Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

My best advice about writer's block is: the reason you're having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly.

By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it's the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from "writing well" to "writing badly," you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don't like to admit it, because we're raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let's just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that's a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck.

We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands.

We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn't going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster.

And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it's no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC.

You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole.

So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second draft.

— Dan Harmon

I normally do not comment here, but I feel like I have to say this. My mom also was beating the crap out of me for most of my childhood and when my sister killed herself, I blamed my mom for it. But after living with all this hate and anger in my life for years, I started to realize that I can only truly be in peace if I learn to let go of these feelings. It definitely wasn't easy and I still find it very hard to trust her from time to time, but recently I hugged her for the first time in many years and to my surprise that actually felt good.

I helped me a lot to imagine how she grew up and how she must have felt to be pushed to such extreme measures. I don't say it's easy and I don't say you have to forgive your mother or anything like that. I just wanted to share that trying to forgive my mother actually made me feel better in the long run.

I hope you will be able to sort this out some day. I wish you all the best.

Hey there, I struggled with the exact same thing as you when it comes to art. I started teaching myself to draw around a year ago. I made my way through the well known books, 'Drawing on the right side of the brain' and the Andrew Loomis books on faces and figures.

The main thing that pushed me through, and still motivates me, is that now I know the language and the reasons for the 'wrong' parts in my drawing. Now when I draw a figure I catch myself thinking 'These legs look weird because I didn't pay attention to the calf muscles and now my figure looks completely out of proportion' or 'My initial gesture drawing was rigid and as a result my figure looks static, with none of the weight being balanced'. For me I can see myself get better, but a lot of the 'Ah-ha!' moments actually come from realising where I've gone wrong and what I need to look at next to make sure I can do better next time.

As an aside, a huge bonus with this sort of thinking is an renewed interest and appreciation for artists you like, I catch myself looking at the work of guys like Charles Dana Gibson and marvelling at their control over light and shadow, or the expressions they're able to conjure with a few lines. It's an intensely rewarding experience. I'd really recommend grabbing a pencil and just going for it.

I am a pianist that went throught this. The first time I wrote something of my own "taste" was when I was 15. A couple of somewhat important guys told me "We can't wait until you are 18."

This is the only field in which I had this kind of luck. (I am about 30 now and I can write a song within about three days that I would be happy with. A more recent one was when I took an Estonian poem by Johan Liiv and set it to music. I can sing the words, know their meaning, wrote the song accordingly, but I don't speak Estonian.)

My other interests had no such kind of luck. I am still aweful at soccer, but better than other people who started off as rugby players. My MSc was the first time I discovered/invented mathematics and I still am looking for my taste, though I know what it is (self-dual frameworks). I can program the way I think in mathematics, but I am not an accomplished programmer. All of this takes a lot of time, but the recognition along the way is important–especially that one song that I could write at an early age–but then again, I started playing piano when I was, indeed, a six-year-old.

Not everything in life has to be solved, and in fact many things can't be solved. If you do enough therapy you begin to understand the fuzzy traps of the mind, and catch it falling into the "we must solve this" loop.

Often times the answers to many of our problems are obvious (that doesn't mean not-complex; i.e., an alcoholic often knows the best way to improve the quality of their life), and people aren't dumb, but they can't commit to the "solution."

As soon as you break from obsessing over solutions, you begin to break down habits and reasons why you're in the position you're in. Which has the corollary effect of, eventually, "solving" it.

Once I got good at noticing "solution loops" in my own mind I began to notice it in the conversations of friends. It's amazing how many people are stuck in sometimes multi-year loops. And so now, for life problems of a more macro scale: I a) never try to solve anything for anyone, and b) try to gently guide the conversation away from finding an explicit solution to better understanding why they may be in the position they're in.

This sounds simple / reductive, but it's one of the most powerful ideas / tools I've discovered in the last few years.