How a Writer’s Wisdom Helped Me in a Technical Project

You can’t improve something that doesn’t exist.

“You can’t edit a blank page.” — Nora Roberts

I was thrilled to discover that one of my all-time favorite pearls of wisdom for writers originates from my all-time favorite fiction writer.

This wisdom has supported me in many projects, and not only in writing. Also in Self-Gamification. Sometimes I had the idea that my game rules were not good enough, and I wouldn’t be successful in either designing them or playing the games they defined (in other words, in pursuing my projects). Often before trying the idea out.

Seeing the whole process non-judgmentally, making progress in small steps, and seeing it as a game, let me see that such an attitude is ingrained in most of us.

Yes, it has to do with fear. Fear of failure and fear of success. The latter possibly being the fear that success will somehow fall undeservedly into our laps, and we won’t be able to justify it. People will see that we don’t deserve it, and our “fundamental” failure and unworthiness will become public.

Acting upon these fears resulted in day-dreams of both failure and success, and escaping to other activities that I assumed were more reasonable or easier than doing what I wanted. Seeing these fears without judging them helped me recognize that it was all a means of running away from creativity’s discomfort.

The awareness I gained from this realization and recognizing that fear grows along with the yearning to accomplish something helped me return to my project “games” and resolve other stagnating activities.

Here is an article where I told a story about a crowdfunding campaign for the book, the excerpt from which you are reading, and that the planning of it, along with preparing material for the launch, was beneficial for writing this book:

But sometimes, planning and mind-mapping can turn out into a solution to save us from “playing and enjoying the game” and creating something we very much want to make.

I had a big epiphany on this while leading an international working group (Business Rules Working Group, BRWG) to establish a relationship between over five hundred decision points for an international technical standard. The organizations we represented or worked for (as consultancy service providers) implemented this technical specification into their projects and programs. We spent many meetings creating many maps without completing any of them or achieving anything worth showing.

In the meantime, I became a professional writer and learned the truth I quoted above, “You can’t edit an empty page.” Then just before another online meeting of our working group, it hit me. That was what we were trying to do with these five hundred decisions. We were editing an empty page!

We spent hours and hours of meetings arguing about which decision points were more important than others, and how we should group them. We were trying to find a perfect solution, each of us coming from various organizations with various contexts from all over the world. We failed to see that all of the views in the group were perfect. And that we were spending time editing something that didn’t exist yet.

So, after some contemplation, I sat down and asked myself how I, with my background and experience, would arrange those 500+ decision points in a sequence if I personally were a project implementing it.

I took several decision points to consider each day and place somewhere in a sequential chain. These were my small and effortless steps.

After each step in this project, which often consisted of considering five decision points (sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on their complexity) every day, I collected a point.

This project, which I took on out of curiosity, resulted in a series of blog posts (which I shared with the community and the working group), and two books, which were bought and used by many projects applying the international specification S1000D.

My books serve as one of the possible mappings of relationships between those decision points, which their readers can now “edit” and use as is most appropriate for their own projects and organizations. I shared the lessons I learned while working on these books with the working group. As a result, we came up with further concrete solutions for modification and improvement of the S1000D concepts, and guidance to facilitate its implementation.

And it’s all thanks to the simple truth that you can never “edit a blank page.”

A note to this article: It is a modified excerpt from Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed reading this article, then in addition to those quoted above, you might also like these:

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