Mistakes and imperfections

`0:24:27`

loud but I can't be there. So hopefully other people read it and say it out loud to themselves and if there's a mistake like you it's not that big of a deal. I mean I want to make it right but also to what extent? There's this this is a weird story. I actually wrote about this once um I was in this Navajo rug um gallery. And I was looking at these Navajo rugs and they're really geometric and and beautiful but they all were kind of like off in a way. Like the triangle wasn't quite like the the angles weren't right and there were some mistakes what I thought were mistakes and I asked the guy I said why like why are there mistakes in these And he said like you know this is this is his interpretation. Uh the Navajo didn't see that as a mistake. He

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basically said like just like if you're a walking on a path and you stumbled or you tripped or you took a slightly different direction. You wouldn't back up and redo that section. You just keep going. It's just like yeah there was a thing that happened but you just keep going. And he goes that's what they do with their stitches. If they kind of were off a bit it didn't matter. They just keep going just as they would if they were walking or doing something. And I wonder if that in some ways can gave me some latitude did not take like not to take precision quite as And as long as the message gets through that's enough. Yeah. I it's so funny that you say that. I Oh good for you. And uh

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and I have two sets of basically bowls at my apartment. I have the cheap bowls that I bought on Amazon that are Amazon Basics and they're black. They're perfectly round. There's they're spotless. And then I have this one bowl that's blue um and it's got sort of some Oaxacan patterns and I bought it down there and it's got all these little nicks at this point and it's like very imperfect. The bowl isn't even perfectly round. The texture of it is sort of feels a little messy and stuff but I always pick up that bowl first. I never eat from the bland Amazon bowls before the Oaxacan bowl because it has so much more character. It has so much more life. It is so much more human. Yeah. Same thing. It's yeah it's the wabi-sabi thing in Japan. It's there's something about that. Now I should correct the spelling error. Like

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it does it doesn't make the piece Your in your point the nicks and the chips make the bowl feel different to you in a way that feels better. I don't think a spelling error makes the piece feel better but I also don't care that 340 people saw it wrong and then the rest 10,000 more saw it right when I fixed it online. It doesn't really matter that much. Yeah this is a a strange parallel that but it's somehow top of mind. But there's that John Legend song where he says all your perfect imperfections. It's like he's pouring out his love and his praise. And I think that we're talking about editing earlier. I think this is the problem where a lot of editors destroy writing is they try to make it perfect and they don't honor the perfect imperfections.

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no shade on my Ink editors but I had a few run-ins like that where there was like a sentence I wrote which I was really felt really good about and they kind of rewrote something and it was very it just felt like they were sterilizing it. Yes it's a great word. Yeah. And I'm like no no it's okay if there's some bacteria on this or whatever right? In my head I'm like that's yeah that might be better technically. Like there's words sometimes they would use. I I can't remember any examples but there was like the more it was the correct word but I don't want that word. I would like the way the other word sounded and felt and it was a little awkward and I kind of liked that. And so that's one of the tricks with editors is to help help them or help you know I guess help them understand what you're going for in your writing. It's for me it's not precision. It's not

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it it's it's a feeling I'm trying to get across. And this to sterilize something in some ways is to remove all the feeling. Like you walk into a space that's sterile. Maybe it's a beautiful museum or something or it's a beautiful modern piece of architecture. I love modern architecture. I love old But you walk into some modern and it's too sterile. It's cold. Everything's too perfect. There's like three materials. There's no dust anywhere. There's nothing. And you're like I don't really feel good in this space or I don't really want to touch anything and leave a fingerprint. Versus you walk into an old space that's patinaed. It's worn. It's been lived in. Uh maybe the ceilings are lower. It's more human scale and you're like this is messy. This is sort of whatever but I love this space. And that's how I want my writing to feel is like kind of

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like a lived in and I want our design to feel this way. Like our products are designed differently. They don't look like the industries where the industry work is all kind of everyone's like driving their style from Apple. It's just like everything's like trying to be Apple. We're trying to be like the cozy living room that's comfortable and it's precise enough but there's some attitude there. There's some personality. There's humanity I'd like to think at least and I'd like to have that in my writing as well. Yeah. Well I think that this is part of the problem with the keyboard itself is you have the delete key. Whereas if you have a typewriter or you're handwriting you end up with all of these weird errors and these weird imperfections and you sort of go on these tangents and stuff like that and

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you're like, "Ah, I messed up, but I kind of got to go with it." Sort of like the path that you were talking about earlier. Whereas with the delete key, you can just look at the screen and go, "Delete, delete, delete, delete." And I just wonder if the delete key has contributed to a kind of polish in contemporary writing. Good question. I think you're probably right. I mean, also like grammar checkers and spell and these things like look, they can be useful, I'm sure. Like in some cases, but I think when they become a crutch and you lean on them and you're aiming for again, like technical precision. There are some writers who are wonderful at that, but I think it goes too far for most people and it removes themselves from the piece. Got to be careful of that. So, when you were working with the ink editors, with the rework editors and you

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were having those conversations, would you go back and rewrite the piece from scratch or would you go in and make line edits? Um both. It depends on the piece. So, some of the pieces like some of the edits were so substantial, they wanted us to really rework the piece and there's a point where I don't know where the point is. It's not like 50%, but there's a point where you just feel like this is moving around so much, it's not the same thing anymore. So, let's not work from the same thing. Let's start over. And they were right. Like this idea would have been better presented this way. So, I'm not going to try to take this ball of clay and turn it into something else. It's just not going to be that anymore. There's not enough material there anymore. So, we'll start over. Other times it was just like nailing a few sentences or like whatever. So, it's it's both. It's not a I'm not rigid in those in those ways. Um

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but I'm definitely not afraid of throwing out work. Right? I don't think because I put it on the page, it needs to stay there in spirit and you move it around. It like it can go. And I'm not just talking about like a line. I can talk I can talk about like writing this much. It's like close the file, don't save, new, right? Not even the delete key cuz you can undo And I found myself undoing deletes. Like I want to like close the document, open a new document, so it's really fresh and start again. Yeah, I also find that memory is an amazing tool for compression and focusing on what's important. Like your brain doesn't remember things that aren't important. So, if you need to rewrite the thing and you have a thousand words, the 250 that you actually remember is highly correlated with the best stuff. 100% and

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then I'm the same way with like to-do. I don't keep to-do lists. Is that right? Yeah, I don't keep I don't I have like a few things I need to do every day that I want to focus on and maybe I'll forget to do one. Someone will probably remind me or whatever, but I don't like to have this list that I'm staring at of the things I have to do. I want to remember the things I'm supposed to do so I can think about I want to think about these How do you structure your days running a company so that you still have time to write? Because it's obvious that it's paid off, but it's one of those things like sort of like going to the gym. Like on a day-by-day, it might not be the best thing that you can prioritize, but on a year-by-year, decade-by-decade basis, obviously you should be going to the gym, you know? For sure. Um I'm pretty unstructured.

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I write when I have something to say. I don't write when I feel like I need to write. I only write when I have something to say. So, it could be something comes up earlier in the day at work. There's like some thing we went through. I'm like, "I should write about that." Or I have some other idea. I should write or I read something I should write about that. But I don't I don't set aside time every day to do this um or every week to do this. I don't have a cadence. It's not like I need to write one thing a week. There's times when I write a good thing every day for a few days, you know? It just it it I have to it's a feel thing for me. The gym's different. Like I have to go to the gym. I have to work out with a trainer cuz if I don't, I won't do it. So, I need an appointment for that. I don't like appointments for writing or any creative things um except for when I'm learning something. So, like I'm learning drums right now. I'm