“The path to a passionate life is often way more complex than the simple advice ‘follow your passion’ would suggest.” — Cal Newport
As one of my tasks for World Domination Summit, I recently rewatched recordings of every main-stage speaker. Though all of the speakers were great, Cal Newport’s talk has been most on my mind over the past couple of weeks.
Cal Newport is an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He’s the author or several books, including the recent So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. He also writes a blog called Study Hacks, where he explores best practices for work and learning. (In his words, he’s attempting to decode “patterns of success”.)
At World Domination Summit, Cal explored the age-old wisdom to “follow your passion” when choosing a career. You’ve been told you should follow your passion, to do what you love and the money will follow. But how sound is this advice? He argues that it’s astonishingly wrong: It’s not age-old wisdom; in fact, it’s a recent idea, and one that does more harm than good.
For a quick highlight from Cal’s talk, watch from 7:56 to 14:43, where he describes how Steve Jobs did not follow his passion when building Apple Computer into a world-wide brand.
As a young man, Jobs was passionate about philosophy and eastern mysticism — not electronics. Building computers was just a way to make some quick cash. But eventually, this scheme morphed into something more. And eventually, Jobs did become passionate about computers. He didn’t start out that way, though, and he certainly wasn’t following his passion when he started Apple.
In much the same way, I fell into writing about personal finance.
Money was never a passion of mine. Even today, I don’t really care about the stock market or budgeting or how to find the best savings account. I care about writing. I like to tell stories. Somehow I fell into a career of writing about money, of telling stories about personal finance. For some reason, I’m good at this, and I’ve been able to make a career out of it. But it’s not my passion.
I’m not ready to argue that you shouldn’t follow your passion. I still think that’s good advice for many people. But I think Cal Newport is on to something when he says that happiness and fulfillment are much more complex than adhering to a simple maxim. In reality, if you choose to excel what you do, the passion will often follow.
My friend Jen (well, one of my friends Jen — I have three…or more) sent me this video, which you’ve probably already seen. It’s a New Zealand Airline safety briefing with hobbits and elves and orcs. And Gollum.
Cute. (And, in one place, with double entendre!)
But I’ll tell you what. Nothing beats the safety video I saw on Pegasus Airlines in Turkey. It was filmed using children of Pegasus employees and is so flippin’ cute!!. Here’s a short version from Pegasus itself:
“We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them.” — M. Scott Peck
One reason I enjoy dating Kim is that although superficially we’re unalike, and although we’ve had vastly different life experiences, deep down we have similar values and life philosophies. This means we have some interesting conversations about the way the world works, and we each bring a different perspective to the discussion.
Last weekend, the topic turned to the nature of personal responsibility. Both of us believe strongly that each person is responsible for her own happiness, that each person is responsible for his own success. Yes, life deals better hands to some people than to others. Plus, some people seem to be luckier than other people. Ultimately, however, you are responsible for improving your own state in life. You cannot expect anyone else to better it for you.
Note: This belief is built into my tenets of personal finance. When I say “nobody cares more about your money than you do“, this is exactly what I mean. Yes, take advice from people. Yes, take advantage of the resources available to you. But ultimately, you are the one who responsible for building and growing your nest egg.
This discussion was reinforced on Monday as I continued to read through M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. The entire first section of The Road Less Traveled is about personal responsibility, and there’s a great chapter on what Peck calls “the escape from freedom”. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis mine):
…Almost all of us from time to time seek to avoid — in ways that can be quite subtle — the pain of assuming responsibility for our own problems…
The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior…Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity, be it “fate” or “society” or the government or the corporation or our boss. It is for this reason that Erich Fromm so aptly title his study of Nazism and authoritarianism Escape from Freedom. In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom.
As children, by virtue of our real and extensive dependency, our parents have real and extensive power over us. They are, in fact, largely responsible for our well-being, and we are, in fact, largely at their mercy. When parents are oppressive, as so often they are, we as children are largely powerless to do anything about it; our choices are limited. But as adults, when we are physically healthy, our choices are almost unlimited. That does not mean they are not painful. Frequently our choices lie between the lesser of two evils, but it is still within our power to make these choices.
…There are indeed oppressive forces at work within the world. We have, however, the freedom to choose every step of the way the manner in which we are going to respond to and deal with these forces.
