Words. Ideas. Actions.

04 April 2023

Here’s the thing: This is the last scheduled post in this Not Tweets series. When I first came up with this exercise, I wanted an outlet for my thoughts which would replace my daily — at least — habit of sending Tweets. I also wanted some guardrails for how long this would last, so I came up with what I thought was a sufficient targeted number of posts, repurposing original Soundgarden song titles for the titles of each of these entries. Some nights, that worked better than others. And tonight is one of those others. 

I don’t really have a good tie-in for tonight’s title. In fact, I don’t really have a great topic for tonight. Some days were like that. And I think that’s a pretty good way to bring these posts to a close. Because throughout it all, life has gone on, and I’ve gotten to settle in each evening and try to make a little sense of whatever thoughts have bounced around in my head during the day. The fact that today was so historically consequential at the same time as it felt so mundane is actually a pretty great snapshot of how I’ve been feeling since I started these in November. 

Some days, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about, jotting ideas in my notebook between meetings or during dog walks or even as I misheard a song lyric. Other days, I was simply too overwhelmed with breaking news to have anything other than rambling tumbleweeds cascading around in my head. But every weeknight, I sat here for a few moments, honing fractions of ideas into whole sentences, helping to cement a snapshot of me and my brain on any given day. Through it all, the unexpected kept happening. And the fact that I kept these up through it all is honestly what I’m proudest of. 

You see, I love a routine. I rely on them. Patterns and systems and habits help calm me. Otherwise, my anxieties can get the best of me. Just the burden of putting down these words every night worked to soothe the unease of not being able to Tweet each and every thought in my head. But in a world where we’re having to reuse, and almost redefine, the word “unprecedented” almost every day, I fell back on routine as a way to keep calm, and carry on.

When I started these I was angry that a business made a business decision that I wish it hadn’t. In January, when Google announced thousands of layoffs, including my own, I was angry that a business made a business decision that I wish it hadn’t. What these posts have helped me realize, though, are a few ideas I want to capture form my future self:

1) No company should be worth more to you than you do to yourself.
2) No matter how prepared you think you are for something, you are never going to be prepared for everything, so just relax a bit.
3) No one knows what you’re going through, and you’ll never know everything someone else is going through, so give them a break.

I’m sure there are more reminders that would be helpful in the future, but I think these are a good place to stop. I love writing. I don’t love editing. I could keep writing for another hour, I’m sure. But great writing is essentially good editing. I don’t think anything in the Not Tweets collection could be called great, but there are nuggets there I’d love to revisit. And edit. And try to get them to great. So, while this is the end of Not Tweets, I hope you’ll see a more polished version of something which started here in another form in the future. Until then, thank you for allowing this experiment to go on for more than four months. And thanks for reading this, or any of these, posts. I ended each of them with the same question, “See you tomorrow?” I can tell you now, I definitely will not see you here tomorrow. But I hope to see you soon. Maybe on Mastodon? 

17 March 2023

When I thought about writing tonight’s post earlier today, I had a couple of ideas. Almost too many ideas. There’s the half-finished content design-related notion about where to put settings which don’t fit into obvious labels. Then, there was the one about that recently unearthed band I found in the used section at Amoeba which is right up my alley and a complete mystery about how I missed them. Another is the rant about consequences and who we, as a society, extend forgiveness and second (and third and fourth) chances to. Still another was the tension between our ability to use ingenuity to solve problems but not the incentives to bring about real changes which aren’t tied to someone’s profits.

They are all worthy of further exploration here, I think. But they take time and consideration, if I want to do any of them justice. And I do. I know that I wouldn’t be satisfied if I didn’t do my best to explore any and all of those. And that pressure I put on myself, which I talked a little bit about last night, means that I’d look back at a lackluster post and regret having done it at all. Even as I sit here now, I am lamenting the fact that I forgot to include one of the points I wanted to make in the post about naming and identity. 

