stamp 202507121228
In a podcast interview, in conversation with Aidan Helfant, Bob Doto said it’s not really the interesting question how and why did you start writing this or that book. He starts many books - some gets finished, most doesn’t. He lets his ideas grow, and play out naturally which one will be the one to dominate his interest.
I ache and aim for this mindset. I always feel pressure to finish what I started and feel shame when I don’t. I wish it would be easier for me to let go of projects that just withered away and see them just as much the part of the process as the ones that got to bloom.
Related
- Calling my Zettelkasten a digital garden can represent a healthier productivity mindset. 1c-calling-it-a-digital-garden-is-a-good-reminder-that-one-can-keep-a-zettelkasten-just-for-the-joy-of-keeping-it
- Borrowing the word from my late mother-in-law, I call it the duzzasztó-mindset.
- Luhmann called his notecard collection a septic tank.
- My mother-in-law used to have a shaded, humid corner of her garden, where she just dropped random plants and cuttings, and she let them either die or survive. When she wanted something to plant, she just shopped from this nursery.
- I saw a similar idea in a gardening docu series, where a woman living in a tropical area had such a nursery all year round. It was actually an old bath tub, where she dropped plants and cuttings. She said, there’s no waste in this tub - the plants either become a part of her garden later, or become food for the other plants.
- Although revisiting this, it reminds me of the chilling line of the Three Body Problem book series, “you are surrounded by food”.
- In my teenage years, I hade a notebook titled “Ötletek, amikből akár regény is lehetne” - “Ideas that could become a novel someday”.
- I was wondering why it is so hard for me to identify as a humorous writer, when humor is an essential part of my style: 1.1c3 Vajon miért nem képzelem el magam humoros szerzőként annak ellenére, hogy a humor fontos része a személyiségemnek