Month: May 2015

Fear, Not Money

What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to doing work that matters?

A lot of people say money. As in, a lack of money.

A lack of money can certainly be an obstacle. But it can also be an excuse.

It’s awesome to have the funds we need to give us the time and other resources that will help us do work that matters. But if we say we can’t do anything meaningful because it’s not our full-time job, that’s fear talking.

Now, there are cases where money truly is a debilitating issue. I have friends and family members who just can’t seem to get ahead — at times they feel as if they’re drowning. Money problems can be extremely demotivating, crippling, and depressing.

However, right now I want to talk about those who see money as their biggest challenge to doing work that matters and yet have never stopped to consider if there are alternatives. Or perhaps you see the paycheck as a validation of the work you’re doing — you need the promise of income as a pat on the back that you’re doing something valuable.

But the truth is…

Money is a tool, not a validation

You with money may have an advantage over you without money, but it’s not a guarantee. At the end of the day, what money does is buy opportunity.

  • Opportunity of time: if you had a million dollars in the bank to pay all your monthly living expenses and to pay someone else to handle all the menial tasks of your life, then you could spend all your time working on your craft. But even if you had all the time in the world, it doesn’t guarantee you’d choose to do meaningful work.

  • Opportunity of collaboration and community: if you had a million dollars, you could hire a team to work with. But even with a hundred million, there’s no guarantee that you’d be able to hire an all-star staff of hard-working, kind, fun, brilliant, self-starters who all get along.

  • Opportunity of networking: if you had a million dollars, people might invite you to their fancy dinners, and ask you to collaborate with them. But even if so, there’s no guarantee that the right people will notice you

  • Opportunity of research and discovery: if you had a million dollars you could buy all the books you need to learn up on a subject, travel somewhere to a conference to meet new people and learn new things, and more.

  • Opportunity to use better tools: if you had a million dollars you could buy the nicest camera, the fastest computer, the highest quality paint brushes. But even then, there’s no guarantee that the tools at your disposal would empower you do to work that matters.

If money is your biggest challenge to doing your best creative work, ask yourself what advantage or opportunity it is that you’re looking to money to solve. Once you figure that out, ask yourself if there’s a different solution to your challenge.

If you say you need money so you can have more time to do the work that matters to you, and yet you’re watching an hour of TV every day, then money’s not the first problem. How you’re spending your time is.

If you say you need money to afford the right tools, yet you go out to eat every day and have a monthly car payment, perhaps you should assess your spending and budgeting.

The real obstacles are fear and not being willing to sacrifice

I spent four years writing shawnblanc.net during evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks before I was able to quit my job and take the website full time. Jason Kottke had been writing online for 7 years before he quit his job to take kottke.org full-time. Myke Hurley spent four years podcasting before he was able to take his passion full-time. John Gruber wrote Daring Fireball on the side for 4 years before making it his full-time gig.

In short, it takes time — years, usually — before doing the work you love can get to a point where it is also the work that pays the bills. But sometimes, it never pays the bills.

Are you willing to show up every day for 4 years?

Talking to a friend about this just this morning, he said that he doesn’t think it’s about money at all — it’s about how much people are willing to sacrifice to do the work they love. People don’t want to give up all the things they need to give up, so instead they place the burden of action on having more money.

* * *

In her book, The Crossroads of Should and Must, Elle Luna writes that there are four obstacles to doing our most important work: Money, Time, Space, and Vulnerability.

While money, time, and space are the reasons given most often for not choosing Must, there’s another fear that’s far scarier and spoon about much less.

Choosing Must means that you have to confront some very big fears. It will make you feel vulnerable.

Doing our best creative work day in and day out is difficult. As anyone who writes, draws, or takes pictures on a regular basis can tell you, thinking and creating something awesome every day can be hard and frightful.

I don’t want to minimize how helpful it can be to have a financial safety net in place, nor how frightening it can be when you’re barely scraping by. I’ve been in debt, I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck even though I didn’t have to, I’ve survived on less than minimum wage, and I’ve had enough money to take a year off if I wanted. In all those seasons, there were still challenges and fears that I had to press through in order to do work that mattered.

Elle Luna also writes: “It is here, standing at the crossroads of Should and Must, that we feel the enormous reality of our fears, and this is the moment when many of us decide against following our intuition, turning away from that place where nothing is guaranteed, nothing is known, and everything is possible.”

