I can’t seem to help turning things into games.

I tell myself I’m going to go for a leisurely swim and just go as long as I feel like. Pretty soon I’m counting laps, counting strokes per lap, and giving myself little challenges to meet.

It’s like this when I shoot hoops, vacuum the floor, wash the dishes, sit by a fire, or respond to emails. It doesn’t matter what it is, I almost always end up gamifying it.

I’m not sure if this is good or bad or a bit of both. I mean games are definitely good sometimes, especially for really monotonous tasks. But the games aren’t necessarily fun. Sometimes they are, but mostly they’re a result of some kind of OCD tendencies I have to quantify and patternize every task and always – always – find ways to do it better or faster, even when that has no bearing on the outcome or when the entire goal of the activity was just to relax.

Occasionally I can just doing things without little sub-tasks and challenges within, and it’s kind of nice to have an open-ended, non-timebound experience, where the activity is one whole rather than a bunch of parts. Writing is one of the few things I can do that way (though I often gamify that too).

I’m not sure if I do this because it reduces the scope of the goals to nearer term, or because it keeps me from getting bored, or for some other reason I should seek counseling for. Maybe this is universal.

Learning to tell stories is an incredible skill. But learning to think in stories is even more fundamental.

A narrative arc is more memorable and impactful than factual bullets. The ability to create narratives is what allows attracting friends, collaborators, investors, customers, and fans.

Storytellers are interesting people who get interesting opportunities. Not just those who tell anecdotal tales, but those who weave all of life into layers of narrative. The price of wheat is not merely an economic fact, it’s part of a story that started somewhere and will end somewhere. And it’s probably nested in other stories.

But telling stories starts with thinking in narrative arcs instead of dots.

I’ve seen this illustration several times (I’m not sure the origin):

These are all different ways to see facts. But none of them weave a story. There’s no narrative in the dots or the colors or the lines or the connections or paths. They are facts with relationships, but they stop short of a narrative arc. Yes, there is wisdom in seeing that point A follows a path to point B. But why? How? For what purpose? What happened when the path was completed? What was going on before?

A narrative thinker will see these facts and be able to construct a story – a beginning, middle, and end – with motivations and purpose involved. Stories have teleology, facts do not.

The ability to see a meaningful story in any person, event, or series of facts leads to the ability to communicate in narratives. You can connect dots for reasons, and show the future if the dots continue to connect.

Thinking in story helps you be more interesting because it helps you be more interested.

When someone tells you, “I’m an engineer”, instead of filing this as a fact in your mental Rolodex, you immediately want to know the story. How did they end up an engineer? Is this the end of a long journey, the beginning of a new story, or the middle? Curiosity drives you to ask good questions, good questions make connections, and connections lead to opportunities.

Discovering, telling, and re-telling your own story is a great place to start. Why are you sitting there reading this right now? What led you here? Why? What does it mean for the future?

I’ve discovered I have the best weeks when I can alternate frenetic days with deep dive days.

Several days in a row of either deep work (writing, thinking, planning) or loud work (people, podcasts, emails, tasks) and quality declines. But If I can have a single day of lots of calls and being “on” with other people, followed by a day doing mostly alone work, I get the best of both.

I can pour myself into the demanding work knowing tomorrow will be a respite. As I’ve gotten older, I definitely prefer the quiet work to the loud, but I need the loud stuff in some minimum quantity, and my work requires it more than that anyway. So I try to carve out days or half days in between the loud work to have plenty of quiet work.

Both types of work require energy, and both can give energy back if done right, but switching between energy states is optimal for me.

I wrote yesterday about the information war. We’re bombarded with so much information if we are tuned in it’s impossible to think.

But I don’t think the long-term solution is total retreat from the world at large, or what Venkatesh Rao calls Waldenponding.

The bad information experience is like artillery perpetually pounding around you, driving you mad. But there’s another kind of information experience that’s more like a constant stream. It flows endlessly, every moment bringing past new things. You can wade in, you can get refreshed by it, you can have fun, catch valuable bits, and you can also drown. But the info stream is not inherently hostile or trying to make you useless like the info artillery. You can step back onto the banks and just observe without getting immersed. You can contribute to it, consume from it, or use it for inspiration to create.

