Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.
Work is the manifestation of value, and anyone who tells you that a person whose mind is 50% occupied with anxiety is more likely to manifest value is a person who isn’t manifesting much.
“Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.” – Clayton Christensen.
Another excerpt:
“It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.”
I’ve written about this before, but two great articles recently said it even better:
Don’t try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky, glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn’t neat. – Bill Coyne of 3M, via Bob Sutton
If the process of bringing new things to life were a living, breathing organism, it would be a nasty beast! It would be unpredictable. It would consume as much as you dared to feed it. Some days, it would really stink. Yucko! And it would have a tendency to chew up people and spit them out. Most of all, though, it would hairy. Really hairy — think dense forests of tangly, greasy, matted, hair, the likes of which make people run for shampoo, scissors, clippers, straight razors, and a blow dryer…
But in that fuzziness is an unpredictable wellspring of creativity, which — if left to do what it will in in its own nonlinear way — is the source of the new and the wonderful. Consequently, one must never give in to the temptation to shave the fuzzy hairball that is innovation…
Understanding how to deal with ambiguity at a personal level is the key to unlocking one’s creative confidence. An organization which understands how to resist shaving the hairball, populated by people who know how to orbit the hairball, will be capable of bringing amazing things to life. – Diego Rodriguez
From Ed Catmull’s talk at the Economist Ideas conference:
I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures.
One of the protections is the notion that they have the final say so. Now this is a very hard thing to say because we say we are filmmaker led. The reason its hard is if they can’t lead the team, we will actually remove the person from it.
We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’.
“The process of making is the point of it. The object looks good if the process felt good.” – Origami artist, Between the Folds
A friend, currently in her surgical residency program, describes what “scrubbing in” feels like:
Once you’re scrubbed in, you can’t really do anything else until the procedure is over. If someone calls for you, all you have to say is “I’m scrubbed in”. You can’t touch your pager. You can’t touch anything. And you yourself are literally untouchable.
Is there benefit in “scrubbing in” for the rest of us, in other types of work? What might it look like for designers?
But with many similarities.
“I actually would’ve gotten a lot of stuff done Friday if the whole universe hadn’t been against me,” Olson said. “I took my car in to get my tires rotated, but the guy said he couldn’t get to it until the following Tuesday, so I was like, ‘Screw that.’ I also went to Staples to pick up the computer desk I’d had on layaway for the last month, but I forgot to bring my receipt. They wouldn’t give the stupid thing to me, even after arguing with the guy for almost an hour. The whole day was a colossal waste. Except I got a new belt I needed for work.”
Michael Beirut, partner at Pentagram, describes his real design process:
“When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem!”
As much as we like to tell ourselves (and others) about our robust, repeatable, formal design process, great work usually comes down to a little bit of magic.
Millions of years ago, our ancestors spent most of their days gathering edible plants and fruits, and trying not to be eaten themselves. Their main desires were likely just to form protective and procreative relationships. They didn’t have much language or symbols to express meaning beyond what you could immediately sense. They lived almost entirely in the moment.
Today, we spend most of our time in the future. We study in school to learn things we might need to use later. Then when we work it’s usually to create things that will only exist in the future, or that others buy to use in the future. As our work becomes more complicated, its results move further away from the present moment.
It’s tempting, then, to spend most or all of our mental energy on the future. Even when we’re not working, our default state is to plan for and think about the distant future. Since we’re good at creating complex plans and systems in our work, we turn around and try it on our personal lives–our relationships, activities, and emotions.
Sometimes this personal planning works well. It can help us accomplish big tasks, acheive our goals, and create a coherent life narrative. However, it is subject to a couple pesky details.
The first is that we are just not very good at anticipating what we will want in the future. Several studies show this, including one that asked people to plan all of a week’s lunches in advance. They tended to choose a variety of interesting foods, but in the end were less satisfied than the control group, who chose each day’s lunch separately during the week (and tended to get the same thing each day). The book The Paradox of Choice explores this further, along with other examples of our poor choices.
The other danger is in creating an “idealized self” who embodies everything you wish you might be, but exists only in your mind. It’s often disappointing, rather than inspirational, to compare your actual self to this idealized self. The separation between you and your ideal can paralyze you from making any changes, because the difference seems too great to overcome in your current (flawed) state.
