Tag: comparison

Comparisons (Personal Development)

Wandering the Twitterverse:
I’m spending time on Twitter building my social network there (#Writercommunity is a good start). It’s a great place for encouragement and commiseration and celebration

But there are dangers. I’m an author who has written five books and

haven’t yet gotten an agent or sold one to a publisher, and I refuse to self-publish because the average self-publisher sells 250 books at latest count. 

There are people on Twitter who have agents, who have books traditionally published, who have awards, who have 41k followers on Twitter. In other words, people much more successful than I am. 

It’s hard not feeling inferior. Or bitter. All the ugly emotions that I don’t want to bring into the Twitterverse because people are so nice there.

Comparing yourself to others is toxic. 
Those negative feelings are the result of comparing myself to others, always the more successful ones. This creates a toxic inner voice that says, “why aren’t you as good as them? You should be better. You should try harder.”

Or ” You might as well give up. You don’t have a chance. You should never have been a writer.”

Either way, I don’t like the person I’m listening to. I want to hide from the Twitterverse, from people, from my cats (who don’t care as long as I feed them).

My solution
First, I take a short break from Twitter and have a good talk with that toxic inner voice. Cognitive journaling (Check out this link; )Ragnarson, 2019)) helps with the cognitive distortions I experience. For example, “You don’t have a chance” is an example of furtune-telling, and I know I can’t predict the future (or I wouldn’t be in this mess anyhow). 

Then I go back on Twitter and celebrate those who are successful. I know I would like it if people celebrated me. If there’s such a thing as good karma, I would like to have a piece of it.

Finally I celebrate myself, because I know I’ve come a long way. 

Reference:
Ragnarson,R. (2019). Cognitivejournaling: A systematic method to overcome negative beliefs. https://medium.com/better-humans/cognitive-journaling-a-systematic-method-to-overcome-negative-beliefs-119be459842c [Available: January 9, 2020)



Moleskine+ vs Rocketbook — let’s see

I’ve been writing at best sporadically the past few days, experimenting with something that I really haven’t done much of, and that’s composing in a notebook.

I generally compose on the computer because my advisor for my dissertation program strongly encouraged this. I like composing on the computer because of my anal-retentive tendencies which get riled up by editing on paper. I hate scribbles. I hate white-out. I hate crossing things out neatly. And forget about pencils, because they smear. I want a pristine page with pretty handwriting, and I will tear out a page and rewrite if that’s what it takes. I waste a lot of time and a lot of paper. 

Hence, my consumer experiment. I have a Moleskine+ pen I bought with a settlement from Barnes and Noble a few years ago. The original pen didn’t function well, so I just got a replacement that does work. This pen, plus a proprietary marked notebook from Moleskine, allows one to write while the camera in the pen records keystrokes, and these pages can be digitized through OCR and sent to Dropbox (or other places) to be repaired as needed — the OCR is not perfect, but it handles my idiosyncratic writing well. 

So let me lay out the advantages and disadvantages of this:

Advantages:

  • The pen writes smooth as butter
  • The notebook is pretty
  • Will digitize several pages at a time.
  • Decent handwriting recognition
  • Relatively robust iPhone app
Disadvantages:
  • The pen requires charging
  • The notebooks cost $27 apiece; there are no cheaper options
  • Scribbles — even more disconcerting because they’re in a pretty notebook
I’m trying an alternative which is known as a Rocketbook, which set me back about $30. The notebook is also proprietary; but it is made of material that can be reused by either wiping or putting in the microwave (I’ve heard both). You write using an ordinary Flexion pen (An erasable/washable pen made by Pilot in many colors); other pens will become permanent. The magic is in the iPhone/Android app which does screen capture and digitizing.

The advantages and disadvantages (ahead of my trial) look like this:

Advantages (perceived): 
  • Reusable, and therefore less expensive
  • Better designed for use as a tool and not a permanent record
  • Can use with more than one pen as long as it’s Flexion
  • Could make mistakes and erase using liquid
Disadvantages (perceived):
  • Flexion pens don’t write as solidly as other pens
  • Flexion pens can feel scratchy (at least on paper)
  • Scanning must be done one page at a time.
So I will be comparing both methods to see which works the best for my drafting on paper, and furthermore, to see if there’s advantages to drafting on paper such as enhanced creativity or the ability to jot random notes down.