Colin Wright's Blog

We can worry about rot and horribleness and still tend a beautiful garden.

I try to remember this when I feel myself drifting into a helpless “what’s the point, everything sucks” mindset.

There are a lot of things in the world that I think should change and that I’m not in the position to directly address. But there are things I can do in my own life, for and with people I know, for and with my neighbors, for and with things and spaces and ideas I think are important.

My reach and capac...

Any suitably aspirational goal will require we complete a bunch of steps before we can cross them off our list, and the stair-step nature of these paths can cause us to lose sight of the actual thing we hope to accomplish, losing ourselves in the intermediary sub-goals that will supposedly get us there.

We may then commit ourselves to attracting a bunch of social media followers, glad-handing the right people, or accumulating a pile of wealth, and with time, these sub-goals can come to seem l...

When I was a child, I would often envision an incredibly rich, detailed image (usually something related to monsters or robots or superheroes), but I would be incapable of translating that envisioning to graphite and paper.

That inability to draw things the way I thought they should look was frustrating, and it motivated me to redouble my burgeoning doodling efforts, to take all sorts of advanced placement art classes, and to eventually major in art with a focus on drawing (before eventually ...

Something that helps me cope with periods of malaise, pain, or discomfort is reminding myself that the me I am today is not the final me.

This is just a version of myself, iterated from previous versions of myself, and every aspect of my being—my life, my career, my relationships, all of it—are prone to revision. That’s how I got to where I am now, and that will continue to happen in the future.

Even as we work toward goals that would change a whole lot about our lives, we tend to imagine ...

Most growth happens beyond our current capacity.

Maintenance is good and healthful, and at times (and in some aspects of our lives) that’s exactly what we should be doing. But if we want to develop—in terms of skill, in terms of thoughtfulness, in terms of strength or balance or other sorts of physical dimensionality—we usually have to go beyond what we’re able to do, today, and then suffer and flail around a little bit to achieve those gains.

It’s possible to go too far too fast, of cours...

It feels good to have written a book.

It’s similar, I suspect, to the feeling of running a marathon or hosting a successful dinner party: it’s an achievement, and it’s satisfying to know you’ve done something difficult and aspirational (even better if there’s some kind of implied social status attached to said achievement).

It also feels good to write a book.

The act of jotting, editing, sculpting something over a long period of time is meditative and frustrating. It’s growth-inducing; ...

A surprising number of technical issues can be solved by resetting the glitchy device.

Sometimes you have to unplug it or hold down several buttons to make it work, but this can be a fairly simple solution for what are sometimes shockingly complex issues resulting from an operational state that’s somehow gotten muddled.

I find that my brain and body often work the same way, and can be similarly unmuddled.

If I’m experiencing some kind of body-glitch—a weird ache, tightness, or congestio...

I wear contact lenses most days, though I wear glasses while getting ready in the morning and at night before going to bed.

I got my first set of glasses (with early-model transition lenses, so I felt pretty cool and sci-fi) in middle school, after it became apparent I couldn’t see the day’s in-class math lesson that was emblazoned across the far wall by an overhead projector.

I was doing well in class, but it seemed like I was always copying off the person next to me. The teacher later re...

Many norms, folkways, and standards exist because they’re (almost always) the best way to do something (by some metric).

The USB-C standard isn’t the most bleeding-edge option that technology and manufacturing can offer, but it’s a really solid, relatively high-performing default that’s a significant upgrade compared to what came before.

The three act story structure, similarly, isn’t always going to be the absolute ideal way to present a narrative, but a lot of the time it’s better than t...

Being able to persist through difficult times, tedious moments, and dark nights of the soul is important if you want to achieve any kind of long-term goal.

That’s true whether you’re painting a mural, planning a big event, or raising a child. There’s a lot to love about all these processes, but plenty of strain, angst, and even pain, along the way.

When you’re in it, though—really focused, committed to the task at hand, ignoring all those aches and anxieties by thinking about how good it w...