Serendipity
First, explain what it is, then make it look nice.
Picasso once said, Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. In other words, one must be doing it — putting itself into the zone — to finally find the solution.
This is evident in Picasso’s museum in Málaga, Claude Monet’s house and garden in Giverny, or Van Gogh’s museum in Amsterdam, where you can see these master’s art in a chronological order, starting from the beginning of their careers.
It’s been a while since I’ve published anything on my blog, but this doesn’t mean I’m not writing. On the contrary, I’ve been incessantly working on my book. But that, on the other hand, doesn’t imply that I’ve made a lot of progress. In reality, it was only today, after starting the third draft, that I was finally happy with the book format.
In addition to Picasso’s mantra, what helped me find my way was a strategy I use when I can’t figure out a solution. What frequently helps is to first explain what it is, then make it look nice. Ironically, that doesn’t seem like it applies to understanding art. Anyway, when I restarted the book for the third time, I did it from the middle, explaining what the Containers of Information are. It was then that I gradually began noticing that parts of it connected to many things I had already written in the two previous drafts, which I started repurposing.
I'm often surprised by how simplifying things can end up being a daunting task.
Several months ago, I got stuck trying to code a complicated set of rules to try to automate the process of building my newsletter, while also making it more intuitive for readers to understand. That turned out to be a huge task because I’m not a developer, and I went back to the laborious manual process.
However, for some unknown reason, my brain refuses to let go of some projects and continues to secretly work on them. After a few days, years, or hours, when I’m lucky, these bursts of insight begin to emerge in no particular order or interval. For example, In June, I was here doing something completely unrelated, and my brain asked me this:
🧠 “—Why don’t you just send an email for each article you post?”
It was indeed a good idea. It’s not only much easier technically speaking, but Substack, the platform I was already using, had that feature. So, it was just a matter of copying the post from my blog and pasting it on Substack. In hindsight, I don’t even remember why I decided to send a monthly compilation of posts.
Of course, the new plan came with its own set of problems. Because that made things so much easier, at some point I decided to post the articles across more platforms, which led me back to a time-consuming task. Not to mention that I’m unsure if it’s worth the effort.
Little did I know, my brain had been secretly plotting to automate the process I gave up many months ago, and today it came up with another brilliant insight:
🧠 “—Compared to what you attempted to do in the past, I’m pretty sure it is much easier to create an automation on your blog platform to send a single article instead of that compilation.”
That’s a great idea, I thought. And here we are. This is a test article to make sure posts like this get sent automatically. If everything goes as planned, I will be able to centralize all the processes of posting and sending the newsletter in a single place. And it will all be done on its own. Finally!
Update: It worked!
It is amazing that, while trying to simplify a situation, we often end up making things even more complicated. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, sometimes it’s just a matter of turning things around a little to see how simple a solution can be.
When I asked Voicenotes to describe the picture shown in today’s video, I wasn’t expecting so many details.
As you can see below, it got very few things wrong. For example, the “I❤️🐘🏠” (I love Evernote Home) was hilariously converted to “I ❤️ 🦛”. As for the chemical structure, it is indeed caffeine, but the sticker is on my tumbler, not the laptop.
As a side note, that is a goodbye photo. On that day, I was told that the Starbucks would be closing for a period of 18 months. Like what happened when I lived in Boston, it took me a few weeks to find the best Starbucks in Porto to take breaks from working at my office.
This one had a fairly evenly split number of local and international customers. It was never full of tourists, and, at the same time, that peaceful feeling of listening to people speak so many different languages was still present. Then there were the enjoyable conversations with many baristas who started talking to me because of the sticker with a caffeine molecule on my tumbler. One even asked me if I was a chemistry professor 😄
I’ll now have to go on a new quest to find another similar fun place. Maybe it’s the Universe’s way of reminding me that change can bring unexpected positive outcomes.
Have a lovely week, Vlad.
Without experiencing the unknown variables, it’s impossible to organize efficiently
The best way to organize things, whether they’re physical or digital, is to accept the mess for a while. That’s why my strategy for organizing things is to always start with a messy environment, a blank canvas to play with. However there’s a catch: I have to pay close attention to what I’m constantly searching for and using.
It is only after rearranging things again and again and learning my necessities that I am finally ready to begin building the system that will meet my needs. But, there is no doubt in my mind that that will not be the final version. The world around us constantly changes, and we must adapt to keep up.
The tricky part is figuring out the exact moment when the messy stage has to give way to some order. I like to use a concept I borrowed from economics: Transactions Costs. In other words, if the mess is making me less and less productive, it’s time to pause and organize by choosing the best workflow I’ve come up with so far.
If you haven’t already, I encourage you to watch the video below. It’s about an Evernote notebook being built from empty to fully functional. It started out messy, and I added tags, links, etc. as I learned what I was constantly looking for and using.
And like I said before, it’s a strategy that works in both the digital and physical worlds. Last week, I finally organized my workbench inspired by the way I moved objects around when I was working on the Apple IIe restoration project. I’m pretty happy with the final result, but I already had new ideas for it.
The messy approach is also a way to foster creativity. There are many good books about this subject. There’s one literally titled Messy, but The Click Moment and Algorithms to Live By also discuss it.
Moving things around forces us to look at a problem from a different perspective, which helps us come up with unexpected solutions. But it is important to keep in mind that the project on which we are currently working is not our sole concern. In my case, the messy workspace was also a project in progress.
Take a look at the shelf and the soldering station; they are all made from scrap wood. By the way, I love that cool industrial vibe. You can even tell from the black circles on one of the shelf legs that the piece of wood was once below the table glass. It was a test; I was trying to figure out how many crossbars I needed to keep everything stable and I ended up replacing the studs with the thicker ones that are there now. As for the rest of the replaced pieces wood, they were used on other projects.
But there are more repurposed materials. The desk itself is made up of the top glass of an old kitchen table, supported by some cheap Ikea trestles. As for that Chromebook, it will not get Chrome OS updates anymore, but it is still good enough for Google searches and the Evernote web client.
So, the next time you are working on a complex project, don’t be too hard on yourself. Every so often, a little mess is what you need to unlock a solution that was always there, but you couldn’t see.
By the way, switching to another project also works, but that’s a story for another time.