Inkhaven was all I wanted and more
Sorry guys, no drama here. The program was great.
Yesterday, I published How Inkhaven failed me. How Inkhaven 2 could be better.
A lot of people have reached out to me and expressed condolences, saying that they were sorry to hear that Inkhaven did not work out for me and that I had so much frustration with it.
Which was like totally not what I intended! My overall recommendation score for the program was 8/10. I was very happy with the month, and would recommend past me to attend. What I described yesterday was the part that would have moved me from 8/10 to 10/10.
So, with that said, what are the things that actually made Inkhaven great?
Inkhaven worked: I wrote so much it became easy
The requirement of posting 500 words per day did work. I produced so much content, and wrote many things I had wanted to get out of my head for a long time, and got way more used to writing and sharing my work publicly.
The pressure to publish did work on me. I achieved was I knew I could not have without the requirement. My main complaint, which I described in the previous post, is that this did not go far enough. I think the daily publishing was such a great pressure to write that it made the program good, no matter all the other pressures against writing I described.
See more detail in my early retrospective:
I got better at thinking and at disagreeing with people
The intellectual environment was amazing. I had so many stimulating conversations, and many posts came out of those. I learned to publicly disagree with people, and that was a big move forward on my blogger’s journey.
The most productive relation of this type was with Dreev, the creator of Beeminder, one of the contributing writers. When Dynomight made a workshop about writing lists, I shared that I wanted to make a list of all the reasons why self alignment is a better way to be productive than commitments, and Dreev immediately said he was interested in reading it. This led me to write the list, have discussion with him about it, write more drafts, him commenting my drafts, me publishing Early thoughts on Cyborg & Mentats, him giving a lightning talk about why commitment devices are cool, and me giving a counter lightning talk about why sometime self alignment is better, and then us having a session where we debated what should be used in which context.
This was the first time in my life I had such a productive disagreement with someone, and that definitely got me hooked. I want more relationships like that.
Another one was my response to Jenn’s old post Rich Friend, Poor Friend, where I sent her feedback on the post, we talked about it, debated it during the hike, I wrote a contra post, she wrote a follow-up to her original post, then a contra contra post. And then I drafted a contra³ post (not published yet). This was also a great series that got me better at thinking about building friendships and communities.
In those two cases, this happened because those topics were very close to our hearts, we disagreed on what was the best way to get something, and we both were curious in understanding the other and ready to take stands against the other.
I loved this part of Inkhaven.
I read so many good posts
Another great thing that happened this month is that I read much more blog posts this month than in the past few months. I read a dozen posts or so per day, with some days going up to 50. It was great reading so much and discovering so many new parts of the world I did not know about.
Specific shout out to William, whose history posts I skipped for a while, until a week before the end when one of them caught my eyes and led me to binge read his whole blog. They were so good.
I’m looking forward to going back through every residents’ writing and reading all their curated posts.
I met Vaniver
Another amazing part was my coach Vaniver. I got the chance to talk with all the coaches before the program started, and the choice was obvious. He had the perfect wise wizard vibe I was looking for: someone who could get me and where I was trying to go with my life, and who could give me advice on what to think about, and point out considerations I was missing. It helped a lot that I really enjoyed talking to him, as that led me to ask him to chat just for fun, which in turn led to the deep conversations that made me change my plans and produce my best work.
I’m excited to keep talking with him about my plans and hang out with him. It feels like this could develop into one of my most interesting and productive new friendships of the year.
Overall impressions
Inkhaven was very good for me compared to the alternative. I had nothing planned for November anyway, and all the stuff I wanted to do in Paris could wait, so I’m glad I flew all the way to Berkeley for this program.
I expect that it will have significantly increased the amount of writing I do in the next few months, and could quite possibly make writing a large part of my career, who knows.
I’m very thankful that Ben Pace decided to have me as a resident. I did not yet have a lot of public writing, so he took a risky bet. I’m glad I accepted, and I expect he’s glad I joined!
I’m excited to see what Inkhaven 2 will look like