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Wellness Wednesday for October 26, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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People are saying good things about Alan Moore's storytelling course on BBC Maestro, and one idea they quoted from it really triggered me in a good way.

To paraphrase, thinking about creating is much more pleasant than creating the same thing, and it's a very dangerous trap. Your story, song, statue or game is perfect in your mind's eye, and daydreaming about how groundbreaking it will be when you finally get down to making it, salivating over that frankly genius part of it you came up with will overpower your will to actually make anything if you don't fight it.

Take one of your ideas, a small, low-stakes one, and make it real.

It's interesting because I've never really had this problem. Every single time I get an idea, I want to make it immediately and to see it in the world even if the task is ridiculously big and completely outside the scope of my capabilities. While it's probably true that many people like the idea of creating but not the actual process of creation itself (and that's understandable since making anything worthwhile is often quite frustrating), I will say that it often gets easier with experience and there's a strange satisfaction to be found in attempting to restlessly optimise every aspect of your creation.

Realistically, I'd also say that enjoying the process is a necessity of being a creator especially considering the amount of grinding and effort and lack of expected payoff that inevitably comes with the territory - I genuinely think it would be an absolutely miserable task without it. Perhaps not everyone can get to a point where they can enjoy it, and that's fine, but it does mean that one might be limited to creating smaller-scale projects or that other endeavours might simply be better suited to their temperament.

I suspect this distaste comes from seeing many immaculate, unassailable ideas rapidly fracture into a thousand pieces on first contact with reality.

This is a very big reason why you'd want to get your ideas down as fast as possible, yeah. Your mental model of what something could be like is a few levels disconnected from how it'll actually come off in real life, and in my experience it's all too common to have an idea which conceptually seems great inside your head (many of which are of the "why hasn't anyone done this before?" variety) but turns out to be terrible. It's a good idea not to get too attached to ideas before you test out if they actually work or not.