In the moment

Recently I’ve noticed a pattern in my creative pursuits. If I don’t do an idea as soon as I get it, it’s likely I won’t go through with it. I tend to get excited about an idea when I have it, and that’s the prime time to do it. Many times I do go through with it, and that’s awesome! But other times I’ll just write it down and hope to come back to it later. But as I said, I find that I tend to not follow through on the ideas I don’t implement immediately (or if I do follow through with them, it’s more difficult to be as passionate or excited about them as I was when I conceived the idea). 

I’ve seen this play out mostly with Conjecture. I’ll have ideas about videos I want to make or concepts I’m excited about and write them down. Many of these I’ll try to do quickly, but that definitely doesn’t happen with all of them. In fact, now that I think about it I have often been “waiting” to do a specific video I had wanted to do for a while. This is usually something I’ve put off for a while that I genuinely do want to create. But I instead wind up doing a video on some other topic that inspired me much more recently. I used to feel kind of guilty about this, but now thinking about it through this context I don’t feel as bad: it’s easier to pursue an idea in the moment than one I was excited about a while ago.

So now that I’ve realized this, I’m trying to research/film/make/do things as soon as possible after I get the idea. That’s why I’m writing this now: it’s not exactly a long or impressive blog post, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there. Hopefully I’ll be able to follow through on this idea, haha.

Reading a Book

This weekend I went on a retreat with my a cappella group, NOTA. It was a lot of fun and we spent most of our time talking and hanging out with each other. However about 2 or 3 times I wanted to excuse myself from the group to read a book I liked, one that I wanted to get back to reading. The first time I said this to the group they said something like, “Why did you bring that here? You’re with all of us!” This was asked out of pure curiosity with perhaps a hint of mild judgment. But around the second or third time I wanted to excuse myself to read, the message took a different tone: “Seriously, why are you doing that?? You can do that anytime!” These replies, I felt, were more intended to guilt me away from reading and back into spending time with them.

So I get that I could read a book anytime and that everyone is here together, but reading is something I do to relax myself. I didn’t really say that at the time, but I figured most people viewed it that way. Also it’s not like I read so much that I dropped out of all the activities we did. I participated in pretty much everything we did, and only really read when I felt like there was a lull in what we were doing. I’d say the maximum amount of time I spent reading on this day-and-a-half trip was one hour.


…Do these attitudes towards me reading seem kind of harsh? Yeah? If you think so, you’re not alone. Maybe I can offer an explanation: I wasn’t ever actually reading, and I never said I was going to go read. I said I was going to play video games.


Ah, now it makes sense—I didn’t get this treatment because I wanted to read, it was because I wanted to play video games! But...everything I said otherwise was true. For me, video games offer a kind of relaxing solace others find in reading. I want to spend time with my friends, and I did that for the vast majority of the weekend. But sometimes I just want to do the things that relax me and make me feel happy, which is often playing video games.

We have this stigma about video games that prevents many of us from seeing them as anything beyond some dumb thing that wastes our time. I see them in the same light as reading for fun, they’re experiences that engage your mind in a gripping and exciting way. I’d actually argue in many cases video games can provide more than books, like forcing your brain to think how to act in novel situations, or allowing you to experience deeply interactive scenarios not often present in books.*

I don’t want to made to feel bad about doing something I love, especially when it’s not seriously impacting my life or anyone else’s in a negative way. I just want to help others understand why this stigmatized, child’s activity might actually be more than meets the eye

