Thought Confetti #1
1000 words per day, every day, unless I don't want to. 0.2% toward my 1M word goal [2036/1000000]
Today, I decided to publish a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise. This is honestly pretty intimate stuff and is totally unedited (except for removing names). I use a program called The Most Dangerous Writing App that will delete everything if I stop typing, so I don’t get to go back or edit or stop. These are my raw thoughts, and I have to face them without judgment. I hope you will read them in the same spirit.
The reason I am publishing this exercise is because I believe that people don’t get to see inner conflict enough on the internet. We only publish our highlight reel, our edited and curated thoughts, our best and most polished ideas. But life is also composed of periods of struggle and conflict — self-doubt, insecurity, pain, boredom, monotony, envy, and all manner of “unpublishable” self-talk are regular experiences that come and go as the human animal navigates life. We each have a process for working with ourselves, yet we seem only to publish the final result, which creates the illusion that human life is a series of publishable events, rather than a messy and improvised process.
Navigating that messiness is 99% of what we do, so I’d like you to see a small unfiltered view of how I navigate mine.1
I feel weird
I guess I want to write.
What do I want to write about?
Well, I suppose this essay is a bit like one of Visa's 1000 word vomits. Write 1000 1000 word vomits. If I do a 15 minute squibbler every single day, and each 15 minute squibbler adds up to 1000 words (which seems about accurate, given that I tend to type at 70+ WPM, although that would be if I were never stopping or deleting my words. Traditionally I can type at 120 wpm max, if I know xactly what I'm typing, but I don't know what I'm typing in these cases because I have to prompt myself, or simply allow myself to vomit the stuff out there I guess)
Anyway, the point is, let's estimate that I type at 70WPM, well that would mean I type 70*15 words when I'm doing a 15 minute squibbler, which is 70*10 + 70*5 which is 700+350 = 1050 words per day.
Okay, so a 15 minute squibbler is equivalent to a 1000 word vomit, which means that if I do one of these every day, I only need 1000 days / 365 days/year = 1000/300 - 1000/60 wait no that's not right... how can I do this math better. Well, it's like fuck I really don't understand how to do it. I don't think it's as easy as I think... anyway, I know that 1000/334 = 3 years, so this is a little bit less than 3 years.
That's an interesting revelation. 3 years I will be 28 years old, almost exactly.
28 is pretty young to have written 1,000,000 words for myself. yea, wow, that's actually quite impressive.
Sure, maybe 1000 words at 25 isn't great, but 1,000,000 words at 28 is insane.
So that leaves me with the question: what do I want to write about?
I want to write about my feelings. I want to use this space to explore my mind and give myself therapy, since I'm pretty sure I'm the best and wisest mentor I've met, especially for my own problems. (This is literally true, by the way, and is a constant source of consternation for me. How can it be the case that everyone I meet is so broken in this way or that such that NOBODY I have EVER met has impressed upon me the idea that they are wise enough to be my direct mentor. I've met many people who could be specific mentors, but none who I felt had a total domain knowledge of life that I really looked up to, well, except D*** and P*** I suppose, and I'm quickly rising to be their peers. I'm not sure if I'll rise to be D***'s peer anytime soon, he's on a growth path that is truly meteoric as well.)
Okay, so my feelings.
I feel stuck or blocked. I'm going to split into two again, one who is probing/giving advice and one who is asking/seeking, so I can use the dialectical process.
SEEKER: I'm not sure what I should be doing with my life?
TEACHER/MENTOR/WISE/SAGE: well, what do you want to do with your life?
SEEKER: I want to be useful. But I also feel like I'm writing too quickly to know what I want. This question should take time, surely... it should be something I think hard about, not something I just prompt myself with while writing in a way that will explode if I stop for 5 seconds.
SAGE: why should it take time?
SEEKER: I don't know, because it's costly to get it wrong!
SAGE: what is the cost?
SEEKER: that I waste time!
SAGE: will it waste your time?
SEEKER: yes, if i commit to something for many years which I don't actually want.
SAGE: are you committing to anything for many years?
SEEKER: no.
SAGE: so what time is being wasted?
SEEKER: hmm... but if no time is being wasted, then why do I feel like I don't want to get it wrong
SAGE: i'm not sure, why do you feel like you don't want to get it wrong?
SEEKER: because I would be a failure.
SAGE: I know you don't believe that.
SEEKER: It's true, I don't actually believe that. Now I feel like I might just be procrastinating on what to do because I have a lot of energy, and that energy wants to do many things. I also feel like I should be helping my friend J*** build his startup, and I have clear direction there, so I don't want to spend too much energy brainstorming other things.
SAGE: so what do you want to do then?
SEEKER: Well, I want to publish. I also want to help J***, but I really want to publish. I've been writing to myself and videoing for myself and keeping notes to myself for too long. I want to publish...
SAGE: what do you want to publish?
SEEKER: I don't know, I don't want to be annoying.
SAGE: ah.. you don't want to be annoying?
SEEKER: my whole life people have called me annoying for talking too much, for always taking up space and being the center of attention. people have called me annoying because I didn't know when to shut my mouth...
SAGE: were you annoying?
SEEKER: i suppose i annoyed some people, yes.
SAGE: did you annoy yourself?
SEEKER: no, definitely not, but I want people to like me.
SAGE: you want people to like you?
