Exploratory Writing: Everyday magic for life and work

One of the main reasons to engage in exploratory writing is that it allows you to uncover something that’s worth saying. It’s trivially easy to be a passive recipient of other people’s content – this is idea consumption and doesn’t benefit anyone other than yourself. It’s relatively easy to share other people’s ideas along with your initial reactio

We resource ourselves best physically with the ancient, non-negotiable principles captured neatly by coach Sara Milne Rowe as the SHED method: sleep, hydration, exercise, diet.3

What’s my biggest advantage here? (Follow up: And am I making full use of it?)

What would I say to a friend here?

Just as with agency, intention and attention in Chapter 5, I believe there are three interconnected but distinct principles of playfulness at work, all of which lend themselves well to an exploratory writing approach: creativity, originality and problem solving.

We are what psychologists term ‘a society of selves’:

Dan Pink makes a similar point when talking about regrets: If we understand what people regret the most, we understand what they value the most... So when people tell you their regrets, they’re actually telling you indirectly what they value.4

Ready? Enough theory already. Find yourself a big scruffy pad of paper and a pen or pencil, put yourself somewhere you won’t be disturbed for six minutes (even if that’s the bathroom). Write the following prompt at the top of a sheet of paper, then set a timer for six minutes and just write, as fast as you can, whatever comes into your head in resp

But there’s a cognitive cost attached to metaphors too: it’s easy to forget that the metaphor isn’t actually the thing itself. If we use them intentionally, they can help us be more creative and solve problems, not to mention communicate our ideas more effectively to others. But if we’re not aware of them, they can trip us up.