Building a Lion: Making The Writing Process Enjoyable
Dear Friends,
Yesterday my son made a lion out of LEGOs. He loves building things, and because of that, I love watching him build things.
LEGOs are the world’s most popular toy, and it's obvious why: in the process of building the lion, my son embodied all nine conditions that make an experience enjoyable:
There are clear goals every step of the way
There is immediate feedback to one’s actions
There is a balance between challenges and skills
Action and awareness are merged
Distractions are excluded from consciousness
There is no worry of failure
Self-consciousness disappears
The sense of time becomes distorted
The activity becomes an end in itself
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow”
There's no better metaphor for the writing process than playing with LEGOs. To make the writing process enjoyable, you need to start with construction toys that already exist: notes in your own words.
When you break apart ideas and capture them in writing, you're extruding your thoughts and cooling them outside your head. This takes raw, ephemeral, and amorphous ideas, and gives them permanence and shape.
Every sentence that successfully “says what you mean” adds a simple, durable, detachable, configurable, and extensible brick to your collection. You’ll accumulate bricks meant to connect and interlock with other bricks – and they’ll be visible and arranged in front of you, like toys. You'll write with your sentences, not from your head.
Years ago, David Perell used this same metaphor. He wrote, “As the number of artifacts you create increases linearly, the number of connections you make between them increase exponentially.” (Indeed, four LEGOs can be combined 24 different ways; eight LEGOs 40,000 different ways; and 16 LEGOs 20 TRILLION different ways.)
Because you can write with your existing LEGO bricks, David concluded, building a collection of them ultimately saves you time.
Building on David’s thoughts, my own conclusion is this: consistently extruding your thoughts and giving them shape outside your head ultimately saves you time…and makes the writing process enjoyable.
Just like building a lion.
Thank you for reading!
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Sincerely,
Justin
