Puke and Clean Up
A question I’ve gotten more and more as this whatever-it-is goes on and on is: “How and how do you find time to write a daily email?” To which I reply, “Just puke and clean up.” But you may also want to know the details (besides, of course, ruthlessly feasting on prompts from others and having a fantastic editor-illustrator)…
My son’s middle school is a block from Permanent Equity’s office, and I drop him off at 7am. The two of us have a 20 minute drive into town and usually try to talk about something interesting on the way (him more and more begrudgingly). By 7:10 I am ideally parked at the office with a half-formulated thought, hashed out with a begrudging teenager, about some aspect of capital, opportunities, or people (though he wouldn’t phrase it that way).
Before I do anything else, I pull out my laptop and puke out as much of whatever that is as I can remember onto the page. Next, I go running.
Running for me is therapeutic, cathartic, and meditative, and therefore when I do my best thinking. If I’ve puked something out on the page, it’s while running that my mind considers if there is more to remember and also how to clean it up. And if I don’t stop running until I’ve remembered it all and cleaned it up, voila fini (as my friend Elsa in Switzerland says), there it’s done.
Something that’s potentially interesting about this “process,” if you want to call it that, is that it has two phases. The discovery phase, with my son, is social. It’s judgment free and about bubbling things up that others might find entertaining or interesting and getting as much of that into the world as possible. The refining phase, when I’m running, on the other hand, is antisocial. It’s about ruthlessly deleting and reworking words and ideas that 30 minutes ago held promise.
And I think that makes sense. Good ideas need both points of view and a point of view (and I think meetings should be organized in those categories as well).
Another maybe interesting aspect is that this process doesn’t yield predictable results. In fact, I try to work up to a week ahead or more in order to protect against the inevitable days when it yields nothing at all. Failure isn’t just an option or possibility, it’s an inevitability. Embrace that and protect against it.
What is predictable, however, is that I do it. Because if you want to do anything well, even creative things, my experience is that you have to approach them systematically.
In other words, puke and clean up. Regularly. Try it this long weekend. And have a great one. We’re back Tuesday.
-Tim