Alex Hillman has a nice post on his response to Steven Johnson's Where do Good Ideas Come From, thinking about how we continually process and re-process our information. It mentions one specific method, which Steven calls "the spark file". The idea being that you keep a simple log of "sparks" -- thoughts that come to at all hours of the day -- and review that log regularly to help you understand how these ideas combine and relate to one another. The result -- which makes perfect sense to me -- is a "defragmentation" of your brain: the opportunity to take these seemingly scattered thoughts and smooth them back together into coherent ideas. This is something I've thought about for a long time. Steven is also one of my favorite authors. This blog is named after the core idea in Where Good Ideas Come From, "the slow hunch". A few years ago, after reading that book, I wrote up an idea for something I wanted to help me manage this process for myself, which I called the Open Commonplace Book. The gist of that idea being that my "sparks" are distributed across a lot of sources -- tumblr posts, tweets, notes to self, etc. And I'd love a way to help recombine them. Since then, I've done this, in some way. I keep a private blog -- and I actually call the posts "sparks", which is funny -- which I try to write to every day. I also use Notational Velocity and SimpleNote to keep running lists of notes to self. This is pretty good for input, but I know that I'm still not getting the most I can interms of reviewing and recombining. What I like so much about the "spark file" idea is how simple it is. Just keep adding ideas, sequentially, and continually read back through them. Then see what happens. This process of de-fragging your brain is really important. For building your slow hunches, and for helping you focus. A few days ago Nate Matias passed along this mind map for building focus, which I basically agree with wholesale, and which touches on the value of reflecting and de-fragging your brain (whether you use a spark file or some other method). Everything these days is about how we process and manage our information. It's hard and will only continue to get harder. But being mindful of this, and being disciplined in approaching it, will no doubt pay big dividends.
Last night, Andy Murray won the US Open -- his first grand slam victory -- in an epic 5-set match (tied for the longest ever). I was on a train and missed the whole thing, unfortunately. But the story is great -- Murray won the first two sets, then dropped the second two, only to rally in the fifth to win. And more importantly, he has been a perennial runner-up -- always getting close, but never able to close (until now).
My favorite line from the HuffPo piece is this:
Just weeks after winning gold during the London Olympics, Murray has finally broken through in a Grand Slam. The perennial contender had consistently been held at bay by Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the sport's marquee events. After losing in the 2012 men's final at Wimbledon to Federer, an emotional Murray told the partisan crowd that he was "getting closer."
Getting closer.
I know that feeling -- working so hard at something, but not being there quite yet. Being so close you can taste it. Working, little by little, day by day, to get there. Keeping your eye on the prize but not getting distracted from the task at hand. Working with determination and quiet confidence.
I've always thought of tennis as perhaps the most difficult of sports. It's like hitting a baseball, but while you're running, and with 90% of the addressable target area out of bounds (in the net, outside the lines, etc). To top that off, you're a team of one, battling yourself, inside your head. So it's really easy to get frustrated and implode when things start heading south. I played a lot of tennis as a kid, but basically haven't played at all for the past 15 years or so, until recently. Over the past few weeks, I've picked it back up and gotten really into it, and it's been really fun and also a challenge. My playing style has always been aggressive and error-prone. I have (IM*H*O) beautiful strokes, but go for a lot of winners and tend to make a lot of unforced errors. Historically, I often lose to players who can simply get the ball back and put me in a position to beat myself. On serve: it's aces or double faults. You get the idea. Clearly, this is a frustrating way to play, and to be. And it puts me into a position to love and hate tennis at the same time, and to get really down on myself for not living up to what I see as my potential. Recently though, I've been working on a way to address this. I've been going into playing tennis expecting it to be frustrating, and knowing that overcoming that frustration is part of the challenge, and part of the fun. Seems like a subtle difference, but it's really been game-changing for me. If I go in expecting to have a mental challenge -- and knowing that I'll get through it -- rather than being surprised when it happens, it's somehow way easier to deal with. It becomes part of improving my game, just like working on my strokes, and it generally helps me relax and get loose, rather than get frustrated and tight. This may seem like a stretch, but it reminds me of what a good friend once said about eating magic mushrooms: that it's a challenge and an adventure; that he fully expected to get freaked out and scared, but working his way through that, and getting over it, is part of what he liked about it. Seems crazy in some ways, but I get it. So, I guess I'm saying playing tennis is kind of like tripping on mushrooms. And of course, it's the same with being an entrepreneur. Apparently Reid Hoffman characterized entrepreneurship as "throwing yourself off a cliff and building a plane on the way down", which feels right. And my friend
Alex Hillman has a nice post on his response to Steven Johnson's Where do Good Ideas Come From, thinking about how we continually process and re-process our information. It mentions one specific method, which Steven calls "the spark file". The idea being that you keep a simple log of "sparks" -- thoughts that come to at all hours of the day -- and review that log regularly to help you understand how these ideas combine and relate to one another. The result -- which makes perfect sense to me -- is a "defragmentation" of your brain: the opportunity to take these seemingly scattered thoughts and smooth them back together into coherent ideas. This is something I've thought about for a long time. Steven is also one of my favorite authors. This blog is named after the core idea in Where Good Ideas Come From, "the slow hunch". A few years ago, after reading that book, I wrote up an idea for something I wanted to help me manage this process for myself, which I called the Open Commonplace Book. The gist of that idea being that my "sparks" are distributed across a lot of sources -- tumblr posts, tweets, notes to self, etc. And I'd love a way to help recombine them. Since then, I've done this, in some way. I keep a private blog -- and I actually call the posts "sparks", which is funny -- which I try to write to every day. I also use Notational Velocity and SimpleNote to keep running lists of notes to self. This is pretty good for input, but I know that I'm still not getting the most I can interms of reviewing and recombining. What I like so much about the "spark file" idea is how simple it is. Just keep adding ideas, sequentially, and continually read back through them. Then see what happens. This process of de-fragging your brain is really important. For building your slow hunches, and for helping you focus. A few days ago Nate Matias passed along this mind map for building focus, which I basically agree with wholesale, and which touches on the value of reflecting and de-fragging your brain (whether you use a spark file or some other method). Everything these days is about how we process and manage our information. It's hard and will only continue to get harder. But being mindful of this, and being disciplined in approaching it, will no doubt pay big dividends.
