What I’ve Learned So Far

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.

Last week I listened to this Bill Moyers interview with former Army colonel and current Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, who has scathing things to say about America’s leaders — of both parties, in both the executive and legislative branches — and their treatment of the foreign policy of the United States.

See the interview (or read a transcript) here.

I’m looking forward to reading Bacevich’s just-released book, The Limits of Power. I expect to grind my teeth at our leaders’ stupidity and caprice when I read it, but that’s not a bad thing.

No big deal, but if you’re one of my regular correspondents — or, heck, if you merely aspire to such an exalted status — please expect slower, shorter, and less obsessive message-answering from me. In other words, please expect me to be a sometimes-bad correspondent going forward.

Why? Mainly so I can devote more time to my New Year’s resolution to “Eliminate unfinished business in my life.” I don’t expect to be quite as bad about correspondence as Neal Stephenson, but I do intend to pursue some “good procrastination” on things like correspondence so that I won’t do bad procrastination with my Ph.D. work, my book-writing, et cetera.

Have no fear — if you send me something that needs a response, you’ll get one. But it may take a little while. Otherwise, please expect loads of radio silence in place of my usual chatter.

Oh, and expect me to display a light heart as I get my Big Work done.

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(Picture by L. Marie.)

Clearing the decks of stuff I’ve been meaning to talk about . . .

ArmadilloCon, held last weekend in Austin, was fun. It was my first sci-fi convention, and I attended mainly to meet and hear from guest of honor John Scalzi. He was just as funny and self-effacing — but in a charmingly ego-centric way! — as you’d expect if you read his blog regularly. You can also check out Scalzi’s writeup of his ArmadilloCon experience.

Another key attendee was my Hoover’s colleague Patrice Sarath, who, besides being an acute business analyst, has a new book out called Gordath Wood. My wife said that Patrice’s panel was very interesting — the best one she attended. So, go, Patrice!

My kids liked the dealer room, where they looked at all sorts of books, toys, robots, etc. My daughter also particularly liked Scalzi’s reading of the hilarious first chapter of his work-in-progress, The High Castle, which John was nice enough to deliver in a PG-13 version out of deference to my kids.

About the picture above: One of the exhibitors I met was local author Christine Rose, whose new YA fantasy novel, Rowan of the Wood — co-written with her husband Ethan — comes out on October 18. Given my daughter’s love for fantasy novels of this ilk, I imagine we’ll be attending the BookPeople release party that day. Yaaay for local authors!

And while we’re at it, yay for flights of fancy in storytelling, which was, at bottom, what ArmadilloCon was all about.

I once read a great quote from Pat Riley — he of the five NBA titles as a head coach — in which Riley said that his goal was to help his players get one percent better each day throughout a season. One percent.

It doesn’t sound like much, and indeed it’s a modest goal that would seem to be more about easy attainability than about world-class ambition. Until, that is, you start thinking about compounding.

Several times before, I’ve referred to Richard Hamming’s great talk about getting the most out of your career. One of the key concepts in the talk is the idea of compounding — using today’s gains to build on yesterday’s, not arithmetically but geometrically or logarithmically. (This, by the way, is also a key aspect of Anders Ericsson’s research on “deliberate practice,” which I’ve discussed on my professional blog.)

Doing the math

I was curious to know what sort of gains you’d see if you legitimately improved by one percent each day at a given thing. Clearly, it wouldn’t be possible to be so precise with many endeavors, e.g. painting pictures or learning to be your own bicycle mechanic. You could tell you were getting better over time, and maybe even day by day, but you’d have a hard time putting numbers to it.

But let’s pretend that whatever thing you want to do well is quantifiable, and that on Day Zero you start with 100 units of Goodness in the domain you’re improving.

0 = 100
1 = 101
2 = 102
3 = 103
4 = 104
5 = 105
. . .

At first, one-percent-daily improvement makes it look like you’d need nearly 100 days to double your acumen — which could be less than inspiring if you’re pursuing a new activity at which you suck, and at which you will merely suck less when you double your performance.

Eventually, though, you start to see a little headway:

25 = 128
30 = 135
35 = 142
40 = 149
. . .

Then the ol’ mathematics starts to kick in, and the quantities start to get stunning:

100 = 270
150 = 445
200 = 732
250 = 1,203
. . .

And so on. If you kept this up every day for a year, on day 365 you’d boast 3,778 units of Goodness — that is, you’d be nearly 38 times as good as when you started. At the end of two years, you’d have nearly 143,000 units of Goodness. A body can remove a lot of suckitude that way.

Sure, there’s such a thing as diminishing returns. Sure, most of us will need to take days off now and again. Feel free to adjust these numbers any way you care to. The point still stands: the work doesn’t just pile up over time — it multiplies.

How are you compounding your personal gains?
What could you do to get one percent better each day?

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No big revelation here, just a reminder: sometimes we ponder and ponder a thing, massage it in our minds, think about it six ways from Sunday, and generally make it into a big, hairy deal . . . only to find that it’s just not that hard in the actual doing.

Cases in point:

• Some form of regular exercise. I’m not talking about training for the Ironman. Getting out for a daily walk — even in the heat of a Texas summer — just isn’t that hard. If it’s too hot, get up earlier, or go out later, or walk in a mall or office building that’s air-conditioned. Or do bicycle kicks in your living room. Or swim. yesterday, I saw a guy who evidently has some sort of degenerative neuromuscular condition jogging . . . in the hottest part of the day. Virtually always, there’s something you could be doing.
• Saving money. Few Americans save enough, and as a people we have a negative savings rate. Yet virtually everyone who reads blogs has some discretionary income that they could sock away using a gew not-especially-clever strategies.
• Artistic creation. If you have plain paper and a cheap ballpoint, you can work on your drawing ability every single day — or at many different odd moments of every day. The tools you need to write that novel you suspect lurks within you? A spiral notebook and a mechanical pencil will work just fine.
• Alternate transportation. A couple of weeks ago, I took the bus to work all week, and it was virtually effortless — even enjoyable. Yesterday I fixed the flat tire on my bicycle and went for a little ride. No big deal.
• That Big, Looming Project you’ve been avoiding. Whether it’s cleaning out your garage, finishing your degree (note to self!), or whatever, it’s probably not quite as bad, not quite as hard, as you’ve been making it out to be. Time to dive in and find out.

