Let me tell you about a man named Jerry.
In 1963, Jerry started drawing a map of an imaginary city. It began as a single sheet of paper, and when he reached the edge of that sheet, he taped on another. Then another. By the 1980s, there were over 800 pages. As of this year, there are more than 4,000.
Jerry’s map isn’t just big, it’s alive. It has layers, almost like overlapping dimensions, with names like the Flood and the Void. Towns get papered over and vanish. Others sit untouched for decades. The whole thing breathes and grows and forgets itself in places, the way a real city does.
Here’s the part that stopped me in my tracks, though. Jerry doesn’t sit down and decide what to work on. He draws a card from a special deck he built alongside the map, and the card tells him what to do. Revise this panel. Start a new one. Work on the deck itself. It even tells him what materials to use.
You’d think that would make the whole project feel mechanical, like Jerry is some kind of artistic vending machine. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening at all. I think Jerry figured out something the rest of us spend our whole lives dancing around: that the hardest part of making anything was never the making.
It’s the choosing.
What should I work on today? How should I approach it? For how long? In what order? Every one of those questions is a tiny toll booth standing between you and the desk, and most days, that toll adds up to more than we’re willing to pay. We call it writer’s block or a lack of inspiration, but a lot of the time it’s just decision fatigue wearing a more romantic disguise.
Jerry removed the toll booths. He built a system that hands him a decision already made, so all that’s left is the doing. And because the doing is the easy part, once you strip away the choosing, he’s been able to do it for sixty years without stopping.
I recognize something of myself in Jerry, and maybe you will too. I’ve always been a systems person as much as a words person. I like building the scaffolding almost as much as I like what eventually hangs on it. And when I look at his map, four thousand pages deep, I don’t see a genius. I see someone who engineered his own persistence.
That reframe matters to me, because I think we’ve been sold a myth about what great work looks like. We imagine it arriving in a flash, a bolt of vision that some rare few are gifted and the rest of us are waiting around for. But most of what we call genius, when you get close enough to it, turns out to be a much less glamorous thing: someone showing up, again, on a day they didn’t feel like it, because showing up had already been decided for them.
Four thousand pages of an ever-changing fantasy map sounds impossible until you realize nobody ever draws four thousand pages. They draw one page. And then, because the friction of deciding what came next had already been handled, they draw another.
So if you’re staring down a project that feels too big, or you’ve stalled out because you can’t decide what to work on next, I don’t think the answer is to wait for a better idea or a clearer sense of purpose. I think the answer is to ask a much smaller, much less romantic question: what’s the one thing standing between me and starting, and how do I remove it before I have to think about it again.
For Jerry, that’s a deck of cards. For me, I’m still figuring it out, one page at a time, same as everyone else.
I’ll let you know when I do.