WWN28 : Avoiding the Bugmen

On Monday morning I got up to hang some curtains.

“Done by ten am,” I thought to myself.

“Then I can update my content, schedule out some longform posts now that Tweethunter can do that, take a break at lunch, and then write out Voice box and send to beta buyers.”

So I started doing that.

But there’s a slight problemo with my ‘plan’.

We live in an ooooold house, with lathe and plaster walls. Which means that hanging anything is…

A living nightmare!

You can’t use a stud finder to find studs, because the nails aren’t magnetic enough. The lathe doesn’t always sound hollow where there’s no stud because of the construction. At least to this amateur. The studs aren’t even a set distance apart.

And the lathe and plaster is far too weak to hang anything on.

Proper plasterboard, drill a few holes, whap some rawl plugs in, hang anything short of a piano with no bother.

But this stuff?

Nope.

I found some studs (I thought), drilled some holes, missed it, drilled some more.

Ended up with about thirty holes for about five studs.

(Please don’t take that sentence out of context.)

And by the time that curtain finally graced the rail, it was mid-afternoon and my mental energy was more completely spent than George R. R. Martin’s goodwill with his fans.

(At least I got it done though, right? Unlike said author…)

In fact, it sucked up so much time that I never even wrote my daily email to Carran’s Cabin that day, so I was gonna write you about that and the problem I see online of Performative Productivity…

…but I’m going to save that for next week.

Because as I was thinking about my curtain rail saga, I realised a lot of people who swim in the online writing waters are probably thinking the same thing:

“Why are you hanging curtain rails? Why not hire it out? Why do it yourself?”

After all, the Content Creatooooor gurus would tell me that I should be focused on making money, should outsource everything else to focus on my highly paid writing work and so on.

But I don’t. Why not? Because:

I don’t wanna be an insect.

But let me explain that one a bit…

Years ago now I attended an event that was full of big names in the sports world.

Top tier athletes. Runners, hurdlers, sprinters etc.

People you will have heard of, I'm not talking small town track and field. Olympic competitors and medallists. People who have dedicated their whole lives to mastering one event and who have triumphed at it.

I had free access to them all. I could talk to anyone I wanted.

So I spent half an hour chatting to the dude providing background music. Then I wandered over to the coffee bar and talked to the two guys who were on staff there. I talked to an old guy who used to be a navy airman, and a middle-aged mother of two.

Because here's the thing with top tier athletes.

Most of them are really boring to talk to.

(I know a few who’re great, I talk with broad brushstrokes here, don’t get offended on anyone’s behalf.)

But the thing with top tier people in any field is that they're specialists. One specific skill that they have obsessed over for decades. And most of them don't have anything else to their life. No more strings to their bow.

To borrow a phrase from Robert Heinlein, they're insects.

Now, don't get me wrong. Someone who obsesses over every detail of their craft can be a fascinating person, if you enjoy that area. I love talking to obsessive craftsmen writers. But that's because I love writing. To anyone else? They're dull.

I enjoy talking to obsessive cooks, because I love to cook.

I'm not a runner, so someone who can only chat about running bores me to tears. Same with gym bros. Same with metric obsessed Content Creatooooors. Same with obsessive accountants and so on.

But why dedicate an issue of the Write Way to boring bugmen?

Because this is powerful advice for writers.

If all you know is writing?

All you can reach are writers.

Specialisation is for insects my friends. Do you want to be a bug? Or do you want to be a human? To be well rounded? To know enough to talk to anyone about anything, with real interest? You need to move beyond your area.

X-Twitter Content Creatooooors love to talk about being the one person who is the best at their thing. They obsess about data, they optimise every aspect of their lives, they outsource everything except their one thing.

And they are boring little bugmen.

Alex Hormozi might be great at business consulting. I dunno. Maybe I'd hire him if I had a big business I wanted to exit from. Would I go for a pint with the guy?

No way, Hormozi.

Do I want to read anything he writes unless I'm using it to solve a specific problem I'm facing?

Nah.

Don’t be misled by the Halo and Dunning-Kruger effects. Being good at one thing doesn’t make you good at everything, and it certainly doesn’t make you interesting either.

Great writers are insatiably curious about the wildest things. Tiny details fascinate them and grow into whole stories. They've drunk deeply of all that life has to offer them and they are brimming with ideas and stories to tell.

It's one reason I dropped out my PhD. Academia, in my friend's description, is "learning more and more about less and less." That bores me. I want the world.

Sure, I'm a world expert in in vivo essential genes in African trypanosomes. Almost nobody knows more than I do about studying kinetochore-microtubule dynamics using one specific type of optical microscope.

And nobody cares!

(Not even me…)

Far better to be competent at many things and excellent in a few.

That’s why I hang my own curtains. Because I want to learn. I want to know what it’s like to curse the ancient ways of wall construction. I need that frustration, it fuels my writing. I need the satisfaction of eventual triumph. I need the understanding of the feeling of tools in my hands and wrestling with the real world.

So I hang my own curtains, I build my own furniture, I cook my own food.

Could I outsource it to focus on writing? Yes.

Should I outsource it to focus on writing? No.

Because if I did then I’d have nothing worth writing about.

I’d be a specialist.

I’d be Heinlein’s insect.

I’d be a bugman.

But instead? I'm a pretty competent DIYer, despite what my curtain saga might indicate. I’m an exceptional cook, a good writer, a passable speaker. I'm competent in maths, science, history, accounting, business. Good at poetry, fiction, copy and prose. I suck at music, but I'm picking up the tin whistle and tinkering on the piano again.

If you went through my shelves in the cabin you'd find pulp fiction, thrillers, fantasy, sci-fi, literary fiction, adventure stories, non-fiction, theology, books on church history, the history of cancer, the battle of Trafalgar, the history of magic, writing books, poetry, etc.

None of this is a boast, because I'm not even close to mastery in these. It's just an illustration of what following your interests looks like. Don't let yourself be put in a box as "the writing guy". That just makes you boring, which makes you a worse writer in the end.

Pick a skill, sure. Master it, sure. But don't be one dimensional.

Don't be a bug, or you’re gonna get squashed.

Cheers,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

fin

But not quite fin for the fine folks in Craftsman’s Corner who keep the lights on around here. They’re getting a practical exercise in how to develop a broad interest and how to pick up one particular skill…

P.s. This weekend I’m going to send you a couple of emails about Kieran Drew’s Magnetic Emails. I’m going to be offering a powerful bonus that I’ll be disclosing to the Cabin first. If you want to get in on that, make sure you sign up before Friday evening:

You can do that here.