…One of the roots of this “sense of impotence” in the majority of [people] is some desire to partially or totally escape the pain of freedom, and, therefore, some failure, partial or total, to accept responsibility for their problems and their lives. They feel impotent because they have, in fact, given their power away. Sooner or later…they must learn that the entirety of one’s adult life is a series of personal choices, decisions. If they can accept this totally, then they become free people. To the extent that they do not accept this they will forever feel themselves victims.
Again, I’m reminded of Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. That entire book is about letting go of the idea that other people control our destiny, that we’re handcuffed to our past decisions. Browne, like Peck, argues that we’re responsible for our own freedom, our own happiness. But too many of us say “I can’t because…”
The reality is not that we can’t, but that we choose not to. It’s a subtle shift in framing things, but it’s an important one.
This morning, I drove half an hour from Portland to Canby to run a bunch of errands. I stopped by the family box factory to do some computer programming (paper prices have risen), had lunch with my accountant (who is also a close friend), and had my girlfriend clean my teeth (she’s a dental hygienist). I left the dental office at about 4:30 and was stuck in traffic for almost the entire drive.
“This sucks,” I thought, as I sat on the freeway with everyone else. “Plus, I’m hungry.” I hadn’t eaten much despite the fact that I’m supposed to be increasing weight.
“Maybe I’ll eat at Screen Door,” I thought. Screen Door is one of my favorite Portland restaurants. It features great southern food, including the best fried chicken I’ve ever had. Fried chicken has a lot of calories. And there’s lots of protein there, right? It seemed like a great way to get my daily dietary intake up to where it ought to be.
Screen Door is usually packed. Not tonight. Tonight, there were maybe five tables full, plus one fellow at the bar. Two fellows at the bar after I sat down.
“I don’t need a menu,” I told the bartender. “Just give me the fried chicken and a Rhett Butler.” A Rhett Butler is like an old fashioned, but with ginger puree. I pulled out my notebook and prepared to take notes on this month’s book group book, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.
“What are you reading?” asked the fellow seated next to me at the bar.
“Hemingway,” I said.
“Can I see?” he said as he picked up the book. He leafed through the pages. “John Donne,” he said, noting the inscription at the front of the book. (“For whom the bell tolls…” is a quote from Donne’s famous mediation on death.)
Note: As some of you may know, I am a poetry geek. Always have been. One of my favorite poems is John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”. “Thy firmness makes my circle just, and makes me end, where I begun.” Great stuff.
“That’s very buddhist, you know,” my companion said, handing Hemingway back to me. “‘No man is an island’ and all that.”
“Is it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Nothing in the universe stands alone. Everything is connected. Everything can be broken down into something smaller. Everything arises from causes and conditions. All things that are born are subject to death.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s interesting.”
“You know what,” my companion told me. “You ought to go online. Go to YouTube. Look up this guy Dzongsar Khyentse Ripnoche. Look for the videos where he answers questions.” I offered him my notebook and he wrote it down for me.
“You might also be interested in a couple of other books,” my new friend told me. “You should read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda and On Becoming a Person, which is a great humanist book by Carl Rogers.”
“Wow,” I said. “My girlfriend really likes Paramahansa Yogananda. She says Autobiography of a Yoga was very influential for her. In fact, in my car I have a couple of his lectures on CD.”
“He’s the real deal,” my companion said as our dinners arrived. My fried chicken smelled delicious. He had ordered a cheeseburger, which I didn’t even know you could get at Screen Door. “He’s not a charlatan like a lot of those guys in the east. He’s a real avatar.”
As we ate, the guy next to me asked me a bit about my life, and I asked a bit about his. I told him that I make my living writing about money. He told me that he makes his by practicing naturopathic medicine. Or he used to anyhow.
“I was building my practice,” he told me, “and everything was going great. But then fate intervened. I got hit by a drunk driver. An eighteen-year-old kid t-boned my car and I lost everything to medical bankruptcy.”
“That sucks,” I said. “What a shitty thing to have happen.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It just reinforced how nothing is permanent. You can thing you have security, but it’s really just an illusion.” He paused for a moment, taking a bite of his burger. “But you know, there have been a lot of blessings that came from that. You’d be surprised.”
“From the accident?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I learned a lot about myself. I’m much stronger now. I’ve never been happier.”
“Good for you,” I said, stirring some of my mashed potatoes in the tasty tasty gravy. We sat in silence for a while.
“How old are you?” my friend asked eventually. “Forty-eight?”
“Forty-three,” I said.
“Forty-three!” he said. He seemed surprised. “You have a little grey hair there, buddy.” I was dying on the inside, and I wanted to laugh. Nobody’s ever thought I looked older before. Most people think I’m in my thirties.