The info stream has always existed, even before computers and cell phones, radio and TV. It’s the scuttlebutt, the gossip, the collective conversation we call culture. It’s trends, fads, ideas, fashions, commerce, and events constantly moving around us.

The digital world has broadened the stream to include more participants, and the flow is faster than ever. But each individual also has more control over their experience of the stream, how they consume, and especially how they contribute.

Waldenponding sounds both difficult and welcome when under constant fire by the info artillery. If only we could go screenless and escape, we’d become whole beings and achieve spiritual enlightenment, we think. But I think the urge to retreat entirely is another form of delusion, less dangerous perhaps than the delusion of thinking it’s all real and urgent and important, but a delusion nonetheless.

It makes more sense to take control of your relationship to information, rather than be controlled by it or completely shielded from it.

First, get the hell out of the bullshit battlefield. Don’t let yourself be bombarded. Don’t sit there and get shelled to oblivion. Get away from the noise and chaos and need to always know the news and have an opinion.

Breathe.

Maybe wander the quiet woods for a bit after leaving the battlefield. When you’re ready, approach the stream. Look at it as something beautiful and fascinating. Respect it as something powerful and dangerous. Wade in from time to time as you are able without getting swept away. You’ll get stronger and form a better relationship to the stream over time. Make it a part of your existence that serves you, not the other way around.

And when you realize it’s pulled you under, or that you’ve wandered away from the stream metaphor altogether and are back on the battlefield, exit again. Go back to the woods.

Metaphors are how we make meaning. The conscious navigation away from a battlefield to a stream can help reset your engagement with the world of endless information. At least it does for me.

You are being bombarded.

The blasts just keep coming, day and night. It’s so bad there’s a perpetual ringing in your ears, you can’t see straight, you can’t focus, and the people and reality right in front of you seems far off, disconnected, a blur. The constant barrage of artillery overhead has your whole being humming, vibrating unnaturally.

You can’t read, or write, or talk calmly, or think deeply, or experience silence. Even in gaps between the salvos, you’re too shell-shocked to be of much use. Every sensation sets you off.

That is the environment in which we live.

The trenches are anything connected to the internet or television or news of any kind. Information is the artillery.

The good news is, you can leave.

You can get the hell out of the foxholes and away from the mud and blood and constant head-splitting noise. When you exit this battle, there’s no negative consequence, no dishonor, no desertion, because the battle is not real. It’s bullshit. There are no sides, no ground to be taken or lost. The only objective in this battle is to occupy you with it, to keep you from being useful, fulfilled, free, and productive.

You can’t become useful, fulfilled, free, and productive sitting in someone else’s trenches while information artillery rains down, paralyzing you. You can only lose if you play.

The only way to win is to quit. To enter the fray is to be consumed and lose your sense of sanity and self. To exit is to regain your humanity and reclaim your capacity for creative thought.

Don’t let yourself become a casualty. Leave now, before the shell-shock gets worse. Exit the information barrage. Be alone with your thoughts. Be free.

Felt the need to flip on the mic and catch up with my good friend TK Coleman.

This is a weekly paid subscription newsletter where I share the honest ins and outs of building a company.

You can read and subscribe here (some of the issues are free).

Flipped on the mic this morning and just did an unscripted little bit about the problem with police.

Oh, and some F bombs, so probably don’t play it around small children or church ladies. It’s comedy, so you’re not allowed to be offended. ;-)

It’s hard to write honest.

Sometimes the “truest sentence you know”, as Hemingway advised to write, is something you don’t want to say. Or something you don’t even want to know.

Honest doesn’t have to mean some kind of deep pouring out of feelings. It doesn’t mean sharing personal information. It doesn’t mean poignant or moving or cutting. It just means true. True to what you know.

Sometimes honest writing is funny, sometimes sober. Sometimes expository, sometimes narrative. The difficulty is, you don’t know what honest writing for each session will look like until you start. At least I don’t.

The truest sentence I know today is that I’m having a hard time formulating what I know and feel in my gut into any kind of words. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to anyway. So I’m honestly writing about the difficulty of honest writing.

Sometimes you don’t have to wait for the facts to come in to know if something’s wrong.

