The Stuff You Do

July 30, 2025

Colin Wright

Jul 30, 2025

Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
Listening: Julie by Horsegirl

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Quick Notes

New Work:
- This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Age-Gating
- Yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was on Pain Classification & the pod was about the Vulnerability Paradox

The Stuff You Do

It feels good to have written a book.

It’s similar, I suspect, to the feeling of running a marathon or hosting a successful dinner party: it’s an achievement, and it’s satisfying to know you’ve done something difficult and aspirational (even better if there’s some kind of implied social status attached to said achievement).

It also feels good to write a book.

The act of jotting, editing, sculpting something over a long period of time is meditative and frustrating. It’s growth-inducing; it’s productively frictional.

It’s a joyous sort of exertion, if you’re the type of person who enjoy writing and books and stories and sharing things with others.

The process is tedious and the path can be long and uncertain, but there’s something invigorating about the entire exercise, which is probably why some people stick with it all the way till the end, despite the ponderousness of the process and its many difficulties and downsides.

For every accomplishment, there’s the thing at the end and there’s the stuff you do to get there.

If you’re solely aiming for that end-point, you’ll be a lot less consistently motivated and thus a lot less likely to actually achieve that goal.

Counterintuitively, then, it can be more productive to focus on finding some kind of satisfaction in the process rather than prodding yourself forward by imagining how good it will feel to have written a book or run a marathon.

Learn to love the daily grind, the minor victories, the mysterious and meandering paths between milestones. If you can find a way to enjoy (or latently love) the stuff you do to get to that eventual destination, you’ll be far more likely to stick around until the end.

And even if you never quite make it there, the experience won’t have been wasted because the endeavor itself was valuable.

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Interesting Links

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We had the “people’s holiday,” the Riverwest 24 in my neighborhood a few days ago. It’s ostensibly a cycling event where people on bikes ride around Riverwest for 24-hours straight, but it’s also become a huge event for non-cyclists, with special bonus stops, mini-events, and a parade-like atmosphere. This sign (these were all over the place during the event) sets the right tone: it’s a chilled-out sort of thing and everyone is friendly and having a good time. It was hot and humid, but I was out walking around a LOT to take it all in and see everybody.

What Else

Writing and books are on my mind right now, as I’m about to pivot back to working on Yore the first of August. The beta reader feedback I’ve gotten has been encouraging, but also pointed out some things that I should probably tweak, rearrange, or change—which is exactly what one hopes to get from this kind of feedback.

It’s been just silly hot (triple digit ‘feels like’ temperatures) for the past few days, so I’m also looking forward to the end of the week, as things should be moderated by then, which means I’ll stop melting and will be capable of thinking clearly.