I once read an article which said that people should refrain from speaking about work they’re doing until it’s complete. As I remember it, there was a scientific study which suggesed that talking about doing something apparently “scratches the same itch”, neurobiologically speaking, as actually doing something.1
Talk too much about what you want to do before you act, the theory goes, and you never will.
I’m pretty sure I’ve taken that idea too far lately. There has been, in fact, a major change in my life which I haven’t written about yet. My plan was to announce it alongside some projects that I’ve been working on. But when I ended up being far, far busier than I had planned and all my work took much longer than I expected, I was still afraid to talk about things until they were almost ready to go because…
Well. You know.
- You’ll just have to trust me on this because my Google-fu is failing me right now [↩]