So, instead of trying to struggle though trying to craft one of the posts I mentioned, we went out for ice cream. And I think it was a much, much better use of my time tonight, whether we were wearing green or not. My hope for you this weekend is that you don’t have to struggle as much as I do when trying to decide between a weighty task you’ve assigned to yourself, or a waffle bowl filled with a scoop of coffee ice cream covered in hot fudge, whipped cream, peanuts and a cherry (that your daughter will definitely steal from you, so you should probably get two). 

See you tomorrow?

16 March 2023

I am exhausting. Not exhausted. I mean, I am that, too. But what I mean is I think being me is also exhausting. I might be exhausting you as well, but at least you can take a break from me. I never get a break from me. I’m always here. With me. Making me do things. Which is exhausting.

In an effort to avoid going down an Izzard-esque monologue, let me explain. One of the many fascinating — but frustrating — features about my brain is that it keeps making demands of myself. Let’s take these posts as an example. Nobody walked up to me in November and said, “Hey, Stephen, I dare you to write a three-to-five-hundred word essay every weeknight right before you go to bed.” Yet, here I am, clad in my jammies, watching a recorded episode of “World News Tonight with David Muir” on the DVR, typing these letters into a few digital boxes. So, why am I doing this to myself? The honest answer is I don’t really know. I’ve often given myself lofty goals or tried ambitious projects. But I’m not really sure what motivates them. Or why I finish them. 

Well, that last part isn’t accurate, is it? I finish them because I tell myself I have to finish them, right? Would something terrible happen if I didn’t? I mean, seriously, if this post didn’t show up here tonight, would you have been disappointed? Yes? No? Would you have even noticed that one was missing? You’re not reading these that closely are you? I mean, did you even catch that every sentence in this paragraph has ended with a question mark? And why should you? You have other things to do, right? 

Whether it’s this Not Tweets blog, my Journal Journey look backs, #The100DayProject called ”Choose Must” in 2015, and the revisiting of them in 2016, or even my one EP a month in 2018, I keep signing myself up for extraneous tasks in addition to either working or looking for work, and — more importantly — being a partner and a dad. I know I need creative outlives. In fact, I love these creative outlets. I hope that after I’m long gone, our daughter can look back at them and learn aspects about me she’s now too young to quite comprehend. But why am I pushing myself to get through the entire list of original Soundgarden song titles I’m using to quantify how many of these blog posts I intend to do? If I tell you there are only two dozen left, what does that make you feel? What about if I told you there were only a dozen left? How ’bout six? And what if I said tonight’s was the last one? Do you have different feelings about each number? I know I do. So, I keep typing, hoping that as I do, a new thought spurs an inspiration for just one more post. Is it the attention I’m looking for? Seriously, I have no idea. But it’s definitely come up in therapy. The only real reason which makes any sense is that if I don’t finish these projects, I feel like a failure. And that’s unacceptable. At least to my brain it is.

As I leave you tonight, I can tell you this isn’t the last one of these. At least it‘s not intended as such. I have a few more ideas for posts, and more than a handful of song titles to use. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a satisfying answer to why I sign myself up for these kinds of journeys, but I am glad you’re on this trip with me. You’re still here, right? Hello? I’m exhausting. 

See you tomorrow?

13 March 2023

During my — what seems like — hourly scrolling of LinkedIn, I came across a post about writing that resonated with me. I know I’ve talked about the act of writing as a way to crystalize ideas, but the link Jonathon Colman shared captured a lot of what I tried to say the other night on my own. 

I’m sharing this because I want to use tonight’s post to better formulate an idea I had when I misheard a phrase while listening to a podcast yesterday during our last evening dog walk. I don’t even really remember what I misheard at this point because I spent the remainder of the walk trying to work out the notion I had. The gist of it, however, was about how we spend a lot of time looking for, “a needle in a haystack.” And that’s our jumping-off point.

