Welcome back, y’all. Last month, I kicked off the newsletter with a willing acceptance of defeat. Projects have been hard to keep up, and much like our specially approach to lockdown in the US, there seems little we can do to encourage an end by individual will and action. When ends allude, continuity can satisfy. While the first issue was an absolute blast to write and share, this second issue has been a warm comfort of a different kind.
I really like the commentary on dog's intelligence being (at least in some ways), different, rather than worse. It's something I've been thinking a lot around neurodiversity.
A lot of what's considered "poor communication skills" in autism are actually communication skills that work perfectly well between autistic people. Since I (not autistic but there's overlap with ADHD) am often baffled and confronted by some standard neurotypical conversation patterns, it makes just as much to say that neurotypical people have "poor communication skills".
Or that neither do, they just speak different languages. (This is one of those things that I want to write about for The Whippet but kinda care too much and it would take so much context, so it never ends up happening.)
Re: time of taking a newsletter - it absolutely takes a tonne of time! It's one of the things I try to tell people, but I don't want to scare people off, I just mean: assume it will take you basically a day's work. (For something of The Whippet's length. Obviously like, Austin Kleon's is 10 sentences long and probably doesn't take that long.) It probably takes me 6 hours to write (with more time throughout the week to collect stuff), but it's not like you can write for 6 hours and then do 2 hours of different work, your brain is pretty much checked out after that.
Cause what happens is, people intuitively feel like it will take roughly an hour, and then they beat themselves up and feel bad that they keep "not getting around to it". They didn't not get around to it, they just literally... there was no space for it, with everything else.
I end up saying stuff like "You have to make sacrifices" and sounding like entrepreneur-fanatic blogger type, but I don't mean it like that, it's just literally maths, you can't do a day's work in an hour, and you probably don't have a spare day of disposable, unfilled time, because who does, and people are just setting themselves up to feel bad because they're struggling to do a mathematically impossible thing
(This isn't related to anything you said, you obviously are making time! It's just stuff I think about. It's kinda nice for someone else to be like, yeah, this really does take time!)
This is also me and my belief that all locations within Melbourne take about 45 minutes to get to. Even if I look it up on google maps and definitely know it will take longer, my brain is still like "I'm gonna allow 45 minutes for travel".
I certainly came to the idea of dog intelligence by way of a wish to better understand and regard varieties of human intelligence, despite my insistence the two not be taken in tandem. It's a bit of a tension, but it seems the best way to understand us is to treat us as both incredible creatures and nothing too exceptional. What could feel more foolish than expecting a dog to think just as you do?
If you don't mind sharing further, what types of neurotypical conversation patterns feel confrontational or inaccessible? I'm quite curious about where the boundary lies and how difficult it is to overcome.
The amount of time necessary to write is, I think, something one can only conceptualize if you know how to edit your own work. If I learned nothing else in graduate school, it was how to separate the writer and the editor in my head. I'm not a fan of Hemingway, but this is really the core of his idea "write drunk, edit sober." The latter takes different skills and more time. If you sit down to work on a newsletter, and expect the first outpouring to be publish ready, and then find you need time to craft it down to something you like, it makes sense to be surprised by the time commitment. I don't know much about Austin Kleon aside from his celebrity, but I'm reminded of another famous quote, variously attributed to Voltaire, Twain, and Pascal. It goes something like "I apologize for the long letter. I did not have time to write a shorter one."
definitely agree re: length! Austin Kleon is.. well, yeah, the celebrity. His newsletter is one of the most popular and is 10 recommendations, but no expansion. Just like "I'm listening to this album right now" with 'this album' hyperlinked
re: conversational stuff - I'm happy to talk about it except it would take a fair bit of time to articulate well , which, cf making sacrifices because there isn't enough time to do anything.
One example though is: people speak very indirectly (they don't say what they mean, they say an encoded, roundabout version of it). And when you do say what you mean, since no one says what they mean, they look for the subtext and think you meant some other thing. (And by "people" I mean Australians - who are very slightly more direct than British people and significantly less direct than most Europeans). I'm not talking about passive-aggression or guess culture or anything like that, just... everything is kinda euphemistic.
Example from recently:
I've written a piece of copy, and I post it saying "which of these 3 headlines work best?"
Someone replies suggesting a different headline to any of them.
They are PROBABLY politely trying to say they don't like any of my 3, and so are suggesting a 4th. But I'm not sure. (This is a very indirect way to say it, but I've learned patterns, so I know that's what it can mean. I am pretty good at knowing the codes, compared to many ND people)
So I ask, because I need to know whether I can pick one and publish, or if they're not happy with it: "Are you politely trying to let me know I shouldn't use any of the first three? Sorry, not able to tell. Happy to scrap those if they're not working for you."
"I just thought we could explore some other angles"
I still can't tell if that's them doubling down on avoiding conflict, or they literally are just brainstorming.
This is.. extremely typical of people
Like, they don't answer the question you asked, they answer a different, tangential question that you didn't ask, leaving you in the position of pushing for clarification (seen as rude, often ineffective) or just... trying to mind read
This is not all NT people (my friends aren't like this) - but it's the mainstream norm that is very crazy-making to me, because I feel like I'm constantly biting my tongue. Not to say anything mean, I'm not like, "I want to insult people but I guess they don't like honesty".
I just often want to end everything I say with "literally please hear the words i am saying with my mouth and not different words that you imagine I might secretly mean"
Ahh, yes. That kind of indirect communication can be hard for anyone, so I can appreciate why that might be an extra challenge for some. It's especially frustrating to me outside the realm of work, because there I can at least see that it may come from not wanting to be confrontational or even from an attempt at tact that leads to a lack of clarity. Outside work, it just feels like obfuscating the point to potentially selfish or lazy ends.
