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Back in 2020, I started to write a book about making decisions. After writing a dozen or so chapters, I burned out and abandoned it because that’s my move. But then a little while ago I went back with fresh eyes to see if it really was as stupid and useless as I thought it was, and realized that, with a little TLC, it could maybe be kind of smart and kind of useful after all.
I’ve decided to share selections-in-progress as I work on finishing it, because feedback is the fairy dust that makes things fly. I promise that’s the only Peter Pan metaphor I’ll use today.
The book’s working title is “What’s Next? An Antidote to Decision Paralysis.” What follows is one of the chapters-in-progress, a sort of meta case study about how I got started writing this book in the first place.
The Story of Three Ideas
For a good number of years, I’ve wanted to write a nonfiction book. Way back at the at the start of 2020, I decided that was going to be THE year. I was going to take a break from fiction, and take a serious crack at an entirely different category of literature.
It was going to be personal, and profound. It was going to be the medium through which I would dispense the gathered wisdom of my adult life. (I like to keep my ambitions modest.)
The only real issue was that I couldn’t decide what it was going to be about.
Oh, I could rattle off a hundred ideas before breakfast, but even the best ones could probably be covered in an essay. A whole book? That needed a BIG idea. Something that would justify forty or fifty thousand words.
And then I got one. A great one. I kicked it around. I told people about it. They seemed excited. I seemed excited.
Convinced that if I could come up with the perfect title, everything else would line up like baby ducks in a pond, I cleared my schedule and spent an entire weekend trying to figure out what to call this amazing idea.
I failed.
Then I got all wrapped up in whether it could be a podcast, too, or maybe instead. Should I make a website? I made a website.
You can see where this is going.
Pretty soon, this great idea seemed daunting and tedious, and I slouched toward paralysis. Was this really all that great of an idea anyway? After a couple of months, the thing seemed to have flatlined.
But then, favored by fortune, I was struck with another idea. An even better one.
Immediately, I told lots of people (I have patient friends). They agreed, this was it — the topic that deserved my full attention and effort. I should absolutely write this book. And start a podcast. And probably a newsletter, too, to track all my incredible work.
I was going to have to do a lot of research. I was going to have to call a lot of experts. Well that could be fun! Right? Gonna take a real long time, though. A real long time.
Now, I have no problem with long projects (this might be is a lie), but I did have a clenched jawed determination to accomplish my goal of writing a nonfiction book in 2020, and it was already October. Not only that, I had publicly committed to National Novel Writing Month — NaNoWriMo, if you’re familiar — even though it probably wasn’t really meant for books of nonfiction. The point is to try to write a 50,000-word first draft of a novel in the month of November. It’s right there in the name. But I thought I could use the accountability.
Anyway, November was fast approaching, and all I had was a behemoth of a topic that I was laughably underqualified to take on, along with another one that I had since abandoned like the robot boy in Homer Simpson’s attic.
Then, during a conversation with a friend a few days before Halloween, I found myself ranting about several subjects on a similar theme.
I am, to those who know me, a shameless spewer of unsolicited advice. This probably has something to do with being an only child. For my whole life, I’ve operated on the default assumption that people want to hear what I have to say. So far, I haven't been able to turn off this particular feature of my personality, but I have done my best to correct for it in two ways:
Trying really hard to know what the hell I'm talking about.
Apologizing whenever I make an ass of myself, which is really a lot of the time.
Anyway, I realized mid-spew that all of my ranted advice was centered around one basic idea, and that it could maybe even be the backbone of a pretty serviceable book.
Or, at the very least, I could see myself writing a first draft in a month, and I was days away from the first of November.
Sold!
Starting vs… Not Actually Starting
Clever readers will observe salient insights from this case study. Let’s break it down more explicitly for the rest of you.
Here’s the first: Starting is hard enough, and important enough, that you can't afford to worry too much about the particulars.
