A Vision of the Future

I didn't write that title thinking about visualization, but it came to mind as I thought about how to open the blog entry.

It's important to have a vision of what you're trying to accomplish. With a vision, you can make a plan, and with a plan, you can move most efficiently towards achieving what you want to achieve. Without a vision of what you want to accomplish, you're waiting at the whim of fate. This may work out well, but it's not something you have a lot of control over.

The idea of visualization is related to the need for a vision. Athletes often improve their performance through visualization exercises--visualizing their performance in the optimal form helps them bring that optimal character to the real performance. This can be seen as being much the same basic process by which a vision of the future can help all of us: the vision is a model on which we can work, which allows us to guide and refine our efforts to their best effect in our search for our goal.

Swiss philosopher Ferdinand Gonseth wrote a fable that my former dissertation chair, Prof. Jean-Pierre Protzen, of U.C. Berkeley, wrote an article about. In that fable, whose purpose is to question decision-making processes, one character asks another "would you let the dice decide"? This seems like the crucial question with respect to the desire for a vision: are you going strive for something that you want, or are you going to allow yourself to accept whatever the dice serve up? As Protzen points out, we think (we hope) that we can do better than simply letting the dice decide.

Having a vision for the future that you wish to achieve is not necessarily a loss of freedom: having a vision for the future that you want does not mean that you can't change your vision whenever you wish, it just means that you will more effectively pursue whatever vision you have chosen to pursue.

Feedback and Flow

I've been slowly making my way through Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

He talks about how important it is to have immediate feedback to get into the flow state (the flow state is the state of deep concentration that Csikzentmihalyi identifies as the common element in different reports of optimal experience). He talks about how the tennis player knows immediately (almost) whether the shot is in.

But does the dissertation writer have any such immediate feedback? Obviously, at one level, no: the dissertation writer depends on the professors who will ultimately sign off on the dissertation.

On another level, every writer has feedback: is there anything on the page? how much is on the page? is there anything useful on the page? Writers also have the experience of writing--are we engaged? are we focused or wandering? Those experiences themselves can tell us how we are doing.

Often I write something, or rather, I start to write something when I don't really know what I want to say and I'm just saying something for the sake of writing. Often, at such times, I am not focused and my attention is wandering; often my topic is something that I think might be interesting but don't know how to discuss. But as I expend effort to continue to engage with the writing, I begin to find greater concentration, and often I begin to find a greater sense of what I could say, and this helps me focus more: the actual process of writing helps me gain focus. Each word that I put on the page is something to reflect on, and I try to add to it, to refine it. In this way I have continual feedback that helps me focus my attention and move closer to both a coherent written form and to a sense of flow. But, though I strive for such coherence, and find it a nice challenge to see if I can manage to bring coherence into a single, completely unrevised draft, I have no expectation that I will get such coherence on the first draft. Or the second, for that matter. By the third, maybe, but...The more easily that you can write the first draft, the more time you have to revise, and the less intimidating it seems to have a revision ahead of you. If you have a day where you write very productively--you write a good ten pages, perhaps, or more,--then it's much easier to believe that you can have other such days, and so writing becomes that much less intimidating (and therefore that much easier).

In order to get your writing to generate immediate feedback, you need to write something. Let's, for a moment, just think in simple terms. If you're writing and you're struggling to write, and you write a sentence, isn't that a decent feeling? At least for a moment you can say to yourself "ah, I've written that sentence." And if you can write a whole paragraph, you can say "yes, I've written a whole paragraph," and so forth. So it's a good idea, if you're having trouble writing something, to just write anything. See how it looks on the page. See what could follow it; see how it could be built up. Put words on the page.

Sometimes I wipe away what I've written, but if you're struggling to write, you want to get words on the page. I have no trouble filling a page or three (in a blog, certainly, where it's a one-shot deal, and I won't usually even go back to clean up the typos and errors that come from changing my idea in mid-sentence), so if I wipe away a sentence or paragraph, or even page, it's no big deal. But if you're struggling, put words on the page. Give it a try. If you write a first sentence and say "that doesn't work", instead of erasing it, ask yourself, what would have to go with that sentence to remedy the error, and write that. Put words down on paper (or computer).

We have our best experiences when we're working hard, or so at least Csikzentmihalyi reports from his studies of people reporting on their optimal experiences. So how can we create a situation where we're working hard and that work becomes an optimal experience?
Csikzentmihalyi may give suggestions on how to achieve flow--I haven't finished the book--but, if flow states are characterized by concentration and by feedback, we can see that writing is a situation where those conditions apply, and it certainly takes effort. If we want to find flow in writing, the implication seems to be that we want to actually put words on the paper, because these will help us focus and will give us feedback.

Make mistakes. They give you feedback. If you make lots of mistakes, you can write several sentences in a minute. If you try to write a perfec sentence, you can wait hours with no result. Make mistakes, get feedback. Look at the words on the page and say "how do these help me write the next sentence?"

Wouldn't it be great if...?

I was looking at the book Peak Performance: Mental Training of the World's Greatest Athletes by Charles Garfield. Garfield quotes an athlete he worked with as saying, "Excellence is never limited to the playing field. Of necessity, it becomes a way of life." With the behavior of many of the successful professional athletes in this country making constant headlines, I'm not sure that I believe the generality of this statement. But I like the attitude. Or even better, I like the idea that if one makes a way of life of excellence, it will translate into success in any arena.

As I write this, I realize that I'm heading for a potential trap. What is excellence? And, importantly, how does the search for excellence relate to perfectionism--which, as we all know, can cause problems in finishing work? And I don't want to go down this path of reasoning now, however. For the moment I would like to leave the dangers of pursuing excellence aside, while giving a nod to their deserving attention at some point.

I was talking with a writer who was having trouble getting started on his project, and I was talking with him about just looking at the possibilities. Wouldn't it be great if...? Wouldn't it be great if he got his thesis done? Wouldn't it be great if felt good about the project? Wouldn't it be great if...?

It seems to me that a living a life of excellence depends heavily on having a strong sense of "wouldn't it be great if...?". If you have a vision of what it would be great to accomplish--to win recognition, fortune, fame--that is the first step toward achieving results that might be considered excellence. If you're in the habit of having such a vision in your life, it will pervade all aspects of your life, and thus you will manifest the same quality of excellence in all dimensions of your life.

The ability to imagine what you would like--the ability to day dream, basically--is of fundamental value. Charles Garfield talks about an experience in his own life of using visualization exercises to assist him to perform beyond his athletic expectations--there may have been more structure to Garfield's visualization exercises than in loose day-dreaming, but the basic process is the same.

We want to be able to go beyond "wouldn't it be great if...?" to ask what we can do to bring it about, but still, everything depends on the vision--the sense that something is what we want. But bringing the vision into reality is another thing altogether.

There is yet another benefit of the "wouldn't it be great if...?" exercise: it focuses attention on the positive possible outcomes. I talk to lots of writers who are stuck because they are thinking about the negative reaction that they might receive. The fear of rejection is great in most of us (I'd say all of us, but every now and then one meets a person who appears utterly without such fear). When we start worrying about the negative feedback, it makes it harder to do more work--it drains our energy to battle the negative visions and to move in despite of them. It may be difficult focus on the positive outcomes (for example, getting our writing accepted), but when we are focused on them, it is much easier to maintain energy and motivation.