GHDR Monthly Report 0505: Making Better Hooks

⊕captionThis headline caught my attention in Taiwan on a slow news day. This is the kind of pull that I need in my mission statement!

Happy May! It's time for yet another Groundhog Day Resolutions (GHDR) Report! You can check out this year's Kickoff Post to read about this year's premise: using my value commitments to guide logical execution. I'm hoping that following this premise will result in an improvement in my productivity.

⊕ note

Rest in peace, Snow GTI!

A lot happened in April, which began with growing waves of anxiety as I prepared for a month-long Taiwan trip. In addition to facing multiple commitments I had little hope of completing, I also suffered the loss of my beloved Volkswagen due to salt corrosion from 25 harsh New England winters. Finding a replacement car adds drastically to my financial burdens due to the Trump Administration's freeze on funding academic science research and extra tarriffs driving up costs. Yikes.

Happily, much of the anxiety about being in Taiwan has subsided, and I have even made progress on some of the goals I had set in last month's GHDR report so I can pivot my revenue generation activities when I return to the States. I'm still concerned, but not as much as before. I'll figure something out, as I am not entirely without resources.

That said, I noticed a trend in my GHDR-related activities: I was not "feeling the mission" in the tasks I was doing, making them harder to stick to. While I knew that this was the natural consequence of working by myself for a long time, something else felt off.

Collectively, my various mission statements and related strategic goals did a good job of describing conditions that create benefits. However, there was no personal appeal so even my own heart was feeling disconnected. And if my heart wasn't in it, how could I confidently reach out to others? What credibility could an invitation to form a virtuous circle of sharing have? I foresaw casual interest that did not kindle any spark.

I needed a stronger message, but what was it?

The Question is the Answer?

While in Taiwan looking for food videos, How Street Food Made This Stephen Chow Movie a 40 MILLION Dollar Hit? snuck into my YouTube recommendations. This is a retrospective telling of how Hong Kong film director Steven Chow made his comeback after a movie that flopped so badly it bankrupted him. It's a great video about reclaiming one's creative roots, but one moment in particular grabbed my attention see timestamp at 2:23 mark:

Chow once told his screenwriters during a meeting, "A film must answer a question. The answer can be complicated but the question must be simple."

The video essayist goes on to give examples of questions that Chow's other films had posed:

• "What's the ultimate form of Kung Fu?"
• "What does it really mean to be a great actor?"
• "What's the most delicious food?"

This was a revelation. I had been approaching my mission statement as a problem of careful definition. I had made sure to systematically outline why it was a good idea, why it was worth pursuing, and what I hoped the outcomes to be. I felt that my articulation of the ideas would resonate easily with others who shared similar values, but I had made a critical mistake: I was using a "logic-first" phrasing rather than one with "emotional appeal". This violates my own stated goal to put "values first, logic second". No wonder my heart wasn't in it! But even more incriminating was the pattern I saw in each rework of my mission statements over the past few reports. See if you can pick up on it!

While all of these are good directive-type questions, they are also all inward-looking. These are questions that are all about me; while they might appeal to other people on a similar journey, I am not inviting others to join me. It's a failure of inclusive storytelling and of hospitality.

Interestingly, practicing hospitality has not been a problem for me on this trip to Taiwan. Prior to arriving, I had been quite anxious about presenting myself authentically as I am in "masculine camouflage" mode, with appropriately short hair and male attire that falls within parameters of being a foreigner who looks Taiwanese but isn't. However, rather than use this approach as a means to hide myself as much as possible, I had instead made the decision to be fully present in all my interactions with my father and nearby relatives. Being open in a way I had not been before seemed to create a reciprocal effect as people opened up to me in turn; while I can't speak or read the language, everyone seemed to understand an inviting smile and willingness to engage. Just showing interest in people was sufficient to dissolve barriers despite my broken Mandarin ChineseIt helps that the default mode of Taiwanese people is to be conscientious and helpful. Friendliness and respect is returned automatically.. Even one of my aunts noticed, commenting on the "brightness" that seemed to be coming out of me. Quite the affirming datapoint!

So apparently I do have the abilityThis is perhaps an outgrowth of Sri-ness, the gender-independent core that I identified while working through gender identity issues. to express inclusiveness! Could I apply a Chow-style question approach that conveyed it as well?

