Pilers and filers

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Einstein’s desk, the day he died (Photo: Ralph Morse for *LIFE*)

In Temple Grandin’s Visual Thinking, she writes about the work of psychologist Linda Silverman:

In a presentation about the differences in learning styles, Silverman flashes a slide showing a person with a tidy file cabinet and a person surrounded by messy piles of paper. The “filer” and the “pilers,” to use her terms. You probably know which one you are. What does it say about the way you think?

According to Silverman, “Filers” tend to be verbal/sequential thinkers and “Pilers” tend to be visual/spatial thinkers.

When googling around for these terms, I came across a blog post for the Container Store that suggested different products for different kinds of thinkers — tell us who you are so we can sell you something! — filing cabinets and file folders for the Filers, of course, but for the Pilers, they recommend a cabinet of drawers to throw the piles in. (But doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having the piles out where you can see them? Hmm.)

What’s funny is that I was just telling a friend on the phone that I use drawers as a way of storing my collage materials — I toss scraps into the drawers, and when it’s time to make a collage, I just pull out the drawer and start sifting through stuff.

All of these “versus” type situations can be rethought as spectrums and/or creative tensions. There are times when I want to access that sequential part of my brain and bring order to things, and filing does that, but there are other times I want to access my visual brain, and piles help.

Rob’s Roget and reference

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

After writing about discovering the magic of Roget’s Thesaurus, I started getting really interested in what reference books writers keep near their desk.

What I did not anticipate is this photo of Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford with his MacBook and a big stack of reference books:

From his Fresh Air interview:

I love the English language. My favorite book is a thesaurus, you know. I’m constantly looking to find words and language that some bands would maybe hesitate to use or they’re not able to because of the arena that they work in.

In his memoir, Confess, Halford writes about Roget’s Thesaurus being “worth its weight in gold!” and bringing it into the studio with him:

When I wasn’t recording vocals, I was low-profile in the studio and usually sitting on my own in the corner, studying hard from a book. Roger was obviously curious, and after a few days he wandered over to have a word with me.

“You’re very engrossed in that book, Rob,” he noted. “Is it a… Bible?”

“Hardly!” I laughed, showing him the book. “It’s Roget’s Thesaurus!” Roger looked pretty relieved.

Mr. Roget and I were coming up trumps. I have always been keen to widen my songwriting vocabulary and still have that same tome today.

He writes more in Biblical:

I have a book that is very dear to my heart. It’s forty-five years old, but it’s in extremely good nick for its age. Published in 1977, it’s my well-thumbed copy of Roget’s Thesaurus, and it has helped me to write the lyrics for every single Judas Priest album from Sin After Sin onward.

What you need to write a hit, Halford says, is “paper, pencil and a good Thesaurus.”

Hell yeah! (Big thanks to my pal Julien.)

The Psychology of Money

Sunday, February 19, 2023

It is very rare to find a book you like, written in a style you like, published in a way you like. Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money is one of those rare books.

It’s not only a validation of my own approach to money — stay out of debt, live below your means, save as much as you can, take a long view, let compounding do its magic over time — it’s also written in opposition to the “one long slow idea book.”

In a conversation with Ryan Holiday, Housel said the book was rejected everywhere and that his agent had to fire herself because she couldn’t sell it. He said he went with Harriman House because they were the only publisher that would take it. (I’d never even heard of them.) They’re doing the free download with purchase of a physical copy thing that record companies have been doing for years, but publishers still resist. It’s now sold over two million copies!

A blog post is a search query to find your people

Sunday, February 19, 2023

when you pin your kind you get your team — A blackout from my book, *Show Your Work!*

I loved Henrik Karlsson’s piece, “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”

He writes:

A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.

So what do you write about to find your people?

You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.

If you do this, Karlsson says, “You will write essays that almost no one likes…. Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.”

This is really a great summary of the best thing that writing and sharing your work can do for you.