Greg McKeown:
Welcome. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I’m here with you on this journey to learn how to become 1% wiser every day. Have you ever felt like there were just too many tabs open in your mind? Today, I’ve invited Alison Jones, the author of Exploratory Writing: Everyday Magic for Life and Work. By the end of this episode, you will have the simplest of tools that can produce extraordinary results. You’ll discover an idea so simple you’ll get it immediately, and yet you’ve probably never done it before in your life. It will help you to be able to turn the chaos in your mind into clarity and even creativity. Let’s begin.
If you want to learn faster, understand more deeply and increase your influence, teach the ideas in this podcast episode to someone else within the next 24 to 48 hours.
Alison Jones, welcome to the podcast.
Alison Jones:
Hello, Greg. It’s good to be here.
Greg McKeown:
Tell me, how did you discover exploratory writing? Or rather, how did it discover you?
Alison Jones:
The jury’s out on which way it happened, actually. So I guess there’s two answers to that. One is that professionally I was aware of free writing and had used it in the past, and it’s obviously a really powerful tool that many writers use. But the more personal answer is that it just occurred to me at three o’clock in the morning when I was having an entrepreneurial meltdown, and I think I’m probably not the first one or the last to have that and that overwhelming, what have I done? How will we keep the house? You know, all the things that go through your head at three in the morning in the early stages of setting up a business.
Greg McKeown:
You’re having a panic attack.
Alison Jones:
I was having an anxiety attack, a panic attack here. Exactly. And it’s in the middle of the night, of course, three in the morning. It’s when it always happens, isn’t it? And it urges you out of bed. You can’t just lie there, you physically, I had to move, I had to do something, didn’t know what to do, really. Obviously, he thought waking my husband would be a bad idea. He wouldn’t perhaps appreciate that there was a scruffy pad of paper and a pencil. And I just started to write and, and it really was, I say in the book, it was a sort of a, it was a howl on paper, it’s really inarticulate. But then I started to describe the sensation I was feeling, just trying to get some sort of distance from it, control over it. And honestly, I think had that been the outcome, that would’ve been a really good result because I was managing my state, and that was really helpful. But what blew me away was that as I kept writing, I shifted not just into a kind of more calm state but into a more resourced state. And I started to have ideas, and I remember writing, oh, I wonder if, and within this five minutes or so, I had an idea for a way of managing the cash flow, getting a new product out quite quickly. It solved the problem, and it just blew my mind that in just a few minutes, I could move from this limp, limbic, chaotic, anxious state to this resourceful, purposeful planning state. Just through writing into the feeling. I think that was when I suddenly realized it was more than just therapy, more than just state management. That was a really powerful thinking tool.
Greg McKeown:
I relate to that completely because, in the journaling that I do, I find a pattern, which is, I’m drawn to it to just try to declutter, to try and deal with all that mess in my mind. But as I proceed, it isn’t long before I’ve started to actually make a prioritized list of what to do next and which things are important. And it’s not because I’m trying to do that; it’s not because I’m prompting myself to do it. That does seem to be a process. I had a feeling of real connection with you as I read that story in your book.
Alison Jones:
Well, one thing is, I mean, journaling is brilliant. It’s very powerful. It’s a great discipline to do. And I can tell you now, I would never have started journaling in that place. Yes, it was too raw; it was too messy. And the only vehicle that I would’ve trusted was a sort of scruffy pad of paper where I, the kind of deal was that I was going to rip that up, throw it away, so I, I haven’t got it. I literally, I threw it away. And I think that is significant that we need almost something that is roar than a journal sometimes for the stuff that we don’t actually know where it’s going, <laugh> or we, we don’t have the words.
Greg McKeown:
I love that distinction because we talked about it briefly before we came on air, that specific idea that this isn’t journaling, that exploratory writing is permission not to have any audience at all. This is not to be kept, this is just to get it out of you. No strings attached, and so on. So that’s one of the rules of the road for this mechanism of writing. Yes?
