll be getting up at O-dark-thirty with a list longer than my—arm, yeah, arm—of things to do every day.
Coming up thoughts surrounding high agency:
My weakest wheel on the tricycle
The power in the word “experiment”
Taking one step toward something. Just a single, teeny step.
The intense emotion felt when committing to writing this
