#17/120 - The boundary of this newsletter - the past, now and the future
If you are interested in the direction this newsletter will take, this essay is for you.
Hi, I am Summerbud. If you are interested in the direction this newsletter will take, this essay is for you.
You can find the questionnaire at the end of the newsletter. It would be extremely helpful if you could take the time to share your voice, so I can learn more about the topics you’re interested in reading.
Around the end of every year, when the holiday season is coming, I will pick a quiet night, which everything goes dark and darker, quieter and quieter, I will begin to read all the stuff I have written for this year. Piece by piece, with a dim light, and maybe a cup of tea, straight until midnight.
The goal is to identify the boundary of my writing, the frontier of it. It’s like standing in front of a cliff, and looking forward, to see as far as I can.
At the same time, I will also read the appreciation I receive this year, to see and feel that my work is needed somewhere by some people.
Those Appreciations
In the first essay of Connecting Dots, I wrote about “Appreciation is Scarce” and talked about a tool called Appreciation Battery. And here are mine for this year.
Keep going
Around the middle of this year, I began worrying about whether my writing delivers value to others, and one night, my partner shared a message coming from her friend, saying that my writing is valuable, and she encouraged me to keep writing more pieces. That became the great inspiration and motivation for my essay “What Changes When You Promise to Write for 10 Years.”
My partner
My partner always reads the first draft of every essay, and if she can’t make it, she will read them when they land in her inbox. I will always have at least one reader, and I feel grateful about it.
How I work with AI
With my latest essay, “Why the First Draft Must Be Yours - How I work with AI,” I received multiple messages from people saying they benefit a lot from my methodology. One of my friends said that her brother feels excited to try out the method after reading the essay. And one of my friends, whom we have not talked to for quite a long time, suddenly messaged me that she was inspired by the essay.
Those Boundaries
Drawing a boundary is not about knowing the limitation; it’s about exploration, it’s about seeing the unknown.
Among all the essays I wrote in the previous year, these are the methodologies and mindsets I used constantly.
Think before you write
This is the foundation of this newsletter, and I create many structures to force me to think before I write. But even with these tools, there’s still a tendency that I need to fight back.
You can check my writing structure in these essays.
#12/120 - What Changes When You Promise to Write for 10 Years
#16/120 - Why the First Draft Must Be Yours - How I work with AI
First Draft must be yours, and Critique over generation.
These mindsets are used when working with AI. The idea is that we need to protect our cognitive ability as much as possible when adopting AI in our workflow. It’s a double-edged sword, and we need to make sure our potential is not spoiled, our thinking is not replaced.
You can find how I work with AI in this essay.
Use the story of a historical figure as the foundation of storytelling.
Many of my essays use this technique, and I even deeply dive into this realm to test what if I start from their story to convey a concept. This is how I did in #6/120 - Seeing the engineered system of life. The whole essay basically starts from the story of Charlie Chaplin and then expands to the idea I want to emphasize.
But later on, I feel limited by this kind of format. Their story is nice, but it feels less connected to me, and like a filler that didn’t completely serve the goal. Eventually, I move on to a lighter version of this aspect, use those stories, but use them wisely.
Those Unknown Frontiers
From this point, all the stuff is unknown and hidden to be explored.
Show not Tell
Recently, I found out that I am increasingly using descriptive words in my essays.
For example, to describe a man who is angry, we can simply say here comes an “angry” man. But what if we describe him as “Clenching fists, tight lips, sweating, eyes look directly straight to the person, his wrinkles deepens a level from it. You can feel the tension in the air”. I didn’t talk a word about anger, but you can clearly understand that something is going to happen, and the man is in a bad mood.
I used a lot of this kind of technique in my novel writing.
And at some point, I try to embed them into my essay writing, but it turns out to be problematic. I can’t find the balance between scenery description and logical deduction flow.
If I describe too much, the whole reading flow will be broken, unlike a novel, an essay demands more thought on how to balance these two forces, you want to be straight to the point, but at the same time you want to provide this kind of feeling and show the reader what is the scene looks and feels like, so they can better immersed in the world you are bringing to them.
I plan to explore more around this aspect, especially,
How to balance the show and the tell, without breaking the flow of the essay
There are many ways to show, but how do I choose one for the current essay? What is the methodology to decide this, or I will just go with the flow, like what I did on novel writing?
An essay can contain two to three sections of this kind of show. How should I determine when and where to use them?