Alison Jones:
Yeah. There are no rules, obviously, because it’s your writing practice, and you do what you want with it. But I would strongly suggest that you, if you haven’t tried that deal with yourself, that this is not to be kept. I think there’s pressure when you sit down to write in a journal, it’s a beautiful notebook, and there’s a limited number of pages in it, and you want the words to count, don’t you? And I feel even that pressure can sometimes be unhelpful when you are in the really early stages of thinking, I see that scruffy blank page almost as an extension of what’s between your ears. It’s a kind of, it’s this safe space that is completely private. And I think there are very few spaces like that in the world for us.
What tends to happen is that we keep the stuff that we feel we can’t share inside our heads, where it goes round and around in circles and never really gets anywhere. And as you say that the act of writing has this extraordinary magic of it, of moving us forward. And it’s a kind of compromise, I guess, between getting stuff out into the world where you can see it and deal with it and keeping it to yourself so that it’s safe and you can say exactly what it is you need to say, no matter how potentially hurtful or inappropriate or messy it might be. And that, to me, is the deal you do with yourself in exploratory writing. It’s not for anybody else.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I wrote down something as you were talking, which is this process of from chaos to decluttering, then to creation and that it seems to happen spontaneously if you’ll start at the beginning, if you’ll be willing to just get that stuff on a page and, and that I think is the courageous part of this process. Do you think it takes courage?
Alison Jones:
I do. And I think I mentioned to you at the beginning, just in the green room, I loved that phrase of yours in Effortless, the courage to be rubbish. And that seems very much, it is, it does feel courageous because you don’t actually know where you’re going with this. So you start the sentence, you’ve no idea how it’s gonna end and that that’s risky and it does feel, but then because it’s just for yourself, it takes the pressure off it. There’s no requirement for you to perform. And I think the performative writing that most of us do has lots of benefits cuz it allows us to communicate, and that’s great, and we need it. And this is a very different form of writing that isn’t at all performative and does give you the, as you say, the courage to be rubbish and just get it out there in the first stage.
Even I think also this’s the courage to go through the first two difficult minutes, which isn’t a very snappy phrase, but actually, when you start writing almost, it’s like when you start a run, well, not when I start a run anyway, the first couple of minutes are always just, oh, my legs have forgotten what to do, and I can’t get my breathing right. And, of course, three minutes in, the rhythm takes over, and your breathing settles down. And exploratory writing’s very like that. You really have to commit to pushing through for a few minutes. I use a timer. I used to do five minutes, now I do six. Having spoken to Julie Bolton, and I think that is super helpful because you’ve got an endpoint, and it makes it more of a sprint, and it allows you to, because you’ve only got six minutes, you actually end up writing quite fast and quite free. And that, I think, is where the magic happens, where you break through the things that you already know, you know, and get to the things that you didn’t know you knew.
Greg McKeown:
Even the language of exploratory writing surprised me how curious I found that title for the book. In one sense, it’s not like some odd phrase exploratory writing, and yet it said without really saying it, that that isn’t the kind of writing we normally do. And you’ve just given that specific language that we do performative writing. And I think to myself, how much of the writing of our lives is performative in some way? Yeah, performative in essays…
Alison Jones:
I think nearly all the writing that we do in our lives generally is performative in some way we are, except perhaps those scribbled notes that you do to yourself. Remember the dry cleaning. That sort of stuff is purely functional, but it’s not typically where your best ideas happen. But generally, any writing that matters, you know, if you’re writing books, you’re writing for your author, quite rightly, you’ve got your author in mind. If you’re writing an email, a report, particularly business writing, you’re trying to communicate something, but also you’re trying to elicit a particular response. So you are very much thinking, how do I communicate what it is I need to say in a way that’s going to land and result in the outcome that I want from the person reading it? So there’s a whole lot of mental stuff going on there, all of which constrains you in some way.
Greg McKeown:
I think that’s a valid point. That word honest really hits me because just today, I came across a note that I had written out of a moment of frustration that was completely honest. And as I read it again, I found that there was more insight into it than would’ve been obvious at the time. And I think this is the idea of like complete honest writing is that you start to see things, and there’s gold dust mixed between all of the faffing that’s there. And I think that this is what really has drawn me to your work on this subject is the opportunity that I think, if I understand it correctly, that it gives us to discover for ourselves these infinitesimally small but infinitely important insights that hide below the surface.
Alison Jones:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
Can exploratory thinking help us to do that?