Work is not the only thing to blame for this, of course. Understanding and addressing these mental states directly is important and effective. But I think it is also valuable to acknowledge the effect that thinking in future tense all day at the office has on our minds the rest of the time.
One way to see that effect is by observing jobs that don’t primarily act in the future. Many service and artistic jobs are completely in the moment. It’s just not possible for a doctor to operate on you in the future, or a musician to perform for an audience who hasn’t yet arrived. My first job after collect was waiting tables, and if I wasn’t physically there carrying food, I didn’t get paid. The job was right then and there, and it had no future needs or value (besides refilling the ketchup bottles at the end of the shift).
My coworkers at the restaurant were the most socially-active, energetic group I’ve ever worked with. When their shift ended, they were always off to something else, whether a party, shopping, or (often, since these were singing waiters) a rehearsal for a musical or opera. I, too, was involved with multiple small projects, learning web design, and cycling seriously at the time. Work for us did not exist outside of the time and place we did it, and we were more engaged in the world because of it.
Later, when I switched to jobs with long-term, complex projects deisgned for the future, I immediately noticed how this work spilled easily beyond the confines of work, and how lame I and others became when that happened. Working in the future, it seemed, had no limits or boundaries, and threatened to take over our entire lives.
Moreover, an attitude of future focus often makes other aspects of life less enjoyable. It’s difficult to enjoy a sunset if you’re worried about the future of technology, or to concentrate on a book when plans for the next workweek are bouncing around your head. Forcing strict plans or aspirations on your emotional states usually just makes you dissatisfied with who you really are, and putting too much pressure on relationships threatens what you already have.
Working on big, difficult projects and changing the future world for the better can be one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling things we do. The mindset such work puts us in, however, isn’t always the right mindset for other areas of our lives. Specifically, practicing ways to live “in the moment” seems especially important for those who, like me, work primarily in the future. My work’s total future focus is what makes it unique, so I’m very suceptible to its lures and traps. Fortunately, I also benefit tremendously from prayer, meditation, observation, drawing, and other mindfulness practices that counterbalance my work’s future focus and let me engage more with other aspects of life and the present moment.
I think it’s also good for all work, even that of a futurist, to have some grounding in the present. In the end, every project has to start somewhere, in some present moment. Otherwise it becomes just another idealized image, too far from reality to act on.
I suspect that much work in the future, and indeed much of our lives, will involve a balance and cycle between living in the moment and dreaming of the future. Practicing ways of doing both, and alternating between them, seems like a good way to prepare.
But then, that’s just my future side talking…
“And therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I’m following, and I’m not walking in anyone else’s footsteps. I’m making it up as I go.” – Charlie Hoehn, who has had some interesting career moves himself. Roughly approximates what I’ve been learning myself.
“The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobile’s storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engine’s self-starter. Thereafter, our ‘main engine,’ the life regenerating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy.” – Buckminster Fuller.
I’ve thought similar things about a lot of situations: taking a sabbatical, for instance, isn’t sustainable, but it can recharge the storage battery, and power the setting up of new practices that are sustainable. Booster rockets are another analogy–you can’t use them forever, but they can help you break free of gravity. It’s important that we use fossil fuels, booster rockets, and sabbaticals to set us up for when they’re gone.
These lessons from Colin Powell are much more interesting than the usual CEO tripe…
“A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority.” – Merlin Mann. Real priorities are what you are actually doing.
“Improving university education is one of the cheapest and simplest things that we could do to improve the U.S. economy’s long-term prospects. The current system, in light of both the promise and distractions of modern technology, is almost laughably poorly designed. – Philip Greenspun.
Some good ideas, including changing grading, stop lecturing, open offices for students, and teaching the full work process (from vague request to refined and documented solution).
“Many VCs tell entrepreneurs to ‘come back when you have a demo.’ They aren’t wondering whether your product can be built – they are wondering whether you can build it.” – Chris Dixon.
“Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus and concentrate the mind…but for [creative tasks] you want to be looking around.” – Dan Pink
WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?
CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.
“Mission is revealing to others their fundamental beauty, value and importance in the universe, their capacity to love, to grow and to do beautiful things and to meet God.” – Jean Vanier.