Since I just realized that I have never actually blogged about the Nine Precepts of Lichtenbergianism, I shall do that now. (I have mentioned them once, but gave no explanation of them.)
As I explain in the upcoming Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, these Precepts spring from a seminar some fellow Lichtenbergians and I gave at GHP in 2013. In preparing to sit in what turned out to be a crowded room and to discuss how putting off doing any work had actually made us more successful creators, I boiled down our experience to nine keywords. In the seminar, we simply threw each term up on the screen and then all shared how they affected us as artists/teachers/programmers/veterinarians.
Here are the Nine Precepts:
- Task Avoidance: Obviously. Cras melior est.
- Abortive Attempts: Give yourself permission to create crap. Lots of crap.
- Successive Approximation: Give yourself permission to change what you’ve done.
- Waste Books: Create a system to record your ideas willy-nilly. Sort them out later.
- Ritual: Find ways to make your work flow.
- Steal from the Best: Pay attention to the past, learn from it, then run with it.
- Gestalt: Look at your work and see what’s there and what’s not there, what needs to be there and what needs to be not there.
- Audience: Have someone in mind.
- Abandonment: Give up.
There’s a lot more complexity to these ideas, of course. I discuss that in the book. Reserve your copy today. Or tomorrow.