In deciding to write this book, I finally accepted one unyielding requirement: If I was going to do NaNoWriMo, I had to pick a topic and start writing. The when and the what and the how were all pretty arbitrary (no one was holding a gun to my head about any of it), but making a firm and defined commitment slowly pressed me into a corner where I had to take action or break the commitment.
Taking action, in this case, meant actually starting to write the book. Which I finally did, on the 1st of November, 2020, exactly two years ago today.
Before that day, I had plenty of great ideas, two of which were so good I went blabbing to everyone I knew. I could have gotten started on any of them.
I didn't.
I might have accidentally made it sound like I started on those first two maybe-also-podcast ideas, but I didn’t. I spent a weekend trying to come up with a title. I talked to people. I considered multiple avenues of publication. I created an email capture landing page.
Paralysis kicked in, and my interest burned out.
How did that happen?
Billy and the Black Corvette
I want to tell you about my friend Billy Lowe.
During my years of high school, I lived in a rural Maryland town where the richest kid I knew drove a brand new 2000 Toyota Celica. Even though most kids had cars by junior year, most of them were beaters. Mine was a white 1991 Ford Taurus station wagon that my mom bought for $500 bucks at an auction. I held down a Saturday job at Blockbuster mostly just to pay for gas.
But Billy didn’t have a car. I was poor, but he was poorer, and he lived close enough to school that walking was technically possible, clocking in at a little over an hour if there wasn’t any snow. As “close” as he was to the school, he was unlucky enough to not live along a bus route. So, when he couldn’t get a ride, which was often, he walked.
One day, walking home along his usual route on a fine Spring day, Billy found a car.
If you’ve never had the privilege of traversing a rural Maryland road on foot, you won’t know that there are long stretches of mostly just trees, interrupted here and there by old croplands that have long since gone to seed. It was alongside one such rolling field of tall grass that Billy saw it: a black 1996 Chevy Corvette with a thick white pinstripe down the center.
On his feet as he was, Billy got a good long gawk as he slowly closed the distance, all the while expecting that slick ride to pull out onto the road and disappear, like an exotic bird in the wild. But closer up, he could see the car was empty.
Finally, Billy stopped, near enough that he could have reached out and touched that beautiful machine. He looked around, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. It was just Billy and the sexy ‘vette.
It’s important to point out here that Billy was not the criminal type. He was a quiet kid. Didn’t like to get into trouble. I try to imagine how long he stood there looking at that car, then looking around for its owner, then peering through the tinted windows, before he finally decided to try the door.
Not to take it, I can hear him thinking, just to see.
It was unlocked. The smell of warm leather wafted out of the dimmed interior. It wasn’t a hot day, but the car had obviously bathed in the early April sun for hours by the time Billy got there.
Shocked, probably, at how trivial it had been to pull the door open, Billy must have spent several more long minutes, at least, looking out across the field, up and down the road, maybe flinching at the occasional passing car. Surely someone would come along and scold him for this. Surely.
But no one came.
Billy got in and closed the door. There were keys in the ignition.
As Billy told it later, the car had no license or papers. By every appearance, it looked as though it had been abandoned, or perhaps set in his path by some benevolent god.
And now they were alone together, this poor boy and this lonesome sports car.
He turned the key.
The engine growled to life.
There was Billy, sitting inside a damn miracle, listening to that huge engine idle behind the broad dash of polished plastic and leather accents. He had mounted a mystic beast, and could feel its powerful muscles moving beneath him, waiting for the simple command to move, to fly.
After who knows how many stretched and breathless moments of indecision, Billy decided to give it some gas and let it sing. The Corvette howled its mighty song, practically begging Billy to throw the gear into drive and let it loose.
Instead, Billy hopped out and strained his eyes yet again for the owner who must have heard, must now know that some dumb kid from the sticks was messing with his very expensive property.
But still, no one came.
