President Dwight D. Eisenhower often said that what is important is rarely urgent and what is urgent is rarely important.
We always want to find ourselves pulled into our work. Continuous pushing leads to burnout. The absence of any pull toward your work is a sign that you’re pursuing the wrong thing. In fact, it’s possible that the lack of a pull toward your creative project is one reason you picked up this book in the first place.
A fresh idea will always be more appealing than the grind of a project that’s already under way. The insidious thing about a new idea is that it feels productive to stop what we’re doing and tackle that instead. After all, we’re creative – we have to act when inspiration strikes, don’t we? The discipline lies in getting the new idea down onto paper and then going back to finish what you originally started.
It’s in the lulls between flow states when we start noticing all the shiny distractions. If we don’t develop the discipline of writing those unrelated ideas down and then ignoring them as we continue our work, we will never find our way back into the flow state. We won’t finish anything, either.
Stop glamorizing being busy. A hamster on a wheel is busy – where does it get him? I had grander ambitions. I resolved to stop doing whatever came up, whatever highly visible activity created a false aura of productivity and glamour, and instead to focus on being effective. That shift made all the difference.
Ever seen Warren Buffett’s calendar? It’s mostly blank. “Yeah, well, he’s a billionaire,” you might say. If you ask him, though, he’ll tell you that his time isn’t free because he’s rich; he’s rich because he made time for what mattered to him.
My own preference is to set aside at least ninety minutes to tackle a small creative task. If I’m doing any heavy lifting, I prefer a three-hour block, at minimum. I aim for one three-hour creative push per day, more under duress – but then I have to double down on rest and self-care.
People respect a wrong move made with confidence far more than a correct one made without conviction.
Once I was walking my path, once I’d found my creative niche, my photography – and my life – had focus. The difference was dramatic. Suddenly I went from wandering the woods to sprinting like a track star. I dropped out of grad school and went from my first few local clients to working with some of the world’s biggest sports brands.
Batching similar tasks makes everything more manageable and less daunting. You might set aside a specific time each day for processing emails and one for making phone calls rather than allow these activities to proliferate throughout your day, stealing precious time from work that requires sustained concentration.
It requires discipline to maintain boundaries and not let other kinds of work spill in, but batching is a masterful way to protect creative work from the day-to-day interruptions that feel urgent but actually aren’t and can easily wait until you’re ready to deal with them.
Time is precious. Never risk it blindly. Do a risk assessment there as well.
Little did I know at the time that I was developing a rare but powerful tool: quitting stuff I wasn’t meant to do. This is a tool you must wield to create the life you want.
Hedging your bets frees you up to play.
Always aim to reduce the friction involved in starting.
Your point of view is the highest value you can bring. Once you can create work with a distinctive and recognizable personal style over and over again, the world will unlock itself for you. Even if your work is not recognized, you will have unlocked something precious in yourself.
Think different” isn’t just a slogan. It’s a credo, one that made Apple the most profitable company in human history. People accused Steve Jobs of creating a “reality distortion field,” but he understood that reality is already distorted. Apple would never win by trying to build a better mainframe computer. That would have been playing by IBM’s rules. Instead, Apple created a personal computer because that was what it wanted the future to look like.
About a decade ago, Jeff Bezos declared that Amazon was “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” It was expanding from selling everyday goods such as books and brushes to selling “cloud services.” Talk about castles in the sky. What the hell did Amazon know about “Big Data”? The collective reaction was: “Stay in your lane, Bezos. Leave this brainy digital stuff to companies like Google and Microsoft and go back to selling lawn mowers.
Making space for your work is important, but it isn’t the same as doing the work. Get yourself set up, give yourself the time, tools, and whatever space you can, and then, for the love of everything holy, start. Just start.
What matters is that you start. All you’re deciding to do is to try. Do whatever you can with what you have. It will never feel like the right time. You will never be “ready.” Avoid preparing too much. Start before you are ready. Start with fear. Start with uncertainty. This is one of the biggest secrets of the most creative, happy, successful people: Just start.