Hello, world!

I think I'm a little over 20 years late to the exciting world of blogging, RSS, and participating in the exciting world of the internet. But I don't want to let that stop me. I've had a few attempts at blogs in the past, and they've inevitably fallen by the wayside. This one likely will, too. But again, I don't want to let that stop me.

I'm not sure why, but I've only ever been a lurker on the internet, despite being online everyday since I was.... hmm... 10 years old? Again, it feels like I'm 20 years late to the party. The closest I've come to "participating" is being active in work-related chat servers (slack and discord). Besides that I never feel I have anything of value to say.

Last year I did a series of daily exercises called "Morning Pages" from a book called "The Artist's Way". One of the things that the book emphasized (perhaps more than anything else), was that to be prolific and productive -- you need to let go of the idea that what you say needs to have value. Or it needs to be polished. Or it needs to be perfect.

I did the writing program -- by hand -- with pen and paper. It was... terrible. lol. I really thoroughly did not enjoy it. I think I wrote every morning for about 6 weeks. I suspect I would have liked it better if I'd typed it, because at least that way I could kind of "think out loud" and do SOME amount of editing if what I wanted to say wasn't coming out, or if what I wrote was just wrong. I was working with an executive coach at the time who had recommended the program to me who insisted that writing with a pen and paper would improve my experience. I liked him and figured I'd give it a shot. In the end, I never got the transformative effect he must have felt when using pen and paper.

I've met several people who swear by writing with pen and paper and think it must just not be for me. I hate how slowly it forces me to write. If I read over the words I'd written with pen and paper, they're no more lucid than anything I type. If I think back on my experience writing, it's no more zen or relaxing than I feel when I type. If anything, it's the total opposite because my hand is cramping, everything takes way longer to write so I don't want to explain anything in detail or add any colorful flagrance or style to what I'm writing.

All that aside -- I do think the original idea -- that what I write doesn't need to be valuable to anyone -- is still a decent one. There's a related idea that helped some film maker "let go" of his concerns about making something "good". I forget who said this, but his observation was that we don't get to decide what's valuable. It's other people who decide whether something is valuable or meaningful to them. So he didn't bother trying too hard to make something especially valuable or meaningful.

(Somewhere near the end of this interview,) Neil Gershenfeld observed of the young MIT faculty trying to get tenure, that it was those who were trying the hardest to figure out how to get it were the most miserable, and it was those that weren't worrying about it too much who were happiest and who ended up getting it. How sad for the worriers! And yet, I think that's how it goes in life. The programmers who program things for fun end up being the best at it. I suppose I've become quite a worrier. I worry about the future of my career, especially because the first few chapters of it seemed to be going in an uphill trajectory. I have been satisfied at work and very well compensated. Am I spoiled now? I am looking for fun, meaningful, well-paying work. Am I asking to strike gold twice? Have the first few years spoiled my expectations? Or has it shown me what's possible, so that I (rightly) won't settle for less?