Am I doing the right thing? (5/7)

In my previous post, I wrote about the danger of defining yourself purely by your career, and what a shame it is if people don’t recognise that they are so much more than that. The exact same principle applies to defining yourself purely by creative success.

To recap: if you’ve followed the logic of these blog posts so far (if there is one!) it’s that, if you define yourself as something, you’ll feel the need to do that thing and make continuous progress at it. How to measure that is difficult and not all that intuitive, and the temptation to compare yourself to others kicks in. Others are doing the same thing, and in trying to validate themselves, are prone to lying about their productivity/progress. Which escalates indefinitely until everyone feels terrible.

Creating = Self

Who you are is to a large degree determined by how you spend your time. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a writer. But you don’t spend that much time doing it.

It’s not just you. So many great writers—Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Viet Thanh Nguyen to name the first three I remember saying something about it—openly acknowledge that the intensive mental energy required to write can’t really be sustained for more than a few hours a day.

When it comes to writers so prolific that they spend more than those hours a day writing, I imagine they write with their brains switched off. Their prose typically reflects that, and I wouldn’t consider it an accomplishment.

I also don’t believe you can game your biology into greater output.

I used to think that alcohol helped writing. Now I’d guess that it lowers inhibitions rather than assists imagination—it’s really not necessary, and in fact deleterious to the writing process itself. For example, I remember that when I was hungover I’d be filled with creative ideas—but maybe lose motivation for a week or longer, and my mood would be completely shot. Typically I’d be 2/3rds into a short story draft by Friday, plan to finish it that weekend, drink a lot, wake up Saturday and maybe get back to it Tuesday, having almost forgotten what it was about.

What about coffee? Writers are always yammering about that. Well, why not go full-pelt Philip K Dick mode, snort crystal meth and finish your novel by sunrise?

You know that’s not the point. (I don’t know you, but I hope you don’t!) And yet on many smaller levels we abuse ourselves in the hopes of levels of productivity that are not innate and inevitably come with larger penalties that slow us down overall.

So I’d say, sorry: you’ve got three hours a day maximum, you’ll probably only do two or less, and struggle during them. You might be a genius, but you’re a human genius.

Accept it, Leo and others! You can only do so much. And acceptance is your only option to maximise productivity. Anything else maximises it in the short term but minimises it overall. A marathon not a sprint, as they say.

Focus on the greenness of your own grass because your neighbour is either lying about his or using weird chemical colour enhancements that make his grass greener than yours today but dry it out completely by Tuesday.

In the next post, I’ll discuss whether or not we are what we spend our time on.