More reading, more writing
My psyche’s perpetual back and forth
There are times that I really and truly believe I am insane. Not in the fun, lovable way, but like there’s something not quite right going on north of my neck. Mostly, it’s when I think about my inability to focus on one thing, and how many times I’ve bounced back and forth. It’s not the bouncing, it’s the inability to, in retrospect, deduce why I had bounced at all, let alone to use that knowledge to predict when I will bounce again.
It is, put simply, frustrating, and sometimes makes me wonder what’s going on up there, just around and corner and out of sight of my conscious mind.
When I was a boy, I was constantly told that I was smart and that I could do anything I put my mind to. The first, I recognize now, was inadvertent poisoning (done, as so much inadvertent poisoning is, with the best of intentions), but the second has largely proven to be true, much to my benefit. The challenge, of course, is not doing anything that I put my mind to, it’s continuing to do anything I put my mind to. Shiny things fight over my attentional focus (to steal and paraphrase a great turn of phrase by Nassim Nicholas Taleb) two whores fighting over a sidewalk.
In reality, though, I’ve mostly shown myself to be good at two things:
- Synthesizing information
- Solving abstract problems
Little else.
That’s not to say that I haven’t done well—I have. Being able to do these two things gets you pretty far in the modern world, and I will continue to ride them for as long as I can. But they put a neccesary box around my ambition. A large box, but a box nonetheless.
There remains, however, a yawning gap between what I am—smart and successful though I may be—and what I want to be. It is, I believe, the difference between being smart and being erudite. The difference between being able to solve problems, and being able to draw on the wisdom of the ancients to recognize which problems have already been solved and which are worth my effort (and then going out and solving them).
I don’t know for sure how to close this gap, but I think that reading more and, importantly, writing more about what I read and the thinking that goes along with it is a good start. I tend to think about reading as a process to be optimized (words per minute—how’s it going, Spritz?—and books per year and all that) rather than a means to this end, this lifting up of myself. It’s been a long time since I read to connect, rather than read as part of a transaction aimed at imparting some immediately useful knowledge. And I believe the only long-term, proven way to connect ideas in your head (the only one that has worked for me, at very least) is to write about those ideas, and see where that writing takes you.
Or maybe this will all fail in a thrashing mess of Amazon Prime deliveries and unread books, as I’m lured away to something else equally shiny and new. Time will tell.