<3


~~~~Footnote~~~~
*This isn’t to say that video games are more fun or better for you overall than reading is (I read a lot, by the way). Video games and books each have their strengths. Books often make me think about my worldviews and expose me to ideas I’d never before considered. Video games don’t do that very often. But video games do let me share an immediate experience with someone in a visceral way I don’t find from books. They also act as a very specific test: “how good can you be at doing XYZ?” Honestly having written this out I don’t even see why we need to compare the benefits they bring—do whichever brings you more enjoyment!

Models of Creativity Applied to Andy Weir's "The Martian"

I’ve recently been reading books and articles about creative success and I started thinking about two principles of creativity I’ve heard reiterated frequently: (1) creators are often bad at predicting which of their works will be the most successful, and (2) they usually have lots of works that aren’t as widely acclaimed before their first big hit. 

After I started generalizing these rules in my head I naturally began to think of outliers to prove them and myself wrong. I thought of Andy Weir’s “The Martian,” his debut novel which not only became a motion-picture featuring Matt Damon, but also earned him recognition and privileges from important people at NASA. This was his first novel, and he had experienced tremendous success, so here was the outlier to these rules. Or so I thought.

As I thought about the situation more, I realized it wasn’t too derivative from what I had said earlier. The first criteria checks out perfectly: Weir didn’t expect at all for the book to become the massive success it did. The second one seems difficult to counter, because this was his first novel. But it certainly wasn’t his first bit of writing. Weir kept a blog with an active reader base for a while before he began work on the novel. And he actually published his novel on his blog, chapter by chapter. He received feedback from his readers and made several big changes to the book based on his readers’ feedback. Even though the novel was perhaps his first formal and complete work, he had written many other things before it.

It doesn’t fit the model to a T, but a fit exists. I also will go back later and cite these sources…I’m just tired right now.

THERE YOU GO.

My Voice

I’m glad we had until Wednesday to write this blog because while I’ve been able to process some parts of our trip well, other parts are still coming in. Anyway, let’s begin.

One of the biggest moments of the trip happened right off the bat for me, at the Atlanta Civil and Human Rights Museum. There was a clip in an exhibit showing this…well, why don’t you just watch it below:

Every time I’ve recounted this story to someone I’ve cried. It just…I feel like I can’t adequately explain in words how this affected me. I think my writing is good, but I find it hard to convey the tones and emotions I was feeling at the time. And that’s why below I’ve attached an audio file that I recorded during the trip, a file where I spoke my mind about everything I had heard. I created this at 10:30 at night after having done MLK’s march on Washington by myself (after having done it with the group).

Like I said in the opening paragraph, I do still have to process everything I’ve heard. I have this desire to put it into a cohesive narrative, whether or not that is even necessary. But for now this audio file will do. Enjoy~

https://soundcloud.com/mattmignogna/sets/civil-rights-thoughts

Thank You, Donald Trump

Based on the things Donald Trump has said (Mexicans are rapists, let’s ban Muslims, etc.), it’s very hard to argue he’s not racist—or at least that his rhetoric isn’t. In fact when people talk about Trump I tend to hear remarks like “oh my god our country is moving backwards.” However I want to argue that Donald Trump isn't moving us backward and in fact is helping us. That seems like a ridiculous thing to say, so let me explain:

While Donald Trump is the one saying these extreme things, one man alone saying extreme things is not important. But when lots of people start to agree with him and support him, that’s when things become interesting. And yes while there are some followers who don’t believe Trump will enact his ideas and follow him more for his audacity and status as an outsider, I believe there are just as many (if not more) who genuinely believe in his ideas. Just take a look at this clip from CNN after Trump said he wanted to rid the US of Muslims.

I don’t think Trump is actually influencing anyone’s views. I think his supporters have always believed what Trump is saying, but we’re just seeing it now. These people had these views the entire time but now that there’s a high-profile public figure talking about it fearlessly, they feel safer themselves to come out with their views. Seriously, watch the CNN clip again and look at the guy interviewed at 1:10. The reporter presses him to say whether or not he agrees with Trump’s Muslims-removal plan and after looking over both his shoulders cautiously, he says yes. You can feel that he’s uncomfortable saying this because he knows it’s not a popular position. And while I don’t agree with the idea, I totally understand why he’d be scared to say something like this.

And this is why Trump is actually really important and helpful: he is empowering people to say what they believe. This shows everyone else what we’re actually dealing with. We will never be able to change peoples ideas if we don’t really know what they are. I mean, think back to the guy from the CNN clip. How could we possibly hold a meaningful conversation and attempt to understand why he feels the way he does if we never even knew how he really felt.

Here’s the bottom line: I agree with almost nothing that Trump says. But he has proved to us that we have a lot more work to do than we thought. And for that we owe him thanks.

