More than 60% of all Indians believe in homeopathy and with that number growing, it is high time that the country begins to understand the science behind homeopathy and the dangers of blindly believing in its claims.
Deconstructing Homeopathy – Critical Twenties, 19 August 2010
In a recent post Seth Godin compared the efforts needed to learn a new thing with the joy one gets from doing it.
Graph 1: Over time, as we discover new things and get better at it, our satisfaction increases. At some point, there’s a bump when we get quite good at it, and then, in most activities, it fades because we get bored. (Ignore the last peak, that’s the joy of being an expert)
Graph 2: Over time, the trouble to do something decreases
Graph 3: The two graphs overlaid. That zone on the left, the red zone, is the gap between the initial hassle and the initial joy. My contention is that the only reason we ever get through that gap is that someone on the other side (the little green dot) is rooting us on, or telling us stories of how great it is on the other side.
It’s a good thought and probably very true. And assuming that is the truth what strikes to me as the most important lesson from the post is this: The bigger your red zone, the louder your green dot needs to be.
Let me repeat that.
The bigger your red zone, the louder your green dot needs to be.
That right there is why we need to have heroes. Those green dots are our heroes, they help us get through the red zone. If our heroes are people we know then we hopefully they will realise that they have to ‘get louder’. If not, then we can use our own voice to make the green dot louder by using the self-manipulation toolbox.
But what happens when we don’t have heroes for a particular situation? As we go ahead in life, we specialise. We use the inspiration that we have gained from our heroes to achieve new things. In the process, we go through unique experiences and we become unique individuals. Individuals with our own very unique problems. It can get very hard to share those problems, let alone find a hero who has been through the same problems and emerged successful. What then? What if we don’t have a ‘green dot’?
A friend recently told me that she finds it hard to write about something unless she has strong feelings for it. ‘It’ can be any thing, any person, or any thought. There is a lot of truth in that submission, I cannot help but agree.
I started blogging because I wanted to get better at writing but even then, I wrote only about things that I really cared about. This blog soon became the thing that I turned to when I had a lot on my mind and needed to organise my thoughts, rationalise my feelings, evaluate a situation…or just stand back and observe something that I deeply cared about. I could feel the words flow when I had strong emotions about what I was writing.
But isn’t that obvious?
When emotions are involved we always tend to be able to do more (good or bad). We are more energised, more enthusiastic and more focused. These strong emotions that can fuel such a rush can range from anger and jealousy to happiness and love.
It seems like the way forward then, doesn’t it? When I want to write about something I must create a strong emotion (of sort) about it and I will be able to write about it. But it’s not as easy as that. Emotions cannot always be controlled that easily. One needs to experience a particular string of events to be able to create that emotion and more often than not we don’t know what are those particular string of events to help us achieve this.
Just when I seemed lost I came across A. J. Jacob’s talk on ted. com.
An editor at Esquire magazine, he takes his writing very seriously. He dives right into it to be able to write about it. He calls his life a series of experiments:
Surely having been through such experiences for extended times (sometimes a year) of his life, must have benefited him in more than one way. It must have not just given him ‘stuff’ to write about but also create emotions that he could use in his writing. In his talk, you may realise that certain events stirred his emotions (such as the last two months of the year when his wife wouldn’t kiss him because he had decided not to shave or the time when he had to stand in his own house because he couldn’t sit on seat where a woman sat during her periods).
Of course, it may not always (rather it may rarely) be the most practical way to be able to write well. But then why not treat writing as actors treat acting. Actors dive in to being the person they want to play: they bend their way of thinking to be able to respond the way the character would’ve responded or they push their emotional frontiers such that they can feel the emotions that the character would’ve felt. Basically, they try to become the character by doing what they can so that the character feels real on-screen. Aren’t we all in awe of great performances where we are not able to distinguish the celebrity from the character?
Can writers do something similar? Become actors so that they can create strong emotions to be able to harness the power of emotions to write. Or do good writers already do that?
Akshat Rathi 