“You eat paleo, don’t you?” he said.
I laughed. “I try to,” I said, “though I’m not sure fried chicken counts.”
“Well, I can’t eat any more of that,” I said, pushing my plate aside. “Who am I fooling?”
The bartender was standing right there. “You need to finish that, young man,” he said with mock severity. We all laughed.
My companion and I talked a bit more, and I mentioned that Kim eats paleo too. (In fact, she’s much better at it than I am.) I’d already told my companion that she was familiar with buddhism, and that she knew about Paramahansa Yogananda. He seemed impressed.
“Your girlfriend must be very thoughtful. How old is she?” he asked.
“She just turned forty,” I said. “And she is very thoughtful.”
“You’re lucky,” he said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“To meet a woman our age who’s thoughtful is very rare. It’s unusual. It sounds like you found a winner. Don’t screw that up. If she actually believes and adheres to this stuff, it’s like finding a treasure buried under your kitchen floor.”
I nodded in silent agreement. I wanted to ask more — why is it rare to meet a 40-year-old woman who’s thoughtful? — but the conversation moved on. We talked about Tibet, about buddhism, about money, about divorce. We discussed John Steinbeck and Robert Kiyosaki.
“I wish I had unlimited time to read, study, and contemplate,” my friend said. “And to meditate.”
“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”
“I’ve traveled around,” he told me. “I’ve met a lot of thinkers. I knew I’d found the right teacher when he told me, ‘The ultimate goal is to become your own teacher.'”
“I like that,” I said.
We stood to go our separate ways. “You can write about this,” he told me (he’d seen me taking notes), “but please keep me anonymous.”
“I will,” I said. “Thank you.” We shook hands and walked out into the rain.
Today, while sorting notes for a big project I have planned for 2013 (my biggest project for 2013, actually), I found a scrap of paper on which I’d copied three excerpts of a buddhist poem. (Well, not a poem precisely, but close enough.) Each of these three verses comes from a different place in a single larger work.
We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Your worst enemy cannot hurt you
As much as your own thoughts, unguarded.
Love yourself and be awake —
Today, tomorrow, always.
You are your only master.
Drink deeply.
Live in serenity and joy.
Meditate.
Live purely.
Be quiet.
Do your work with mastery.
I copied these verses from Teachings of the Buddha, edited by Jack Kornfield. They’re each from the dhammapada, as translated by Thomas Byrom.
These sayings resonate with me; they encapsulate an important part of my world view. Namely, that we are each responsible for our own attitudes. How we see ourselves is how we see the world.
I’m surprised how often people ask me to list the blogs I read. To me, a blog reading list is as individual as a fingerprint. Everyone has different tastes. Sharing my favorites doesn’t seem useful.
But last week, after yet another person asked for my list of “best blogs”, I decided to sit down and share the sites I check daily. Here they are:
Afford Anything — I met Paula Pant at Fincon 2012 in early September. In early October, she picked me up at the Atlanta airport and gave me a ride to my hotel for Savvy Blogging Summit. In those two brief encounters, I was impressed by Paula’s brain and by her entrepreneurial spirit. I subscribed to her blog, Afford Anything. In the past month, I’ve come to realize that she and I share similar philosophies, not just about money, but about life in general. Plus, she’s a damn good writer. That makes her blog one of my current favorites.
The Art of Manliness — Brett McKay started as a personal finance blogger, about the same time I was starting Get Rich Slowly. Somewhere along the way, he and his wife started another blog, a blog about modern gentlemen. It didn’t take long before this new blog became a full-time business for him. It’s easy to see why. The Art of Manliness covers classic manners and style for young men — and for middle-aged men like me. As I’ve dabbled in the dating world over the past year, this has been an invaluable read.
The Art of Non-Conformity — Over the past few years, Chris Guillebeau has become one of my closest friends. I’m proud to be a part of his team that organizes the annual World Domination Summit. Kim and I plan to join him in Oslo next April as he completes his quest to visit every country in the world by his 35th birthday. And two or three times a week, I enjoy reading his thoughts at The Art of Non-Conformity, where he writes about entrepreneurship, travel, and personal development. It’d be one of my favorite blogs even if I wasn’t his personal catsitter.
BBC Mundo — My Spanish lessons may be on hold, but my Spanish learning isn’t. I get my daily dose of news from BBC Mundo, the Spanish-language BBC site. It’s pitched perfectly at my reading level, and I enjoy the wide range of topics covered at the site.