SEEKER: yes.
SAGE: ...
SEEKER: ...
SAGE: ...
SEEKER: ...
SEEKER: well, I do want people to like me, but I want people to engage with my ideas even more. I want my ideas to be "in the arena", so to speak. Real ideas in a real place where they might be considered relevant. But I'm afraid that my ideas are bad, and no one will consider them relevant, and they might even dismiss me as a player because of what are essentially bad ideas. I don't want to be dismissed. I've been dismissed too often...
SAGE: You don't want to be dismissed by the other players
SEEKER: Yes, I don't want to be excluded from playing because of being annoying or because of talking about things I shouldn't be talking about.
SAGE: I see... well, what do you want, rather than not want?
SEEKER: I want to connect with others and to be inspired by them. I want to work with them on amazing and valuable projects. I want to be in collaboration, two minds, many minds synced to solve a BIG PROBLEM together.
SAGE: and how might you find that collaboration?
SEEKER: I'm out of time, my squibbler just ran out. I’ll restart it, one sec.
—
SAGE: so, how might you find the collaboration you're seeking?
SEEKER: hmm...
SEEKER: ...
SEEKER: I guess I could just write down a list of inspiration for that sort of collaboration first, and then work backwards to a strategy. So I'm inspired by PARC, Royal Society, the Princeton founders, the inklings, the Sony founding team, the TMRC (Train Model Railroad Club), the Homebrew Hacker Club...
SEEKER: I'm also inspired by huge projects, although they seem less approachable, like the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Mission, etc. I've actually studied all of the groups I've mentioned, reading about their histories and about the founders of the groups, reading the principles of their social organization. I wrote about it all in a research project, and I have some ideas about how to build a similar scene. My goal is to build that where I live in New York, and we're making significant progress toward that goal.
SEEKER: I just feel like we're reaching some sort of transition point, where I need to be doing something different from what I was doing before. Instead of building out a social commons for ideas, support, research, thinking, collaboration, and salons, etc... I feel like I need to start building out real industry so that we have a properly functioning economy for these projects. Almost all of the research groups I mentioned had pretty clear sources of income (except the inklings, who never really scaled past a small book club, but that's okay because it was a group of academics who were being paid via tenure). You don't inherently need money in order to do work, but you do need a way to sustainably work on research and development, and that's a clear goal of mine (and a theme that runs through all of the groups that inspire me).
SEEKER: I have some basic ideas for how I could earn the income that we would need to support our research and development, but I wonder if I'm on a tangent now... I suppose I'll finish the thought quickly. Mainly I don't know how to decide between a few ideas: 1. start a proper technology company that aims to build a new technology and bring it to market. I have the talent for this now in my social circles, and could form the team, but I don't know if we have the proper idea, because we're not currently tinkering. That's part of the idea of doing the research and development. But who the hell would fund a R&D lab in the neighborhood??
SEEKER: So without funding, we need to bootstrap, which means we need to earn revenue right away. Some ways to do that would be to bootstrap little indie hacker businesses (like AI tooling for lawyers, creator economy, etc.) I have a list of ideas here that would kinda work, and I could get a team together, but it's really not inspiring work to the degree that the proper technology work is, and we might get bogged down running businesses that we really don't want to be running. Still, if we architect them right, it could be a fine play.
SEEKER: I could also get a job at a large firm, but there are no firms that are really doing the sort of research I want. I want to be working on the future of computing ala Alan Kay and the PARC team w/ STEPS. I suppose I could go intern w/ Omar at Folk, but they don't have funding. I could go work with Steve Krouse at val.town, but they seem like more of a SAAS play? Not sure.
SEEKER: I also could imagine building a software consultancy that operates in a few different ways. First of all, we act like a little venture lab -- we help founders launch businesses in exchange for 1. revenue share or 2. equity, depending on the type of business. If they're venture backed, we take equity, if they're a indie business, we take revenue share. Something I love about this idea is that it's inherently collaborative at its core. We get to work with many people on many projects, and we could quickly scale a team as quickly as we could get contracts.
SEEKER: The main blocker to this is that I just don't really like marketing myself. I have the team, and executing on contracts would be easy with my network. I could easily rope in 8-10 senior software engineers on this project within 3 months. Hmm I'm out of time again.
SEEKER: I haven't really made progress figuring out what I should do, I've just put my thoughts on paper... It would be amazing and hilarious if someone read this and thought "oh, I could simply solve this problem for him, or I know just the piece of advice." Perhaps that's a reason to publish...
SEEKER: alright, I'll publish my stream of consciousness writing. I have no idea who will be interested, but I guess I'm just going to hit send on this.
---
And that's where my morning writing ended. I don't want to spam my subscribers with a totally unexpected form of writing, so I'm only going to publish this in my main newsletter this once.
If you are interested in receiving Thought Confetti every day (or whenever I publish), please subscribe to Thought Confetti, which is another substack blog that I'm going to create just for this purpose, and for the purpose of racing to 1,000,000 stream-of-consciousness words written.
Currently, I'm at 2036 / 1000000, or 0.2% of the way to my goal. I should get there in 3 years if I stick with it, but that seems a bit ambitious considering this is the first day.
Talk soon.
- Andrew
Today, my writing seemed to get increasingly coherent the longer I wrote, as I found myself again. I suppose this is something each of us has to do each morning when we wake up. Hmm