No Sense of Urgency
Willie Degel is my spirit animal. I’ve watched every episode of his show, Restaurant Stakeout, at least twice–and not because I care so much about the restaurant business. I hope to some day have a signed picture in my office. Maybe I’ll get one, if I write enough fan mail. So what’s the attraction? I sit there, glued to the TV–and this from a person who wouldn’t even own a TV, save for the rest of her family wanting one–because everything he says is true. About work ethic. About follow through. Both of which ideas are perfectly encapsulated in his favorite phrase, sense of urgency.
Too many people live their lives like they’re immortal. They never start or, if they start, they never finish. People ask me all the time how I accomplish so much and the answer is the same disappointing answer I give about the weight loss: hard work. I don’t “have all this free time” and I’m not “superwoman.” I carve “extra” time from the fact that I don’t drink or (with extremely rare exceptions) watch TV. I wake up every morning before sunrise. Whatever it is, I need to get it done today.
Even if I know I can’t get it done today, even if, logically, I’m not trying to get it done today, I treat every day like the day. The day I finish. The day I want to finish. I don’t rush; I just work. Hard. In my mind’s eye I see the results, and I my goal–every single day–is to make them real.
Which helps, on the days I feel discouraged. The days I have the flu (like today) and no operational shower yet, because I’m not exactly the home improvement master, the days I get a one star review on Amazon. Work keeps me motivated toward the goal, and focused on the goal, rather than dwelling on everything that’s going wrong or could go wrong. It’s too easy to let your (perceived) failures distract you and, in the end, halt you. Hard work, and lots of it, helps you to remember that “failure” is a term really only understood in retrospect. Google “famous failures” sometime, to see what I mean.
Everyone from Stephen King to Babe Ruth to Winston Churchill was told to give up. Faced crippling setbacks. Which were setbacks and not failures, forks in the road instead of the end of the road, because they didn’t let those occurrences define them. All Stephen King had to do to be a failed writer was stop writing after that first handful of rejections. All Babe Ruth had to do was stop swinging.
Sense of urgency is about follow through. I thought about this last night (or rather, very early this morning, at about three) while I was installing the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. What was a sense of urgency? What outlook, or desire, really defined that experience of having one? My husband told me recently that I had the greatest sense of urgency of anyone he knew and I couldn’t have been happier if he’d given me flowers. That, to me, was (is) the best compliment. He said it was because I was (am) the most hard-working person he knew. But is hard work the sum total?
I say it’s, to borrow a phrase from the legal world, necessary but not sufficient. Which is why follow through is a better touchstone to use, in terms of definitions. Follow through, by necessity, includes hard work. Vision. Commitment. The burning need to work through setbacks rather than around them. To push, and keep pushing.
Hard work is good, but you’ve got to have the drive. The drive to keep at it. Too many people start off strong, then fizzle out. Why, who knows. They get sidetracked, or somehow derailed. About six months ago now, someone approached me asking for a shot at producing the audio version of The Price of Desire. I agreed. Things started off well enough, but he never returned the contract I sent him and eventually dropped off the face of the earth without explanation. And…that’s happened to me before. Almost everyone talks a good game on day one. Just like almost everyone describes themselves as hard working, decent, and honest. What they mean by those terms isn’t in how they talk themselves up but, rather, in their actions.
I didn’t publish eleven books in six months, because I’m the world’s fastest writer. Only a couple of those books were actually written within this year. Rather, I’d been writing for years before my “big break.” Which thankless experience prepared me exceptionally well for the equally thankless experience of being a published writer: you get to trade the rejection of agents and publishers for the rejection of readers! If I were doing this for positive feedback, then I’d have stopped awhile ago. Because the arts…are not kind.
I’m doing it for me. Because I have a story to tell, and I have to get it right. Every line, every word. Right, and right now. My sense of urgency comes from within, and is entirely self-directed. Which is what enables me to withstand the criticism, and the uncertainty that is sales rank. Someone, somewhere, will always hate. So I just strap on my hater blockers and keep on. I can’t please everyone and shouldn’t try–that way lies misery, not to mention artistic death–but I can please myself. I can know that I’m living out the truth of my own vision. Artistic and otherwise.
And that’s my sense of urgency.
What’s yours?
