Posts tagged “Jorge Arango”

Listen to Steve and Jorge talk about their writing processes

Late last year I spoke with Jorge Arango on The Informed Life podcast. I’ve just written the second edition of Interviewing Users, and Jorge has just put out Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind through Connected Notes. We thought it would be helpful to reflect on our different processes for organizing information and book-writing in particular.

Our conversation is in two parts (between 35 and 40 minutes each). You can find the audio and transcript at the the episode pages (Part 1, Part 2) and each are embedded below.

Part 1:



Part 2:

Topics

Part 1

  • The New Edition of ‘Interviewing Users’
  • Writing the First Edition
  • The Evolution of Writing and Publishing
  • How We Got Into Writing
  • Writing Books for a Changing World
  • Writing a Second Edition

Part 2

  • The Mechanics of Writing and Organizing Ideas
  • The Challenges and Joys of Writing a Book
  • The Role of Structure in Writing
  • Using Different Tools
  • Reflections on Writing

Listen to Steve on The Informed Life

Thanks to Jorge Arango for a great conversation on The Informed Life podcast. The half-hour episode is embedded below, available at the podcast site, and wherever you get yer podcasts. The episode page also has a transcript.

And I have found, over the last few years, that in addition to providing tactics and kind of mindsets and sort of, “here’s what I advise and recommend for you to be successful in doing this work.” In these interactions that we have in kind of these feedback sessions, the role that I’m often playing is in giving people confidence and being able to say, “oh, the thing that you are describing is very common.” Because I think people have some experience, it feels weird, and they’re like, “well, I’ve screwed this up.” And so I’m working hard to give people confidence and say… to affirm their experience, to validate the uncertainty and struggle they felt in it. And then maybe say, “yeah, here’s a thing that you can try,” or, ” you know, there are tactics to kind of address this.”

But they need the confidence as much as they need the tactics. Because they might get to those tactics on their own, but if they feel like, “this is not the right way to do it, I’m screwing this up,” because it is a weird thing, because you may find yourself feeling like you’re screwing up when you actually are succeeding, because you’re dealing with the absolute uncertainty of another person who you don’t know, who you’re spending time trying to get to know a little bit… it’s entirely unpredictable and uncontrollable. And so, all the ways that we expect ourselves to be successful is to be controlling for all that uncertainty, but it’s inherently uncontrollable to some extent.

So yeah, the more you do it, the more you either make mistakes or feel uncertain about an experience that you’re having and reflect on it, whether it’s through listening to a podcast where people are talking about this or reading a book, or, working with someone who’s more experienced, who can reflect back to you. Those are all ways that we do become more confident with these sort of… surprising or unexpected aspects of what the nature of the work is.

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