Hello!
I'm Jesse Alford, and you're reading the very first issue of nonlinear.garden.
It's hard to act on what you know. Even when it's all you know. I know, marrow-deep, that rapid iteration is necessary for this kind of thing. The draft of a first issue that this actual first issue is replacing was nonetheless approaching book scale. The conceptual density was overwhelming.
The path to sending you something I'm proud of seemed to only grow longer as I tried to walk down it.
I named this project nonlinear.garden because I knew - I know! - that there is no obvious single path, known in advance, to visit all the topics I want to cover. I realized, somewhere thousands of words in, exactly what I was doing.
I was excited, at first! At last, some structure! A plan! Some order! I started adding headings, to help call out the concepts I was arranging in a line.
That's not what we're here to do. Once I realized it, I got on a right path, or at least, the path that's led me here.
Friends, we have limited time, at every imaginable scale. We certainly have limited time together.
I know we don't make the most of it by always going straight to walking in urgent lines.
I know we don't get to the places we need to reach in one mighty effort, outlined and executed to perfection.
We need to sway, we need to wander, and when we're building things, we need to ship. That's always been the topic for this issue. It's an ironic topic to grow into a dreadnaught of a post! But I found my way back.
Sending this first issue is more important than conveying all the concepts that want to crowd into it. It's more important to use what I know than to ignore it in order to talk about what I know.
This kind of iteration is the only way I know to do anything near the edge of my capability. That edge is where everything interesting is, but I can only operate out here if I do myself the kindness of acting on what I know, not just knowing it for fun.
It's easy to come up with excuses to over-produce, over-invest, to hold back by pouring yourself into something. At least, it is for me. But the uncertainty and the unanswered questions pile up. Is this the right approach? Does this make sense? How much can people get through? I know how to get answers: a bit at a time, finding an idea I can get something out of, working on it, sending it out, learning from what comes next.
So we find that the first requirement, in order to gain desired experience, is to act. To be better at finishing things, you have to finish things. Choose things to finish that can be finished well - and this usually means smaller things.
Decomposition, scope cutting, slicing - any term will do.
This will give you the time and space you need in order to finish the rest of what you need to finish, eventually.
Go smaller, and smaller again, until you are satisfied.
(Don't wrap back around and let making something ever-smaller hold it back, either!)
We'll see how often I can take my own advice.
See you next issue. We might talk about the unreasonable usefulness of organismic metaphors, tiers of learning systems, why thermodynamics demands ambition, or something else - if you have any guidance or suggestions, you can reply to this email and let me know.