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                                             July 3, 2009

                             "Doing Creative Work"
                             [ref]

Merlin Mann offers advice on doing
"creative" work: don't obsess on
process, dive in and get started,     SCIENCE_OF_LUCK
get used to the fact that you're
going to suck (sometimes) and stop
worrying about it.                       Actually, he starts out talking about
                                         being goal directed, and that somehow
   Okay, fair enough.                    morphs into this don't worry about
   Now let's talk about                  where you're going philosophy.
   brain surgery.

   There are some forms of work,
   even some forms of "creative"
   work, where you really do first
   need to gather tools, to learn
   how to proceed before proceeding.

       The point is that there
       are no principles,
       fundamentally, "no one      The advice he's providing
       knows anything".            is not useless, but it
                                   is domain-specific.

                                   When he says "creative work", he's
                                   essentially thinking about
                                   overcoming writer's block, and
                                   (I suspect) writing some fairly
                                   simple, short works (e.g. magazine
                                   articles).

                                   Other mental techniques are needed
                                   for larger projects that do indeed
                                   require preparation of some sort --



             His one, rather simple point of advice ("just dive
             in and get started") works only when no prep is
             needed (or it's been done already), and (I suspect)
             when you don't really have all that far to go to
             get the job done.

             Some tasks are slow, steady slogs...
             how much prep do you do, and what kind?


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