Get Rich Slowly — No surprise, but the personal finance blog I founded six-and-a-half years ago is also a daily read for me. I don’t comment there much anymore, but I do read the articles so that I can keep up date with what’s going on over there.
Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools — Kevin Kelly is the former executive editor of Wired magazine, and he hosts several blogs at his site. Cool Tools is my favorite. It features an ongoing list of books, gadgets, and other things that make life easier. (I was shocked and honored when he featured my own book — Your Money: The Missing Manual — as one of his cool tools, writing, “This is the best user-guide to personal finance I’ve found, and I’ve probably read them all.”) Cool Tools is a great site, but also dangerous. It tempts me to buy things I do not need!
Kottke.org — Jason Kottke’s blog was one of the first I ever read. And here I am, over a decade later, still reading it. His site is simply a collection of interesting links he finds around the web, but that’s okay. I trust his ability to curate content. It saves me time and keeps my mind stimulated.
Legal Nomads — Like Paula at Afford Anything, Jodi Ettenberg has an amazing brain. Over the past eighteen months, she and I have had some great chats by phone and in person. But when I’m not able to tap directly into her head, I get my fill of Jodiness through her blog at Legal Nomads, where she writes about food, travel, and related topics. (Speaking of which, Jodi just published her first book: The Food Traveler’s Handbook. I downloaded it for the Kindle the other day, and now need to find time to read it.)
Mimi Smartypants — I don’t remember how I found Mimi Smartypants, but I know why I stick around. This personal blog features some of the funniest, smartest writing on the web. The Chicago-based author works in the publishing industry and writes with candor (and humor) about sex, adoption, public transportation, music, food, sports, and more. She doesn’t post often, but when she does, it’s a treat.
Mr. Money Mustache — Before I retired from Get Rich Slowly, my readers had been singing the praises of Mr. Money Mustache, whose brash personal finance advice resonated with many folks. I met the author at Fincon in Denver, and was impressed. His view of blogging and mine are very similar, and I admire his personal philosophy. Mr. Money Mustache is now on my reading list, and I recommend it to folks looking for solid money advice.
Zen Habits — I’ve been reading Zen Habits since day one. I’ve enjoyed following Leo Babauta’s development, his quest to lose weight, quit smoking, make money, and raise a family. What I like most is that Leo’s blog is a true reflection of his own quest to become a better person. He’s flawed, just like me. And it’s because of his flaws that he’s constantly striving for improvement. It was a joy to meet Leo in person last year, and I look forward to spending more time with him next summer.
There are other blogs I read less often, and others that are new to my daily routine, but these are the sites I find myself reading regularly. As I say, the list is personal. These sites have info I find useful and/or fun, and authors with compelling voices.
What do you think? Do you read any of these sites? Based on what you see in my list, can you recommend other blogs I might like? I’m always interested in finding well-written content that stimulates my brain and keeps me entertained.
When I returned from Turkey, I came home to find that the song “Gangnam Style” was everywhere. (600 million views on YouTube!) I’m okay with that. I love it too. Here, though, is an acoustic version of “Gangnam Style” that may be my favorite version yet:
Earlier this week, I mentioned Do the Work!, Steven Pressfield’s small book about overcoming procrastination and getting things done. Today, I want to share something I read recently in The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck.
My parents loved The Road Less Traveled when I was a boy, but I’ve never read it myself. Kim has a copy of it on her bookshelf, so I’ve been making my way through it slowly when I have downtime at her house. It’s interesting.
Peck’s book begins in a buddhic fashion, postulating that “life is difficult”. (The first of Buddha’s four noble truths is that “life is suffering”.) Peck argues that suffering is necessary, but that we can achieve mental and spiritual health by using four tools to cope with the challenges we face. Namely:
Delaying gratification
Accepting responsibility
Dedication to truth
Balancing
I don’t know what he means by all of these yet because I’m not very far in the book. I have, however, begun to read the section on delaying gratification, and I find it fascinating.
Note: Peck’s four tools for dealing with difficulties remind me a little of Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements, which I shared last week.
I particularly liked this passage in which Peck explains that procrastination is, essentially, a manifestation of low self-esteem. If you don’t like yourself, you don’t value your time, and so you waste it or you put things off. (As always, emphasis is mine.)
