The Uncertainty Mindset 2019-2020

A newsletter project by Vaughn Tan (book | homepage | Twitter | Instagram).

If you've arrived here from an external site and want to know what's going on—or if you've become disoriented in this garden of forking paths—you can always go to the index page, the topic list, or the issue list.

Feel free to get in touch (especially if you find a broken link) or sign up for the newsletter.

#41: Surrendering control

vaughn2nd January 2021 at 3:09pm

This issue is about how I resisted producing and sharing work-in-progress on my book for almost a decade out of a pathological and irrational fear of criticism, even though writing clearly improves thinking. This dumb hangup naturally delayed the book's publication, though other issues with the publishing industry also contributed to this.

I then expand on the idea of using a self-imposed forcing function (like writing a newsletter) as a method of self-therapy to get over this dumb self-imposed roadblock. The second half of this issue is a working version of an article I wrote for the Yak Collective, an amorphous organization, on the benefits of surrendering control in ways that are carefully designed to force organizations over the obstacle posed by a fear of failure—an instance of what I've come to call desperation by design.

You can find it here: #41: Surrendering control