Alison Jones:
I really believe exploratory writing can help us to surface the stuff that’s hidden that we are dimly aware of or even not even aware of at all. I guess we don’t have any spaces to do it, and we have so many readily available alternatives to it. So now, if we have an itch of a question, make my kids, well, I go to Google, my kids go to YouTube, and they’re looking for other people’s take on this. They’re looking for what the world says about this, you know, what’s on the internet about it. And that’s a really tempting way to start because it gives you something to work with right from the get-go. You, you’ve got an answer; there you go. And I think if you can detach from that for a minute and lean into your own thoughts about it, you are so much more likely to come up with something original, relevant, and important to you. I mean, then you can go and look on Google and see what other people say, but there’s something about taking that time before you just switch into that kind of derivative search-focused mode to actually explore what’s going on inside your head. That’s really valuable. And I think very few people understand that they can do, even.
Greg McKeown:
Speaking of exploring what’s going on inside of your head, you identified some of the science behind why exploratory writing works. Can you share some of that with us?
Alison Jones:
Yeah, I, part of me thinks it’s still magic, even though I know a little bit of the science now, but one of the things that really blew my mind was instinctive elaboration, which I hadn’t, I mean as since one of those phrases that as, as soon as somebody, yes, of course, yes, that’s the thing that I knew about but didn’t have a word for. And it’s just simply that mental reflex that kicks in when somebody asks you a question, and it hijacks your brain. And no matter how deeply you are involved in the five-year forecast or whatever, if somebody asks you, what did you have for lunch? You can’t help but think about the panini that you just, you know. So it is usually used for evil. and we usually ask ourselves really awful questions like, why am I so bad at this? Or why does nobody like me? But if you set yourself good questions, then you really set yourself up to use that mental reflex really positively. So if you write something like, I don’t know, I’m feeling really unsettled today. And I think the reason is that sets you up for that more curious, exploratory treatment of yourself, and it’s much more kind to yourself.
Greg McKeown:
The term is instinctive elaboration, is that right?
Alison Jones:
That’s it, yeah.
Greg McKeown:
Instinctive elaboration. And this is the term for what the effect of questions has on our brain. Yes? Am I catching it right?
Alison Jones:
So you ask your brain a question, and it can’t help but go looking out for answers.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. You used the word, it hijacks our thoughts. Yeah. And our unconscious mind cannot help but go to work on it.
Alison Jones:
It’s so helpful, and it makes you realize that, actually, your main job here is to find the good question because then you can let your brain do the work. As long as you give your brain the time and space to answer it. If you have set yourself up with a really interesting question, you’re gonna find something useful. You don’t have to worry about how you are performing and doing that because your brain is hardwired to do it. I find that huge liberating.
Greg McKeown:
The idea that your brain can not not do it is, I think, the experience we’ve all had. And yet having this label for it and being able to go and do a bit more research after I read it in your book, I couldn’t help but start asking people questions just to watch the involuntary experience that follows even the simplest of questions they suddenly have. The brain will stop and pause and look. So yeah, mo more thoughts on instinctive elaboration. Anything else?
Alison Jones:
I guess knowing that it’s all about questions is really helpful. I think often when people do journaling or do free writing, they kinda start with a blank page, and that can feel quite intimidating. So knowing that actually all you have to do is bring a question, and questions can come from anywhere, but we have them all the time. Or if you have an experience or something that unsettles you or somebody says something that bothers you quickly, you can turn that into a question. So it’s like the raw material of the day can then become your prompt for the free writing session. And I find that really helpful.
You don’t have to just, you know what’s on my mind. Like, I mean that that is a perfectly good prompt, by the way. You can totally use that. But if you’re a more practically minded person than me, if you’re more sort of functional with your writing, then knowing you can turn any negative or positive experience or any neutral experience that you’re just interested about or curious about turning it into a question, it becomes a kind of habit of mind that I think is really powerful.
It has this kind of added benefit in the way that I first instinctively did when I was writing at 3:00 AM, that sense that you are detaching yourself almost from the feeling from the experience itself and observing the feeling and using it as grist to the mill, if you like. And that’s hugely helpful because it reminds you that this isn’t simple reality. This is a construct. This is you interpreting reality and the emotions that you’re feeling, the imputation that you might be giving someone else’s to it, to their motivation or what they are trying to get from you. All of that is, is your constructed reality, and dipping into exploratory writing reminds you that there are other stories, there are other ways of looking at this, that actually, the world is so much more complex than we instinctively feel when we experience it.