It’s easy to feel sophisticated by telling yourself you’re waiting until you’ve reviewed all the relevant data. The data become the focus, and you dissect and debate what it might mean and wait and seek for more. The better informed the better!

But sometimes, if you step back and ask what different data would do to change actions, there isn’t a clear answer. You’ve gotten sucked unto analyzing info, supposedly to help you form a deferred judgement, but the thing you’re forming a judgement about didn’t need more info in the first place and more info wouldn’t alter or clear it up.

Sometimes you just know. But you’re afraid. It feels too bold. Haphazard, radical, simple. Well, sometimes the right thing is.

Sometimes a spade is a spade, and info about where it came from, who put it there, or the odds of it showing up again are intellectual exercises not necessary to form a judgement and do what needs to be done.

It seems like you should have to consume information and ideas to get inspiration. But it’s not true.

School and most formal teaching begin with information stuffing. You cram facts into your head for weeks or even years, preparing to someday do something. This is the surest way to reduce the odds that you ever do anything original. This is like a Keynesian theory of knowledge. “We’ll all get better if we keep consuming stuff.”

You don’t need to consume before you create.

My best mornings begin on this blog. Before email, text, Slack, Twitter, or any other external source of information. When I begin with creation, the creation is better, the day is better, and I’m better.

Days when I wait until late in the day to write my blog always feel more chaotic. The blog feels more obligatory than cathartic. It’s more a jumble of reflected feelings picked up during the day, instead of an expression of stuff inside me stirred up while I slept. That’s the stuff that tends to be most original and interesting. To me, if not to anyone else. (And I blog for me, not anyone else).

I highly recommend, as an approach to writing as well as learning anything else, creation before consumption. Pick up a guitar and start plucking. Grab a brush and start painting. Try figuring out equations, speaking Spanish, or ice skating. Before you study them.

Go create. This will provide the context for consumption that makes it vastly more valuable. Creators are better critics too.

There’s an energy

That wants you to get panicked

Refuse to give in

A discussion on the money properties of bitcoin and how to bootstrap a currency.

The weekly newsletter is $5/month, but today’s issue is free for everyone. I’m just that kind of guy.

Read it here.

There’s a story about the theologian Smith Wigglesworth awakened in the middle of the night to see a dark hideous creature in the corner of his room.

“Who are you?”, he asked.

“The Devil”, it replied.

“Oh, just you?”, he said as he rolled over and went back to sleep.

The Soviet Union had a major problem. Lawbreakers were everywhere. They were spreading pamphlets, posters, and graffiti of the most threatening variety to the ruling class. Satire. The most difficult part for the bureaucrats and armed thugs trying to stop it was they didn’t always recognize it. Artists forced to create art for the party would lace it with inside jokes and mockery the average person would spot, but the self-serious government would not.

The government of New York wants you to know they will not tolerate freedom. Every citizen is a prisoner, condemned to their home and allowed brief outdoor excursions as long as they are alone. They want to enlist you to enforce this slavery. So they setup a special number. “Text this number if you see anyone violating our oppression.” And people did text it. A lot. They texted dick pics in such a volume the government was forced to shut down hotline.

Evil is self-serious. Oppressors and statists can only live by fear. Fear is the only thing they have. If they are not feared, they are nothing. They are a threat only to the extent people fear them as such. There is nothing – nothing – done by the state and the dictators who run it that can be done if people do not fear them.

Courage appears to be the antidote to fear. In a way it is, but courage is such an equal and opposite force that when it meets tyranny the resulting spectacle can spread more fear. A courageous martyr sometimes inspires mass revolt, but often makes an example that sends people deeper into hiding.

Pure ideals and clear arguments can offer some resistance to tyranny. But the stronger those ideas, the more danger that they morph into tyranny themselves. Violent ideological revolutions devolve into a new form of tyranny.

But laughter cannot be defeated. It does not confront head on. It does not play the game evil wants to play, on familiar turf. It plays its own game, speaks its own language, a game and language the devil doesn’t understand. It’s confounding and unstoppable. It undermines the foundation of fear evil relies on.

The degenerate, unserious, self-interested rabble who don’t respect anything enough to not mock it are a greater protection from tyranny than well-meaning high-minded intellectuals.