I think sometimes imposter syndroming is intellectually safer than allowing yourself to feel any sort of confidence.

Or I guess I should say feels intellectually safer. Anyway, sometimes it feels safer not to believe in yourself than to shoot as high as you think you could and face the real possibility of failure.

This might be a really obvious thought, but it just occurred to me that the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction is that in fiction, you construct a world and a story, and your job is to create the illusion that there is stuff going on outside the boundaries of what you’re showing, or that the world is somewhat messier than the way you’ve depicted it.

When you write nonfiction, you do the opposite. The real world is an inherently messy place, and your job as the writer becomes trying to construct this illusion of order through what you choose to include (or not), how you choose to present things, and how you order or juxtapose different events and/or ideas.

I just had the striking realization that my tendency to have one foot in and one foot out of multiple disciplines might have something to do with my tendency to want to write about them.

Being an essayist is all about having an interesting perspective, and being scattered is definitely a way to do that. How good of a way to do that is it? I don’t know, but I’ve yet to run out of ideas.

Painters have this concept of the “ugly stage” of a piece, where a bunch of elements are starting to be there but everything lacks detail and is sketchy and messy and it doesn’t quite look like the painting it’s going to be just yet.

I think that idea applies to a lot more things than just paintings.

I feel like I’ve been getting a lot of questions about public speaking recently.

Someone asked me, about two weeks ago, whether I have formal training in public speaking. The answer to that question is no; honestly, I’m not sure what that even means or would entail.

Anyway, here’s my public speaking “advice”:

1. Get good at writing – being able to clearly articulate your ideas in text helps with being able to express yourself in general.
2. I have a policy of not turning down opportunities to talk in front of people unless I have to. You get good at doing it by doing it more. The more terrifying the opportunity, the better, and the more variety in the experiences, the better. Speaking in front of 3 people and speaking in front of 700 people can be very different types of scary when it matters. I’ve done both.
3. You kinda have to believe in the moment that what you are saying is actually worth listening to and that people should care. Another term for this is “confidence”. I think this is the actual hard part, but it’s also the most valuable.

Tl;dr convince yourself that your ideas are important enough that you should be convincing other people to listen. I guess there is a certain level of arrogance involved in this… lol.