Tag: practice

P-ing Over Productivity

MarlonLeave a comment

We live in a society where our worth is tied heavily to our sense of productivity. If you’re not doing enough, then you are not enough, by definition. You can feel this any time you run into someone you haven’t seen in a while. Almost everybody’s go to question is work related. Such versions of these questions include:

“Where do you work now?”

“How’s that job of yours, you still there?”

“Are you working?”

It’s as if we’ve become human doings as opposed to human beings. We forgot what it was like to just be a human without needing our jobs to define our character. It’s funny too because the word work carried a double meaning. On the surface it pertains to working at a job. But then if you dig a little deeper, it also carries the implicit question of are you functioning?

Today we’re going to delve into The Six P’s of Productivity so that we are no longer squashed by the expectation to be and appear productive in the eyes of our peers, and learn how to approach life in a more meaningful way that is less dependent on how you look to the world, and more focused on how you feel about your personal experience.

  1. Presence
  2. Practice
  3. Progress
  4. Pacing
  5. Purpose
  6. Patience

PRESENCE

What I love about writing is that it forces me to focus on one thought at a time. My ADHD brain usually races from one to another in a seemingly nonrelated manner. What writing affords me is the ability to slow down my thought process and to get a visual sense of how my thoughts are either connected or disjointed.

Within the process of writing, I try my best to not think about anything else but the topic at hand whether it’s my personal journal, my novel, or this very blog post right here. As soon as I let my mind distract me and tempt me toward doing something else, then I will lose that chance to express my feelings and ideas in a coherent manner. Either I will give up on writing or end up writing something incoherent and all over the place.

This is why it’s importance to eliminate distractions as best as possible and train your mind to think only about the task at hand. Any thoughts that are irrelevant to what you’re doing, you can make a quick mental note to take action on later, but if you’ve sat down and decided to write, paint, or compose a piece of music, then that is all you should physically be doing and that is all you should be thinking about.

And all that takes…

PRACTICE

Practice makes perfect, they say, but what they don’t say is how perfectionism prevents practice. What often prevents us from getting things done is a feeling of incompetence and the lack of confidence which I’ve touched upon in 3 Ways Perfection is the Ultimate Procrastination, and the only way to gain any sense of competence is practice.

Of course you’re gonna suck at something at the beginning. As I always say, much thanks to a quote from a Street Fighter graphic novel ala, “a master was once an awkward novice.” You need to get over yourself and realize that it’s not about how you appear to others or even yourself in your mind, rather it’s about mastering a craft and doing what it takes to become a said master.

And all that takes practice. Consistent, messy, and grueling practice. Read the books and watch the videos you need to learn about music composition all you want, and you can even daydream about being a famous musician all you want. But none of that will really amount to anything if you don’t practice your instrument and just play the damn thing to eventually achieve some sense of…

PROGRESS

Being present when you practice anything, you are bound to achieve some level of progress. No matter how little your progress is, it is important to take stock of it, especially if you’re feeling stuck. One way to do this is to write in a Progress Journal and keep track of all the things you get better at in your given field.

This idea of a Progress Journal is so important that I wrote about it a second time many years since the initial post, but ADHD interconnectivity of my blog aside, even mentioning how much I wrote about progress so many times speaks on the importance of it because from each successive post about progress marks different milestones in my own personal journey.

In your own personal journey, progress is going to be something very close and intimate to you in a way that no one else will ever truly understand, unless you have a good mentor keeping track of your progress along with you from an objective and an emotionally detached point of view. You kind of need both your personal connection to your progress and your mentor’s detached point of view to it in order to strike a balance toward proper…

PACING

Whenever you start a new job or hobby, it is important to also pace yourself so you don’t burn out. As an ADHDer, I’ve had so many hyper-focuses that almost everything I love doing creates a tinge of fear in me because I remember all the times I would sacrifice eating, sleeping, and even relationships just so I can continue enjoying the dopamine rush of doing something new and exciting.

So while you do want to become present in what you do, practice it consistently, and track your progress, you also want to pace yourself so you don’t burn out as fast as I have many times. For instance, when I wrote the first draft of It Starts at Home, back when it was called Dear Stupid Diary, I wrote about 6000 words a day because I couldn’t stop myself. I got addicted to finally becoming present to the point that my entire sense of time had gone irrelevant.

It’s very seductive when we find something we really love to do that it can easily consume all of our time and energy to the point of costing other aspects of our lives. So don’t forget to take your appropriate breaks and to pace yourself accordingly so that you save your energy and excitement for another day and sustain that consistency over a longer period of time. It is much better to do a little each day for a long period of time than it is to everything all at once in one day, only to risk losing all that initial euphoria and end up doing nothing the next.

Pacing becomes really easy when you’ve discovered your…

PURPOSE

Why you do what you do is a deeply intimate thing only you and a handful people will ever truly understand. Whenever I feel stuck on any creative project, I always ask myself, “why am I even doing this again?” If it’s because I want to appear productive and impress people, or even prove to myself that I’m not as lazy as my ADHD forces me to be sometimes, then I’ve already lost.

However, when I remember that it’s because I love creating things and enjoy the presence it affords me, then I am better equipped to keep at that task at hand. This blog post itself has been a challenge because the first draft was all about my work experience, which is ironic because of how I opened this post about not tying our self worth and identities to what we do for work.

