TJL #28: Start with the upper-left hand brick (Daily Productivity #3)
Simple tips & tricks on how to be more productive
Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #28. In this newsletter I share the best of what others have figured out already. To get the full TJL experience, subscribe today.
Today: A simple trick to become more productive by starting with the top left brick.
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
Today I’ll share a simple trick to break through any creative block that you might have. This is from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book is a fictionalised autobiography of a trip that the author (Robert M. Pirsig, pictured above) and his son (Chris, in the back) made on a motorcycle from Minnesota to Northern California. The book is not actually about Zen or motorcycle maintenance, but about philosophy and life.
Start with the upper-left hand brick
For this next part, all you need to know is that Pirsig is a philosophy teacher at a university teaching students:
He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't. They just couldn't think of anything to say. One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a fivehundred-word essay about the United States.
He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman. When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say.
A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this. He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana.
“I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it.”
When you don’t have anything to say it’s because you think you don’t have anything important or original to say. It may be that you are just unaware of the fact that you are, in fact, able to look and see freshly for yourself, without regard of what has been said before.
Narrowing down the problem to a single brick destroys this creative block. It now becomes painfully obvious that you have to look and see for yourself, because who has written about this brick before? Suddenly, you discover you have a lot more to say than you previously thought.
Application
“Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Ask yourself, what is your upper-left hand brick? When you feel that you are blocked creatively something is holding you back. One possibility is that you fear that you don’t have any original thing to say.
To break through this block try to start writing about the most silly little thing you can think of. Whether it is a brick or a question or just a thing you want to say. Once you start writing about the first brick, the second one naturally follows, and so on.
What is your upper-left hand brick?
Previous TJLs
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