230. Grippy & Slippy

<p>One day, I was in a coworking space, here in Colombia, writing in my Moleskine notebook. One of the other co-workers came up to me and asked me a question.</p> <p>He said, in Spanish, and with a sense of earnest curiosity, “Why are you writing in your notebook? Your computer is right in front of you. You can write much faster on your computer. Why aren’t you writing on your computer?”</p> <p>That question really stuck with me, because I thought the answer was obvious -- though I guess it wasn’t.</p> <p>And it got me thinking about the tools we use to create, and why we use them.</p> <h3 id="creativityishard">Creativity is hard</h3> <p>You already know, from listening to episode 218 about the <a href= "https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/four-stages-creativity/">Four Stages of Creativity</a>, that we don’t solve creative problems all at once. We need to go through stages. We need to go through Preparation, learning about the problem. From there, the problem goes through Incubation. Our subconscious works on it while we do something else. Only then can we reach Illumination -- our “aha” moment. Finally, to get it ready to ship, we need to go through Verification.</p> <p>And you also know, from being a human being, that when you’re up against a really tough problem, anything in the world suddenly becomes more appealing than that problem.</p> <p>You’ll get “shiny object syndrome,” and want to escape to another project. Or you’ll check social media. I even find that I sometimes procrastinate on a really tough project by working on a slightly less tough project, that I have been procrastinating on until now.</p> <p>Ayn Rand called it “white tennis shoes syndrome.” That if she came up against a tough problem while writing, she’d suddenly remember that there were some white tennis shoes in the closet that had smudges on them, and needed to be cleaned. Distractions, it seems, are nothing new.</p> <h3 id="choosethetoolforthecreativejob">Choose the tool for the creative job</h3> <p>But, I’ve found, depending upon where you are