The Friday Thing #727

Hello Friday! It's been a while since I typed one of these from 30k feet. Currently en route home from SF to SEA.?

The Friday Thing #727?is a dilemma. A few weeks ago, I read a headline in a post from Hiut and it’s been on my mind ever since. It was “The tyranny of dabbling” and I can’t decide if I love this idea, or if I dislike this it.

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Dabbling is where dreams go to die.

But slowly.

You have the same 26 letters as anyone else.

The keyboard is your stadium.

It’s where you win.

Or lose.

You don’t need more players than your rival.

Just like you don’t need more letters.

You have enough.

It’s 11 v 11.

It’s 26 v 26.

With writing, you just need to know how to rearrange them in the right order.

So that those words forge an emotional connection with people that motivates them to engage with you.?

That's it.

All of it.

I’m so torn. As a parent, I want my kids to dabble. I want them to try many things in order to find their thing. As a leader and professional, I want to commit. I want deep investment that leads to proficiency and expertise. Yet, I also want to dabble – I want my team to dabble, because the dabbling is where new ideas are found, where new ground is broken. And then, the post from Hiut went on….

Writing is thinking.

Writing is a gymnasium for ideas.

Write to learn how to make a good talk great.

Write to learn how to make the complex simple.

Write to learn how to convey a big idea in the fewest words.

Write to learn how to separate the important details of your argument from the noise.

Clear thinking is a genuine superpower.

And here is the best thing, with practice, you get better at it.

The keyboard is a gym for your mind.

Go often.

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I mean, the word meta is at the point of being overused right now….but this was meta. It’s what the Friday Thing is to me. A gymnasium for ideas…mostly in my head that I get to share with you, but what an amazing turn of phrase. “Writing is a gymnasium for ideas”

And so today, I sat with a wonderful collection of people from The Atlantic – Nick Thompson, Derek Thompson, Hayley Romer and Joanna Mayer Jones. They had bought together a collection of people to a gymnasium. Not an actual gymnasium, but a lovely dining room for lunch and an exchange of ideas. Nick interviewed Derek and there were ideas, there was simplification of the complex, there was signal amongst the noise.

All to say, I am happily torn between being a dabbler (in so many random things) and a committer, into things I am passionate about – art, cars, design, storytelling. But most of all, I want to be a gymnast. Of ideas.

That’s all this week. Just putting an idea out there for you to dabble with. Or commit to.

Happy Friday,

--- Steve