With all kindness and tenderness, let me challenge you: If it’s mostly about the money, then perhaps it’s not about doing your best creative work after all. If you see money as your biggest challenge, perhaps you’re not being honest with yourself.

Fear, Not Money

Just Smart Enough

Apple Watch

Does this sound familiar? You pull your iPhone out to check the time, and the next thing you know you’ve been scrolling through Twitter for 6 minutes and now you’re reading about the migration patterns of cats. You don’t even like cats.

I’ve worn a wristwatch for years. For one, I like to know what time it is. But also, wearing a watch is an excellent solution to passively checking Twitter and Instagram when all I wanted to know was the time.

Last year I wrote an article in praise of my analog watch. In short it was about how my analog watch does one thing well: tell time.

Now, my affinity for analog watches doesn’t mean I’m against the concept of the smartwatch. But after 8 years of having an iPhone within arm’s reach, my experience has taught me that the promise of convenient notifications and relevant information at your fingertips is almost always paired with the reality of distractions, tugs for attention, and perhaps even an addiction to the “just checks”.

Having the Internet in your pocket isn’t always roses and ice cream.

* * *

Naturally, I pre-ordered my Apple Watch the morning it went on sale. The little critter arrived just over a week ago.

As a gadget geek, I think Apple Watch is awesome. It looks great, it has some gorgeous watch faces, the fitness tracking and goals are fantastic and healthily addictive, and it pairs so well with my iPhone.

But just because it’s an awesome and fun gadget doesn’t guarantee it’s helpfulness. As I wrote at the beginning of this article, one of the reasons I wear a watch is so I can check the time without using my iPhone.

Not to be all philosophical, but one of the big question that’s been looming in my mind regarding Apple Watch is this: For those who want to spend less time staring at their iPhone, will Apple Watch make that easier?

After a week — which, admittedly, is a very short amount of time — my answer to the above question is yes: Apple Watch makes it easier to leave my iPhone alone.

Apple Watch fits, appropriately, right between a smartphone and a dumb watch. Apple Watch is certainly more feature-rich and “connected” than my analog watches ever were, yet it’s not anywhere near an “iPhone 2.0” type of product.

In other words, Apple Watch is just powerful enough to be useful and fun, but not so powerful that it’s distracting or frustrating.

Apple Watch certainly could be distracting if you let it. But that’s easily avoided by not installing too many apps or allowing too many types of incoming notifications. Where Watch differs from iPhone is that the former is not very good at being a passive entertainment device.

While you can install apps such as Instagram and Twitterrific on your Watch, using them is like reading the news on a postage stamp. Doable but not delightful.

Just Smart Enough

For me, there are three things that make Apple Watch great so far: Notifications that matter, activity tracking, and Complications.

Notifications

On my phone I already get only the most sacred of notifications: text messages, Twitter DMs, Slack Mentions and PMs, emails from VIPs, event reminders, Reminder reminders, new calendar events added to my shared calendars, Vigil alerts, Dark Sky weather alerts.

It sounds like a lot when listed out all at once, but aside from text messages, the vast majority of those things rarely ever fire. In fact, I take pride in how infrequently my iPhone beeps or buzzes.

And on my watch, I get tapped even less: text messages, event reminders, and Dark Sky weather alerts only.

We’ll see how this pans out over time, but so far getting just these few types of notifications on my wrist have proven to be immensely helpful and not the least bit annoying.

And using the Watch for messages is usually great. For the vast majority of the friends and family whom I text message with throughout the day, we communicate with emojis and short quips — something the Watch is perfectly suited for.

Activity

The activity tracking has is great. Too great, perhaps…

Getting those rings filled every day has become so compelling. It’s too soon to tell if it’s simply the fun of a new “game” that will soon wear off, or if the awareness of my activity along with the daily goals will bring about an improvement in my healthy activity and behavior.

Complications

As for the Watch face, I’ve settled in on Utility. I have the detail dialed down to the most simple possible. And I’ve three complications set up: activity rings in the upper left corner, current temperature in the upper right corner, and day + date on the face. Each morning I change the accent color, usually to match my shirt, because why not?

Apple Watch

At a glance I can see the time and the current temp, which is so nice. I’m getting ready to go for a run, should I plan to go to the gym or is it nice enough to run outside? … We’re about to load the kids up in the car, do they need jackets right now?

