Merlin Mann has relaunched 43 Folders; he doesn't want to be the productivity guy any more, he wants to be the creativity guy. It's a good choice.
He notes some essential tension between the demand of professional bloggers to produce immense quantities of on-topic dreck that generates a lot of page views, vs the wise craft of intense creative types who sweat the details to edit things down to a fine polish. (Or something like that; it probably overstates the issue.) And he bemoans the tendency of people to consume an endless stream of shitty first drafts as if that was the only thing worth doing:
What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I’ve come to despise it. (from better)
Since this post itself is a shitty first draft of a summary of what is probably 100 other things I've thought about, I'll keep it short. Sometimes, when you want to have deep insight into a topic, you have to immerse yourself in the details. Your makebelieve insight and fake-connectedness are exercises in helping you understand the world, and even though sometimes the explanation that comes up doesn't really sound any more insightful than what your wikipedia-quoting eight year old can come up with, it came from you. Sometimes, if you are really lucky, you get to reflect on a bunch of first drafts and turn them into second and third drafts - hurray! But at least you got that thinking out into public in a format that can get some feedback. The best way to have one good idea is to have a thousand ideas.
Recommended reading: Alex Osborn's 1949 "Your Creative Power: How To Use Imagination".
