Nothing In the Tank
May 14, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: Superagency by Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato
Listening: Hard To Accept by Trace Mountains
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
Quick Notes
New Work:
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Energy Star
Yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was about Epistemic Anxiety & the pod was on Cognitive Atrophy
Nothing In the Tank
Ideas tend to beget more ideas, but only if you spend the ones you accrue.
It’s a nice feeling, having a good idea. But if you leave it in the tank, unutilized, it produces little value (beyond serving as a reminder that you had a good idea, once).
Far better to burn that fuel, to use it as motive power to get you to the next stop on your journey: the next iteration of you, but also the next tank-full of ideas.
It’s far less risky to conceive of things than to implement them, of course. As soon our brainchildren are booted from the safe wombs of our imaginations, they’re exposed to criticism and doubt. In the light, we can see all their imperfections and flaws, their many missing pieces and vulnerabilities.
Given all that, it’s tempting to just hoard ideas and never write that book, paint that portrait, or orchestrate that performance.
But failing to enact these otherwise formless imaginings renders us less capable of producing more of them in the future. Our ideas, tucked away in long-term storage, stagnate and grow moss. They deteriorate like astronaut bones: freed from the oppressive weight of gravity, but drained of density and form, as a consequence.
I like to think in terms of leaving nothing in the tank, burning through every possible idea I’m fortunate to have so that my brain assumes I’ll always need more.
This seems to work decently well, as when I sit with just one idea too long, I find my capacity to imagine beyond the context of that idea atrophies.
When I have an abundance of possibilities to act upon, on the other hand, my imagination is far more prolific, my practices fueled by that volume and diversity—even though I’ll never have the time, energy, or resources to act on every single beautiful brainchild.
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What Else
Going off lactose has helped my gut a lot, but it may not be the only issue tormenting my innards. More labs and x-rays this week—wish my poor, suffering intestines luck.
In brighter news, I’ve further refined a MacOS version of Authorcise that I think I’m going to submit to the App Store. Been building a lot of little apps and extensions this past week, which has been a blast, but has also made a few of my tedious daily tasks a lot less tedious (which is what technology is supposed to do, ideally!).
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I have often said, when asked about my generally prolific output, that whatever the muse brings I take and execute more or less immediately. Thus when she sees the queue is empty she provides another. If I fail to act on what comes too often, she stops bringing ideas. I don't have to execute perfectly, just enough to clear the runway. Sometimes it's enough to write it down as a note to myself for later, but usually I have to grab it when it arrives or I lose it.