I really like the commentary on dog's intelligence being (at least in some ways), different, rather than worse. It's something I've been thinking a lot around neurodiversity.
A lot of what's considered "poor communication skills" in autism are actually communication skills that work perfectly well between autistic people. Since I (not autistic but there's overlap with ADHD) am often baffled and confronted by some standard neurotypical conversation patterns, it makes just as much to say that neurotypical people have "poor communication skills".
Or that neither do, they just speak different languages. (This is one of those things that I want to write about for The Whippet but kinda care too much and it would take so much context, so it never ends up happening.)
Re: time of taking a newsletter - it absolutely takes a tonne of time! It's one of the things I try to tell people, but I don't want to scare people off, I just mean: assume it will take you basically a day's work. (For something of The Whippet's length. Obviously like, Austin Kleon's is 10 sentences long and probably doesn't take that long.) It probably takes me 6 hours to write (with more time throughout the week to collect stuff), but it's not like you can write for 6 hours and then do 2 hours of different work, your brain is pretty much checked out after that.
Cause what happens is, people intuitively feel like it will take roughly an hour, and then they beat themselves up and feel bad that they keep "not getting around to it". They didn't not get around to it, they just literally... there was no space for it, with everything else.
I end up saying stuff like "You have to make sacrifices" and sounding like entrepreneur-fanatic blogger type, but I don't mean it like that, it's just literally maths, you can't do a day's work in an hour, and you probably don't have a spare day of disposable, unfilled time, because who does, and people are just setting themselves up to feel bad because they're struggling to do a mathematically impossible thing
(This isn't related to anything you said, you obviously are making time! It's just stuff I think about. It's kinda nice for someone else to be like, yeah, this really does take time!)
This is also me and my belief that all locations within Melbourne take about 45 minutes to get to. Even if I look it up on google maps and definitely know it will take longer, my brain is still like "I'm gonna allow 45 minutes for travel".
I certainly came to the idea of dog intelligence by way of a wish to better understand and regard varieties of human intelligence, despite my insistence the two not be taken in tandem. It's a bit of a tension, but it seems the best way to understand us is to treat us as both incredible creatures and nothing too exceptional. What could feel more foolish than expecting a dog to think just as you do?
If you don't mind sharing further, what types of neurotypical conversation patterns feel confrontational or inaccessible? I'm quite curious about where the boundary lies and how difficult it is to overcome.
The amount of time necessary to write is, I think, something one can only conceptualize if you know how to edit your own work. If I learned nothing else in graduate school, it was how to separate the writer and the editor in my head. I'm not a fan of Hemingway, but this is really the core of his idea "write drunk, edit sober." The latter takes different skills and more time. If you sit down to work on a newsletter, and expect the first outpouring to be publish ready, and then find you need time to craft it down to something you like, it makes sense to be surprised by the time commitment. I don't know much about Austin Kleon aside from his celebrity, but I'm reminded of another famous quote, variously attributed to Voltaire, Twain, and Pascal. It goes something like "I apologize for the long letter. I did not have time to write a shorter one."
definitely agree re: length! Austin Kleon is.. well, yeah, the celebrity. His newsletter is one of the most popular and is 10 recommendations, but no expansion. Just like "I'm listening to this album right now" with 'this album' hyperlinked
re: conversational stuff - I'm happy to talk about it except it would take a fair bit of time to articulate well , which, cf making sacrifices because there isn't enough time to do anything.
One example though is: people speak very indirectly (they don't say what they mean, they say an encoded, roundabout version of it). And when you do say what you mean, since no one says what they mean, they look for the subtext and think you meant some other thing. (And by "people" I mean Australians - who are very slightly more direct than British people and significantly less direct than most Europeans). I'm not talking about passive-aggression or guess culture or anything like that, just... everything is kinda euphemistic.
Example from recently:
I've written a piece of copy, and I post it saying "which of these 3 headlines work best?"
Someone replies suggesting a different headline to any of them.
They are PROBABLY politely trying to say they don't like any of my 3, and so are suggesting a 4th. But I'm not sure. (This is a very indirect way to say it, but I've learned patterns, so I know that's what it can mean. I am pretty good at knowing the codes, compared to many ND people)
So I ask, because I need to know whether I can pick one and publish, or if they're not happy with it: "Are you politely trying to let me know I shouldn't use any of the first three? Sorry, not able to tell. Happy to scrap those if they're not working for you."
"I just thought we could explore some other angles"
I still can't tell if that's them doubling down on avoiding conflict, or they literally are just brainstorming.
This is.. extremely typical of people
Like, they don't answer the question you asked, they answer a different, tangential question that you didn't ask, leaving you in the position of pushing for clarification (seen as rude, often ineffective) or just... trying to mind read
This is not all NT people (my friends aren't like this) - but it's the mainstream norm that is very crazy-making to me, because I feel like I'm constantly biting my tongue. Not to say anything mean, I'm not like, "I want to insult people but I guess they don't like honesty".
I just often want to end everything I say with "literally please hear the words i am saying with my mouth and not different words that you imagine I might secretly mean"
Ahh, yes. That kind of indirect communication can be hard for anyone, so I can appreciate why that might be an extra challenge for some. It's especially frustrating to me outside the realm of work, because there I can at least see that it may come from not wanting to be confrontational or even from an attempt at tact that leads to a lack of clarity. Outside work, it just feels like obfuscating the point to potentially selfish or lazy ends.