Episode 3: The Step that I Can Take

alex 2022-05-21 2 min read

In this episode I talked about going down the wikipedia rabbit hole, which is something that I often do but which often devolves into a mental spinning my wheels type endeavor. It’s like I have all of this mental energy that I want to dispose of, but I find it hard in certain ways to get the power to the ground so to speak.

I also talked about not censoring myself for the show, that’s almost my mantra at this point that I have to keep reminding myself of. Don’t censor yourself for the show. Nothing bad even, I just don’t let my words reflect what’s going on in my head, and sometimes I’ll have parallel trains of thought going at the same time, but I don’t want that. And I feel it’s a bad habit of mind that I do with myself in the context of this podcast, but that I do with other people too and I think that makes it harder to connect when I do that.

I also talked about the overnight Amtrak train and how the appealing idea in theory doesn’t seem to hold up in reality, and how surprisingly expensive it is! And I already started a bad habit of trying to bullet point the episode in my head for this post while speaking it.

I started thinking through ways to flesh out the content of the show, and one thought I had was to use this as a brainstorming tool for work, so I can do technical episodes too, talking about that stuff as a way to get myself to slow down and flesh out ideas more concretely than I can normally do in my normal frenetic bouncing from one idea to the next. And ultimately that’s I feel the biggest mental benefit that I get from this, it’s just about how speaking my thoughts into the podcast is first and foremost a way of getting my brain to slow down. There’s other ways that I could do that that might work just as well or better, but this is the step that I can take.