One book that might help you with this is Mindset, by Professor Carol Dweck. (Find out more about it here.) Dweck’s research shows that our mindsets — which mostly fall into “fixed” (i.e. inflexible, set-in-stone) or “growth” (i.e. focused on possibilities and learning) categories — determine much about our approaches to life and its challenges.

To put it more bluntly, if you want your life to be a sucking mire of self-judgment and personal stagnation, then by all means keep following the same old patterns of stewing on your problems without taking action. But if you want your life to get better, turn down the self-criticism and the over-thinking, and turn up your appetite for learning and growth.

Hey, BIG problems like clinical depression, alcoholism and other addictions, chronic overspending, or a lifetime of poor self-image won’t be wished away in a moment, or remedied entirely by tackling the mess in the garage.

But tackling the mess in the garage won’t hurt, either, and for those of us who don’t have really debilitating issues to grapple with, hitting the mess in the garage (or the love handles, the unbalanced finances, etc.) at the point of contact may be our only effective way of building momentum.

Your turn: tell me something that you’ve done that you dreaded in prospect, but that wasn’t nearly so bad or so difficult once you got into it.
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(Photo by Jason Gulledge.)

I’ll share with you one of my pet theories. Ready? Here goes:

In this society we are entirely too afraid of death, and therefore too aversive about giving it any thought.

Let me rush to say that we wouldn’t benefit from a young-Morrissey-like fascination with death — much less from suicidal tendencies or excessively morbid imaginations.

But we would benefit from a more candid understanding that, on this earth at least, we are mortal. That means our days are numbered. That means we shouldn’t waste time, but instead live richly across the days we do have.

All of us have reminders that life can be unexpectedly short. Cancer, accidents, wars — the world is full of forces personal and impersonal that can cut short our time here. We’re right to stop these forces wherever we can, and to live for as many days as we can. But however many days we have, it’s important to make them count.

I’ve been thinking about this much more lately, ever since I stumbled across the 37 Days blog and met its author, Patti Digh. The blog’s title comes from Patti’s experience caring for her stepfather, who died 37 days after he was diagnosed with cancer. Her focus is clear from the blog’s tagline: “What would you be doing today if you only had 37 days to live?” I encourage you to visit the blog, read what she has to say, and think your own thoughts about how you would live out your last few weeks on earth — if you knew that they were your last few weeks.

(By the way, I intend to review Patti’s new book for my professional blog as soon as I receive the review copy her publisher is sending me.)

Okay, so what about the very un-37-like number listed in the title of this post?

That number is one rough estimate of how many days I personally can expect to live before dying of natural causes. It’s the sum derived when I subtract my current age in days (13,198) from the average number of days (31,070) that my four grandparents lived.

I’m fortunate that all of my grandparents lived past 75, and that three of them lived past 86. Given advances in nutrition and medicine, I hope to outlive them all by a wide margin. To be honest, I hope to live — hale and alert — past 110.

There’s good news and bad news about these expectations. The good news is, heck, I’ve got lots of time. The bad news is that the illusion that we have lots of time leads leads so many of us to waste so many of our days. This is why Patti evokes such great responses when she gets people thinking about how much life they’d like to compress into their few remaining days.

17,872 days seems like a lot, until you consider that surely plenty of them will be spent doing chores, earning a living, stuck in airports, sitting in the doctor’s office, waiting in traffic. Plenty of them will feature enough headaches that no Big Work will be done. Plenty of them will, or at least could, center around the kind of dithering that it’s all too easy to embrace when we don’t value our days fully.

How many days does that leave over? How many ways could we leave a mark on the world — make an impact for the forces of good — in those days?

Maybe it’s still a large number, but it requires focus to use that number. It requires focus to make sure that the number of days spent in housekeeping or wage-earning or small-timing doesn’t turn into “all of them.”

So very quickly, it seems, a big number can turn small.

My twenties, seen in the rearview mirror, seemed to go by like a shot. The first half of my thirties, even faster. My kids are sprouting up into adolescents before my eyes. Now I’m old enough to be President (not that I’d take the job), and nearly as old as Kipling was when he won the Nobel Prize. I’ll be 40 before you know it.

Then 50.

Then 60.

Then . . . well, there are no guarantees, are there?

Whether you’ve got 17,872 days left, or 37, or three — live today, friends.

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(Image by lydurs.)

Robert J. Sawyer is, according to many in the know, Canada’s top science-fiction novelist. He’s been writing more than 25 years now, and more than a decade ago he reprised Robert Heinlein’s five rules for writers, adding a sixth of his own.

1. You Must Write.
2. Finish What You Start.
3. You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order.
4. You Must Put Your Story on the Market.
5. You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold.
6. Start Working on Something Else.

Particular interesting to me is Sawyer’s idea — highly accurate, from my experience — that each of these guidelines will cut the potential audience of writers in half. Out of hundred would-be writers, fifty won’t write regularly, twenty-five more won’t finish what they start, and so on.

It’s a sobering observation, and one well worth pondering if you mean to write seriously.

Read Sawyer’s whole commentary here.

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Related posts:

• Neil Gaiman explains Terry Pratchett’s writing success.
• My entire advice for writers.

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