Elizabeth King is, “Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.”
Tomorrow morning when you wake up, you probably won’t feel like engaging in the practice, and if you do, you probably won’t feel that way the next day. That what we do is once decide. We decide that we’re a runner, and runners go running every day. We decide we’re a blogger, and bloggers blog every day, and that decision lightens the cognitive load so much because there’s no time, no reason to negotiate with ourselves because we already had the meeting. We already decided. Now the question is not should we go or not. The question is should we go left or right, but we’re going.
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so my mom worked as a volunteer at the museum and then got a job there and pioneered the museum store. She just stuck with it and stuck with it and stuck with it. Without a lot of drama, but in terms of it was sustaining. She could point to work that she did that others didn’t think was going to make a difference that really did.
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I think authenticity is a crock, and I think authenticity is overrated and talked about far too much. The problem with authenticity is it’s selfish. Authenticity enables us to say whatever we want and if people don’t like it, well I was just being authentic. It is a ticket to self-absorbed inconsistency, and I don’t think anybody we serve wants that. I think what they want is consistency. I think they want us to make a promise and keep it, and the reason it’s called work, not my hobby is because I made a promise.
I decided a really long time ago that I was going to be consistent, and it didn’t matter if in a moment, I felt like yelling at a customer service person, or going up on stage when I’m supposed to be adding energy and just taking energy instead. What I learned from that is the way we act determines how we feel way more often than the way we feel determines how we act.
do what you love is for amateurs, love what you do is the mantra for professionals
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Because generosity doesn’t mean free. Generosity means that you’re expending emotional energy, emotional labor to help somebody else
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anxiety is experiencing failure in advance, at least it is for me. Meaning, that after it’s over, we don’t call it anxiety anymore. We’re in grief or we’re rebuilding, but when it might go wrong, worrying, anxiety is what we feel when we’re imagining it did, and that’s not helping anything. The question is how do we focus that part of our attention on something generous instead because anxiety and worry is almost never in service of someone else.
It’s in service of our need for the status quo and reassurance. I think that reassurance is futile because you never have enough of it.
It feels great to get reassurance. I wish that the phone would ring and it’s the head of the Pulitzer Committee saying that they read this thing I wrote, and it’s fantastic. I would be high as a kite for at least a day and a half, and then you’d need it again because what it did for you was make you feel for a moment like bad outcomes weren’t going to happen, until you got new evidence that they might, and then you’re back to anxiety and worrying again. People who get hooked on reassurance might end up building an intimacy with the person who’s reassuring them all the time, but it is not helping them do better work, nor is it making them happier. The alternative is to say this might not work.
This thing I did, this thing I cared about might not work. Odds are it won’t, but I have a portfolio and then I’ll make the next thing because we don’t live on the savannah. This is not a matter of life or death most of the time. It is instead a matter of ego and self-esteem, and it’s not fatal. All of the worrying is worse than the rejection when it finally comes. Better I think to merely do the work, be generous with the work, and improve our skills so we can do it again, and that gets back to Elizabeth King’s quote.
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Everyone’s come up with their own combination of what’s holding them back. The way to unlock it, I wish there was a hierarchy and a taxonomy that said “This is how we get all the way up to the top.” I don’t feel like it’s Maslovian in that way. I feel like we each find our own sinecure, our own way to hide out from the thing that is keeping us from the creativity that we want to deliver, and it starts to eat us up inside.
The deeper we’ve built it, the harder it is for us to have an outsider help us. The list of excuses we have is infinite. So I don’t know if I could point to this one, which unlocks all of them. I guess the juggling one has a big piece of it, which is throwing, not catching. I think the generosity one, which is I’m not throwing for myself, I am throwing for other people. When I add those two up, what I end up with is this. Creativity is a generous act. Get out of your own way, don’t ask for a guarantee. Simply merely ship the work without drama and without dialogue.
The current Western mindset is: tell me if it’s going to work and then I’ll do it. Part of this comes from school, which is you know you’re in school if someone says will this be on the test. The phrase will this be on the test means I am willing to momentarily memorize this if you are willing to trade me for an A. If not, I’ll zone out because I’ve got plenty of other things to do. I’ll be back when you’re ready to trade.
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attitudes are skills.
Okay, so let’s talk about skills. You’ve come up first with wrestling and then with other skill-based activities that you excelled at by putting in an enormous amount of effort and practice and grit, but plenty of other people did too and you somehow outperformed them. You’ve done that beyond the physical realm. You’ve done it in culture and in writing as well. I would argue that’s because in addition to the obvious, easy to measure hard skills of how many words per minute can you type in, how many pounds can you bench press. There are soft skills and they involve curiosity, they involve experimentation and 30 other things. These are all skills in the sense that we can learn them.
We can learn to be more honest, we can learn to be more diligent, we can learn to be more persistent, and that’s great. Because if you can learn them, then you’re not stuck where you are. You can become who you want to be. If we start by acknowledging that our attitudes are skills and that skills are learnable, suddenly talent recedes far into the rear view mirror. We are going to be rewarded not simply because we can beat someone on a test, but because our whole posture is based on the possibility of better,
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pedagogy and the thinking about how people learn. I think one reason that a lot of people are bad at teaching is because they don’t think about pedagogy. All they know is they know something and if they could just recite all the things they know, someone else will know it too, and that’s not how learning works.
the typical person we seek to serve learns something, that we learn things by becoming momentarily incompetent. We used to feel like we were in control, that we understood things and then all of a sudden, a new fact arises that counters what we know. In that moment, we’re feeling incompetent and that’s when most people quit, but then we get through it, and now we know something more than we used to know, and now we’re on to the next thing. Pacing that process is tricky.
If you’re sitting listening to a high-level conversation between two extraordinary systems engineers, they’re back and forth and really fast because they’ve got full throttle between them, but most of the time, you don’t get that privilege. The challenge is not to dumb it down, but to figure out what are the useful chunks of tension that you can create where someone can feel the tension, get through the tension, absorb it, and then be ready for another bit.
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If you want to learn how to juggle, you have to drop an enormous amount of balls. If you want to learn how to swim, you have to sort of drown. If you want to learn how to be creative, you have to show me an enormous number of bad ideas. Pick the smallest region, domain, any segment you want. Start listing your bad ideas. Keep listing your bad ideas. Let’s prove that your bad ideas are not fatal.
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