I have a secondary version my Utility watch face saved that has the timer complication at the bottom center. When grilling (which we do about 3 times a week now that the weather is warming up), it is great to have the timer just one tap away on my wrist.

As Ben Thompson wrote yesterday:

Complications are invaluable, and the delta between pulling out your phone to check your calendar, or the weather, versus looking at your wrist is massive.

Agreed. It’s the complications and the basic notifications that make Apple Watch just smart enough. Taking a little bit of time to set up what I do and don’t want on my watch has already paid dividends.

There is still much to be improved about the Watch’s core functionality (such as improvements with Siri dictation (editing, anyone?), and 3rd-party apps that don’t have to round trip to the iPhone). However, my first impression of the Apple Watch has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s attractive, useful, and, most of all, fun.

Just Smart Enough

Fantastical 2 is The Best Calendar App for Mac  →

And hey, speaking of calendars, yesterday we published our review and pick for the best calendar app you can get for your Mac. It’s Fantastical 2.

Chris Bowler, writing for The Sweet Setup:

Managing your time has long been a part of the knowledge worker’s day, and calendar apps have been around almost as long as email. But while the quantity of available options is high, the number of quality calendar apps is a small handful.

The option that is best suited for you will depend on your needs, but a closer inspection has shown us that, for most people, Fantastical 2 is the best calendar application for OS X users.

Fantastical 2 is The Best Calendar App for Mac

The Chokehold of Calendars  →

Mike Monteiro:

In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening. […]

People rarely schedule working time. And when they do it’s viewed as second-tier time. It’s interruptible. Meetings trump working time. Why?

The other problem is that for so many corporate and team environments, the schedule for makers is run by managers. A manager gets things done by checking off their to-do list 15 minutes at a time. A maker, however, gets things done by working on something that doesn’t fit on a to-do list, and they need a good 4 hours of uninterrupted time (preferably one or two of those each day for a week or two).

See also Paul Graham’s article, Makers Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

The Chokehold of Calendars

The Discreet Watch  →

Speaking of Watch faces, Ben Brooks makes the case for how the Watch is an ideal gadget for nice events. It looks great when dressed up, you can customize the watch face to suit your outfit, and because of the discretion of notifications on the Watch, you’re not pulling your phone out all the time when at a social event. That’s pretty much exactly why I got a Watch — less reason to use my iPhone when out and about.

And speaking of customize the watch face to suit your outfit, one thing I love about Apple Watch is that you can save your various customized faces.

At first I thought you could only have one customized face of each type, and if you wanted to change that Watch face up you had to dive in and customize it again. But that’s not true, you can add as many custom Watch faces as you like and then have the handful of your favorites all at your fingertips. So you can have your go-to everyday Watch face, your work-out Watch face, etc.

The Discreet Watch

Stephen Hackett On Apple Watch faces  →

Stephen Hackett gives a rundown of the 10 different Watch faces:

While having so many options is great, many of the faces have frustrating limitations in the ways they can be customized or used.

Agreed: I’d love to get more ability to customize / swap-out different elements from different faces. But that’s just a minor quibble, really. About five days in with my Watch, and the faces are hands down one of my favorite features.

I’ve been mostly using the Utility face with the most basic detail allowable, activity rings in the upper left and current temp in the upper right. Then I’ll customize the color of the second hand and the date depending on what I’m wearing. Kinda dorky? Sure. But why not have fun with it?

The Modular and X-Large faces are also pretty fantastic. And I had no idea about just how interactive and cool the Astronomy face is.

Stephen Hackett On Apple Watch faces

Your Best Creative Work

On this week’s episode of my podcast, The Weekly Briefly, I seek to define what “Your Best Creative Work” actually means.

It’s a phrase I’ve been thinking and talking about for years. Does it only relate to “artsy” stuff? I don’t think so.

* * *

Here’s a picture of someone doing her best creative work:

She shows up every day. When it’s easy and when it’s hard. It doesn’t matter. She is committed.

This is something only she can do. Yet even still, it might not all work out as planned. There is no clear path about comes next. There is a lot of guessing. There is fear.

Some days the work is so much harder than others. Some days everything comes together and it’s amazing. At the end of the day, it’s always rewarding.

