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[I'm reading *Moby-Dick* at the moment](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/xavierroy_srividya-suryanarayanan-asked-if-we-can-do-share-7490785589437349888-Pdwq/), and I've been thinking about first lines. That's probably inevitable when you're reading a book that begins with ***Call me Ishmael***.

It is such a strange thing to do with the beginning of a novel. Melville doesn't explain where we are or why Ishmael is speaking to us. He doesn't even tell us much about Ishmael. He simply gives us a name and a voice, and somehow that is enough to make us keep reading.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to write a story of my own and have been stuck on its first line for a while. I wrote:

> I was on my regular maintenance walk along the northern wall when I first noticed the crack. I thought to myself, *Well, it wasn't there yesterday*.

I've been staring at that sentence long enough to feel a discomfort knowing that something about it wasn't quite right without being able to say exactly what. Then I went back to my notes from Stanley Fish's [*How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One*](https://link.amazon/B0dLqhUXV), and I started to see the problem in my sentence.

For one thing, I'd buried the important bit. The main clause is *I was on my regular maintenance walk*. Grammatically, that tells the reader that the walk is the important thing; it wasn't. The *crack*, which is actually the reason I'm telling the story, gets pushed into a subordinate clause.

Fish has an interesting way of making you look at sentences structurally. The grammar isn't just a set of rules for putting words together. The structure itself tells us what to pay attention to. The main clause gets the prime position; everything else has to negotiate for attention. I'd given that position to the walk. I had got the hierarchy backwards in my sentence.

Then there was the narrator getting in the way. *I first noticed the crack. I thought to myself.* Both phrases are telling the reader that something is happening inside my head rather than simply letting the thing happen. Fish calls these constructs as "pointing words": *I noticed, I saw, I felt.* They're not necessarily bad, but they can be unnecessary. If the crack is interesting, perhaps I don't need to announce that I noticed it.

So I tried taking the narrative scaffolding out of the sentence altogether and ended up with:
> *The crack wasn't there yesterday.*

Now this felt much better, not the level of 'Call me Ishmael'.

It also made me notice something I hadn't thought about before. I'd originally written *yesterday*, which seemed perfectly natural. But *yesterday* is entirely dependent on the narrator. We know what yesterday means because the person telling us the story knows when they are speaking. So one more change:

> *The crack wasn't there on Thursday.*

Replacing it with *Thursday* suggests that there is a routine behind the sentence. Someone walks along this wall often enough to remember what was there on a particular day. There is a schedule, a history, a world that existed before the crack appeared.

One word suddenly seemed to be doing the work of an entire paragraph. Fish wrote about the "sentence as world." A good sentence doesn't merely describe a world. For a moment, it creates one. Sometimes a sentence can give you enough of a world that you don't need the narrator to explain it.

Perhaps that's part of what makes *Call me Ishmael* so effective too. It doesn't tell us much, but it gives us someone to listen to. Three words and there is already a relationship between the person speaking and the person reading. The rest of the world arrives later in the story.

I've spent rather too much time worrying about whether the first line is doing everything it possibly can. Now I need to stop fussing over it and write the second line and the third, and someday the final line.

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I am currently working my way through _[Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics](https://amzn.to/4rxur0X)_ when I read about the Newton/Leibniz rivalry on who invented calculus. [^1]

> In 1696, Johann Bernoulli and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz challenged Europe’s mathematicians to solve the **[Brachistochrone problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachistochrone_curve?useskin=vector)** (finding the path of fastest descent). Isaac Newton, then 54 and working at the Royal Mint, received the challenge on Jan 29, 1697. He solved it overnight and submitted it anonymously. Bernoulli instantly recognized the author, famously stating: *"ex ungue leonem* (as the lion by his claw).

That phrase got me wondering about fingerprints and identity.

Over the past year and more, we have been using the em dash as the "lion's claw" of an LLM-generated content. And because it's prevalent, the claw has become a tell. We used to say, _"[On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog?useskin=vector)"_ Except now, the dog is an AI, and we know it’s a dog because it can’t stop using em dashes to simulate "thoughtful" prose. 🤷🏾‍♂️

I imagine Bernoulli opening Newton’s anonymous letter today. Instead of elegant geometry, he finds a perfectly optimized, AI-generated proof. And if he looks for a 'claw', he would find none, not a hint of a man who stayed up all night grumbling about _being dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things_. It made me wonder: would Newton purposefully insert a stray comma today, just to prove he wasn't a bot?

[^1]: I hated calculus at school and now I know who to blame for it.

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The 2 Types of Value - Or, Why We Struggle to Explain Ourselves to Others by Jay AcunzoJay Acunzo (Jay Acunzo)
Jay Acunzo on the difference between discovered value and apparent value, and three distinct phases of clarifying each type to others.

I’ve always been proud of my work. For years, I described what I did with a statement that felt right:

> *"My mission is to collaborate with organizations to help people understand and use software better."*

It was a good, honest statement. It explained what I did and how I worked. But something about it never quite fit. It focused on the process, not the outcome. It said *what* I did, but not *why* it mattered.

That thought lingered until I read Jay Acunzo’s piece on [two kinds of value](https://jayacunzo.com/blog/2-types-of-value). He talks about:

* **Apparent Value:** the benefit people recognize right away, the thing that connects to what they already want.
* **Discovered Value:** the deeper benefit they notice later, once they’ve experienced the work.

