logoalt Hacker News

RecycledEle • yesterday at 10:10 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I drove my teachers nuts with my unconventional writing process. I start with a blank word processor document, and start making notes. Then I rearrange them, and finally I start turning it into an essay. My teachers stood over me, demanding that I stop misbehaving, and write an essay from start to finish. I could not do that. My brain does not work that way. I can not keep enough things in my head to organize a few pages that way.

---

I was once thrown out of a job interview after their secretary yelled at me for what seemed like 5 minutes because I was filling out a form from the shortest blank to the longest blank rather than from the top to the bottom. I had experienced such a trying day, that I just could not bring myself to fill out anything but the next shortest field. All the while, this crazy lady was yelling at me as I had to stand at her desk in front of a room of HR scum/manager scum and job applicants.

---

I classify linear thinking as one useful way to check if something makes sense, not the only way to think.


Replies

BobBagwill • today at 1:59 PM

I sense a hint of malicious compliance. Did you also write all the vertical strokes, then the horizontal ones, then the loops? Vowels, then consonants? Write each letter in alphabetical order? Express your zipcode as a geometric series? You have a future in the go-slow bureaucracy of your choice! :-)