Last week I promised myself that I would write every something each Monday, but as I come to write today, I will admit to you that I am a little frustrated with myself.
Last week, I did have 2/3 rough and idle ideas of what I would I could write about, but I didn’t write them down immediately - and now I can’t remember them.
Or rather, I can remember them but none of the actual nuance and detail that made them (potentially) any good as ideas whatsoever, not even the shallowest substance of what I thought made them worthwhile.
So, they may as well have been completely forgotten. I blew it, basically. And all because I broke my own golden rule (that I have successfully stuck to for 6 years, but only when it comes to lyrics).
Basically, if I ever think of or hear a line or and have the thought “hmmmm, that would make a good lyric’ I PROMISED MYSELF that I HAVE to stop what I am doing and write it down immediately. It takes about 15 seconds. I made this promise 6 years ago and I’ve stuck to it ever since.
It’s a tiny thing (and it actually happens pathetically infrequently) but it means when I am working on a song I now have a store of hundreds of lines (80% of which are useless and I can’t for the life of me think why I bothered to retain them) to choose from. It's great, and it’s a tiny thing that is basically no real effort - just (a very small) discipline and habit.
BUT I haven’t ever managed to implement this rule in my life for anything even slightly more complex than ‘typing about 3-10 words I literally just heard into my phone’. I have never managed to implement for something as ‘complex’ as a ‘really basic'.....IDEA. I’ve never managed to make it an immutable rule that I live life by, probably because it takes 5 minutes (rather than 15 seconds) to sketch out an IDEA in enough detail to preserve it in a form that you can work on later.
But that failure to take 5 mins out to write those ideas down has cost me over an hour just now, scrabbling about for anything to write, crossing everything out, starting again, and then ending up with something probably inferior in the process.
So I’ve lost out. Maybe not hugely in this individual instance, but extrapolate that over a whole year/lifetime and then multiply it along every dimension of my life and how much am I losing out by? I really dread to think.
So look, if the only thing that writing to you every Monday achieves is that I manage to (even faultily and imperfectly) implement some version of a ‘recording of my ideas’ as part of everyday life then honestly, that will count as a massive, massive win.
How many ideas (in the absolute broadest sense of the word) do we ALL have that, simply because we don’t own a net to catch them in, and have even a modicum of self-discipline to sit down and pay them a small amount of attention.....just float off into the ether.
It's basically a free cosmic scratch cards that you couldn’t be bothered to find a coin for.
Stu (Lux Lisbon).
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