Miss Tolerance

Hi, 

Writing has been hard for me the past couple of weeks. I wouldn’t say that it is writer’s block. I would liken it more to idea block, or more specifically articulation block. 

I am having a difficult time making sense. Not making sense in a way that I am speaking gibberish, but more so that I can’t make sense of the ideas that are coming through on a daily basis. I can’t find the through line of how the idea applies to either general or specific applications. The place it is affecting me the most is this newsletter. 

That being said, I think I narrowed it down to two causes: 

• I am playing with a wider breadth of information than I did when I first started writing this newsletter. 

• I don’t know what I want to happen as a result of writing this newsletter. 

Let’s roll chronologically, today. 

When I started writing this newsletter almost 2 years ago, I started because I wanted to capture the lessons that I learned from starting a business. The goal was to get down the story of the business, to document the changes I had seen in myself, and get a sense of things I did well (or poorly) on the path of starting that business. 

Since then, I have pretty much covered most everything that I consciously remember learning. Considering this is newsletter #91, that is pretty solid in my opinion. 

Recently, working at a Centaurian AI, I have been exposed to a wider variety and depth of information than I ever have in any period of my life. There have been days where I go to sleep just trying to sort through all of the information that I experienced that day.  

I have talked about failure a lot recently. Yes, they are probably in some way or another influenced by my own perception of everything surrounding The Hero’s Journal. But, I think that would be a cop out, especially considering, most days I am more thankful for the successes I was able to experience through that experience than any perceived failures. 

I think the rise of failure talk has actually been because of the positive pressure I have been feeling towards growth. Trying to tackle difficult subject matters on a daily basis and attempting to reconcile them with what I already know, unlearning faulty models, and building new refined ones is a very eye opening experience. 

For some reason, whenever the topic of failure comes to mind, I get a mental image of James Harden practicing his patented step back that he terrorized the NBA with for years. The level of precision that he had with that move and the detail it took for it to not be a travel could only be the result of repping that move out thousands of times. I am also sure that of those thousands of reps many were either travels or misses. 

When working through this new stimulus, I can be really hard on myself. I know what it feels like to miss a jump shot or have a bad race. I don’t know what it feels like on a consistent basis to not be able to square the circle. 

By the time my running career was winding down, I was getting pretty good at reconciling a bad race. I knew what it felt like to be disappointed in a performance. To use a basketball term, I had a high miss tolerance. 

For understanding topics, I have a really low miss tolerance. If I don’t immediately start to form a working model of how a topic works, I am hard on myself. 

Thus making it hard to write a newsletter. Why would I write a newsletter, when I can hardly understand anything… is what my saboteur says. 

In running, you run another race. In basketball, you shoot another shot. In writing, you write another piece. 

They have the same answer, but can feel completely different. 

It isn’t just about getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, you also have to get comfortable discovering new types of discomfort. 

The second reason: I don’t know what I want to happen as a result of this newsletter. 

The “why” behind this newsletter is still pretty unclear. Well, the particulars are uncertain. The long tail is pretty certain… I like being the guy who writes a newsletter. 

Does that mean I will win every week? Probably not. 

This newsletter right now has an identity goal. Which means, when I miss a week or write something I don’t think is very good, the work is allowing myself to be someone who is becoming a person who writes a great newsletter. 

Maybe one day, I will have a capitalist aim for this newsletter, but for right now it is just an investment.  Each newsletter written is a coin in the piggy bank that I will get to crack open one day and purchase the title of a writer. 

One that I can cash in every time I look in the mirror :)

Happy Labor Day! 

Kyle