When we love something it is of value to us, and when something is of value to us we spend time with it, time enjoying it and time taking care of it. Observe a teenager in love with his car and not the time he will spend admiring it, polishing it, repairing it, tuning it. Or an older person with a beloved rose garden, and the time spent pruning and mulching and fertilizing and studying it. So it is when we love children; we spend time admiring them and caring for them. We give them our time.
…
The time and the quality of the time that their parents devote to them indicate to the children the degree to which they are valued by their parents.
…
The feeling of being valuable — “I am a valuable person” — is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline. It is a direct product of parental love. Such a conviction must be gained in childhood; it is extremely difficult to acquire it in adulthood. Conversely, when children have learned through the love of their parents to feel valuable, it is almost impossible for the vicissitudes of adulthood to destroy their spirit.
This feeling of being valuable is a cornerstone of self-discipline because when one considers oneself valuable one will take care of oneself in all ways that are necessary. Self-discipline is self-caring. For instance — since we are discussing the process of delaying gratification, of scheduling and ordering our time — let us examine the matter of time. If we feel ourselves valuable, then we will feel our time to be valuable, and if we feel our time to be valuable, then we will want to use it well.
The financial analyst who procrastinated [mentioned earlier in the book] did not value her time. If she had, she would not have allowed herself to spend most of her day so unhappily and unproductively. It was not without consequence for her that throughout her childhood she was “farmed out” during all school vacations to live with paid foster parents although her parents could have taken care of her perfectly well had they wanted to. They did not value her. They did not want to care for her. So she grew up feeling herself to be of little value, not worth caring for; therefor she did not care for herself. She did not feel she was worth disciplining herself. Despite the fact that she was an intelligent and competent woman she required the most elementary instruction in self-discipline because she lacked a realistic assessment of her own worth and the value of her own time. Once she was able to perceive her time as being valuable, it naturally followed that she wanted to organize it and protect it and make maximum use of it.
I used to be a terrible procrastinator. I also used to waste my time on frivolities. Based on the above passage, it will probably come as no surprise to find that I had little self-esteem. I didn’t like myself, so no wonder I didn’t value my time.
Now, though, I’ve changed. I do like myself. I like who I am. I like what I do. And because I’ve found self-worth, my relationship with time has changed. Whereas I once wasted hours on mindless television or (especially) on videogames, I rarely do this anymore. (Sure, I play games and watch TV sometimes, but it’s a conscious choice, a chance to unwind now and then.) I’ve also become much better about procrastination. When I do procrastinate, it’s usually because I’ve done a poor job prioritizing, not because I’m unhappy with myself.
There’s a lot of good stuff in The Road Less Traveled; I can see why it has sold seven million copies. If I’d read it earlier in my life, it might be one of those foundational books that my personal philosophy is built upon. Actually, it may still become one of those books. I’m sure I’ll be sharing more insights from The Road Less Traveled as I slowly work my way through it.
With rare exceptions, I’m not a fan the horror genre. It’s a little too real for my tastes. Still, now and then, a little horror can be fun.
This year, Jennifer threw a late party for Kim’s 40th birthday. Because we held the event at the end of October, naturally she chose a funerary theme. For instance, she rented a hearse to transport Kim and me to the celebration:
Brett and Vicki gave us (sort of) spooky masks:
And, of course, the cake (a “rice krispie cake”) was shaped like a tombstone:
Last weekend, we joined a couple of dozen other folks to play along in the gym’s second-annual “zombie apocalypse” game. The game involved lots of running for us humans, but the zombies didn’t get much of a workout. I think the zombies had more fun, though. Take a look at Kyra and Kim’s makeup:
Nobody — not even her boyfriend or family — could tell which zombie was Kim
Kim and Kyra vowed that they were going to “kill” me during the game. I vowed they weren’t. Ultimately, however, Kyra prevailed and I was forced to join the walking dead…
All of this is prelude to the following: Although I’m not a fan of the horror genre in general, I do like ghost stories. Ghost stories are great fun. I like complex novel-length ghost stories (like Wilkie Collins’ wonderful classic, The Woman in White) and I like short, simple ghost stories — like “The Velvet Ribbon”.
When I was a boy, my sister Shelley had “The Velvet Ribbon” on vinyl record. It scared the hell out of me, but I listened to the story over and over. A few years ago, one of my readers sent me an mp3 file of the story. And now, in the age of YouTube, somebody has posted the story online:
Spooky!
If you’d rather read than listen, here’s a text version of the story:
The Velvet Ribbon by Ann McGovern
Once there was a man who fell in love with a beautiful girl. And before the next full moon rose in the sky, they were wed.