See, I feel like a lot of times, we develop a number of ideas trying to locate and extract the needle. Can we use a magnet? Could we get a light to reflect off it somehow? What about sifting it to the bottom? What I don’t think we spend enough time on is how to sort through the hay. In my mind, that’s where the problem really is. 

Essentially, it’s a signal-to-noise issue. And the methods to going after the needle just add to the chaos, and probably won’t yield the results we’re hoping for. But, in my content strategy-focused brain, I want to bring some order to that stack of hay, leaving nothing but order and the elusive needle.

As an example, I’d advocate developing a sorting system for all the hay. Let’s say we just start organizing them by size. This would do a couple of things in my mind:

1. Bring some focus to the search

2. Force a methodical, systematic evaluation of each piece of hay

3. Identify what’s been done and what’s left to do

4. Ensure that nothing was missed

Obviously, this would take a considerable amount of time. But the other advantage is that you’d be able to evaluate how long it should take you to get through the pile and estimate when you’ll be able to actually stumble across the needle. 

Thankfully, I don’t think I’ll ever actually have to find a needle in a haystack. But I have had to come up with ways for people to find the information they’re looking for amongst a sea of other information. By thinking about how everything else is sorted, we help people more easily find what they’re looking for, rather than sending them on a Quixotic path. Thanks for letting me tilt at this windmill for a bit tonight.

See you tomorrow?

03 March 2023

There are many reasons these posts have been valuable to me. Yes, they are giving me an alternative outlet for what used to be Tweets. But the forcing mechanism to do a lot of this thinking out loud has also made me better at interviewing (I think — honestly, until I land my next role, that could just be fantasy). Whether or not I’m actually better at it, I know that my answers have been more concise and more thoroughly thought through because most of the time, I’ve drafted some sort of first draft in one of these posts.

At this point, there are more than 50,000 words in four months’ worth of notions and ideas which were basically just scribbles in a notebook before they got a little more solidified here. To quote John Dickerson from this week’s episode of the Slate “Political Gabfest,” “Nothing sharpens the mind better than organized thinking, which is what writing is.” This organized thinking helps me take the ideas in my head and try to form them into a coherent narrative, so I can tell you (or — maybe — more accurately, a me in the future) the first draft of a story which may still need some tweaking, but has the essential elements of a point I can build upon and make better in the future. For instance, today while prepping for an interview, I wanted to highlight something I know I had mentioned here before. So, I looked it up, used part of that post as a first draft, and then honed it even more to make it more specific to the role and company I was talking to today. I’ll let you know if it leads to something more.

As I look at the dwindling number of remaining Soundgarden song names I’m using to power the titles of these, I’m starting to think about what’s next for this blogging exercise. I don’t want to give up on the readily available access I have created for ideas I want to take with me to interviews and my next employer. But the usefulness of these needs to be more than just a place for me to think out loud, mostly to myself. Right? It’s all starting to feel a little navel-gaze-y. However, I still have ideas I want to explore here, and I know that news events and emerging technology and musical discoveries will always turn the gears in my head. What I do with all that kinetic energy is still an open question, though.

See you tomorrow?

22 February 2023

I’m starting to have a love/hate relationship with these posts. I miss Tweeting, that’s for sure. But I don’t know that these are scratching the same itch. I mean, I guess I know they’re not. So, why am I still doing them? It’s a great question. Let’s try and tackle that today.

If these are truly an alternative outlet for Tweets, fine. The logic breaks down very quickly in a number of ways, but we’ll pretend it’s an apples-to-apples comparison for now. I enjoy the freedom from specific subjects that Tweeting had for me. Want to talk about the World Cup? Great! Need to vent about changes to a product you used to spend most waking hours thinking about? Have at it! Have some ideas about our elected officials? Share them widely! But with that boundlessness also comes indecision. It’s like having access to almost every song ever released and not knowing what to listen to. And this choice overload ends up leading to posts like this. 

