Inversion: My Wild Card Motivation?

I collect motivations. Here are some of my collections:

Losing weight:

• look better

• feel better

• be there for kids

• be there longer for everyone

• fit into the harness of a roller coaster without needing to exhale

• fit into the booth of a pizza place in Cape Cod, Massachusetts

• have a “longer” dick

• etc

Becoming a better writer:

• understand myself

• learn faster

• communicate better

• share ideas that can help the world

• be a better father/partner/friend/earthling

• get things out of my head

• feel the relief that comes from choosing action that I’ve avoided

Yesterday I came across a new motivation to add to that last list. And it realllllly burned me up. George Mack’s essay at highagency.com has this section of how to escape what he calls the midwit trap. He literally used one of mine—“I want to become a better writer”—as the example. Just flip the problem and it becomes clear through inversion. What would I do to become a worse writer? George says,

1. Do not write

2. Write inconsistently

3. Write about things you find boring

He nailed me with the first one and then suckered me with the second one. I know that I have the ability to be consistent with things, but I wasn’t applying it to writing and George Mack somehow knew it. Something about it just felt blindsiding.

I immediately added this to my list of motivations to become a better writer and knew it was the final one I needed. It might’ve been able to be the first one and only one.

As I write this I’m hands-sweating-scared that my brain will apply this technique to something else before I’m ready and then I’ll be getting up at O-dark-thirty with a list longer than my—arm, yeah, arm—of things to do every day.

Coming up thoughts surrounding high agency:

My weakest wheel on the tricycle

The power in the word “experiment”

Taking one step toward something. Just a single, teeny step.

The intense emotion felt when committing to writing this