She is telling a story. Every day she is trying to connect with others. Her work is emotional. Relational. There is learning. Teaching. Guessing. Loving. She is a mother.

* * *

When we talk about “doing our best creative work”, it’s easy to define creativity as “artsy”. Writing. Designing. Taking photographs. But creative work happens in a variety of forms.

I was recently talking to a friend of mine who is a project manager, and he very much views his work as creative. Creating a spreadsheet to analyze data — that is a form of creativity, and it should be validated as creative. The way a mother or father raises their children and the tactics they deploy. The choices we make as freelancers, small-business owners, founders, or CEOs. It’s all creative

The scope of creativity and meaningful work goes far beyond art.

Any degree of freedom you use to do your work means you have a choice about how you go about it. And that is creativity. You’ve been given the gift of choice, and you can use that to give back and do work that matters.

* * *

What do you think about when you think about art and creativity?

I think about emotions. Fear, doubt, joy, happiness, love, and honesty.

I think about telling a story. Encouraging, inspiring, educating, and entertaining others.

I think about people. Relationships and connecting.

* * *

Doing my best creative work is an amalgamation of both doing work that matters and also taking joy in the journey.

  • Meaningful work, work that matters, is something that I have to do. I am compelled to do it. If it doesn’t work out, if nobody likes it, if I never make a dollar, that’s unfortunate. But I still had to do it. And so, if it didn’t work out or it didn’t make a dollar, I have to figure out how to keep doing it better.
    Meaningful work is also something which I hope will make the lives of other people better. Either by entertaining them, educating them, or helping them in their journey.

  • Having joy in the journey is just that. Having fun. Pursuing “mastery”. Being present in the moment. Getting in the zone. Creating without inhibition. Trusting your gut.

Put these two together, and boom. You’ve got yourself a recipe for your best creative work.

When you define your best creative work like this, it changes everything. Suddenly it’s less about the quality of art you produce and it’s more about being valuable, meaningful, and honest.

And you realize that your best creative work is part of every area of your life: work, family, rest, personal life, etc.

Doing your best creative work every day is a choice. You get to choose to do work that matters.

I try to make that choice when I’m at my keyboard, when I’m on a date with my wife, when I have half an hour of quiet alone time, and when I’m playing catch in the back yard with my two boys. In those moments, it’s not about the context. Art. Relationships. Business. Each one is a chance to choose to be honest, true, vulnerable, and personal.

Your Best Creative Work

What it Takes to Do Work That Matters

Yesterday on Twitter I asked folks what challenges they face when it comes to doing meaningful work.

These are some of the answers I got back:

Fear that I’m too late.
Fear that my work won’t be good enough.
Fear that my work will be rejected.
Fear of unworthiness.
Giving in to distractions to escape / pacify the fear.
Finding something that I feel is meaningful to work on.
Stuck in meetings, leaving no time to do any meaningful work.
Having to put out fires and check inboxes, leaving no time or energy to do meaningful work.
Am I even capable or equipped to do meaningful work? If it’s out there, do I even recognize it?
Moving too fast; rushing into projects and ideas.
Holding back; afraid of success and the necessary changes it would bring.
Lack of financial resources. Having to spend time doing non-important work in order to pay the bills.
Spending too much time doing meaningless, trivial stuff.
Frustrated by my capacity. I could and should be doing more, and the days feel as if they slip away.
I’m overcommitted.
There are so many distractions. I have a hard time keeping focused.
Fear that those I look up to won’t respect the work I do.
Getting others around me to be motivated and make change.

The fight to stay creative is real.

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes that “any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity”, or, “any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower” is sure to elicit resistance.

Resistance comes in all shapes and sizes: Fear, distractions, diversions, interruptions, procrastination, hesitancy, shame, lethargy, doubt, et al.

In my experience, the greatest challenges to doing work that matters are these:

  1. Lack of clarity: Do you even know what meaningful, important work looks like and how to do it?
  2. Not thirsty enough: Not willing and eager to learn, grow, evaluate, try new things, and take risks.
  3. Fear: In all shapes and sizes, as listed above.
  4. Distractions (and diversions): which are both internal and external.
  5. Inconsistency: not willing to show up every day.

Therefore, if you want to do work that matters, this is what you need:

  1. Clarity
  2. Thirst
  3. Grit

Where grit is tenacity. Work ethic. Stubbornness. It’s the willingness to press through your fear, overcome the your distractions, and show up every day even when it’s hard.