To describe what’s happening in real time, I started typing today because I have a self-imposed deadline. I basically only have this hour to craft these words and post them before a series of other commitments take over the rest of my day. Obviously, there is no real downside to not getting one of these up tonight. But I like continuing the streak. At least until I’m out of Soundgarden songs to use as titles for these things. With these constraints in mind, I started typing that first paragraph up there. And now, we’re here. Together. Are you still with me? Good. Now, back to that choice overload idea. 

Because I have such free rein, sometimes I have a hard time deciding what to write about. But I still want to write. Obviously, I could do that on my own without subjecting you to having to read these, but forcing myself to post every weekday holds me accountable, at least to myself, to my own commitment. I need to keep writing if I want to get better at writing. I think that’s how that works.  But what to write about. The anniversary of the war in Ukraine? The way 2024 primaries are shaping up? Content moderation in front of the Supreme Court? My hopes to get into the Noise Pop show I want to see tonight? When news or events drive me in a typing direction, those posts usually come quickly. But days like these tend to overwhelm me. Too much freedom. So, we end up with another post about process. But I find those fascinating.

As I explore more of my abilities and collaboration tendencies, I find that I love learning about how other people tackle problems. Are they list makers, like me? Do they use the motivation of a deadline to push their ideas further? Can they “kill their darlings” quickly in order to serve a better idea? The more we talk about our creative processes, the better we’d all be, I think. There’s no magic sauce to coming up with a great idea. And If I can co-opt a technique from you that makes me better at creative problem solving, then I’m all ears. For me, it’s a lot like setting up a guitar with an alternate or unusual tuning. At the very least, I’ll be trying to create something completely new to me. Stretching myself like that, hopefully, leads to me learning something new. And that’s never a bad thing, in my book.

See you tomorrow?

06 February 2023

Friday’s post was not as controversial as I anticipated. I was hoping for a vigorous defense about albums I missed or long rants about an undeserving inclusion or even a — deserved — interrogation about decades-long gaps between some of the chosen albums. But none of that came to pass, save for Spencer replying with his own well-thought-out list. Which leads me to conclude my list, like the albums on it, is definitely, completely perfect. So, let’s move on to something potentially more controversial: artificial intelligence.

I’ve been reading a lot of articles and opinion pieces about the rise, use, and fears around AI, specifically text-generating bots. And with today’s announcement of Google’s public entry into the text-generating AI playing field, I thought it might be the right time to talk about how I think these services will change writing on the web, and how I’m feeling about that. In a word, I’m excited.

Now, I completely understand the reservations people have about technology coming for their jobs and livelihoods. But that worry isn’t new. Technological advancements have forced people to adapt since the invention of the wheel. Today’s worries, I think, are just specific to a set of craftspeople who haven’t had to worry about their roles being automated out of existence ever before. Potentially. These advancements shouldn’t be feared, though, they should be embraced. Writers are so much more than sentence generators, which is — essentially — all these emerging technologies are. And even if we only use them to create sentences, there will always be a need to make them better. Or more targeted. Or even used as inspiration. And that’s the part which has animated me recently.

I’ve used a few of these posts to talk about creativity. It is the only part of me I know I’ll never run out of. I’m not saying that to brag, it’s just, at the very least, each day brings many new opportunities for me to make something new. Today, it’s this post. But some days, it’s a simple doodle. Or a guitar riff. Or even an impromptu bedtime story for a very discerning nine-year-old. And it’s that creativity I’m looking forward to putting to use with all of the AI that is emerging. 

Most of my creative endeavors, I’ll admit, are made better with a collaborator. As a writer, I’m much better working with an editor. When I was in bands, the songs that we came up with as a group at practice, or as the result of bouncing ideas back and forth rather than bringing in a finished tune, were the ones which proved more popular and endured in our live sets longest. And when I was focused on UX problems, especially at Twitter, my work and our solutions were much better thought out (and simpler to implement and use) when I had a designer and researcher to collaborate with on solutions. Thinking about the future of my work, or even ideas I have for personal projects, I feel almost overwhelmed with opportunities to work with these different text generators. Essentially, they are more than tools; they’re like collaborators which never sleep. 

