In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig tells a story about Phaedrus (the main character) curing writer’s block for a student at Montana State University. Pirsig tells the story way, way better than I do, but here’s a crude summary:
Phaedrus’ student wants to write an essay about the United States, but doesn’t know where to start .
Phaedrus suggests she narrow it down: write about Bozeman instead.
When the paper is due, she doesn’t have it and is very upset. She is stumped. Phaedrus is stumped.
Next, Phaedrus suggests: “narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.”
She walks out, satisfied. But just before her next class comes back in tears: She can’t do it. She can’t think of anything to say!
Phaedrus then says: “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Aha! Suddenly, ideas flow out. She starts writing and can’t stop! What is going on?
After some reflection, Phaedrus gets it: “She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard […]. She couldn’t think of anything to write […] because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. […] She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.”
The point of this story is that, if you’re dealing with writer’s block, a very useful pointer is to simply do some seeing yourself. Tell me: what do you see? Don’t tell me what you think you “should” see, or what you hope to see. Tell me what your senses and your experience and your common sense tells you, right now. We all see and know much more than we think, we just need to pay attention and drop into that ultra-rich stream of sensory experience and understanding.
So in this post, you’ll see me work through some writer’s block I’ve been dealing with for the past few days: I have a note on my phone with literally 100s of blogpost ideas, but only 24 hours in a day and a PhD to finish. And I’m stuck. They’re all so interesting and I have no idea which one to spend time on. So I’ll reason through it, stream-of-consciousness style, by repeatedly asking myself “what do I see?” and then writing what comes out.
If you’re here for your twice-a-week nugget of wisdom, you can leave now. What follows is a (lightly-edited) Feynman-style word vomit where I answer the question: “What should I write about next?”
What do I see?
Well, I have a note on my phone with 100s of ideas. But I simply do not have enough time to write something coherent about all of them.
Let’s start bite-sized. Let’s pick one and go from there.
What do I see?
I can’t do it. Why is it still so hard to pick one?
Well, part of the difficulty is that it feels like I’ll miss out on something if I pick wrong.
That I will regret my choice. That I will pick one thing and, somehow, not get what I want.
What do I see?
But, like, what do I even want?
Well, part of it is to find an interesting idea. Something intellectually challenging. A fun puzzle.
But I also want something that will be “useful” to other people, since that will presumably open up the doors for me to continue these kinds of explorations.
What do I see?
I don’t know! I don’t know what the right topic is! And I don’t like not knowing!
Aha! Not knowing. What’s the issue with not knowing?
What do I see?
Frustration. My face scrunches up. My heart beats harder. I feel tension in my chest. In my shoulders. In my back. A sinking feeling in my gut!
Somehow, my body thinks it’s back in the African savannah! It feels the gaze of a predator in the bushes!
Not knowing is not fun.
Man, I wish I did know.
Then, perhaps, I could… have more control. I would know, with absolute certainty, what the outcome of my actions would be.
What do I see?
Well, how fun would life be if I always knew what’s gonna happen next? A part of me loves the thrill of watching the slot machine of life spin.
The tension in the uncertainty is fading away. Hey, check it out, I don’t have an answer to my question, and I’m still alive! No predator in the bushes, after all.
What do I see?
Well, I do actually know something and that is that a lot of “successful” writers seem to have a niche. They pick something and get good at it.
They may explore it from a variety of directions, but they all spiral around a common rhythm. The same way Wittgenstein described his process in Philosophical Investigations (bolding is mine):
“After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into […] a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. […] my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.— —And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.— The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.
The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many of these were badly drawn or uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected a number of tolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that if you looked at them you could get a picture of the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album.”
Another example is Dean W. Ball, in his blog on AI policy. His niche is AI policy, but he draws from a variety of sources. Apparently, he’s digging into the Talmud now. Very cool.
Dean W. Ball@deanwball
there comes a time in every ai policy professional’s life when they realize they have to read the talmud to make further progress, and for me that time was this week
7:44 PM · Jul 11, 2026 · 773K Views
504 Replies · 169 Reposts · 2.1K Likes
What do I see?
Another common theme in these blogs: they’re useful. They live at the intersection of “interesting” and “useful.” Quotes on those words because they’re both very nebulous.
We need to strike a delicate balance here. Interesting ideas are always fragile at the start and should be protected from the razor of “usefulness.” But it’s still worth thinking whether your niche has at least some plausible way of intersecting with something other people might use. With something you might use.
What do I see?
Well, here’s another thing I know: the central rhythm of my interests is scientific discovery and insight. I like understanding the world. I like understanding how we understand. My interest in meditation, this PhD in robotics and AI, even this Substack. They are all circling around how we make sense of the world. Not in a philosophically abstract way, but in an everyday, practical way.
What do I see?
Overwhelm! What about this niche topic should I write about? Well, let’s start bite-sized. How about answering the following: how can we measure scientific insight? Even more bite-sized: when I look back at my current research project (which I have 500+ pages of logs for), when and how did “eureka” moments happen? Is there a bite-sized way of modeling this? A tiny foothold on this question? Even with a toy model? I think there is.
And guess what, my niche topic intersects with real life! Here’s a Cosmos Institute grant asking for methods/tools that empower human judgment in knowledge production. Nice.
What do I see?
Well, it seems like I figured it out! Somehow, this self-guided, Socratic method of sorts helped me figure out what to write about next: measuring scientific insight, coming up with a toy demo for it, and seeing if the Cosmos people are interested.
And it all came from simply prompting myself, coming back to what I know, and see, and feel. Coming back to what I see. Nice.
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