If you’re reading this, you’re thirsty. You’ve got grit, too. Probably more than you think.

But do you have clarity? Do you know what your meaningful, important work looks like? And if so, do you know what you need to do to make it happen?

Clarity is at the foundation of meaningful work and meaningful productivity. We need clarity about who we are, our values, our vision for life, what’s important, and what we can do every day to stay steady in our aim of doing our best creative work.

If you know what you want (clarity) and you’re motivated to go after it (thirst), then oftentimes the grit takes care of itself. Fear is less likely to hold you back. Distractions suddenly aren’t so distracting.

* * *

You are capable of doing work that matters. We all have fears. We all have opportunities for distractions and diversions. We all have to choose to show up every day. You won’t find someone doing meaningful work for the long haul who doesn’t have at least some measure each of clarity, thirst, and grit.

What is a challenge you’re facing regarding doing meaningful work?
I’d love to hear from you: email or Twitter.

 

P.S. As you may know, I’m building a guided, online course about doing our best creative work and living a focused life. The Focus Course solves the very issues I’ve written about in this post. Well, mostly. While I can help you with clarity and grit, thirst, I’m afraid, is all up to you.

The Course is on track to launch in the late June! This week we are recording the 20 videos that will be part of the course (see below). The end is in sight and I am so excited to share this with you!

A few days ago I got an email from Ross Kimes who was a member of the Pilot course. He wrote to tell me about how the Pilot version Focus Course helped him, and with his permission I’ve shared it here for you.

What it Takes to Do Work That Matters

WebdesignerNews: The best curated stories for designers (Sponsor)  →

If you’re like us, you spend hours every morning browsing through hundreds of posts on your RSS feed, hoping to stumble across relevant news stories. We built WebdesignerNews to provide web designers and developers with a single location to discover the latest and most significant stories on the Web. We search through hundreds of posts on blogs, social media, and news channels, to deliver the most essential stories of the day. Our content covers quality news, fresh tools and apps, case studies, code demos, inspiration posts, videos and more. Check it out!

* * *

My thanks to WebdesignerNews for sponsoring the site this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

WebdesignerNews: The best curated stories for designers (Sponsor)

Avoiding Burnout

On this week’s episode of The Weekly Briefly I talk about how thirsty we are to do meaningful work. It takes more than just showing up every day to do our best creative work. And if we focus too much on just the output we are doing (without taking time to learn and grow) then it can easily lead to burnout.

This week’s show is sponsored by Wired In: Eliminate Distractions. Stay focused. Get a custom, wireless, LED ‘Busy’ sign from Wired In.

And below is a transcript of the episode for those who prefer to read.

Show Notes and Transcript

I used to hate to read. I didn’t think I hated it, but I did.

I never wanted to read. I never enjoyed it. Reading felt like a waste of time. Unless I was on vacation. But reading during work hours? No way.

Four years ago I had no idea what I was doing. When I first started writing shawnblanc.net full-time, I was clueless and afraid.

In the words of Ray Bradbury, “I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eyes.”

Those early years of writing this site were difficult. They were fun, to be sure, but they were hurried. I held on to this sense that I had to keep up with the pace of the internet. And on top of that, I didn’t know what sort of writer I wanted to be or what sort of things I wanted to publish on the site. So I was running around in a hurry to publish who knows what.

Nearly all my attention was focused on publishing.

Frequency (not consistency). That was my primary measure of success. Or, at least, that’s what I assumed all the paying members wanted: more published words every day.

They tell you to ship early and ship often. As a writer, shipping means getting your words onto the page and then getting them out there into the world.

My focus was so intent on the frequency of my publishing that I rarely felt liberty to do anything that took me away from getting at least one or two links up every day. This was folly.

In his book, First Things First, Stephen Covey writes about what he calls “Sharpening the Saw”.

We often get so busy “sawing” (producing results) that we forget to “sharpen our saw” (maintain or increase our capacity to produce results in the future). We may neglect to exercise, or fail to develop key relationships. We may not be clear about what’s important and meaningful to us. If we fail to build our personal capacity in these areas, we quickly become “dulled,” and worn out from the imbalance. We’re unable to move forward as effectively in the other roles of our lives.

Maintaining and increasing our capacity is foundational for success in every area of our life. In short, don’t stop learning; don’t stop training.

