"When trying to locate something, search your mind first"
About this Quote
A surprisingly bracing little rebuke to our default setting: outsourcing attention. "When trying to locate something" sounds like a mundane domestic problem (keys, phone, that file you swore you saved). Then Bruce pivots: the first search isn’t under the couch cushions, it’s in your head. The line works because it treats memory and perception as real terrain, not vapor. You don’t just misplace objects; you misplace the narrative of your last five minutes.
The intent is practical, but the subtext is cultural. We live amid frictionless external search: Google, Find My, inbox search, endless receipts of our lives. That convenience quietly trains us to skip the internal audit: What was I doing? What did I touch? What did I assume? Bruce’s "first" is the key word. He’s not romanticizing intuition; he’s proposing an order of operations that restores agency. Before the world becomes a scavenger hunt, interrogate your own habits of distraction.
Context matters: coming from a working writer, it doubles as craft advice. Plot holes, missing motivations, the "lost" scene you can’t find in the draft often aren’t missing on the page; they’re missing in the model of the story in your mind. Same with arguments and anxieties: the thing you think you’re searching for externally might actually be a gap in understanding, an unexamined assumption.
It’s also a gentle reminder that attention is a resource. The fastest way to find what’s gone is to notice how you lose things in the first place.
The intent is practical, but the subtext is cultural. We live amid frictionless external search: Google, Find My, inbox search, endless receipts of our lives. That convenience quietly trains us to skip the internal audit: What was I doing? What did I touch? What did I assume? Bruce’s "first" is the key word. He’s not romanticizing intuition; he’s proposing an order of operations that restores agency. Before the world becomes a scavenger hunt, interrogate your own habits of distraction.
Context matters: coming from a working writer, it doubles as craft advice. Plot holes, missing motivations, the "lost" scene you can’t find in the draft often aren’t missing on the page; they’re missing in the model of the story in your mind. Same with arguments and anxieties: the thing you think you’re searching for externally might actually be a gap in understanding, an unexamined assumption.
It’s also a gentle reminder that attention is a resource. The fastest way to find what’s gone is to notice how you lose things in the first place.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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