The key to using them as more than tools, and not simply fearing that they’ll replace me, goes back to the creativity I need to employ to turn a potential competitor into a collaborator. Sure, I can plug something simple into the prompt, get the results, and call it a day. But what I’m looking forward to is using the prompt as a starting point on a journey to something entirely unique. All powered by me, working to make both the prompt and the resulting answer better and better until the final product is something decidedly new and unexpected. 

Let’s say I wasn’t to create a new story for bedtime. I could simply ask one of these services to, “Create a bedtime story for a nine-year-old girl.” But with a little imagination, I could start a little further down the path to something more interesting, like, “Create a rhyming bedtime story about a pair of cucumbers who get stuck in a museum elevator while on their way to see their friend’s show about floral arrangements.” No matter what comes out, we‘re already into brand new territory as far as bedtime stories go around here. And, depending on what the result is, I get to take that as just a starting point for the rest of the pair’s journey.

Basically, I want to spend all day typing prompts into all the text generators, coming up with new ideas for stories or writing prompts or just flights of fancy. It all sounds much more interesting than updating my résumé. Say, that gives me an idea …

See you tomorrow?

25 January 2023

Tonight’s post is going to be a bit of housecleaning. A few nuts and bolts, some additional context on a couple of notions, and what I’m thinking for its future. Well, barring the unpredictable, of course. So let’s get to the ’splainin’.

I’ve been trying to complete one of these every weeknight. As you probably know by now, the impetus was to keep me from Tweeting, but still give me an outlet — albeit different — to put ideas out in the world. Since I started at the beginning of November, this is my 62nd edition of Not Tweets, by my count. While I still miss the immediacy of Tweeting, Twitter has changed so much, as has the usage of the audience I was Tweeting for, posting my ideas there just isn’t the same. So, here we are.

Now, for those keeping very close track, you may have noticed a common theme in the posts’ titles. Each and every one of them is a repurposed Soundgarden song title, which does a couple of things for me:

1) Saves me from having to think up a bold headline that was SEO-worthy.
2) Puts a finite number on how many of these posts I’ve tasked myself with.

By my count (with this Wikipedia page as my source), Soundgarden released 120 songs during their existence (1984 – 2017). But since I’m not using the tiles of covers they released (nine of them), that adds up to, hopefully, 111 posts here, eventually. Which means we’re more than halfway through. 

[ Inhales deeply. ] 

Now, for one last thing: Since the Google layoffs, I’ve been much more active on LinkedIn. As I texted a friend the other day, LinkedIn is the GenX TikTok. And since I’ve been there so much, I’ve been posting links to the last few of these posts there, too. Now, even though I know that their recommendation algorithm is over-indexing on posts which include #GoogleLayoffs, these links are getting much more traction than when I cross-publish on my blog, Medium, and on Post. I know not every one of these is appropriate for inclusion on LinkedIn, but if I can find a justification for including some of them there, the readership has been surprisingly large. Thanks to any and all of you who are reading this because of a link from LinkedIn.

See you tomorrow?

09 January 2023

Tonight, I want to start with an admission. It’s not going to be revelatory. In fact, I’ve alluded to it here before. But it’s something that’s been bothering me most of the weekend. And then, today’s episode of The Gist compounded matters. During Mike Pesca’s interview with Eric Newcomer, they discussed the difference between people writing for journalistic publications and those writing for their own. And the chasm of resources, in both time and money, which then dictates what each can cover. I think my posts are a great example of this, which leads me back to my admission: These posts are quick and mostly easy for me to do because they’re limited only by my creativity and opinions. Both of which, it seems, I have in abundance. 

