Why Writing Wasn’t Fun Anymore
(And Why I’m Back)
While not a naturally gifted wordsmith, weaving a tale or constructing a written logical argument brought me a lot of satisfaction as a child. I pushed writing in my spare time outside of public school by creating fantasy worlds and crafting my own Dungeons and Dragons adventure modules. These were good times filled with no expectations and an air of unlimited possibility.
As I entered into adulthood at the University of Chicago, I was forced to write–I wrote over 120 pages in 10 weeks–and, while challenging, really enjoyed it. I entered school assuming I would graduate to be a book-writing professor and practicing Doctor of Psychology. I left school having fell in love with design yet not really knowing what that meant.
I spent the next decade practicing design, learning what it meant, and ultimately attending the IIT Institute of Design (ID) to hone my craft and understanding. Graduating from the ID in 2007, I was writing as much as ever as I co-wrote Naked Innovation with friend and colleague, David McGaw, and also began penning a blog on this website. My writing was fluid, focusing primarily on my areas of expertise–innovation, strategy and design–and I was receiving good feedback. It was fun.
The main reasons I wrote (note: these could be principles of writing for anyone):
Writing forces you to really understand something.
If you’re not there to explain a concept in person, you better be clear with how you convey it. Writing enabled me to unpack innovation, strategy and design in a way that a conversation never could.
Writing enabled the consideration of thought outside of industries required in my day-to-day work.
While I may be focused on a client industry–retail, for example–writing let me think about other industries, meta-topics in the practice of user experience and also tap into one of my three personal obsessions: innovation, evolution and visualization (more on these later).
Writing enabled me to flex linguistic and intrapersonal types of learning.
More specifically, it helped me wrestle with the English language and learn a little bit more about myself.
I wrote on this blog, wrote as a part of speaking and wrote Naked Innovation, with plans for writing other books.
Then one day, I just stopped.
I went cold turkey. I didn’t specifically know why. Initially, I thought it was because I had just become too busy. The life of a road-warrior-consultant makes it easy to justify chopping just about everything that’s good for you out of your life: relationships, eating well, exercise or writing. Writing was just one activity too many and didn’t seem fun anymore.
First weeks, then months passed. After a bit more reflection, I came to find the real reason why I stopped writing.
User experience architect and author Mike Kuniavsky’s recent tweet summed up what I was feeling:
There are so many people writing, talking, speaking and tweeting, it’s a cacophony of sameness. My interests around innovation, strategy and design have become obsessive topics written about by obsessed individuals. The self-aggrandizing nature of it all, with a lack of real criticism, became a little wearying.
In the end, I questioned what else I really had to add. By regularly reading the work of Adam Richardson, Alex Osterwalder, Arne van Oosterom, Bruce Nussbaum, Chris Anderson, the great Clayton Christensen, Diego Rodriguez, Helen Walters, Horace Dediu, John Gruber, Kontra, Larry Keeley, Peter Merholz and the Adaptive Path crew, among others, what was the point? It was easy to be a sponge. It was easy to be lazy. It was easy to have a sharp point of view in person and then not follow that up with deeper thinking shared in the open.
In the end, people reflect and move on. People have opinions and change their minds. People stop being lazy. I’ve decided to start writing again.
To make a contribution, I’m going to be less critical of incremental thinking and recognize leading thinking itself is mostly evolutionary in nature. Unlike innovation which dictates an idea be realized and brought to scale, collective wisdom grows over time with many people sharing overlapping thoughts. Thinking ebbs and flows until action brings a notion into more concrete reality. Evidence around multiple or simultaneous discovery and filmmaker Kirby Ferguson’s great work illustrating that Everything is a Remix is pushing me back into the (re)mix.
I plan on three different types of writing here at /creativeslant. First, thought pieces about my field: innovation, strategy and design. Second, I also know some wicked smart, cool people that I would like to interview, talk shop and share their thinking with world. Finally, I’m starting a series of posts notionally titled “First Thought.” The premise is there is one important news item of the last week–a big “move” in the innovation space–that I highlight and dissect, sharing some initial thinking each Monday. It should be fun (again).
With that, let’s get to it...