The metaphor and the anti-metaphor

JFS is a book of metaphors.

The biggest one is, of course, "shipping" itself

"Shipping" is a metaphorical use of a term for literally putting products on ships, invented (so far as I can tell) by the tech world to mean launching (there we go again) a product or project from private (maybe even secret) development time into public view/access. But this use of "shipping" is so common today it doesn't even read as a metaphor. It just means the thing.

The second biggest one is the dinner party

The one that actually registers as a metaphor. This one is deliberate. Lots of projects fail because their makers get psyched out; their projects are work or work-adjacent, and heavily freighted with the pressure of Big Important Work Things. And when the Work Thing isn't working, people panic. And panicked people can't even listen to advice, much less take it.

Dinner parties, on the other hand, are not considered important (especially by tech-type people), and certainly not life or death. Planning a dinner party is accessible; everybody eats, almost everybody has been to a dinner party, and most have thrown one, even if it was only small. Plus the idea of a dinner failing isn't so bad. Transform the scary unknown into the known and your reader will be receptive.

The dinner party makes its entry in the first post-intro chapter and is sprinkled throughout, starring only in the backwards planning chapter. On a re-read I realized it's more integrated into the whole book than I remember, but not as consistently as I'd like.

The third metaphor is… missing

Yep, missing.

We've got a metaphor for the entire act (shipping) and a metaphor to reframe the scary aspects of planning and executing the act (dinner party) but nothing at all to  reframe or even discuss the fear, uncertainty, doubt, resistance, procrastination, and self-sabotage that comes before, during, and even after the act.

When I re-read JFS, it feels like it's missing something to ground the entire thing… and this is it.

What will the third metaphor be?

That's what I've been hung up on.

My first burst of inspiration went something like this — focusing on the way that it feels:

DRAFT
It feels like there’s an invisible something between you and achieving your goals — it’s blocking you, freezing you in place, holding you back…

• You know how to get things done, but you… don’t. Can’t.
• You can see your way forward — you know how projects like this work — but you can’t feel your way forward.
• You’re doing things — creating momentum — but you somehow never seem to make any real progress.
• You feel like you ought to be getting a hint now and again, like a feeling you’re on the right path, but you pick up nothing but radio silence.
• You’re stuck, frustrated, and tired.
  And worst of all — because you can see no real reason for this stuckness — you believe it’s a personality flaw. That there’s something wrong with you.

But there isn’t.

Let me repeat: There is nothing wrong with you.

The invisible wall is real.

It’s not creative block, it’s not “resistance,” and it’s not self-sabotage. It’s not in your imagination and there’s nothing wrong with you.

That right there? That’s the crux of this entire book. There’s nothing wrong with you. And I’m going to prove it to you, if you let me, by showing you how to get what you need to achieve the things you want.

The wall is where we begin.

(This is a draft… don't pay too much attention to the actual quality of the writing, hey? Just the metaphor!)

And I think that feeling is accurate!

However!!

A wall is a bad metaphor for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that a wall metaphor would necessarily involve metaphorical tearing down, probably even brick by brick — because walls are made of bricks — and my whole build-your-business brand is Stacking the Bricks. Just that one little thing. Whoops.

What's the "competition" do?

Other books frame this enemy as The Resistance, or The Lizard Brain (aka primal fear). But let's unspool those metaphors, because metaphors are important: both The Resistance and The Lizard Brain are framed as things that live inside you.

And I disagree with that premise, fundamentally. Fear and resistance are inside us, obviously. But why? How'd they get there? Because of an external circumstance that is so everyday that we don't notice it at all.

Resistance and fear are symptoms, not causes.

I want my third metaphor to reflect the cause

Because even in v1, I discussed the cause explicitly:

JFS v1
The bottom line is this:

• when you’re a child, your parents tell you what to do... and then they either reward you, or punish you
• you go to school... and your teachers tell you what to do, and then they either reward you or punish you
• you go to college and... you pick your classes but somebody else tells you exactly what to do, and then they reward you, or punish you
• and finally, you get a job... and yet another chapter in the People Tell You What To Do And Reward Or Punish You Saga

Skills depend on context. A skill divorced of all the "support" (rules, rewards, and punishments) of the context in which you learned it isn't the same. Doing it for yourself isn't the same as doing it for work.

Just Fucking Shipping means freeing yourself from the structures that both drive and punish you…

…structures that enable you in the moment, but disable you when you're outside them.

JFS is the path to becoming truly independent. And that's tough to boil down into a single, punchy metaphor like a dinner party.

The feeling is like a brick wall you can't see, but that metaphor's out.

The feeling is also like quicksand — and that's a metaphor I've used before to great effect, in 30x500. Quicksand works here; the more you struggle, the deeper you sink. (And, like quicksand, it's not really… real.) But it doesn't carry the implication of context lost, or building structure.

The function is like culture — living abroad often means having to re-learn the most basic of daily assumptions and interactions. But I'm not sure how approachable that is as a metaphor. Most people haven't picked up and moved to a culture not their own.

The popular/cliché metaphor fish out of water is designed for this, and people understand it, but do they really feel it?

This essay doesn't have an answer

Because I'm not done thinking about it yet. No amount of rule-following (write 1,000 words a day!!) can force a creative epiphany, alas! But here I am, talking it out, thinking about it, hopefully stirring up the compost of idea-generation so it'll germinate something when I'm not looking.