Greg McKeown:
What question do you think you were answering that day that you woke up at 3:00 AM?
Alison Jones:
The one I started with, I didn’t start with a prompt that day. I didn’t need a prompt. I was away. But it, what was happening in me, but was what? What have I done? What have I done? Why would I leave a perfectly good job and security and all that good stuff? Why, what have I done? I’ve messed my, you know, it’s probably an example of a fairly unhelpful question actually,
Greg McKeown:
But it actually worked perfectly.
Alison Jones:
It’s interesting, it turns it around. It worked perfectly well. Yeah. As I say, I didn’t consciously think of about it as a prompt, but it was the kind of howl that was going around me, my head. And what I took it into is what can I do? Which is much more solution focused.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. But I like this idea that you’ve presented that we can turn life’s messiness and challenges into our prompt. For example, I wonder whether the real unconscious prompt was, what is this howl? You know?
Alison Jones:
What, what’s going on? Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. Something like that. Just what is going on? I think that doesn’t feel like a bad prompt if you’re looking for sort of a one to always go to what is going on in my life. I,
Alison Jones:
Yeah, that’s a great one. There’s lots of multipurpose prompts, and that’s a really good one.
Greg McKeown:
Give me other examples of prompts that you have found to be particularly useful.
Alison Jones:
There’s a few pages of prompts, I’ll just pick out a couple right now. The best part of me is saying, which I think is a really nice one. What would I say to a friend here is a great way of creating some sort of distance and helping you be kinder to yourself. If I could have a coaching session with Greg, what would he say? Who could help with this? My superpower is what would happen to my business if I couldn’t type tomorrow? And that’s a really specific example of using it to sort of kickstart some ideas about maybe future-proofing your business. So if you have something in mind, we use quite a lot of these, either campfire that I do for the Extraordinary Business Book Club, and we’ll take something that’s on somebody’s mind and just riff off it. When I look back on this week, I want to say, if I could focus on just one thing in my work stroke, life stroke, relationships today, it would be, I mean, honestly, you can just riff off anything that’s on your mind and turn it into a question.
Greg McKeown:
As I was reflecting on this, there are a couple of things that came to my mind. One was a question that I have often used in planning but not in free writing. And that is just what’s important today.
Alison Jones:
Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
Because when I ask that question, I often don’t know the answer when I ask the question. So I have to go through a process of meaning-making and connections and looking at all of the pressures coming at me and filter through them to even get to an answer.
Alison Jones:
Right.
Greg McKeown:
Now, I want to try this with free writing. I want to do a six-minute exercise. And for those of you listening, I want to extend that specific challenge to you as well, to time yourself for six minutes, maybe doing this instead of your usual planning process. And just try to just throw that out as right as fast as you can on a piece of paper you’re going to throw away. Does that all sound right? What am I missing?
Alison Jones:
That’s it. Six minutes. Put on a timer so that you’ve got a contract with yourself. You stop when the timer goes off, right? Without stopping. Be as honest and raw as possible. Don’t care about where the apostrophes go. And then at the end, just look back and as you say, pick out the gold dust, cuz there’ll be a lot of draws in there, especially the first couple of minutes. But just keep going, and you’ll find the gold dust.
You said something of them, it was really important. You said you don’t know the answer to the question, what’s important today? And I would say that that is essential. So this is what Edgar Schein calls humble inquiry, isn’t it? It’s that sense that you ask a question not from a power play, not because you know the answer and you’re trying to get somebody else to say it. It’s an honest, open, curious question. I think that’s really important. And I think as business people particularly, we’re so used to stealing in answers and we’re so used to expecting ourselves to have answers, it can feel quite uncomfortable, quite courageous to ask yourself a question where you know you don’t know the answer. And if you think about your average CEO, where do they get to do that? Maybe with a really good executive coach, but your coach isn’t on hand 24/7. So having that space to ask questions where you genuinely haven’t got a clue what the answer is, I think, is really important for our mental health as much as anything.
