Writing and talking about technology have been tough the last 2-3 years. I have regularly had thoughts and put them away when it doesn't feel like I have a clear perspective or an idea of what I want to say. There's been a disconnect between my habits and how I would feel about the outcome.

It felt something like burnout, where I have plenty of thoughts, but when the sentences get written out none of the threads feel worth pulling on. The feeling has been something akin to being in a spin cycle. I'm never exactly sure when the ground is going to stop shifting long enough to have a thought worth finishing.

It's been a weird situation because I still wanted to do lots of stuff, but the stuff that I wanted to do didn't feel particularly meaningful in the context of gestures at everything else. The disconnect wasn't between the stuff I wanted to do and wasn't doing, it was between the stuff I was doing didn't feel like it had the same professional rewards.

This is… completely different from my personal hobbies and projects which have been a complete mess, basically since I became a staff engineer and maybe my entire life. On the side project side I've stopped and started any number of different experiences. Game design (Subsweeper, RPS21), sketching, writing. Every project I've tried has fizzled out the same way. And I've tried… well I've tried everything. Small projects, big projects, breaking up work, not breaking up work, and nothing seems to make sense.

We live in a culture obsessed with finishing things. "Real artists ship", book counts, running prizes, competitions, 10x10 grids in board games. "Starting feels fast, finishing is fast". It's all based on this idea that it's important to set internal goals and then hit those goals in order to feel success. For some reason none of this helps, I can't get it to fit right. It's really hard to develop the right theory of mind.

Through it all, running and weightlifting have been centering practices for me, habits I can go back to to feel connected to myself even if other things are confusing or challenging. Initially I assumed that this was just because there was "no pressure" on these tasks. I came to the realization that I don't have a coherent theory of mind for what progression looks like. All of the recommendations are ostensibly good, but none of them actually explain how to develop skills over time. The top down theory of "make something that interests you". Or the 10,000 hours of good feedback theory. But wtf is good feedback?

None of these things offer a coherent theory for what skill progression actually looks like. This is different than in running or weight lifting which have very specific theories of progression.

A wombo combo of a podcast, a book, and a manifesto (about game jams in the form of a game jam?) have led me to the belief that I've been thinking about creative practice all wrong and why that might be.

Feedback

It is in fact, all about the feedback.

One of the weird things about having ADHD is having to recreate a lot of normal productivity stuff from first principles. Why is it that some people are good at certain skills. Why are non neuro-divergent people so much better at prioritization, for example? What's interesting about this isn't the root cause (executive dysfunction), it's the fact that they don't have to ask questions like "which thing is more important to me?" or "what next step should I take here?" they sort of intuitively know (or at least make an intuitive leap).

In weightlifting there's this thing call mind muscle connection. It's the idea that as you're doing a lift you can concentrate and feel the muscle doing the work, to make sure that you are engaging and using the right form. It's something I've noticed in running as well. When I'm running just right I don't feel like I'm hitting the pavement so much as my feet are pulling me along the ground. It's the physical equivalent of the tumblers of a lock sliding into place, cthunk cthunk cthunk. It just feels right.

There's a book I've been reading recently that explains this. The Extended Mind talks about how thinking about the brain as the "only place where thinking happens" is a limiting belief that prevents us from developing more coherent and complex ways of thinking. The Extended Mind calls it "brain bound" thinking. It's the idea that in order to accomplish something you have to set a goal, a theoretical idea first. And the purpose is to strive towards that idea. But The Extended Mind makes clear that our brains are responsive to all sorts of inputs that we take for granted, both within our bodies and externally. Part of the reason running and lifting feel so fun beyond the progression is this mind body connection. While I'm doing those activities I can glean all sorts of gratification from feedback I'm getting.

In this world, focusing on projects and outcomes ("side project" or otherwise) is a "brain bound" way of seeing the world. Outcomes are a complex skill that it takes time to develop, to understand what you're doing and whether or not you're aiming your way to it successfully. It's led me to this belief that feedback has multiple types of registers and abstractions. What one person calls "feedback" may actually be a higher order abstraction for a bunch of smaller pieces of feedback they're not even recognizing.

When a more experienced artist says something like "make smaller projects" this sounds good in theory. If you do smaller things you will learn more more quickly. But if you're a beginner, you don't know what scope even looks like, how could you? Something that seems obviously small to a beginner might be wildly complex. How are you supposed to pick the right project? The aforementioned "finishing" also gives you the chance to get feedback. Perhaps if you're "learning in public" you can get lots of commentary from all sorts of people online, that would be great.

But there's no guarantee that what you call done is the sort of thing that other people will want to engage with. Project size and project doneness matter on a social, political, and business level. Absolutely. What How Big Things Get Done makes clear is that those things matter hugely at a societal level. I just don't think they matter as much at a personal one. It's possible to make tons of progression running without ever completing a formal marathon. And whether you can bump out a blog post a day but never have enough organization to put things into a book, versus never being able to complete a blog post but you can craft a beautiful story in 5 years seems more like a story about the personal relationship between you and the work than it does anything to do about the value of the work.

What's the difference between getting some feedback on a small game from an aquaitance versus getting it from strangers online? What does the level of "doneness" matter? Ernest Hemingway was famous for saying a good day of writing is one sentence well written, how does that fit into the mental model of small projects?

Does a conversation with a good friend about how to handle a certain game mechanic count less because it's not public? Nobody is going to buy your game manifesto makes the really compelling point that when and how you decide something is done has more to do with public recognition than it does with learning or personal satisfaction. "Putting stuff out there" is a single potential form of feedback in a world replete with them. The challenge with feedback is that it's like water, you have to develop the skills to actually understand it. You have to practice paying attention.

