What writing taught me about quality

The gift of slowing down

Learning that quality work takes time and effort has allowed me to appreciate the gift of slowing down.

My writing coach Rachel shared an observation that I cannot stop thinking about: “When you write with the hand it forces the mind to slow down.” I tried it the next morning writing my morning pages by hand and I did slow down, my mind can’t escape the slow hand. I noticed I have a choice when handwriting and a new idea comes to mind. I can either go to that idea and speed up my writing to finish whatever is on my mind, or I can slow down and finish what I have to say and trust that this other idea comes back. The hand moving on the paper allows me to stay on track. Writing helps me see connections between my chaotic thoughts, because I can revisit them. I also don’t race to the next thing all the time, but stick with something until it’s on paper.

I’ve also learned that engaging in something deeply can get me into a flow state. Quality and curiosity seem to go together.

Once I visited a somatic experiencing therapist and towards the end of the first session I asked “When can I expect to see the impact? How can we do it 10x faster?” She stopped her face from dropping, pulled herself back together and calmly explained to me that the whole idea of somatic experiencing is to slow down. For example, by slowing down and paying attention, I can notice pressure in my chest when I talk about something related to my grandfather that still makes me angry today.

Craft has helped me with this. With reading and writing, you have to slow down. The result can get better by slowing down–but slowing down doesn’t mean every part of the process is slow, it means recognizing that even the ideas and work that come fast are the result of living and thinking and processing over time.

Appreciating what’s possible

I learned first hand that putting in time to create something quality pays off. When I wrote about the origin story of our company I thought it would take 3–5 hours, but it ended up taking 25 hours. Now I look back at that piece and I’m proud. I know it took sweat to get done and that makes it worthwhile. Putting in time gives the thing a chance to be good.

This makes me appreciate quality work when I see it. When I read something that hits home, I sometimes stop and think, wow this must have been hard work! For example, I read Michael Nielsen’s (who has a Physics Ph.D. in “Quantum Information Theory”) piece on “Augmenting Long-term Memory,” where he describes his process to grok the AlphaGo paper. What surprised me is how often he read the paper over the course of a week. I’ve never read a single paper that often in my life.

Or in, “On Writing” by Stephen King, when he describes someone fleeing from some dark mass, on a boat, being pulled through a crack in the boat into the darkness of the lake until his last finger disappears and the ring falls off his finger and spins on the boat. I can hear the ring spinning in my mind. And it’s not by accident. Understanding the effort quality takes makes me appreciate the craft of writing when I recognize it.

Not just with writing, either. When I watched “Perfect days” by Wim Wenders, I noticed details like how slow the movie is and how it matches the main character’s way of cleaning toilets in Tokyo. I’m in awe, I feel a sense of depth and appreciation, which creates a feeling of connection to the creator of the movie and to humanity, because other people who experience the piece, may feel similar emotions.

It’s the awe I get when I see the Space X rocket returning to earth and being caught by the start ramp, or when I sit in a self-driving Waymo in San Francisco chuckling with my business partner David (half in awe and half in disbelief that this is happening). Or when I contemplate the fact that my writing coach sits in her apartment thousands of km away from Berlin and she’ll read this and comment back on it and I will make something from it. But I don’t need to print it out, I don’t have to go to the postal office, get a postal stamp, send it to her and wait for days for her to receive it. It’s almost instantaneous thanks to the internet and a gazillion other things that we did to make this happen.

All of that infrastructure, the ideas etc. took millions of man hours, and somehow we as a species found a way to compound like crazy on that. And my sincere hope is that we don’t blow each other up, before it gets even better. So humans continue to wonder in awe, “How long did it take to make that?” and feel inspired to make things themselves.

THE END