Greg McKeown:
Well, and again, this idea that there’s a space between what’s in our head and any communication with someone else, that there’s a space there to be completely raw. That’s, you’ve said the word honest, but raw is even better, isn’t it? That’s the idea. That you just to get to be exactly what you are, what you think right now in front of you, and that it is not just an exploration, but that there is actual discovery in that, you know, the point of the exploration that you discover this is what I think.
Alison Jones:
And that you move forward.
Greg McKeown:
This is what’s going on. Yeah, this is who I am. I can filter through this and actually learn that about myself. It’s awfully hard to do it when it’s all happening inside of your head.
Alison Jones:
Yeah, no, and that sense of forward movement with it as well. I remember one of the loveliest things I discovered in my research of the book is Steve Peters, The Chimp Paradox author. He used to be the coach to the GB cycling team, and apparently, he had a rule that any athlete could come complain at him, but if they did that, they had to do it for 15 minutes without stopping. Nobody ever could . And I think that’s really interesting because if it keeps going round and round in our head. I don’t know about you, but I can complain in my head for way longer than 15 minutes. But if you actually properly give yourself permission to rant on paper after about a couple of minutes, you’ve said all, you’ve got to say, and it starts to feel quite boring, and it maybe that’s the root of the magic, but you actually end up starting to come more solution focused. I think you see yourself, you allow yourself to be heard. And there’s something really powerful in that.
Greg McKeown:
I think that’s a very interesting story that you just described about us not being able to complain for more than 15 minutes. Whereas it feels in our heads that we can be complaining for hours and hours, weeks, months, years, but actually what we’re doing is complaining about the same things, ruminating on them, spinning on them, and sometimes worse than just ruminating with spiraling on them. And so we get more and more frustrated or more and more depressed, or mental health is going down the tube. But if you can get it out, you realize, okay, it’s just those things, and I’ve dealt with it now, and so I’m free to get to other newer, better thoughts.
Alison Jones:
And I remember not long ago, actually, I was feeling quite overwhelmed. There was an awfully lot of stuff on my plate, professionally. And I remember starting a sprint saying something like, I feel completely overwhelmed at the moment, and it’s because, and I started listing out all these things I got, there was about five things. I was like, yeah, actually, now I look at it that it had felt so overwhelming. And actually, you know, one of them was fairly easily sold, and it was a really, I kind of laughed at myself, but I also, I felt, again, so much more resourced and capable at the end of that session, which was a great gift.
Greg McKeown:
How long did you spend in that session? Was it literally six minutes then that you spent in that session?
Alison Jones:
Literally six minutes. Yeah. In fact, I think it probably…
Greg McKeown:
Six minutes.
Alison Jones:
I always set the timer for six minutes. Often it ebbs and flows. So I think with that one in particular, there was a sort of vomiting onto the paper for probably about 90 seconds, after which I kinda went, actually, that is it. And then took a breath and thought, well, actually, what’s the first thing I need to do here? And then it shifted into a slightly different gear. So I did write for six minutes, but it was a sort of six minutes of two parts, which isn’t unusual.
Greg McKeown:
Is this the kind of thing that a manager listening to this conversation could have a team of people do at the same time? Or is that something that you think would be just inherently more performative, and there’s a, there’s too risky to do?
Alison Jones:
No, and I do this all the time. I do workshops, you know, teaching this skill to people in organizations. It’s massively beneficial partly because of all the human stuff because we’re all humans. But I think there’s also when you come to an organizational level, there’s the inclusivity piece.
So many people feel that they can’t be the first person to speak or that they are too low status to speak first in a meeting, or they aren’t confident enough because English is their second language, or simply that they are neurologically, that they are reflectors, they don’t wanna speak, they want to think about something. And I think if you can imagine if you started a meeting with a six-minute writing sprint focused on the topic at hand, it would reduce groupthink because you wouldn’t have that first contribution just anchoring everything. It would allow people who are visual thinkers to sort of draw it down in their, if that’s the way that they like to think, it would allow someone who’s in, whose first language is in English, to write in their own language and just prepare their thoughts. And I think that it’s such a simple thing, but you can imagine the quality of the contributions to that meeting and the equity within that meeting would be improved massively.