So Good They Can't Ignore You

This is a summary of the main points in Cal Newport's book So Good They Can't Ignore You.

.....

Summary

1. "Follow your passion" is bad career advice. Many people don't have pre-existing passions and their path to finding work they loved was complicated.
2. Great work is rare and valuable so you, in return, need something rare and valuable to offer in return: career capital. This is basically high proficiency in something useful. You have to be So Good They Can't Ignore You (Steve Martin quote and the book's title). 
• To develop yourself to the point of being so good you can't be ignored, you need deliberate practice. This is practice where you intentionally force yourself to practice increasingly difficult tasks because overcoming/learning them will make you better. This part sucks, but it's how you develop skills instead of plateauing like most of us do. 
• It's easy to see this applied to athletes and musicians, but we don't tend to hold this mindset for everyone else. That is a big mistake.
3. Control over what you do and how you do it is super important. Cal calls control the "Dream-Job Elixir." This could mean leaving your job and starting a similar but more independent role or many other things. There are two traps to fall into with control, however. 
• The First Control Trap: it's dangerous to try and gain more control (leave you work, do something radical) if you don't have enough career capital to back it up.
• The Second Control Trap: once you have a lot of career capital, employers won't want to lose you and will fight to keep you on your traditional path.
• Use the Law of Financial Viability (do you have clear evidence that people are willing to pay you for your capital) to discern how much career capital you have and which control area you may be in.
4. To build work you love you cash in career capital for valuable traits like control and mission, a bigger reason or calling for your work.  
• The best ideas for mission are found at the adjacent possible (where you're at the cutting edge of your field and so you can understand things about your field that most others can't). 
• Once you have a mission you have to make it succeed, so generate small steps that produce feedback. Cal calls these little bets. 
• Finally, adopt the mindset of a marketer to make your work known. This is the Law of Remarkability: it must (1) literally compel people to remark about it, and (2) launched in a venue conducive to sharing and remarking.

One last thing I should mention: Cal argues that for most jobs it doesn't matter what you're doing specifically because you can become good at it and ultimately love doing it. However he does list three job attributes that would each prevent workers from developing following Cal's ideas.

1. Few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing rare and valuable skills
2. Job focuses on something you believe is useless or harmful to the world
3. Job forces you to work with people you dislike

Thoughts

1. If many people don't have pre-existing passions, that means they were developed from...something. So could we potentially alter our existing passions and create new ones with some cognitive framing? I think the answer is yes. Also, we haven't experienced everything we ultimately will, so the scale we use to judge how much we like something could change drastically as we find out new awesome things we didn't know existed. 
• however, I think it's a little quick to throw out the idea of passion altogether. Obviously as people find work they love they become passionate about it, and passion also seems to describe mission. So perhaps it'd be more beneficial to think about passion after you have career capital and control rather than before or never.
2. This part I totally agree with, especially deliberate practice. It's humbling to think about how many skills of mine alone have plateaued: piano, beatboxing, singing, smash, YouTube (maybe?), and I'm sure many other that aren't coming to mind. Deliberate practice is just how you get better and we often don't do it because it's difficult...I want to focus a lot on this in my personal life, and that will be discussed more later on in this post. 
3. Control, autonomy, has come up in literature time and time again as being important to people. While reading this I tended to think of freelance-type work as one of few paths with more control, but more control could simply mean a different role in one's organization. 
• As for the second control trap, I think to the movie Get Smart with Steve Carrel. Because Steve is the company's best analyst, he's turned down for a promotion because they feel like they can't afford to lose him in his job. If Steve had read this book, he would have known that he had a lot of leverage at that point.
4. This section really loses me. I think Cal is stretching his examples to fit this category. One guy for instance is an archaeology grad who loves communicating and eventually gets a show on the discovery channel. I don't know if he needed a mission for that, he was just good at communicating and happened to come across the right people and loved doing what he did. The "little bets" were a side-result of his fervor. I think gaining enough capital to experience the adjacent possible is really important, though I don't think you need to be in the AP to experience a passion or mission. I think experiencing the AP is more reflctive of how much career capital you have rather than connected to mission. Now I do think the law of remarkability is actually quite legitimate, but I feel like it accounts more for people recognizing you for your career capital, not building a mission. 

Plans Moving Forward 

[I'll probably come back and edit this section later, just posting initial thoughts here right now]