A Question of Yearning

I spent three days workshopping through possibilities, starting from my current set of mission statements developed over the past two months of GHDR reporting:

I had started the year with rationally defensible framing of the problem, then inserted myself into the equation later by expressing it as something I wanted. I needed to directly inject the inclusive feeling into this, but I was a bit stuck on exactly what feeling that was.

What was I trying to say? Who was I saying it to?

I let the feeling bubble up, letting negative memories assert themselves. Really, I just hate seeing people overlooked or made to feel small, unwelcome, or inconvenient. I know what it feels likeA large part of my anxiety about coming to Taiwan was steeped in early childhood culture shock and social isolation, and I know that many people feel disregarded with respect to their "importance". I hate this so much. If I squint really hard when reviewing my personal development, I can discern how every one of my career paths was related to seeing people as part of the work. My interests in graphic design, communication, human-centered engineering, film and video, game development, and so on are all fields related to applying the psychology of people to create systems that they intuitively grasp because I want to see them where they are and understand where they want to go. And as I've grown older, I also want people to be seen and understood, accepted for who they are, and empowered to express their ideas and interestsA common sentiment in neurodivergent circles, yes?.

Here is what I came up with after workshopping these nuances into ClaudeAI's memory context:

It's a little longer that the Steven Chow examples, but it retains the essential essence of my yearning while implying intent to take action together:

• Having to be invisible references the feeling that oppressed people often feel is a necessary survival tactic. Sometimes it's also the feeling of being constantly overlooked, unappreciated, and misunderstood so they never get a chance. It is this and more. I want to provide camaraderie and receive it in return. I want to apply my interest in communications and human factors to make it happen.
• Creating a world is the call to action, though not everyone wants to answer the call. This phrasing suggests that this is significant work. I want to bring my bag of human-centered design+engineering tricks to a party that wants to do the same thing.

I think this phrasing is relatively short and sweet enough so people know immediately if they are interested in less than 3 seconds. My earlier mission statements, though economically and elegantly framed or my own use, completely lacked the visceral and immediate quality that a good prompting question should have. It should help quite a lot with conveying what my work is all about, also providing a simple mission metric to test whether I'm working on the right projects with the right attitude. It's both organizing principle and guiding beacon.

Conclusion

So that's the main achievement of this month of GHDR. I did get a few other things done related to the URSYS library, gathering all the forms I want to rebrand, and writing more detailed documents about The Colony and The Meadow. This new "Big Question" provides the missing foundation while speaking directly to my heart, and this provides me with additional aspirational energy...that's super important to me!

And let's not forget that The Big Question provides the psychological handhold for other people to find me. I believe that my road to financial security is bound with successes shared with others that also want an answer to the Big Question. This can happen through in-person meetings and through connections made on social media on multiple fronts:

• blogging of shareable ideas
• free productivity form downloads and hardcopy stationery sales
• public code libraries that others can use to evaluate my skill, also empowering people

To wrap up, here's the Big Question reframed as new mission directive:

This new direction may seem at-odds with my past interest in productivity tools, but all my tool designs are steeped in the human-centered approach to creativity and recognizing people where they are. This is visible in forms like The Concrete Goals Tracker and The Emergent Task Planner in their permissive prompting. The kind of productivity that I like comes from successfully overcoming resistance so one can do the things they want to do without giving up on their uniquenesses. I'm much less interested in what productivity systems or methodologies you use, and I'm not interested in proclaiming which ways you "should" or "could" approach a goal. I'm not that interested in efficiency as a metric for whether you are failing and succeeding. We already have lots of these tools. What I care about is removing mental barriers to productivity, and the particular one I want to bring down is that sense of not being good enough, feeling judged, or lacking in value. Those are the tools that I want, and I think this can happen by engineering a culture that rewards "truly seeing each other" as a primary social mechanism. Sustaining economic benefits, with luck, would follow. That's my envisioned end game.

With my new mission statement, I'm saying that this feeling of "invisibility" is what I want to focus on. It's not exactly productivity or personal development as one might normally think about it, but it's the thing that I care about the most. I want people to thrive and find their own power among friends who understand how hard it is to follow your own heart. In other words, it's not just willpower but also connectedness that is important to me. Selfishly speaking, it's what I need to function at my best. There are probably people out there who feel the same way.

This seems to fit, but we'll see how sturdy an anchor this really is. After all, great insights and ideas don't actually do the work. But a glad heart helps the work feel lighter, right?

Wish me luck!

INDEX of GHDR 2025 POSTS