Tag: adversity

Quotes on the Universal Struggle to Write

A few quotes on, as Robert D. Richardson put it, “the daily struggle for adequate expression”.

“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.”

William Goldman

“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things that people do.”

William Zinsser

“The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

One Blink at a Time

Bauby and Claude Mendibil, a freelance book editor.

One day in the winter of 1995 Jean-Dominique Bauby, a journalist and editor of Elle magazine, suffered a cerebrovascular seizure. When he awoke in hospital twenty days later his mind was intact yet he was paralysed from head to toe save only his left eyelid. Doctors diagnosed him with locked-in syndrome but they found a way for him to communicate by reading from a French language frequency-ordered alphabet until Bauby blinked on the letter he wanted. A word could sometimes take two minutes to transcribe.

At some point Bauby decided to write a book the only way he could, one blink at a time. It took him on average 200,000 blinks to write The Diving Bell and the Butterfly which, in the English translation, amounted to 143 pages. It’s astounding to imagine how much collective effort that took, more so on Bauby’s part.

It would be too simplistic to say that if a paralysed man can write a book with one eye why can’t we write a book (or anything) with our two working hands? With all due respect Bauby was an editor on one of the most popular magazines in France so I think it’s unlikely he doubted that his book would be published though he may have doubted whether he could finish it. If Bauby never pursued a career in journalism yet could still write well I think it’s likely publishers would have saw a market for his memoir. How many quadriplegics write memoirs with one eye?

If Bauby can write a book in the very worst of circumstances I’m sure we can do it too in less than ideal but more than acceptable conditions.

Out of Work? These Mental Models Might Help

Picture a black box with two open ends. A CV goes in one end and out the other, after some time, comes a rejection or an interview invite. If it’s a rejection you have no clue why it was rejected because the box doesn’t supply feedback so you assume, since this is probably your twentieth rejection in a row, that you’re unemployable and maybe you should just give up if only you weren’t slowly going broke. The box, if you hadn’t already guessed, is the employment system.

Thanks to a once in a century pandemic many businesses worldwide have gone bust and unemployment has soared as a natural, although distressing, consequence. In one chapter of Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann’s book Super Thinking they write about natural selection and how the model applies to society:

“Beyond biological evolution, natural selection also drives societal evolution, the process by which society changes over time. In any part of society, you can trace the path of how ideas, practices, and products have adapted to ever-changing tastes, norms, and technology.

You will live through many more societal shifts: economic cycles, waves of innovation, evolving norms and standards. With more people than ever and everyone more connected through the internet and globalization, these shifts are happening faster than in the past. You must adapt to these changing environmental pressures to be successful.”

(Weinberg, Gabriel; McCann, Lauren. Super Thinking (p. 100). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.)

Right now we are living through one hell of a societal shift. It can seem inappropriate to talk about natural selection during a pandemic as the phrase is often synonymous with survival of the fittest but, in its intended context, what the model emphasises is that we always need to adapt to the circumstances we find ourselves in if we wish to survive and thrive. How we actually go about doing that is the tricky part because even in normal times adapting to a changing economy is not as simple or easy as it seems.

Another mental model that can shed some light inside the black box that is the employment system is first principles thinking. With first principles we question and deconstruct our assumptions until we are left with irreducible truths or facts about, in this case, earning a living in a post-pandemic world. If, for example, we question the assumption that employers should give specific feedback to us as a courtesy otherwise we remain trapped in the purgatory of unemployment we realise that they can’t. There’s just too many people applying for jobs for employers to offer specific feedback.

With assumptions like that questioned and disproven we can eventually resume our job hunt from a better, and hopefully more successful, starting point.

Sagacious Saunders

Photo by Chloe Aftel, courtesy of George Saunders.

“There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.”

George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

I love what Saunders doesn’t do in this quote. He doesn’t peddle that positivity bullshit we find in the self-help market where we can triumph over our inertia and unhealthy habits if we just have the will to do so. Self-help is hard and our failures to help ourselves, from a certain perspective, are funny. It’s not just that we don’t have complete command of ourselves most or even all the time but also that the world doesn’t conform to our desires just because we have them so we’re bound to meet many obstacles.

Still, nothing wrong with a little adversity now and then.