Being useful? Yeah, whatever.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. And a few days ago I wrote about how to organise my ideas to make writing about them more efficient. Turns out, these were just good intentions. The last few days I knew what I wanted to write about, and I didn't have a need to organise my ideas. Today, I faced the same problem of not having a clue how to start again. So I decided to try something different.

While writing my post from yesterday I had an epiphany. I started out with the goal to come up with an example for Goodhart's Law I could draw on to explain the concept. The example I used before was about somebody who wants to hire a writer. Because that someone has no idea what good writing is about, he rates possible candidates on the number of blog posts they wrote (after all, more posts mean more writing experience). One writer finds out about this metric and creates a random blog post generator to game this metric. While this example works, it's also contrived as fuck. I wanted to find an example that is less contrived. What ended up happening instead was that I googled (well, duckduckwent) for examples, copied some of them and started to write a post that bordered on the same clichéd advice I wrote before and wanted to avoid at all costs (I think I tuned it down a bit in the editing).

I am obsessed with being useful. And not in a good way. There's the obsession that Micheal Phelps had about swimming, which drove him to reach new heights. And than there's the obsession about the shape of one's fingers, the size of one's nose, or whatever physical imperfections one might find on oneself. The latter is driven by insecurity, and is the exact type of obsession I have about being useful. I don't spend my time thinking about new projects how I can improve the world. I think of creative projects I want to work on and hate myself because I don't find them useful enough.

Most of what I have written for my blog so far has been influenced by this. In my daily blog, this tendency was reinforced by the fact that the only daily blog I read is Seth Godin's. His blog is amazing. And since it is my only reference for what a daily blog is about, I (unconsciously) copied him. But I don't think I'm equipped to write a blog like his.

There is a certain type of productivity coach that doesn't practice what they preach. The antithesis to such a productivity coach is David Goggins. He knows what he's talking about. He lived his advice. I see what Seth does in a similar way. He's an expert at what he does, and has a lot of experience with what he talks about. I, on the other hand, wrote about ideas I don't have much experience with. Most things I just read about without putting them into action. Writing about them always left a bitter aftertaste.

Whenever I don't have an idea for my daily post, I create a temporary file named "whatever". Then I start writing until I find something I want to expand upon (Read: Could turn into a clichéd piece of advice). When I'm finished with such a post it doesn't look like anything I wrote in the first 30 minutes if writing. As the last step, I rename the file to something more fitting. Today, I did the opposite. I created the same temporary file, but I didn't look for a topic to write. I just wrote for thirty minutes and went with it. I even kept the temporary file name. While writing, I started to fall back into the way I wrote my self-advice. The first step in editing was to delete these sections. I wanted to write something different. I didn't know exactly what or if the structure would make any sense. But it's different. And that's what counts.