The biggest things I took from this book are (1) that it's absolutely worthwhile to get very good at things and (2) we achieve a high level of skill only through deliberate practice. With that in mind, I want to take a more intentional approach towards completing the tasks and developing the skills I want. Specifically, applying for internships and increasing my proficiency in graphic design, coding and YouTube.

I think I should put these tasks to a schedule, doing each on certain days so I can focus exclusively on one per day. Until I apply for a fair amount of internships the internships will carry a disproportionate amount of weight. Here's the schedule:

Minimum 30 min per day on each subject:
M–Internship Application
T–YouTube
W–Internship Application
R–Photoshop Tutorial
F–Coding
Weekend–YouTube

For the Internships, I will mostly just be applying to places I've found and looking up potential opportunities. Not much deliberate practice as I see it, more of just completing a task.

For photoshop and coding I'm still learning the basics, so I'll be continuing tutorials online. That qualifies as deliberate practice because I'm learning new things that will naturally be difficult and different.

For Youtube, I had to spend more time thinking of how I can deliberately practice being "better" at what I'm doing there. For that purpose I'm going to make a list of traits I think described good YT-ers. [I'm almost finished but I have to post this at 8, sooooo I'll be coming back to it later]

1. Engaging speaker, passionate about topic
2. 
   

YouTube section:
I think I need to differentiate first whether I want to just improve my skill or also try intentionally to grow (because while connected, those are two different things). I'll talk about just improving for now.

Here's a short list of the qualities I think make YouTubers great
-they have fun with their own style.




 layout a schedule and plan to help me work on the skills I want to develop. At this moment in time, those are coding, photoshop, getting an internship (not a skill, but whatevs) and YouTube. importantly, (2) that deliberate practice is critical to becoming better at what you do.

1. I'm coming back to this.

What are the things that, right now, I want to be better at. 

photoshop, coding, youtube. 

going ham on YouTube? and i guess internship...resume.


.....
Mid-way through writing this I came across this post by my friend Serena. I had read it before and bookmarked it, and now because of its title I read it again. http://serenafulton.com/2015/05/05/why-following-your-passion-is-bad-career-advice/

Generalizing Psych Activities

In my multi-cultural psychology class we did this activity: thumb-wrestle for 1 minute and each time a partner pins the other, they get .2 extra credit points. As soon as we were told this and paired up, I said to my partner, "this makes me feel awkward, let’s do whatever and say we each won twice.” She agreed.

Our thumb-wrestling was really more pleasant conversation than anything else—mostly about how my thumbs relative to hers were enormous and how the activity therefore wasn't fair. I did wind up winning both of the two wrestles we did. Time was up and the teacher started to say what I (and probably you) had expected all along.

This activity wasn’t about the winner or loser, it was about how we would engage in the activity, specifically whether we had more collectivistic (cooperative, group-oriented) or individualistic (competitive, individual-oriented) tendencies. It was meant to elicit behavior like me proposing we split the victories regardless of the outcome. As the teacher was explaining this, my partner said she’d write down that I’d won 3 wrestles and she’d won 1. 

This activity was...interesting. My teacher said it was to see whether we were more collectivistic or individualistic but I strongly contest the fact that an exercise like this provides much real insight into our generalized behavior. There are soooo many others factors coming into play. 

Yes, I said let’s split the points. No, that doesn’t necessarily make me a collectivistic person. I said what I did because I personally don’t value .6 points of extra credit so much that I’d be competitive to an off-putting extent. In my opinion the social perception of being a “tryhard” strongly trumps the insignificant amount of extra credit available. 

So whether I’m an individualistic person or not (I am), this activity doesn’t reflect my true beliefs because there are other social factors that act on the situation with greater strength than the extra credit incentive did. From a brief glance around the room, it seemed like most if not all students had made some sort of “collectivist compromise” like myself, though we have no way of really knowing whether or not this collectivism applies to any other aspects of our lives. 

So this collectivism activity, while it may shed light on some specific situational attitudes, cannot be generalized because there are too many other factors at play. I’m guessing my teacher knows this, but it still bothered me enough that I wanted to write about it, haha. 

A couple of other things I noticed:

• My partner wrote down 3-1 instead of the actual score, 2-0. She probably felt that even though I said I was totally fine splitting the total that she should be fair. 
• We could have kept the orginal score because I still had two more than her. But 2-0 is significantly different from 3-1 because with the latter she also earns points. 
• Lastly, while I did say we should make it even, I didn’t specifically lose intentionally to make our scores actually even. I was just going to do the thumb-wrestling, disregard the ultimate score, and say we were even. After I won two I could have (very obviously) let myself lose so we both actually won and lost twice. I wonder if other people did this. Does it say anything about me? Probably, but I don’t know exactly what. Let me know your thoughts below :)