Time-based expansion
In the previous year of writing, my routine was a 45-minute clock 7 days a week, and it’s quite enough for my early essay, since there are fewer rewrites and discussions with AI. But after I expanded the workflow and the ideation with AI, I began to feel that I couldn’t catch up with this schedule, and it has been a great pressure point for me recently.
Another reason why I am hesitant to expand the time scale of my work is due to my goal: “Write as long as possible” instead of “Write as fast as possible” or “Write as efficiently as possible”. So from the get-go I know I can not stretch myself too much. First, I need to practice the cadence and get used to it, then we are talking about expansion. And in the end, writing is like creating an art, where time is not the only determining factor of whether an art is good or bad.
And now it indeed feels like a good time to expand. My workflow is expanding, my daily work allows me to do this kind of additional work, at the same time, my ambition is expanding too, I want to touch more advanced topics on my way forward. So in the upcoming year, I will add an additional three clocks per week.
In general, I highly recommend this kind of progression. You first pour a portion of your leisure time into the work, which you won’t feel pressure from. Try to be extremely focused in that given period of time, squeeze the productivity to the max scale, then focus on your other stuff and never look back at this task until the next day. Observe the outcome, then adjust your workflow based on it. And only expand the time scale when you feel absolutely needed.
Rhyme
This is the most mysterious part of English writing for me right now. When I write in Chinese, I can intuitively understand how people read the given line, in what tone if they speak it out. I can subconsciously create a line that is easy to read and feels good when you say it. That is the power of Rhyme, and if people are in rhyme, they are more open to accepting the idea. That is why at the starting point of our education, we use lots of songs to help children remember concrete stuff.
But rhyme is very hard to build when it comes to writing, especially if you are not using your native language to write.
Although I currently use English more than Chinese in my daily life (My note-taking, my daily work, and this essay are all using English as the core language), I still don’t expect this kind of skill can come in line naturally; I need to read more English pieces, especially poetry. (In our Chinese training, we read and memorize lots of poets) to empower this aspect of writing.
What I am interested in
Stay in a long game
This will always be the foundation of this essay. Every entry will link back to this core value. “Stay in a long game”.
But next year, I will begin to think about the opposite of this value, meaning “When should I give up?” The reason is not that we want to give up, but we need to understand both ends to really make a good decision on the way. Ignoring the opposite is like removing the other side of the equation and pretending it’s not there.
For example, I should constantly ask myself, in what scenario I will give up this project. Although my plan is to write it for the next 10 years, there must be some risks that could stop me from finishing this journey. They should also be clearly thought through.
Fundamental Science
I am more into fundamental science recently, especially around theoretical physics like General Relativity, Quantum Theory, Quantum computing, and all the theories around black holes. I keep reading related materials and podcasts, and I find many interesting stories that can connect back to the core value of this newsletter, “Stay in a long game,” like the story of LIGO, showing how perseverance makes great work.
AI
Since I am directly working in this industry (Right now in the field of human digital presence cloning) and the profession I have right now (Programming) is by far the most vulnerable profession in the tide of AI.
I inevitably think a lot about AI, how it will change our life, and in what scale? Often we underestimate the effect of one technology, I would say AI is one of them. Now we can see massive layoffs on the software industry, and what if the same scale happening in much bigger scope of industries? Millions of people will lose their job due to the advancement of this technology.
Are we prepared for this kind of future? And how can we better ride the tide?
Closing
This year, we grew our subscribers from 17 to 37, which is a twofold growth, but at the same time, the most important metric for me, the “Open rate”, dropped from 80% to 60%. Since at the beginning most of my subscribers are in my close circle, they will read my essay no matter what topic I write, but later on, this essay attracts more people around the world, so I expect the open rate to move to a lower equilibrium level.
I will still focus on the open rate as usual. That is the single metric I am interested in; the subscriber count is just the cherry on top.
For 23 years before this journey, I wrote in the dark. No reader in mind. No one was waiting at the finish line. Even when a few people read my work, I knew they weren’t there for the quality.
But now I have you.
It’s the difference between night and day, and since then I take more responsibility for what I said and what I plan to learn. It all aligns to the core value of this newsletter, “Plan a long game, win a long reward.” I feel more motivated than ever.
Thanks for your presence. That means the world to me.
Po Chun
Thanks
Thanks Lucy for reading the draft of this essay.