Greg McKeown:
This is really fresh for me because in a sort of spontaneous moment recently, I drew out this iceberg very basic on a sharpie and labeled the tip of the iceberg loud people in the meeting and they made a little note on red mark at the very bottom, and I was like, this is the quiet people with the answer. And I posted this on LinkedIn, it’s a thousand comments now it’s 30,000 likes. That’s pretty unusual on LinkedIn and in my own experience, and I’m still trying to make sense of it because it’s a very simple idea, and yet it has hit a nerve for people. And so what you just said there in passing, oh this, you know, that, that there’ll be, you’d get more participation from more people if you have this kind of writing sprint at the beginning clearly is addressing a felt pain in teams and organizations, I would say everywhere. Is this what you found?
Alison Jones:
Absolutely, yeah. And it’s, it is transformative, I think. And even the loud people, it gives them time to get their argument, their ducks in a row. You know, they don’t feel disadvantaged at all by doing this.
Greg McKeown:
Do you suggest that people do it in literally every meeting? Is that how far you’d go? Or is it just if it’s a particular kind of meeting?
Alison Jones:
I think where you really do want to bring fresh ideas to the table if it’s an intractable problem or, I mean, I guess it’s what we used to call brainstorming, isn’t it? It’s those meetings where there’s something that requires fresh thinking contributions from everybody. The average operational meeting, weekly team meeting, you probably wouldn’t want to do this. It’s having the right tool for the right job, isn’t it? But a meeting where you really do want to bring out more contributions from more people because quantity breeds quality. Right. This is a great way to do it.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. I called it write storming the other day when I was trying to express this idea. I didn’t have it in this six minutes, this specific way that we’re talking about it. But the idea of before we talk, everybody sit and write; here’s the question, write. So that people can, as you’ve already just articulated, prepare to speak. Yeah. It is almost nothing so awful as when you’re in a meeting, or maybe it’s a presentation, or it’s a lesson format, and somebody asks a question, and you get silence, and it’s so awkward for the teacher if they’re not experienced with that moment of silence. But for the people that are silent, it’s obviously also awkward because they haven’t got their thinking. And in a lot of ways, you don’t want the first person who is ready to speak, to speak in a sense because sometimes you’re just going to get the person who hasn’t thought yet or isn’t even in tune yet. They’re just blurting it out. And so I do love this idea of a six-minute free-thinking sprint on a particular question.
Alison Jones:
It’s fair to say to the person who speaks first, they probably think they’re doing their room a favor because they’re just breaking this awful silence. Which is fair enough. It reminds me as well of Jeff Bezos. Amazon had that rule where he banned PowerPoint, and instead, you got a memo, there was a six-page memo, and at the beginning of the meeting, there was 15 minutes while everybody sat and read the memo.
It’s a slightly different technique, obviously, but I think the principle behind it is the same is that if you’re going to bring an idea to this meeting, go away and do the work, really write it up into a narrative long form piece. So, this benefit there because the idea will be better by the time it reaches the meeting than if you just thrown together a PowerPoint, and there’s benefit because everybody starts the meeting by reading, which means that they have time to think about it. Everybody actually understands what’s going on rather than coming to a meeting and pretending that they’ve read the paperwork that was sent out in advance. And we are not good, I think generally, at crafting those very, very deliberate structural pauses for reflection.
If you think about academia, and I know you’re in academia now, and reflective practice is such a huge part of that. It’s understood that if you’re not reflecting on what you’re doing, if you’re not getting the formative feedback and looking at it and really reflecting on what that means for you and what you’ll do differently next time, then you’re not learning. And that goes, it just goes out the window for most workplaces as soon as people get their degree and start working, and being able to build it into your day in this really lightweight, focused way, I think, is really helpful.
Greg McKeown:
Tell me, what have you learned since writing the book that you wish you’d put in it?
Alison Jones:
Oh, a great question. I wish I’d read Oliver Birkman actually before I wrote the book because a lot of what he says about what the internet does to us is, to use your phrase, is really interesting. And that thing about the inherent enjoyment of stuff and stuff that’s worthwhile doing, taking the time it takes, I’d love to have incorporated that a bit more. Also, my friend Bec Evans wrote a brilliant book called, Written with her partner Chris Smith, which is all about building and sustaining a writing habit. And it’s one of those books, you know when you read a book, and you go, God, I wish I’d written that, and I wish I’d I, I did get, and I did get an advanced copy and read it, but it was too late to make any changes or to credit it. But I wish I’d put some more of that.