Reading that helped me see my old statement differently. It was about discovered value—the appreciation that comes after someone works with me. But it didn’t lead with the apparent value, the outcome that matters most to users and teams.

So I rewrote it:

> *I help users succeed by delivering the right answers, in the right format, right when they need them.*

The first part, “**I help users succeed**,” is the apparent value. It is clear and outcome-focused. The second part, “**by delivering the right answers, in the right format, right when they need them**,” hints at how I get there. It gestures toward the deeper value of good documentation without getting in the way.

That small change reshaped how I talk about my work. It shifted the focus from the mechanics of what I do to the result it creates. Now my statement felt a bit stronger than before and useful. Rewriting my mission statement using this lens was a small change, but it shifted my perspective. Clarity is not only about doing the work well; it’s about helping others see *why* the work matters.

It also leaves me with a question. As technical writers, how often do we describe our work through the discovered value—clarity, accuracy, usability—without first naming the apparent value that others can immediately relate to? And what might change if we led with that? I explored that in more detail in my latest PaperArrow post: [Apparent and Discovered Value in Technical Writing](https://paperarrow.com/thoughts/apparent-and-discovered-value-in-technical-writing?utm_source=Odyssey).

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I have this #kvetch with messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or whatever new messaging is out there.

When someone from my kid's school group messages me, they see the same name and profile photo as my old work colleagues do. Same as my book club friends. Same as people in my PKM communities who only know me as someone obsessed with note-taking systems.

In real life, I'm a slightly different version of myself in each of these spaces. *Different contexts, different modes*. I don't talk about Zettelkasten methods in my kid's school meetings. I don't use the same tone with former coworkers as I do with people I knew in college.

But messaging apps don't get this. They give you one name, one photo, one bio, and that's your identity everywhere inside the app. _You can have different profile photos in each app, but that's not what I'm talking about._

Discord sort of tries—you can set nicknames per server and change your avatar. But your username still percolates through. Slack's slightly better, lets you customize per workspace, but then you're locked into that same identity in every channel, whether you're in ***#random*** or ***#doc-ops***.

What I actually want: let me define who I am _per group_. Different name, different photo, maybe even a different bio or contact info depending on the context. Let me be "Xavier (Max's dad)" in the school chat and "Xavier" in another and "that person who won't shut up about Obsidian" in a third.

I contain multitudes, as Whitman said. So why can't my messaging apps?

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This morning, I wasn’t in the mood to write. Instead, I found myself spelunking through an old external drive, hunting for something specific: some old writings from nearly 25 years ago, little fragments of who I used to be.

And then, a folder titled *Arena* caught my eye. Teenage-me thought calling it “Games” lacked sufficient gravitas. I opened it, and there it was: my collection of favorite games — *Age of Empires*.

In a flash, I was back there again. I remembered my first encounter with *The Rise of Rome*, its demo tucked into an issue of *Chip* magazine[^chip-mag], the monthly bible for computer geeks like me in the late nineties.

The demo was a hard nut to crack. There was no Save option. Quit, and you had to restart from the beginning. It featured the First Punic War campaign: three missions, Carthage against Rome.

I spent hours wrestling with that campaign in a single stretch. It was then, though I didn’t have the language for it, that I stumbled into a *flow state*. I didn’t know the term yet, but I knew the feeling.

I can still feel the urgency, the way my pulse quickened as though history itself depended on me.[^hist-fict] The music wasn’t just background; it was the pulse of the game[^1], the rhythm that carried me forward.[^aoe-st]

**We all experience flow in different parts of our lives**: that intense focus when we’re deep in a piece of work, the way pages turn themselves late at night, or the quiet, almost automatic shifts of gears on a long drive with music and conversation in the background.

Today, decades later, I slipped back into the game and into that same deep focus, where time stretches and the world shrinks to the size of a screen.

When I finally closed the game, I wondered if we can step into flow at will. *Could we slip into that blessed state as easily as opening an application?* I doubt it. Most days, we live in the noise, catching only glimpses of that quiet current.

So I returned to the distractions of daily life, grateful for a few hours when time disappeared, when I was that boy again trying to save Carthage one more time.

[^1]: The sound designers of the game talk about the music of the game at [The Life & Times of Video Games](https://lifeandtimes.games/episodes/files/22) podcast episode.
[^aoe-st]: I still listen to the [Age of Empires soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5GIvUuQjkzBAESIAGlsHon?si=f16fde347a6747eb) when I need a boost of flow.
[^chip-mag]: *Chip* eventually closed shop and morphed into *Digit*.
[^hist-fict]: Maybe this is where my love for historical fiction began.

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I read Naval Ravikant's post _[Be Incompressible - Naval's Archive](https://substack.com/home/post/p-169999834)_, and I found myself thinking about personal mythology. Not the grand, heroic kind, but that quiet narrative shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Taste, I've come to see, is more than surface preference. It's the visible signature of who we are in the music that stirs us, the books that linger in thought, the ideas we return to. But **taste doesn't exist in a vacuum**. This signature is shaped by [personal mythology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_mythology?useskin=vector), the inner story quietly guiding our choices.

Becoming "*incompressible*" feels less like a fixed state and more like ongoing practice. A continual aligning of outward expression with inner truth, refining both taste and story toward authenticity. Maybe this practice is our best defense against being replaced by algorithms that can replicate tasks but not the deeper narrative that makes us who we are.

The question becomes: ***How do I deepen this alignment so that what I create reflects the story I truly want to live?***