stamp 202605022014
Incubation looks like impulsivity, but it isn’t.
Sometimes I can seem impulsive, but it’s not always impulsivity. Sometimes it’s incubation.
When there is a project under the lid, slowly reaching towards its boiling point. And when it reaches its critical mass, the decision seem to be impulsive. But it was brewing for a while.
Related
- This week on May 1st, 2026 (the first day of my birth month - I’ll turn 41), I woke up in a good mood and decided to enlist to get my driver’s licence. I sent a chat message to my husband to get his consent to spend a bunch of money (driver’s licence courses in Hungary are pretty expensive), and he was like… woah, why, how, sure but why. But it wasn’t without basis. We had a savings pocket for it, I chose this driver’s school last year, I’m thinking about it for years, and we had some care troubles brewing in the family lately. But it’s true that I didn’t mention my thoughts about getting a driver’s licence since a while. I wasn’t ready in the last 20+ years. One morning I just felt ready.
- ref-cameron-julia in ref-cameron-the-artist-s-way uses the analogy of a serpentine road going up on a hill. You go round and round, and you often feel like you saw this view countless times. It feels like you are stuck, running in circles. But actually you are slowly hiking upwards, and you see the same landscape from slightly different angles, as you return to them time to time.
- I heard it in a YT video once the advice to sneakily feed your future hyperfixations with useful material. When you feel like you’d like to escape your current pressure project, when you’d like to doomscroll, try to scroll for materials for a project that doesn’t have a momentum yet.
- Stephen King wrote I think in the foreword of The Dark Tower that he often has a second book project to run to when he wants to escape his main work. The first book of The Dark Tower series was such an escape route for him, and he worked on it for a decade or so.
- Having countless unfinished project can be an insecurity tho. 1c3a1-having-countless-unfinished-projects-can-be-an-insecurity-but-also-a-positive-quirk