To please her husband, the young wife wore a different gown each night. Sometimes she was dressed in yellow; other nights she wore red or blue or white. And she always wore a black velvet ribbon around her slender neck.
Day and night she wore that ribbon, and it was not long before her husband’s curiosity got the better of him.
“Why do you always wear that ribbon?” he asked. She smiled a strange smile and said not a word. At last her husband got angry. And one night he shouted at his bride. “Take that ribbon off! I’m tired of looking at it.”
You will be sorry if I do,” she replied, “so I won’t.”
Every morning at breakfast, the husband ordered his wife to remove the black velvet ribbon from around her neck. Every night at dinner he told her the same thing. But every morning at breakfast and every night at dinner, all his wife would say was, “You’ll be sorry if I do. So I won’t.”
A week passed. The husband no longer looked into his wife’s eyes. He could only stare at that black velvet ribbon around her neck.
One night as his wife lay sleeping, he tiptoed to her sewing basket. He took out a pair of scissors. Quickly and quietly, careful not to awaken her, he bent over his wife’s bed and
SNIP!
went the scissors, and the velvet ribbon fell to the floor. And
SNAP!
off came her head.
It rolled over the floor in the moonlight, wailing tearfully: “I…told…you…you’d…be…s-o-r-r-y!”
Tonight, I’ll be doing decidedly non-Halloween stuff. If it’s autumn, it must be time to plan next year’s World Domination Summit. The action team will be gathering at WDS HQ to discuss speakers, venues, and more. But when I get home, I’ll spend an hour or so reading ghost stories. Any recommendations?
Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is considered a classic among creative types, including bloggers. This thin book argues that the biggest enemy to productive work is Resistance, which takes the form of self-doubt, procrastination, addiction, distraction, perfectionism, and so on. The War of Art is a call to ignore Resistance and to do the work you’ve been called to do.
In his 2011 book, aptly titled Do the Work!, Pressfield again assaults this monster called Resistance. This time, however, he offers a step-by-step method for slaying the beast.
Before I left for Turkey, I spent a Sunday afternoon reading and taking notes on Do the Work! What emerged was a sort of workflow for accomplishing creative goals:
Don’t prepare. Begin. Allow yourself, at most, to read three books related to your subject.
Stay primitive. Don’t get fancy. Don’t try to be sophisticated.
Swing for the seats. Aim high. Go big or go home.
Outline your project on a single piece of legal-size paper. Your entire novel, business idea, or whatever should fit on one page.
Use a three-act structure: beginning, middle, end. Start at the end. Climax first. Then beginning. Then middle.
Get the idea down. You can polish and rewrite later.
Fill in the gaps. Once you have your outline, fill in the blanks. Have 7-8 major “sequences” (equivalent to 7-8 major scenes in a film).
Now allow yourself to do research, but only early or late in the day, never during prime working time.
Get your shitty first draft done ASAP. Don’t worry about quality. Act, don’t reflect. Momentum is everything. Do not judge yourself or your work at this point.
There are two components to writing (or any other act of creation): Acting is putting words on paper (writing) and reflecting is evaluating what’s on paper (editing). Never act and reflect at the same time.
Keep working!
The most important question is: “What is this about?” Once you have your theme, write it down. Post it. Nothing off-theme goes into the project.
Ask yourself what’s missing, then fill that void.
The two tests of Resistance are: “How badly do you want it?” and “Why do you want it?” You must be totally committed. You must want it for fun or beauty — or because you have no choice.
Getting work done is no longer a problem for me — though it used to be. If anything, I have the opposite problem: I’ve become a sort of work-a-holic. (Actually, I work like crazy from Monday to Thursday so that I can completely relax Friday through Sunday.)
That said, I love reading books like Do the Work! They show me how other creative types get things done. More than that, they provide added motivation. After I read these sorts of books, I come away energized and ready to do Great Things.
In fact, Do the Work! is one of the reasons More Than Money is up and operational today. If I hadn’t read the book, I’d probably still be trying to come up with the perfect blog name and design. I’d probably still be agonizing over what sorts of things to write about. Instead, I’ve simply begun. I’m doing the work. I can worry about perfectionism later.
Related reading: In a way, this book reminds me of George Leonard’s Mastery, which is the best book I’ve never reviewed. When I talk to people in Real Life, I often say that Mastery is the best book about personal finance I’ve ever read, even though it’s not a book about personal finance. Maybe I’ll get off my butt and review the book for More Than Money.