When I think I have an idea for each day’s post, I usually jot it down in my notebook. It can be an idea spurred by a podcast episode, like today, or a book I just finished (I’m percolating a post about Michelle Obama’s recent book), or some new turmoil at Twitter. In all of these cases, though, the words which get put down here are nothing more than the thoughts in my head. There’s very little reporting. Or research. Or even fact checking. It’s just the mental machinations from a man of a certain age, usually sitting on his couch watching a soccer match on his DVR, while the rest of his family sleeps. Mainly because this is keeping him from Tweeting. Or reading Tweets. But I think, eventually, I want to use this time for something more.  

That same notebook where I capture ideas for what I want to write about — or, more precisely, practice writing about — also includes a long list of notions which would take more time and effort to tell well. There are ideas for content design talks I want to give. And pitches for 33⅓ books I’d love to write. Even a few short stories I used to tell our daughter at bedtime that I want to preserve, maybe even so other parents can tell their kids (ugh, that’s just a pretentious way of trying to avoid saying, “I think I want to write a children’s book or two”). As it is, I’m instead spending the evening hours sorting through a morass of news headlines and podcast episodes and revelations about music or soccer or politics which have passed though my grey matter during the daylight hours, trying to capture a snapshot of where my head was at today. Besides at work. 

As I sit here tonight, I’m not really sure what that means for these posts going forward. I know that I enjoy writing them. I’m not sure they’re anything more than a vanity project at this point, though. Or, maybe, something my family can look back on to get a sense of where my mind was at during what seems like these very strange, liminal times. So, in that sense, they serve a purpose. But, eventually, I think I’ll want to spend the time and energy I’m using putting these together on something that will work better together as a longer-form collection. I have lots of ideas, but much like Pesca and Newcomer mentioned, they’ll take focused time and attention. And intention, something I’d like to get better at in 2023. For now, I hope these little missives are providing the right amount of distractions — both for me and for you — from whatever else it is that could be a different use of our time. The upside is that if I’m writing these, at least I’m writing, And if practice makes perfect, that can’t be all bad. 

See you tomorrow?

27 December 2022

I started listening to a new book today, John Cleese’s Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide. It’s pretty short, and I’m almost half-way through, but — fittingly, I guess — it’s already sparked an idea for tonight’s post. It’s a little self-referential, but I want to talk about my creative process a little bit. Especially because coming up with topics for these night after night has required more than a little imagination.

There are a few ways I try to stay inspired. One of them is an idea I just heard in the Cleese book that I’ve also mentioned here before, but I’ll share it again: constraints. I start drafting these a few hours before midnight, knowing that I want to have everything published, a title, an image, a little blurb on Post., and the post itself, before the clock strikes twelve. Those constraints do a couple of things for me. First, it forces me to focus on a single thought which I can elaborate on and, hopefully, not get too distracted from. Second, it provides a deadline so I don’t end up endlessly editing these instead of actually publishing them. Lastly, that urgency is also a motivating factor for me to get out of my own way. The pressure created by setting both a time and a place for these means that I don’t have too much time to second-guess the direction I’m heading in, while still being able to try and land the plane.

There was a Matthew Barney exhibit at the SFMOMA shortly after we moved to San Francisco where he was creating works by physically binding himself in some way. A part of it was a drawing on one of the walls of the center stairway which he created by harnessing himself from the ceiling and only making marks as he swung close enough to make contact with the section of wall he was drawing on. That piece has stayed with me for a number of reasons, not least of which is that no matter what the original vision was, the marks are the marks, and you can’t really change them once they’re committed. That’s something I’m trying to get better at accepting here. And another reason I want to keep doing these. 

I’ve always had a hard time with the idea that done is better than perfect. But having these constraints every evening forces me to do the best I can, and then let it out into the world. Could these be better? In my opinion, yes. But if I held them until I thought they were really perfected and ready for public consumption, honestly, there’d probably be very, very few of these for you to read. (It’s up to you to decide whether that’s a positive or negative, though.) Thankfully, as Biz Stone is fond of saying, creativity is a renewable resource.

See you tomorrow?