Slow Hunch

Good ideas generally don't come from a bolt of inspiration. They first form as a slow hunch.

Here is the hard part: we have to be open and receptive to slow hunches so they grow in our brain.

The bolt of inspiration lands when a slow hunch crystalizes into an idea. Newton must have been thinking about Gravity before the apple fell. Archimedes must have been immersed in thinking about mass and weight before he had the "Eureka" moment in the bathtub. They all had slow hunches or intuitions.

Here are some of my slow hunches:

• Re-read books from the last five years that left me sad because I had finished reading them
• When I don’t feel like following my schedule, it is a sign that I need rest
• Pick up woodworking again, even if I have not done it in five years
• Take a pause on my hobby of Grassroots car racing
• Double down on Attention, hone it, craft it, deepen the roots

Further reading on this topic is “Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnson, 2011. It’s on my reading list.

Familiar yet unfamiliar

I tried blogging daily for a while. I was on a roll about the Metaphysics of Quality till I realized that I did not really understand it entirely. So I stopped writing what I thought I knew and started reading the two books by Pirsig back to back. This time I marked pages and wrote in the margins. I feel closer to understanding MOQ than I have been.

Reading Pirsig always sends me off on a pursuit of sorts like riding a motorcycle in familiar yet unfamiliar country. The curves of the road and the sights after turns seem familiar, but are they?

I have put woodworking aside since I paused it before my wedding a year ago. My youtube channel gets comments asking when I will post new videos. I thank them and tell them I don’t know. Two videos a week was hard. That channel became about video making which I love. Woodworking lost the focus which I want to love.

Over the years I have picked up several major hobbies: bicycle commuting and advocacy, photography, videography and woodworking. To be honest, these are amateur-apprenticeships, not just hobbies. I was serious about them and I invested my time and money into them.

The simple fact is it is hard to nurture several amateur-apprenticeships if you want to make deep and meaningful progress.

To make it worse, I switch from one to another.

And every time I make a switch, I feel guilty and sad about the last amateur-apprenticeship I have left behind. These days, I am making a focused effort of doing street photography and street portraiture, something I have naturally been drawn to anytime I have been out photographing. I want to spend a day a week photographing people on the street. Maybe start woodworking on the weekends.

It feels like a ride on a familiar yet unfamiliar road again.

Leaning into it

It was only yesterday that I finally finished processing all my paper mail. And when I was done, it felt easy. It felt like the massive wall that seemed too impossible to scale was a flimsy little piece of corrugate that was easily knocked over.

I have faced and tackled a few such walls in the last few years. They all had the same story... too difficult even impossible at first, then they just knocked over as soon as I mustered up the strength to lean into it.

The impossible wall was not the wall. It was me.

I have another wall in front of me now. It seems to have been impossible to get back into woodworking since I took a break before my wedding. I just can't seem to start again.

I need to give this wall a shove. Or rather, I need to find the strength to lean into it. That's all. My previous goals were to spend two hours in the wood shop, or to finish that mortise, or some other difficult task.

New goal: make one chop into the unfinished mortise. Just one. Place chisel on the knife mark, raise mallet and strike. That's it.

That should be all I need to lean into the wall.

I hope.

My Path to Creativity

No one knows where creativity comes from. In this world of outsource everything, the one thing that can set us apart is a creative idea.

I have been subjecting myself to learning something new every few years. Woodworking, particularly hand-tool woodworking has my attention lately. No machines. It is quite challenging. There are motor skills, hand-eye coordinations, etc. that I have to learn from scratch. It is keeping me in the top left corner of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's challenge v/s skill chart.

via Wikipedia

I started at apathy and worry before I picked up my first tool. From then on, I have stayed perpetually in the anxiety zone. This probably describes why I am having a challenging time to start woodworking after my break.

A challenging new hobby is uncomfortable. The thought of it is exciting but the practice is hard:
I have to hold the handplane with my calloused hands
I must plane with the right pressure forward and aft of the plane
I have to do it while reading the grain correctly
I have to know when to stop
I have to hold the chisel perfectly perpendicular while hitting the mallet square on the butt
I can not turn to any machine to do this for me.

It is this adversity that gives rise to creativity. Moreover, I get a handmade coffee table out of it.

A challenging education program will have similar effects that a challenging hobby has but I often fear that an education program digs me deeper into the box that I am trying to think outside of. This is specific to my line of work where more experience comes from doing rather than reading.

There is nothing prescribed that helps grow our creativity once a university degree is acquired and once we get comfortable in our careers. Continued education and MBA degrees add more tools to the toolbox, but I doubt they make us more creative.

Creativity is the use of tools, not just acquiring a larger toolbox.

I am Lazy

It has been two months since I did any woodworking. The whole detached garage was painstakingly converted into my woodworking studio. I have not visited it once to do any work. I have been busy though, but not this busy.

I took a break from the channel a week before my wedding. I made a video about it.

My parents visited a week before our wedding and stayed with us for six weeks. I see my parents once every other year, so we have a lot to cook and a lot to chat. This obviously took priority over woodworking, or even any youtubing.

My parents left us mid-May which means, technically, I had half a month to start woodworking again, and youtubing. But I haven't.

My channel has doubled in subscribers in the last two months when I did not upload a single video. I went from 145 subscribers to 295 as of this minute. Sometimes, youtubing tends to focus on getting more subscribers and I am surely guilty of that mindset. Maybe somewhere I felt complacent that I did not need to upload videos (and therefore do woodworking) to get more subscribers. This is the wrong way to look at the youtube community. The focus should be on content. Always.

So, the last two months, I have been hiding behind my iPad, watching youtube and Amazon videos just to occupy time. I have been hiding because of where I am in the workbench build process. I am at a point where I will have to fit a tenon into a mortise hole. Actually, eight of those. And I am anxious about it. I am afraid it will be a loose fit, or worse, out of square, or both! So much that I would rather not do it. I have also been tired of posting two videos a week. Recording and editing two videos is a lot of work and it takes time away form building the workbench. The second videos will have to wait for a while till the bench is complete. One video a week will have to do for now.

I need to show some grit. I show grit well in some cases but I also hide in other cases.

So here is my promise. To myself. Not to my subscribers who I love, or to anyone else. Me! I will spend at least two hours in the workshop this week. I have an unfinished mortise that needs chopping. I need to overcome the inertia of not doing. I need to get my momentum back.

Wish me luck.