I’ve been weirdly busy writing my new book.
My head has been (and still is) chockablock full of words and ideas as I’m thinking through things. This has lead to a weird side-effect. I’m noticing weird patterns.
Patterns. Weird ones.
Take a look at this picture of a funnel feeding a bottle:
It's a visual metaphore in The Bottleneck Detective Bootcamp book, with the top half representing sales and marketing, and the bottom half representing delivery.
Now scroll up and take a look at the picture of my mum's garden at the top of this note.
Can you see the same shape - the blue glass on the left? Mum tells me it's been in her garden for years. I noticed it this evening.
Somehow my mind is primed to notice weird things like this.
Weird. Patterns.
Another one:
Some time in the last 2 years NZ number plates on new cars started starting with the letter Q. I noticed this last week, for the first time, when I saw "QQQ 602", which I love because it rhymes.
Since then I've noticed dozens of Q plates.
So many, in fact, that my wife has asked me to stop pointing them out to her when we go for a drive.
(She snarkily suggested we play "I Spy" instead.)
What's going on?
My weird theory is that I'm obeying the number 1 rule from the Bottleneck Detective Bootcaml, which is that if you want to find bottlenecks look out for QUEUES:
Billy recalled rule #1 from Bottleneck Detective School…
Rule #1: Long queues are like the smoking gun in a crime movie—they often point to the criminal.
And now I'm seeing Qs everywhere.
I saw three Q cars in a row the other day - a queue of Qs?
Any idea what's going on? Is this just a curse of putting myself jnto a hyper-creative mode? Or am I going nuts? Or something else?
Hope you're doing well. Have you ever experienced anything like this?
Clarke
p.s. Currently, I plan to ship the new book this December - on the 10th anniversary of publishing Rolling Rocks Downhill.