It’s about trusting yourself as a writer. So not necessarily buying into all the myths about writing and having to get up at five in the morning or, you know, writing every day as being the secret, you know. There’s lots of different secrets, actually. It’s just about trial and error. It’s about figuring out what works for you and reflecting on it. And I wish I’d put a bit more of that into the book about, look, this is a suggestion. This is just something that tends to work for people. Use it in whatever way works best for you. And I think I probably could have done more about how you turn that kind of six-minute practice into a more sustained writing practice if you do want to do something more substantial. Those are the two things that immediately occur to me. But I’m sure you know, pretty much, I think every writer is like this the week after it goes to press, you’re reading things going, oh, I wish I put that in the book, but I can’t remember what they all are now.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, but this is one of the challenges of publishing books is that the book ends, but the learning doesn’t. And so you have this quite antiquated process, which has advantages, but a process of even between the time you finish writing the book and the moment it’s published can be nine months. And so, in that nine months, you’ve learned things. Tell me, what have you personally learned about applying this six-minute habit? Like, do you do it every day?
Alison Jones:
Pretty much, and I think that’s the big, you know, often people say, oh, it’s like morning pages, and I’m like, it’s similar to morning pages, but A, you have a prompt and B, it’s probably more functional rather than creatively focused. And C, you just, any time you’ve got that itch of a question. So that is typically how I use it. Otherwise, I can’t often do more than two, more than one a day. I often link it to my run. So I will either, depending on how dark it’s outside at the moment, I quite often do a writing sprint before I go out for my run just cuz it’s so dark outside that I’m killing time until it gets light enough to run. Or often, I will have a thought on a run, and I will come back, and I’ll explore it in a writing session.
So I find that they are very, very complimentary so that I run every day. I’ve run every day for nearly five years now. It’s one of those sort of, you know, building blocks of my life that I, that, that go in there. And I just find it so complimentary to any kind of mental work you do because you can’t do anything else. You can’t be writing, you can’t be talking, you know, I’m just running, and things are just going around in my head, and I find when I come back, I’ve got a new perspective or a new idea and often that’s a really good opportunity to sit down and just lean into it. I’ve had this thought, what, what might that look like?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, mark Zuckerberg recently said that he’d given up running because he couldn’t stop thinking about his business all the time while he was running. But what he really needed to do was had this six-minute exploratory writing at the end of the run. And this would’ve, he could, his running could have continued. There would have been no problem with it.
Do you have a favorite quote? A favorite quote about writing out of all of the quotes and different things you’ve read?
Alison Jones:
Yes, I do. And it’s in the book, it’s in the first bit on rediscovering the page on page 10, and it’s actually Dave Coplin, I think I mentioned it earlier. He was a former chief envisaging officer at Microsoft, so a lovely nod to all the stuff about technology we’ve been talking about. He said, “When you’re trying to create something, when you’re trying to change something, when you’re trying to think differently about something, writing for me is the way that you unravel the spaghetti, and you end up with some really clear, precise thinking that’s actionable that moves the thing forward.”
And just that idea about unraveling spaghetti is just the best image for what exploratory writing does in my head.
Greg McKeown:
Everybody listening to this can relate to the idea of a jumbled mess, a spaghetti of thought that the world’s that we live in our minds. There is a lot of mess in there, and that doesn’t mean that it’s bad, but somehow we have to learn how to take that raw material, write it raw, and then turn that, I think, quite naturally without really trying too hard into a creative process and it becomes more organized through the process of writing. I have experienced this myself, but I love this specific addition that you are giving us and I am personally excited to be able to go and try out this new writing mechanism and to see the possible results. Thank you ever so much for being on the podcast today.
Alison Jones:
You’re so welcome. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Greg McKeown:
What is one idea you heard today that caught your attention? Why does that matter so much, and who is one person you can share that with within the next 24 to 48 hours?
If you’ve found value in this episode, please write a review on Apple Podcasts. The first five people to write a review of this episode will receive free access to the Essentialism Academy. For more details, go to essentialism.com/podcastpromo. Thank you. Really, thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
