I’ve been trying for years to design (entirely inside my head and tons of disconnected notes, with no cohesion or organization or any clear idea of how to build prototypes) a… thingy, that is very kitchen sink ish (it’s a social media network! it makes people rational by prompting them to think about things in ways! it’s a prediction market! it’s an effing MMO!!), never settles down into a specific defined form… etc.
This is a perennial failure mode of my cognition—I’ve done it with other things too—when I was a young teen and into New Age stuff I tried to build a grand unified theory of everything as modes of vibration in cosmic consciousness! And then there’s my tendency to try to fit every story idea I have into the same fictional universe...
The obvious thing to do, of course, is to figure out why you are trying to design one thing that is all those things, and see if a simpler thing to do becomes obvious at that point. The reason could simply be that you like to plan complicated things, in which case settle on a problem that is genuinely complicated and doesn’t need any complications added, or it could be because your interests change rapidly, in which case you focus on a simple but expansive framework so that you can hit the ground running on whatever your new interest is, and achieve something (even just a beautiful thought) in that area before your interests change again. More interesting is if there is some commonality between all the things you switch between, and you can just focus on that part, because that is where your true interest lies.
Obvious, boring but surprisingly difficult to follow advice. Practice taking notes, organizing things, building working projects (which could be as simple as fixing a door that doesn’t close quite right, or a floorboard that squeaks, or as complicated as learning a new programming language to write a short program that does one thing.), and so on. Planning things successfully is a big deal for people that currently don’t. (I should take my own advice...)
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
I’ve been trying for years to design (entirely inside my head and tons of disconnected notes, with no cohesion or organization or any clear idea of how to build prototypes) a… thingy, that is very kitchen sink ish (it’s a social media network! it makes people rational by prompting them to think about things in ways! it’s a prediction market! it’s an effing MMO!!), never settles down into a specific defined form… etc.
This is a perennial failure mode of my cognition—I’ve done it with other things too—when I was a young teen and into New Age stuff I tried to build a grand unified theory of everything as modes of vibration in cosmic consciousness! And then there’s my tendency to try to fit every story idea I have into the same fictional universe...
Oh, but that last one could be fun...
The obvious thing to do, of course, is to figure out why you are trying to design one thing that is all those things, and see if a simpler thing to do becomes obvious at that point. The reason could simply be that you like to plan complicated things, in which case settle on a problem that is genuinely complicated and doesn’t need any complications added, or it could be because your interests change rapidly, in which case you focus on a simple but expansive framework so that you can hit the ground running on whatever your new interest is, and achieve something (even just a beautiful thought) in that area before your interests change again. More interesting is if there is some commonality between all the things you switch between, and you can just focus on that part, because that is where your true interest lies.
Obvious, boring but surprisingly difficult to follow advice. Practice taking notes, organizing things, building working projects (which could be as simple as fixing a door that doesn’t close quite right, or a floorboard that squeaks, or as complicated as learning a new programming language to write a short program that does one thing.), and so on. Planning things successfully is a big deal for people that currently don’t. (I should take my own advice...)