But I rarely ever took time to read and study. I never took mid-day breaks. Even though I could set my own schedule, I usually worked evenings and weekends just to keep up frequency (not because I was working on something specific that had me motivated).

My intense focus on frequency burned me out. Many times. By the grace of God, I didn’t quit.

Here’s an entry I wrote in my Day One almost two years ago:

What do you do when you look at the work you’ve been doing for the past day or week or month and you think, this sucks? I don’t know if there’s an answer or not for getting past crappy work, but I bet you a sandwich the answer probably involves doing more crappy work.

Do as much as you can. Keep writing. Keep making. Write 1,000 crappy words every day. Then put them in a drawer and pretend they don’t exist lest you get depressed.

In my years of writing and doing creative-y stuff, I’ve discovered the difference between burnout and frustration. Between immaturity and fear.

Doing our best creative work every day is a hard and frightful task. But we’re in it for the long haul. We have to remember that there is a lot more to it than merely showing up to do the work.

Showing up to do the work is the brave and noble part of the endeavor. It’s what all the books and motivational posters focus on. And for good reason: if we don’t show up, well then, we’re not actually doing the work.

But let us not get so busy producing that we forget to maintain or increase our capacity to keep producing results.

For me, there were a lot of reasons I hated the idea of learning and improving in my “early years” as a writer. (I put “early years” in quotes because I’ve been a full-time writer for all of 4 years now. I’ve still got about 46 years to go before I’m out of the “early years”. But, the reasons I despised learning in those days were because:)

  • I was focused on the new and the now.
  • I cared too much about my site’s stats.
  • I thought I needed to keep up with the speed of the Internet in order to be interesting and relevant.
  • I didn’t have a long-term goal for any of my writing endeavors, other than to write about what was interesting to me today.

This is not to say that the work I was doing was bad, or wrong. Not at all. I’m exceedingly proud of the links and articles I have published here over the years. But where I needed change was in the foundation from which my writing grew.

I’m still as nerdy about apps and gadgets as I always was. Over the years, however, I’ve found a different pace that works better for me. Partly necessitated by becoming a dad.

I don’t want any of my websites to publish at the speed of the Internet. Because it is impossible to keep up with unless you neglect everything else in your life. And even then, you can only keep up with a tiny sliver of the real-time Web. It can be fun for a while, but it’s not healthy or sustainable for anyone who wants to do meaningful work for decades.

Far more valuable to me than speed and ”First!” are things such as thoughtfulness, whimsy, helpfulness, and long-term relevancy. In my experience, many of these values hide themselves from environments where urgency is the dominant motivational factor.

Who can be thoughtful when they’re in a rush?

Hurry up and be thoughtful! Hurry up and be clever! Hurry up and be helpful! Hurry up, but don’t mess up!

For me, I find much more satisfaction creating something with a long-tail of relevancy than a momentary flash in the pan. And it’s out of this contentment to publish at a slower frequency that I re-discovered the value of learning.

* * *

The value of learning

Would you scoff at the farmer who spends time keeping his tools in good working condition? Would you scoff at the painter who spends time cleaning her brushes? What about the scientist who spends time doing research and experimenting? Or the athlete who practices?

Of course not.

There is a strong connection between practicing and learning and then doing.

You must have both. Some people spend their whole life in school, never creating anything on their own. Others create, do the work, but think that’s the only thing that matters.

I know I fell into that latter group. All my focus was on making and doing and publishing. So much so that I despised learning and researching and giving my mind time to rest and think.

Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Cheeck-sent-me-hai—lee) is a noted psychologist, and the architect the notion called Flow.

Csikszentmihalyi’s theory is that people are happiest when they are in a state of Flow — a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.

Finding flow in our everyday lives is important for several reasons.

  • It increases our happiness
  • It gives us a focus on effectiveness
  • It’s where we do our best creative work
  • It’s how we make progress
  • It helps us to learn new skills

However, finding flow can be challenging; it requires more activation energy. It’s much easier to just turn on the television than it is to get out the paint brushes and a new canvas and change into our artist’s painting clothes. But the latter is where we are more likely to get in the zone, to become lost in our work.

But here’s what I’m getting at: The experience of flow acts as a magnet for learning.