And then the Bogost conversation with Post Game really hit it home. The delight in the pleasures of being in the physical world and the way that artists despise AI because it removes one of the joys of making art, the physical sensation of the process. This struck a chord with The Extended Mind's conception of thinking. That thought occurs outside of the brain as well as in it. The brain responds to the body's stimuli.

When it comes to art, coding, creativity, or projects, I think what's limiting us in our speech is how we talk about these things purely as intellectual pursuits. We set goals and accomplish them. It's a thoroughly top down mindset. But, I think what defines mastery (the people who thoroughly excel at hitting goals) is the ability to gain an immense amount of feedback from any situation. And that feedback listening skill can't be gained through goal setting, it has to be gained through the experience of doing and noticing. And higher order feedback like "good" or "bad", "intentional" or "unintentional" are in and of themselves the accumulation of all of those points of feedback.

“Doodling” “Messing around” and play aren’t just ways to let off steam (obviously) or ways to “test out” ideas, though they do both of those things. Play is a way for us to orient ourselves around feedback mechanisms of a particular medium, idea, or attempt, to develop an If This Then That understanding, connecting the ideas in our heads to the stuff that happens in the physical world. As we get better and better at any practice, those individual moments get chunked away into higher order ideas like “good” and “bad” or directions we might take it, and those get connected to goals or opportunities we might want to take on. They don’t disappear they’re just unconscious. One of the reasons it’s so much easier to sit back on these practices with some things is how personal they are. Stuff that’s social is just harder to disconnect from those bigger goals, and those bigger goals cloud the feedback we receive doing the thing.

Burnout

All of this led me to another conclusion. One about burn out (which I'm sure lots of folk in tech have been feeling lately). In the popular imagination, burn out is this purely mental type of exhaustion that results because our pursuits are taking us nowhere even for all of our effort, or because we are overworked (the wrong type of work). But I'd like to suggest a slight tweak, burnout is a "yips" for knowledge-work. Burn out happens when our historical forms of small, innate feedback no longer line up with the intellectual feedback we are used to getting. When the day to day actions that have provided us with meaning either don't signal the same rewards they used to, or when they don't translate into larger rewards (project success, recognition). AI engineering presents this sort of challenge in twofold.

Good engineering no longer translates into recognition, and AI engineering requires a different set of innate feedback skills (to prompt, review, and cycle) that we are unused to. Changing these sets of reward mechanisms simultaneously leads to that disconnect, the feeling of floating in space, of uncertainty.

It's why the admonition to "set better goals" doesn't work here. It's starting with a top down sort of thinking that is built on the assumption of experience that either might not exist or might need to be rebuilt. Working upward from experience rather than downward from ideal is key, I think.

Where To Go

Starting Fresh

This leads me to believe that people who are really good at putting big picture goals aside and just jumping from moment to moment will tend to excel at picking up new things. They’re not carrying the baggage of the meaning of it all or why they want to do things. I also think it means project size just doesn’t matter all that much. Make whatever size of project you want, as long as you spend more time doing the thing than you do managing yourself doing the thing. And truly, the goal is to just vibe. Pay more attention to how you feel about any given action and response than how you feel about an outcome. The goal isn’t to feel good, persay, it’s to build up a better sense memory of what it’s like to do things. Negative responses are really good from this perspective! They give you data for what’s going on.

Restarting

I do think this also suggests why “restarting” is so much harder. If you have a strong emotional attachment to the way things were you’re not just fighting to build new skills, you’re grappling with old skills that don’t connect to the outcomes you’re used to. (I think this is also part of why skill building creative practices is so hard. Moving laterally means trying things out without the social affirmation you’re used to) Simply telling ourselves not to focus on the big picture stuff is unreasonable. Moving laterally requires a couple of different things. One, recognizing that we still find personal value in the “old way” of doing things, even if there’s no social/professional value. Two, giving ourselves permission to experiment and explore new ways of doing it and not expecting the old mappings to hold up. (This isn’t something we can just tell ourselves either) Luckily it’s a fairly similar process. Doing the thing and noting our responses, but noting both emotions, the old ones and the new ones, so we can understand our expectations and the new feedback we’re generating.

Productive Selfishness

This isn’t to say that only “emotion first” creative practice works. More that it’s a crucial skill in a balance that doesn’t get talked about all that much.

I talk about this in Leadership Is Mostly About Managing Your Emotions and Other People's Emotions, and the basic thesis is that in order to be good at creative work, it requires a pretty solid personal emotional connection to the work. Not just because liking something makes you want to be better at it, but that liking something makes you more able to process the information flying at you. If everything seems miserable how can you differentiate from stuff that’s slightly miserable versus totally miserable. That doesn’t sound frustrating, it sounds incredibly hard. If you don’t like the signals coming your way you can’t really parse between positives and negatives.

This also isn’t to say that people who are good at creative practices have achieved some sort of internal nirvana. Lots of us, for some reason or another, have minds that are wired for certain types of tasks and skills, where the resonance of feedback connects with us more readily. That just means that path to learning less resonant skills probably takes a little bit more effort. And the better we’re able to process our emotions the better we’re able to derive feedback from the creative practices we engage in.

When you start running, the point is to start running. The "mental connection" which sounds a little silly isn't just about "getting in touch", it's building up a vocabulary of feedback about what it means to try things out and see what happens as a result. The hard part, especially for people with lots of experience in other areas of their life, is being ok with that newness (or new newness). With the reality that starting again means admitting to not knowing. But it also the opportunity to re-establish and appreciation for those small skills and cycles that we thoroughly chunked away in our brain back to the forefront. The joy of building new skills is the joy of delighting in the experience of doing the thing. And that is its own blessing.