A Confession and a Commitment
Well hello again! It’s certainly been a while. While we have tons of reasons (ahem, excuses) for our extended break from blogging, the reality is that a big part of it resulted from three immoderate errors that I am particularly prone to. The first I’ll call “the myth of summer writing”, the second is what many people call “shiny object syndrome," and the third was some variety of perfectionism. Probably a fourth was just straight up political burnout.
The myth of summer writing is what many academics face when they look at three months of uninterrupted time and think “I will write All The Things” over the summer! What a glorious plan. Except that this glorious plan fails to take into account random gig work, travel, Zoom meetings, gardening, kid activities, family activities, and constant home renovations because some idiot drove through your house (long story). But what I’ve also come to realize about summer writing is that the old adage that “if you want something done ask a busy person” applies just as well to summer as to anything else. I’m much less productive and motivated in the summer precisely because my time is so unconstrained. So without fighting that reality too much, I’ll admit failure, tweak my expectations for next summer, and move on.
The second – Shiny Object Syndrome - is a bit more pernicious, particularly for my brain, because my brain really likes All The Shiny Objects and really needs external deadlines to function. And the blog lacks external deadlines by default. When I was putting together my strategic plan for the year, blogging was a prime part of that plan, but then got crowded out by about 800 different shiny objects including a new position at work, tons of home crap from the accident (Furniture shopping! So shiny!), three big creative writing projects that are all in various states of undress and that also lack external accountability, and a few big work projects including a grant and some important policy papers, all with pretty firm external accountability (i.e. contracts and co-authors). I haven’t been unproductive, but I have been pretty fragmented and therefore progress on this particular project has been sacrificed to the urgent. And that’s too bad because we still think this blog is pretty damn important, given the immoderation that’s on display every day in the media and broader culture.
Finally, we both definitely fell victim to a certain amount of perfectionism in the blog, thinking that if a post didn't have tons of well-researched hyperlinks and pictures and every "i" dotted it wasn't ready to go live. While it's good to have high standards, let's also be real here. This is a blog, not a peer-reviewed journal and if those can be wrong as often as they are, we can certainly get away with something less than full Science standards. While our goal here will be to continue to provide high quality blogging on interesting ideas in the moderation space (is that a thing anymore?) we'll also cut ourselves some slack and recognize that some weeks the posts may not have pics or hundreds of hyperlinks and it will be ok; everyone will make it out alive.
So for you personal development nuts out there, learn some lessons from the immoderate errors we’ve made along the way and find the moderate lessons at the kernel of these mistakes:
There’s a delicate balance between “too many things to do to do anything well” and “not enough to do so you lose all forward momentum.” In an ideal world, the moderate position would be to have just enough to do that you feel a sense of ownership and accomplishment about your projects, but not so much to do that stress starts chipping away at the edges of your brain. This is a balance I have not done well, but I’m working on it.
There’s also a delicate balance between being excited about new projects and new ideas and being a literary magpie who just flits from project to project without finishing any one of them. In my case, I’m working on following the advice here that “shipping is a skill.” It’s one thing to have a ton of fun projects on one’s plate, but one actually has to finish those projects. You have to ship them off, as it were, or the smell of failure will follow you and eventually start corrupting your creative flow. A radically moderate blogger will get blog posts out precisely because he or she believes those ideas are important and because writing *is* the act of thinking (more on this later, probably).
Finally, the perfect really is the enemy of the good (and the done). Radical moderation requires recognizing when to send ideas out into the world and also working on that balance between constant content churn (not good) vs. not releasing ideas until they're polished to perfection (also not good). We will aim for radically moderate quality. Not mediocrity, let's be clear, but the quality consistent with our goals here to engage people with the ideas of moderation in a consistent and timely fashion.
So here’s our commitment to you and to this blog: We’ll post something, no matter how small, each week. Sometimes these will be larger substantive posts, but other times they may just be a run down of radically moderate articles we’ve found that week and sometimes it will just be a quick shot of "hey, thinking about this and need to digest it." But precisely because we think radical moderation is both timely and an absolutely necessary corrective for our overwrought and immoderate age, we need to commit to moving this particular project forward.
Last, I’m also working on some external accountability for this and other projects I have going, including finding an agent for the book I hope to develop from this blog and for some of the creative projects I have going on. There are a lot of moving parts and finding an agent is much more complicated than the academic writing I do in my real job, but I think turning these projects into “real” projects in my brain will be an important shift. So one final suggestion if you're suffering from similar mental blocks is to find some external accountability -- a writing group or a friend or an agent or something else entirely -- so you can get the things that really matter to you out the door and into the world.
What about you? What goals or projects have you let fall by the wayside? Is that the result of any particular immoderate errors? What have you found helps? Tell us in the comments!