When we are working on something that is challenging to us and which requires the highest level of our skills, then we want to learn. Not only do we learn in the midst of our work, but our work drives our desire to learn more.

And learning — or, as Stephen Covey puts it: “sharpening the saw” — is critical to growth and quality for all the areas of our life: spiritual, physical, relational, recreational, vocational, and economical.

How Thirsty Are You?

As part of my own journey in creating The Focus Course, I’ve become a student of topics such as doing meaningful work, diligence, focus, distractions, work/life balance, and more.

I’ve always been a student of these, but mostly through my own trial and error. Now that I am building a platform to teach others, I wanted to know what smarter men and women than I have had to say about these topics.

Between my bookshelf and my Kindle there are more than 50 books about creativity, business, time management, goal setting, imposter syndrome, productivity, workaholism, parenting, and more. I’ve read all but the last few.

For a while I was getting a new book delivered 3-4 times per week (thank you, Amazon Prime). My wife, lovingly, joked that I’d gone off the deep end…

I bought the books in paperback or hardback because I wanted to highlight them, write in them, dogear them, put sticky notes in them, and have three books open all at once to compare and contrast them if I wanted to.

In his book, What to Do When it’s Your Turn, Seth Godin writes that “the internet means you can learn anything you want, if you are thirsty enough to do the work to learn it.”

And yet, despite this vast ocean of awesomeness, most of us don’t really want to learn anything. We’d rather zone out on Twitter or Netflix. Or burn out trying to make something with the sole aim that it’ll go viral.

Godin continues:

More than 100,000 people regularly sign up for advanced computer science courses online, courses that are taught by great professors and are free to all who enroll. Shockingly, 99 percent — 99 percent! — of the students drop out before they finish the course.

Not thirsty enough.

Learning is a chance to take a risk. To try something new. To observe and evaluate. To ask a question and then listen to the answer. It’s a chance to discover. To have a revelation. To have a conversation.

We learn by reading, listening, observing, doing, teaching, failing, fixing.

We can maintain and increase our capacity in all areas of our life. Ask your spouse if she has a new favorite song. Ask your co-workers what they’re struggling with at work. Watch a YouTube video about woodworking and spend the weekend making a wobbly bench with your kids.

Learning helps us to do better work. It also helps us connect with others.

It took me a few years to come to grips with the fact that it was okay for me to take time away from “producing” in order to maintain and increase my capacity to do creative work. And once I did, I realized how valuable it was to always be learning.

Avoiding Burnout

The Creative’s Workspace

This is what my home office workspace looked like in 2007:

Shawn Blanc Desk

(I still have that trashcan. And the weird blocks underneath the legs of the desk are there because I mis-measured by about 3/4 of an inch when I was shortening the height of the desk to something more comfortable.)

It was dorky, but it was also inspirational. Inspirational for what it stood for, really. That photo was taken around the same time as the beginning of my weekends-and-evenings freelancing career. I had just bought that refurbished Mac Pro and 23-inch Apple Cinema Display, and now I was ready for the big leagues. It felt great to have a new machine (doing print design on the 12-inch PowerBook was not very ideal), and a newly organized workspace with some semblance of organization and structure. You know the feeling.

A few years later, we ripped out the carpet to reveal the hardwood underneath. Painted the walls, got a new desk from IKEA, and bought a lamp.

Shawn Blanc Desk

That’s the desk where I launched my full-time gig writing shawnblanc.net.

A few years after that, we moved my office downstairs because the upstairs room was to become a nursery for our first son, Noah.

Here’s what my space looked like last year (2014):

Shawn Blanc Desk

Since that time things have de-cluttered a bit. Mostly thanks to the Retina iMac (which is still incredible by the way).

Here’s what my desk looks like today (2015):

Shawn Blanc Desk

As desks are wont to do, mine certainly gets cluttered and messy. But I try to keep it clean and not just let the mess get out of control. For me, inspiration and ideas and calm are more prevalent when the peripherals are dealt with.

My desk is where I spend so much of my time. It’s where I work and where I create. I write, design, pay bills, ignore emails, edit and share pictures with my family, and more… all from here. I’m here right now, in fact.

When I think about showing up every day and doing my best creative work, I think about this space. It has certainly changed and evolved over the past decade, but one thing it’s always had has been a surface to work on, a keyboard to type on, and an internet connection to publish through.