Billy got back in the car, shut the door, and revved the engine like it was his last meal. Oh how sweet the symphony of finely-engineered combustion in his ears. As he sat in that svelte bucket seat, pumping the gas in the indulgent rhythm of his fevered adolescent dreams, Billy imagined what it would be like to pull this thing into the school parking lot the next day. He imagined picking up his friends and driving to the mall. He imagined smiling at a pretty drive-through cashier, knocking the car into neutral, and revving the engine to give her a thrill. The same thrill he felt now.
With his hands on the wheel and his foot on the gas, he could imagine rolling rural roads sliding blissfully underneath wide tires at great speed. He could feel the car pull up steep hills, hug sharp turns, and rush down wooded valleys.
Oh, the fantastic dreams that filled his mind as he listened to that beautiful car sing.
The sun was visibly lower in the sky when the engine finally choked, and died. Cause of death? Empty gas tank.
With a wistful sort of regret, and certainly a degree of embarrassment, Billy climbed back out of the car, and kept walking. He was late, after all. There were probably chores to do. I don’t know. We weren’t close, Billy and I.
What I do know is that the next day, as Billy walked to school in the morning along the same route, that car was gone.
Shut Up and Start Driving
When a person has an exciting idea, it ignites the soul with an inner energy. The easiest way for this energy to express itself is by talking. We've all experienced this. Some shiny new thing enters your brain and lights it up. You call your mom. You talk to your spouse. You bring it up with your barber.
Talk about it enough and something sad happens -- the energy drains away. Your mouth was the release valve, and you let it all out.
Like Billy finding that brand new car on the side of the road. Instead of taking the damn thing for a drive, he just revved the engine, admiring the sound, fantasizing about all the places it could take him.
How often do we we do this with a new idea, revving the engine until all the gas is gone? And then, when we turn the key and don't hear anything, we assume it must not have been that great to begin with, and leave it on the side of the road where we found it. Wasn’t meant to be.
Now, I’m not necessarily suggesting that Billy should have driven that car to the nearest gas station, filled the tank, and then just carried on as though it belonged to him until someone came looking. But I’m also not not suggesting it.
The point is, action is what puts more gas in the tank, and talking isn't action. It's just revving the engine. We all know the guy who's always talking about some new idea. Always revving the engine on a sweet new ride. Always in the same dead end town.
Maybe you've been that guy. Maybe you are that guy.
Hey! It's OK. Lots of people have been that guy. Maybe everyone. Probably everyone. Revving the engine is a fully human impulse. It's sexy. It's fun. It's easy.
There’s also no risk in it. You can't crash a car you don't drive.
You don't have to pick a direction if you never start moving.
Sometimes that’s fine. Sometimes the fantasy is enough. You play it out in your head. You invite your friends to play along and some of them do. It’s a good time, a welcome distraction from the toil and tedium of the everyday.
But sometimes it’s not.
Let’s bring it all the way back to those first two book ideas. Were they actually the wrong fit for the November challenge two years ago? I'll never know. Because all I did was rev the engine, and now both those ideas are out of gas.
The third idea, though, I got that one out onto the road. Two years ago, I threw the idea into gear and pumped the gas. I’m not sure the sound of its engine knocks everyone's socks off the way those other two did. To be honest, it still sounds more like an Elantra than a Corvette. Everyone's got an Elantra. I've owned three. It gets you where you need to go.
Maybe the next time I find myself in the cockpit of a sexy sports car of an idea, I'll be smart enough to start driving.
Honestly, kind of exactly what I needed to read today. Thanks for sharing this!
To my favorite, shameless self-promoter: What status does one achieve when they like, comment, and then recommend your Substack to their subscribers?
And um... thanks for the John Cusack pic. ❤️🔥Say Anything is my all-time favorite movie from my angsty high school years. And it happens I've been craving a rewatch. It shall be done. I'm going blind again in your white-on-black atmosphere. I'll recommend you from my home planet. Been meaning to for a while.