#358 How to know you’re an aspiring (or former) writer

Which conclusions did I draw from past experiences?

Have I overreacted to petty events, and ignored beautiful moments?

Have I deleted memories? Maybe invented some?

Have I built stories based on generalizations?

Most importantly: how does the past I still feel affect my actions today?

And if I know a lot of it was my own interpretation… could I change my past, or at least what it means to me?

Would that set me free?

I was undoubtedly in a pensive mood when writing this.

I guess, given the daily letters I send you, you might conclude I’m in a pensive mood every day.

And you wouldn’t be wrong.

But pensive moods can be useful – when they’re coupled with conclusions and insights. Maybe even with Tiny Trust Builders.

And if any of these questions help you re-interpret your past and set you free, too, I’ll be a happy man.

A wistful win-win.

A memory is what we decide to remember from an experience – and what we decide to delete and forget.

Intuition is the instant hunch we get after we’ve repeatedly created memories from experiences; the moment we don’t need the conscious memory anymore.

A small (or unrepresentative) sample size leads to inaccurate intuition.

If I’m betrayed three times in my life and have created strong memories around that, my intuition whenever meeting anyone else may be that they’ll betray me too. Three bad experiences have shaped, and skewed, my relationship to billions of others.

How to develop accurate intuition?

The more memories we create, the bigger the “sample size” for our intuition to emerge from, and the smaller the weight of “outlier events” (like being betrayed).

The more deliberately we create these memories, the more deliberately we hone intuition.

Create more memories. And create them deliberately.