Do What You’re Supposed To Do I just revisited a @visakanv’s essay “Compulsions”, and it occurred to me just a few minutes ago that one of the ways we break out of how we think is to let go of the outputs that we want to get the outcome we want. To do what we’re supposed to do not what we want to do. This is subtle, but I’m going to do my best to explain… I had a big breakthrough a few months ago; my goal was to publish more writing. I figured out a process that works incredibly well for me to get initial drafts of my writing out very quickly so that I can start to edit and get feedback on them. But there was so much potential energy in that part of the process that this breakthrough opened up the floodgates in a way that was energizing at first, but has since been somewhat demoralizing. The bottleneck shifted to the next steps in the process (drafting, editing, and feedback) with such ferocity that it feels as if the breakthrough didn't even matter. The solution here seems to be to change the output. Use the “exhaust” from the breakthrough to port into what the actual output should be. Redefine what the output is supposed to look like. Here’s a less abstract example… A lot of companies that are a normal part of our day-to-day life were born out of a similar process. Twitter was only built because Odeo was in danger of becoming extinct. Slack was a tool built by the team that made “Game Never Ending” to speak with other people internal to the company. They decided to commercialize the tool when the game wasn’t successful. That’s what I mean by exhaust. What if cars ran on the greenhouse gases they created? What if the part of your process that was exhaust-ing was the thing that you shared with the world? What if the rough draft was the final version?