Your creative workspace may be different. But regardless of what or why you’ve got what you’ve got, here are a few things every good creative workspace needs:

  • Ritual: As I wrote last week, by far and away, the best thing you can do for your creative workspace is to build some ritual / routine into it. When you combine the power of a consistent “where” along with a consistent “what and when”, then you’re basically putting your creative genius on autopilot.

  • Fun: Having fun is an excellent way to do our best creative work. If there’s nothing playful, enjoyable, or fun about your workspace how can you hope to create anything inspirational or vibrant? All work and no play makes our creative work very dull indeed.

For me, I have fun built right into the very core of what I do: writing. My keyboard is as clicky as they come, and I love it. Secondly, I have a computer that I love to use: the Retina iMac which is a marvel. As someone who works with words all day long not only do I have my favorite way to type them with, I also have a jaw-dropping display to view them on.

  • Inspiration Rich: Speaking of fun, a good workspace is inspirational. A few friends of mine who have some pretty great workspaces include: Sean McCabe’s office, which is filled with art prints; Cameron Moll’s space which is very open and organized, but yet also is clearly lived in; and Jeff Sheldon’s office studio, which, like Cameron’s is very organized but very lived in.

I have a bit of inspiration in my place. My bookcase is packed with hardbacks, paperbacks, magazines, Field Notes, Moleskins, and Baron Figs. On the walls are prints of photographs I’ve taken over the years. But looking at some of the aforementioned office spaces, I know there is much I could do to enhance the life, vibrancy, and overall inspiration of my own workspace.

  • Distraction Poor: A good workspace empowers us to do our best creative work. Distractions are pretty much the opposite of inspiration and motivation. In addition to not letting myself check any stats or social media before I’ve put in my morning writing time, I also get rid of physical distractions in a couple of ways.

For one, I clean up my desk at the end of the day so that tomorrow when I come down to work, there’s nothing left undone that I need to tend to first. Secondly, I put on headphones. I work form home, but right upstairs are two toddler boys whose superpowers include turning into tornadoes.

  • Efficiency: This is threefold. For one, it’s critical to have the right tools for the right job. You wouldn’t want a butter knife when you’re trying to cut down an oak tree. Secondly, get the best tools you can. I don’t mean get the best tools period, get what you can afford and what you can handle. Lastly, a good workspace is efficient in that it can accommodate what you use on a regular basis and that everything is easily accessible while not also being in the way.

  • Multiple Spaces: This one’s a luxury, but it’s also so great. If you checked out the photos of Sean, Cameron, and/or Jeff’s offices you may have noticed that there were multiple “stations”. Their offices have more than one physical place to do work.

In my office there is my desk, but on the other half of the room is a couch and coffee table. And, even my desk converts between a sitting and standing desk. I have these different stations because not all creative work is created equal. I spend at least as much time writing as I do reading and researching. And that latter activity is better spent not in front of my computer.

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In her book, The Crossroads of Should and Must, Elle Luna lists Space (as in Workspace, not Outer Space), as one of the four obstacles that stand in the way of us doing our most important work — what she calls our “Must”.

Elle writes:

You need a physical space — private, safe, and just for you. When you are in this space, you are not available. I repeat, you are not available. This is your sacred space to be by and with yourself. We all need safe containers. How might you create a safe space that you can spend time in daily? How might you get creative with where it begins and ends? Find this place and make it your own.

The unsung hero of showing up every day and doing your best creative work is your workspace. You may think it’s your determination, zeal, and creative genius. And it probably is. But it’s also that you’ve somehow managed to carve out a spot where you can think and work without judgment, inhibition, or distraction.

Your space doesn’t have to be made with a desk or a computer. I read about one woman who made her workspace by using painter’s tape to section off part of her living room. She ran the tape across the ceiling, down the walls, and back over the floor.

I’ve had many productive days at coffee shops. Find a table where nobody will give you the stink eye if you’re there for too long, put on headphones if you like, and make your space with an Americano as your wingman.

Perhaps you’ve created your workspace intentionally, or perhaps unintentionally. But either way, if you find that you’ve been doing some of your best work lately, take a moment to thank your space.

However, if you’re struggling — if you don’t have a space — it’s time to make one.

The Creative’s Workspace

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My thanks to Wired In for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.

Wired In — A Beautiful Wireless LED ‘Busy’ Sign for the Modern Office (Sponsor)