This is article 3 of 4 for the BanklessDAO Writers Cohort. This is the second of three cohort articles in which I’ll try to work out some thoughts on how to analyze DAOs in prep for an article I’ve been wanting to write for most of this year.

In Field Notes #0…sometimes writing is hard. Not in the “I’m going to climb Everest without training” hard, but when you have a big topic, and especially one that you deeply care about, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Or where to end. Or how to get started.

The article I’ll eventually write on the Archaeology of a DAO is important to me; it’s probably the one I care about the most since I shipped my first crypto article. That was exciting, exhilarating - it was a rush akin to skiing down powdery mountain faces or riding the toe edge of a skateboard until you were certain you’d crash. This kind of work is exciting for a different reason: not because it takes me out of my comfort zone, but because I believe it’s important.

Having said that, I’m totally out of my comfort zone right now; and while this often leads to the kind of writing I think of as channeling, I’m in a space that is the dialectical opposite of that. I don’t believe in writer’s block, which is why I’m writing this now instead of worrying over the text I’m not writing, because there is some reason I’m doing this, I just don’t know what it is yet. But I’ll find out.

The reason I’m out of my comfort zone is not because I’m pressed for time (It’s Tuesday at 1:57pm - in my world of triage it may as well be last week - I’m still early). No, the reason I’m uncomfortable is because I’m worried that if I fail to write something useful, something that moves the conversation of what a DAO is forward, I will have failed. So really, I’m just scared. And that’s ok.

I’m really scared that whatever I write about won’t be Quality. The truth is I care about Quality, maybe way too much. My concept of Quality - yes with a capital ‘Q’, - derives from my reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In that book, in that philosophical tome, Robert Pirsig proposes a controversion of the classical Greek methods of inquiry, the romantic and the rational (which can loosely be thought of as subjective and objective truth - BEing v. inquiring), and seeks to marry them in the concept of Quality. Quality defies definition, but as with obscenity, you know it when you see it (or feel it). I’ve written before that optimism is the subatomic force that binds web3. For Pirsig, quality is the subatomic force that binds the universe, and to a large extent, I agree. If you really want to geek out on this, read his follow-up book to Zen, which is Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals.

Writing is relatively easy for me, which makes sense since it’s part of my job. But it’s been a minute since I wrote something that required both deep research and original thought. Part of me is worried that I won’t be able to pull it off, that I won’t be able to get what’s in my messy head onto a page, that I won’t produce something of Quality. For those unfamiliar, check out The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. While I’m fortunate to not suffer from Pressfield’s many maladies, I’m familiar with the shadows cast by these mythical creatures. And why don’t I suffer from these maladies? It’s because I turned pro. So no matter what, you write and you ship. Even if you gotta ramble on like this for a bit to get to where you’re going. 

The thing about writer’s block is that it's not a block at all, but a mindset. Writer’s block is the failure to believe in yourself, of your worth, of your Value, as Trewkat puts it so well this week (the advantages of shipping late!). 

Working to change a mindset is tough. It’s hard in ourselves and almost impossible in others. To truly change a mindset is to reframe your perspective, to see the world through a different lens, to use new analytical devices. This change requires a reprogramming of sorts; I’m not in love with our tendency to technomorphize computers to the human condition, but an OS update is a pretty good way to think about it. 

I came into this world preprogrammed to procrastinate - which of course makes sense, since I even let my twin brother be born first. I’m not going to say I completed my first assignment for grade school on the bus, that I couldn’t perform until I felt a little pressure, but I’m not going to say I didn’t. And while the stakes have risen dramatically since 1st grade, I still need to feel a sense of pressure to start something.

Part of the problem is that I’m a pretty good scrambler, and the pressure focuses my somewhat chaotic energy towards a singular purpose. I’ve never really had a negative result because of procrastination, as I always get ‘er done, and usually pretty well. Former professors and clients probably don’t want to know this goes from my college thesis to court hearings. I don’t overly prep; I focus and improvise, and this has worked far too well for far too long. Suffice to say there’s a reinforcement mechanism built in that is just really not helpful if the goal is to change my mindset around procrastination. 44 years is a lot of unlearning. 

So here I am, getting close to 10pm (something happened to the last eight hours but it wasn’t here on the page), and I’m thinking shit, if I really want to be able to get my thoughts down in preparation for this fancy article that I really do care about, well I better get with it. 

Up above when I said I’d figure out the purpose of this writing; I just did. I don’t want to procrastinate anymore. And Quality demands that I don’t.

And now that we’ve addressed those issues, we can get to work. 

Hiro Kennelly is a writer, editor, and coordinator at BanklessDAO and the Editor-in-Chief at Good Morning News. He is also helping to build a grants-focused organization at DAOpunks.