Last night, Andy Murray won the US Open -- his first grand slam victory -- in an epic 5-set match (tied for the longest ever). I was on a train and missed the whole thing, unfortunately. But the story is great -- Murray won the first two sets, then dropped the second two, only to rally in the fifth to win. And more importantly, he has been a perennial runner-up -- always getting close, but never able to close (until now).
My favorite line from the HuffPo piece is this:
Just weeks after winning gold during the London Olympics, Murray has finally broken through in a Grand Slam. The perennial contender had consistently been held at bay by Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the sport's marquee events. After losing in the 2012 men's final at Wimbledon to Federer, an emotional Murray told the partisan crowd that he was "getting closer."
Getting closer.
I know that feeling -- working so hard at something, but not being there quite yet. Being so close you can taste it. Working, little by little, day by day, to get there. Keeping your eye on the prize but not getting distracted from the task at hand. Working with determination and quiet confidence.
I've always thought of tennis as perhaps the most difficult of sports. It's like hitting a baseball, but while you're running, and with 90% of the addressable target area out of bounds (in the net, outside the lines, etc). To top that off, you're a team of one, battling yourself, inside your head. So it's really easy to get frustrated and implode when things start heading south. I played a lot of tennis as a kid, but basically haven't played at all for the past 15 years or so, until recently. Over the past few weeks, I've picked it back up and gotten really into it, and it's been really fun and also a challenge. My playing style has always been aggressive and error-prone. I have (IM*H*O) beautiful strokes, but go for a lot of winners and tend to make a lot of unforced errors. Historically, I often lose to players who can simply get the ball back and put me in a position to beat myself. On serve: it's aces or double faults. You get the idea. Clearly, this is a frustrating way to play, and to be. And it puts me into a position to love and hate tennis at the same time, and to get really down on myself for not living up to what I see as my potential. Recently though, I've been working on a way to address this. I've been going into playing tennis expecting it to be frustrating, and knowing that overcoming that frustration is part of the challenge, and part of the fun. Seems like a subtle difference, but it's really been game-changing for me. If I go in expecting to have a mental challenge -- and knowing that I'll get through it -- rather than being surprised when it happens, it's somehow way easier to deal with. It becomes part of improving my game, just like working on my strokes, and it generally helps me relax and get loose, rather than get frustrated and tight. This may seem like a stretch, but it reminds me of what a good friend once said about eating magic mushrooms: that it's a challenge and an adventure; that he fully expected to get freaked out and scared, but working his way through that, and getting over it, is part of what he liked about it. Seems crazy in some ways, but I get it. So, I guess I'm saying playing tennis is kind of like tripping on mushrooms. And of course, it's the same with being an entrepreneur. Apparently Reid Hoffman characterized entrepreneurship as "throwing yourself off a cliff and building a plane on the way down", which feels right. And my friend
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
I wrote about
how the mental roller coaster rides of tennis and entrepreneurship are similar. This story is a great follow up to that, and is one that makes me really happy -- that Andy was able to pull through, to conquer whatever demons were there from prior losses, and further, to come back from what must have felt like yet-another-disappointing-loss-in-the-making.
has described the roller-coaster ride of entrepreneurship -- one day you feel like you're killing it and you've got the whole world figured out, and (literally) the next day, you can feel like you're 100% wrong and totally screwed. That's for real -- in the past, I've felt it on something like 8-hour cycles -- and it's part of the reason why co-founder chemistry is so important; to help you weather that storm. In all of these cases, I think the trick is not letting yourself feel like all is lost -- expecting there to be (sizable) bumps, but understanding that
of course there are
, and that's part of the challenge and part of the fun. Somehow, thinking about it that way really changes things for me.
I wrote about
how the mental roller coaster rides of tennis and entrepreneurship are similar. This story is a great follow up to that, and is one that makes me really happy -- that Andy was able to pull through, to conquer whatever demons were there from prior losses, and further, to come back from what must have felt like yet-another-disappointing-loss-in-the-making.
has described the roller-coaster ride of entrepreneurship -- one day you feel like you're killing it and you've got the whole world figured out, and (literally) the next day, you can feel like you're 100% wrong and totally screwed. That's for real -- in the past, I've felt it on something like 8-hour cycles -- and it's part of the reason why co-founder chemistry is so important; to help you weather that storm. In all of these cases, I think the trick is not letting yourself feel like all is lost -- expecting there to be (sizable) bumps, but understanding that
of course there are
, and that's part of the challenge and part of the fun. Somehow, thinking about it that way really changes things for me.
