What I’ve Learned So Far

So, sing.

(Is it a metaphor? Of course it’s a metaphor. Unless your dream is to sing.)

The world is waiting to hear you.

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(Image by Nick Kocharhook.)

My family’s addiction to affection for Torchy’s Tacos has grown to the point that my son now tells me “I’ll have the usual” when I ask him what he wants to order there. Since he’s nine, that comes across as super-adorable, and indeed I also enjoy being enough of a regular at any place — coffee house, barber shop, etc. — that the staff can guess what I want before I order.

But just now I was doing my normal morning routine, drinking coffee and poking around online, and it occurred to me how much (too much) I’ve cherished that feeling of “the usual” in other parts of my life — especially the parts where “the usual” doesn’t carry the freight for my bigger aims in life.

If you’ve been reading me for any time, you’ll detect already that this is one more way of making a point I’ve made often: habits are incredibly powerful. When they’re good ones, they can liberate us from the ordinary; when they’re the wrong ones, they can imprison us.

“The usual,” for me, includes lots of good things — time with family, a rewarding job, good friends. But it also means subjecting myself to too much communication across my 19 inboxes and beyond. It means dithering around, noodling about things I’d like to do rather than leaping in and doing them. It means too many open channels at once, and not enough production.

It means . . . all the things that have gotten me where I am today, for good and for ill.

The thing to do is to hold onto the things that are worthy of your highest aspirations (friends, family, career, or whatever else is working for you), while amending the habits that aren’t pulling their weight for your big life aims.

The best way to amend them: replace them with new, better habits that do the work of delivering on your dreams.

That’s enough on this subject for now. I have some amending-and-replacing to do.

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(Image by Nealy-J, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

Today I was thinking of what word, if it could be applied accurately to me, would make the most difference in my work. “Methodical” was the best one I found.

What’s yours?

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(Photo by Mike Stimpson, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

Another gem turned up via Twitter:

“Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience.”
~George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

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An irony: Twitter is the medium of impatience — a sentence or two is all that goes into a message, and you can dash that off in a few seconds. Yet in this case Twitter brought me something I (and you?) need to hear.

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Possibly related:

Why Are the Most Creative People in Business Skipping Out on Web 2.0?

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My question to you:

Can genius and social media go together?

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(Photo by Abby Ladybug, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

On vacation last month I read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. I had heard of it before, but was persuaded to buy it by John Moore’s praise for it on his Brand Autopsy blog.

I’m glad I did. Although the book gets a wee bit mystical for me at times, and probably goes on a little long (despite weighing in at only 165 pages), overall it’s a fine treatment of the existential problems that face those of us who want to live our lives as creators.

Pressfield mostly talks about this from the perspective of a writer (he’s the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and other novels), but he explicitly extends his treatment to the other fine arts and to non-artistic creative endeavors like entrepreneurship.

His main concein — and it’s a useful one — is to suggest the personification of that demon Resistance, the entropic force that keeps creative people from working on their creative endeavors. Resistance undermines us in many ways, getting us to put off what’s deep and important and scary (in the good sense) in favor of what’s shallow, immediate, safe, and ultimately trivial.

The solution that Pressfield lays out is to “turn pro,” ideally in the sense of collecting money for your work, but more importantly in the sense of treating your work as true professionals do: by working every day and pressing ahead through doubts and creative doldrums.

There’s a cover blurb from Esquire that calls the book “a kick in the ass.” It is.

Recommended.

One more New Yorker note as I clear off my desk: on the other side of the first page of Haruki Murakami’s essay on running and writing is a Tobias Wolff essay called “Winter Light.” The piece centers on the Ingmar Bergman film of the same name, which had a deep effect on Wolff when he first saw it as a twentysomething university student at Oxford.

This passage particularly caught my attention:

It is a harrowing experience, this film, shot starkly in the winter light of its title and filled with wintry silences, the camera often unmoving in its scrutiny of the human face in anguish, uncertainty, and yearning. When the movie ended, we all sat there as if stunned. I used the word “harrowing.” Truly I felt harrowed, crust broken, buried things churning to the surface.

To me, harrowing the minds of the audience is a fine goal for any creator — writer, filmmaker, painter, what have you. And harrowing yourself is a fine goal for any sort of devotion, be it spiritual, intellectual, psychological, or physical.

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(Photo by Keith@Fibonacci.)

Murakami’s recent New Yorker essay offers a piece of wisdom that transcends watching one’s weight:

When I think about it, having the kind of body that easily puts on weight is perhaps a blessing in disguise. In other words, if I don’t want to gain weight I have to work out hard every day, watch what I eat, and cut down on indulgences. People who naturally keep the weight off don’t need to exercise or watch their diet. Which is why, in many cases, their physical strength deteriorates as they age. Those of us who have a tendency to gain weight should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so clearly visible. Of course, it’s not always easy to see things this way.

I think this viewpoint applies as well to the job of the novelist. Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do — or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins. As soon as I notice one source drying up, I move on to another. If people rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their source, they’re in trouble.

For me, the problem isn’t sources of creativity, and it isn’t (especially) the problem of putting on weight easily. It’s the problem of proliferating cruft easily.

If I want to achieve real progress in my work, I have to follow Murakami’s advice about working hard every day, watching my intake, and cutting down on my informational and obligational (?) indulgences.

Fernand Point was talking about chefs, not creatives in general, when he said this:

Every morning the cuisinier must start again at zero, with nothing on the stove.
That is what real cuisine is all about.

Yet the moment I read this, I thought of the connection to writing and my own overtaxed agenda — or, as I ought to say, my own overtaxed mind.

The perfect writer would approach the empty page each day with a clear mind and a clear conscience, taking advantage of all that had been learned before, but without being burdened by the results of previous efforts. This is true whether those results were good (which otherwise might create pressure to top them), bad (which might discourage the writer), or mixed.

Creative individuals in command of the creative process improve their skills from day to day, neither forgetting their experience nor being burdened by it. Like a great chef, they take the ingredients that come to hand in season, then apply their acumen to transforming those ingredients into works of art or craft.

But when creators allow the tides of life to overwhelm them . . . fluent creation becomes impossible. Skill is blunted by anxiety. Technique hides under the counter while doubt rages.

It is far better then, for artists of all stripes to follow M. Point’s advice to cuisiniers: they should approach their empty kitchens again each morning, rubbing their hands together in anticipation for what they will cook up today.

(Thanks to 37signals for the quote from Point; kitchen photo by ddaarryynn.)

“I asked my mother, what should I teach my kids? She said don’t teach them anything, just give them lots of supplies.”

—Tony Millionaire

(via Austin Kleon)

The other night I was talking with a family member about how the different media each create the conditions for artistic masterpieces. The conversation was in the context of “The Wire” — a show I’ve never watched, but which many think is the best drama on television (and one of the best ever).

Well, haiku would seem to be a good genre to fit on Twitter, where each message has to come in at 140 characters or less. But some Twitterers take it as a challenge to write “twooshes” — i.e. messages that are exactly 140 characters.

After I posted a tweet hypothesizing that a twoosh-haiku might be impossible, a friend pointed me to a Wikipedia page listing the longest single-syllable words in English. Then I composed this twoosh-haiku:

Scootched, then scratched, then squelched
scrounged, then scrunched, then squeezed through straits
breathed, stretched, and then squealed.

A masterpiece? Hardly. But it fascinated me to discover how a theme emerged from the materials I was given. There’s really something to this idea of constraints driving creativity.