Retrospective on writing

I started to edit my old posts. I was surprised to find how badly they were written.

My writing started to change noticeably about ten years ago.

In 2012 I bought a text editor called iA Writer. It has standard grammar check but it is also capable of catching cliches, excessive use of adjectives and adverbs, fillers.

Books that had big influence in my writing in decades since 2000s:

- Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, 

- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, 

- Stephen King's The Shining,

- Colm Toibin's The Heather Blazing and House of Names. 

Reading bad books, and crime novels helped too.

My vocabulary is still weak (it will never reach to the level of an English born), but in modern English lean prose is more important and I might probably get by.  

Ephemeral exhibition

There is an underground passage near the train station where we live. It bypasses a major highway above. 

Cool in hot days, flooded in torrential rains, it witnesses its fair share of mundane events. 

Early in the morning, people are rushing to the train station, or slow moving noisy herd of girls moving in the opposite direction, going to their school, a girls’ college nearby. 

Then in the evening tired office workers, beaten by a day’s work are returning home. Every day is the same. Life is as dull as it gets under the tunnel.

With its grey walls and flickering neon lights, the tunnel is always there, unassuming, never refusing to let you go in one direction or the other, a small wormhole connecting two little universes, one end is for leaving, the other one is for coming.

This endless looking boredom is sometimes broken by an influx of graffiti. 

You can tell if graffiti are made by a herd of teenagers or a solitary artist. 

Teens leave the walls with battered mixture, an illegible cacophony of teenage outrage. Their work is similar. They attempt to show off their signature, made up in block 3d letters, cryptic words that do not mean anything, as elusive as the source of their frustration.  

The stationmaster who is responsible to look after the train station, makes occasional announcements from fixed megaphones erected around the platform. He accepts customer enquiries, warns girls not to block stairways, asks people to wear their masks, and he ensures people to know that the tunnel is his territory.

There is an ongoing arms race between graffiti artists and the stationmaster. When the ratio of graffiti and greyness reach to a certain level, he washes the walls with grey paint and graffiti disappears overnight. 

Yet something unusual breaks this tedious flow. An unknown artist we would never see or know, emerge out of darkness and start to create art. 

Unlike teenagers’ mess, the solitary artist’s artworks are distinctive, they have style and stories, they make you wonder. A few days apart, a new work is added. You can tell it is from the same artist. People using the tunnel witness a living exhibition, wondering what would be added today. This is art.  

Passers like me nervously await the day these works disappear. But unlike an exhibition in an art gallery, there is no definitive day to end it. This makes the art brutally thrilling, you need to understand the message while it lasts, until the day the stationmaster appears with his bucket full of grey paint.  

Cracking Innovation

Merriam Webster dictionary defines innovation as;

1. a new idea, device, or method.
2. the act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods.

In business everybody talks about how innovation is crucial for organisations to grow. 

Despite many books were published, lectures were held about it, innovation remains holy grail of businesses around the world. It is there somewhere, but at the same time it is unreachable. 

Organisations launch innovation programs, but sustaining those is challenging for smaller businesses.

There are two ways to target innovation:

1. Focus on the innovation as an “idea”.
2. Focus on the innovation as a “method”.

Elon Musk’s idea of self landing rockets is not new, it had been in humanity’s mind since Jules Verne’s fantasy of reaching the moon. 

Jules Verne’s novel “From the Earth to the Moon” was published in 1865. 104 years later humanity landed on the moon in 1969. 

Jules Verne's was a true innovator in the “idea” sense. He was the first person to imagine a rocket can be used to transport humans to celestial objects. But this does not make Elon Musk a lesser innovator. 

What makes Elon Musk an innovator is his dare, his courage and persistence to solve a difficult problem and his commitment to “failure” as his best tool. 

Since June 2010, rockets from the Falcon 9 family have been launched 129 times, with 127 full mission successes, one partial failure and one total loss of the spacecraft.

There are 100s of new things that were learned during failures, and many smaller scale innovations improved reliability of Falcon family of rockets. 

We can argue therefore Elon Musk had been an innovator in the “method” sense. His team were encouraged to keep innovating on methods to solve difficult problems based on constant stream of failures.  

Focusing on methods can be a fertile ground to drive idea innovations. Which strategy should businesses favour for increased likelihood of success?

Idea innovators are rare breed. It is always the hardest to come up with a weird idea. 

But if we have a worthy problem, we could start with that. We could allow it to drive method innovations, as we dare and embrace failures as our best tool. We relentlessly try until we succeed.

For example, false alerts, spam and clutter are common problems in alarm and notification systems. They can cause poor user experience, frustration, and sometimes catastrophes (think how many accidents were needed to improve an airplane’s dashboard). We could use these problems as launching pads, and include them in our innovation process. 

Innovation programs must be engraved to organisation’s culture. They need to be seen as integral part of the lifecycle, not exceptions. They must be managed, repeated in regular cycles with inclusion of failure as a first class citizen within the process. Each failure needs to be documented and measured forming a repository of inspiration for new ideas. That could work.

Failure and Success

 Failure is your best tool to help you navigate through solving interesting problems. They are opportunities that will force you think differently. Every failure is like a springboard to bounce on and leap across obstacles. 

Success on the other hand is not interesting. If you foresee  something, and it happens as you predicted, it becomes instantly boring, there is nothing new you can learn from it. It is the path of least resistance.

Cleanup

 I’ve got to cleanup bookmarks. 

I can’t say I am a tidy person. I have episodes of sporadic cleanup, followed by long periods of “orderly chaos” (which may sound an oxymoron but it is not if you read Chaos book by James Gleick).

Orderliness helps me to plan, that is necessary to allocate slots of time to deal with chaos. I embrace chaotic episodes as time pockets when I can utilise creative energy. Inevitably chaos produces entropy (ie. garbage), which in turn requires cleanup for further planning.  

The balance between tidiness and chaos determines how effective you would be.