But upon this rewrite, I’ve regained a sense of my purpose for writing Your Write to Live blog posts: to share my own personal experiences in a way that helps others overcome their own sense of dread and resistance toward living their best possible lives. Essentially, much like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, these blog posts are reminders to myself on how to think and act better in my life. But unlike Marcus, I’m intentionally sharing my thoughts with you in the hopes that they can also provide relief and assistance to anyone else beyond myself.

But whether I help anyone or not, or even start to follow my own advice, we all need a little…

PATIENCE

It’s easy to get impatient when we can see who we can be if we just tried hard enough. A lot of people’s negative emotion is due to not fulfilling their potential that they often see looming in the distance. It becomes a bit of a judge and executioner of our current selves because we’re not who we could be. And while it is helpful to know that you can be better than you are now, thus driving yourself toward personal development, it is also important to be patient with yourself.

Sometimes we’ll stumble and fall along the way, and that’s all part of life. Maybe you can’t be present enough to practice consistently. Maybe you still feel like you haven’t made progress no matter how much you try to take stock of your progress. Maybe you pace yourself poorly and lose sight of your purpose.

When all these things fail, always remember to be patient with yourself. There’s only so much progress one can make at a given time. We all wish we had all the time in the world to do all the things we want and achieve what we want, but life often gets in the way with emergencies, social obligations, and random illnesses and other setbacks that prevent us from moving forward.

Be patient with yourself and with life having trust and faith that whatever holds you back is only temporary. Nothing in life is permanent, only short term or long term. So be patient for the storm to roll by and maybe you’ll find yourself in a place of calm once again, ready to excel at what you love once more.

3 Ways Perfectionism is the Ultimate Procrastination

Marlon4 Comments

I’ve come across several people in my life who have stopped themselves from finishing a project, or even getting started in the first place, because they believed in some perfectionist ideal on how the process should be—instead of simply letting the process be what it is.

The process of creativity is often a long, messy, and emotionally enduring endeavour. It is almost never a straightforward process, rather a bumpy road with lots of twists and turns. Although the inherent challenges that come with creativity can make you anxious about the road ahead, it is actually within this struggle where our greatest work resides.

Resistance is a natural part of the process, and often times, the more resistance you have toward something, the more important it actually is. Resistance is your ego’s way of trying to preserve itself by bringing your self-esteem down, and it is your duty as a creator to squash your ego in its wake and get to work anyway.

As a life long procrastinator, I am no stranger to this process, and am still a victim to it when I’m not mentally prepared enough for it, but nonetheless I hope you find what I share today to be helpful in your own journey.

So without further adieu, here are the 3 Ways Perfectionism is the Ultimate Procrastination:

  1. Not feeling competent enough.
  2. Not feeling original enough.
  3. Not feeling motivated enough.

Practice Makes Progress

If you don’t feel confident to get started on a project, it might mean that you’re lacking a few fundamental skills of the trade to even put a dent into that said project. But do not fret because there is a lot of joy and meaning to be found in learning and practicing new skills. As you learn new things, you will naturally feel excited to employ these new skills and techniques to whatever you’re working on.

I know in my experience, whenever I’ve learned a new guitar or piano chord, a writing concept, or a new music production technique, I’ve always felt the need to experiment with that new skill in my latest project in any given field. It didn’t matter whether I employed the new skill in small doses, in excess, or scrapped it from the final project entirely. What mattered was that I gave myself the freedom to experiment with something new and broaden my skillset.

A lot of people feel like they’re not good enough to start on anything because of this lack of self confidence. And since we often equate competence with confidence, that lack of competence holds us back. I’ve heard the same excuse a thousand times by now:

“I can’t write a song/write a book/make a painting, I’m not creative enough.”

It’s like saying, “I can’t do yoga, I’m not flexible enough.”

Well, here’s the kicker: you become flexible by doing yoga. Likewise with anything creative, you stretch out your creativity at a certain artform the more you engage it. Who cares if you don’t know how song or plot structures work or how to mix colours properly?

You learn by experimenting and actively choosing things to learn either through a class on or offline, a teacher or mentor, and/or by observing the works of art that inspire you and comparing your work to theirs in a reasonable and non-self-esteem-crushing kind of way. The only important thing to note is that you don’t keep yourself stuck in training mode because you’re too afraid to actually create something. Study your techniques all you want, but actually put them to use at some point or that can become another side of this same coin of lacking competence.

Nothing and Everything is Original

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again; do not be overly concerned with being original. It’s a huge waste of time and energy, and a surefire way of crushing your own morale. This is another thing a lot of potential creators often contend with. They want to be above the crowd by way of originality because they have it in their heads that they must be this wonderfully unique snowflake, or there is no point of creating anything because they’ll just be making more of the same to put into the stratosphere.

Stop this kind of thinking NOW!

Think about this instead:

There are only 7 plots in fiction.

There are only 7 notes in a scale.

There are only 7 colours in a rainbow.

Nothing you create will ever be entirely original because you’re already using established artforms such as fiction, music, or art. Just because there are only seven plots in fiction, doesn’t mean you can’t write the story your way. Just because there are only seven notes in a scale, doesn’t mean you can’t rearrange those notes your way. Just because there are only 7 colours in a rainbow, doesn’t mean you can’t mix and match those colours your way.

Most of us want to think outside of the box, but we need to know what’s in that box in order to know what we’re straying away from in the first place, and to do so with moderation that serves our work. Otherwise it can come across as, or actually become, trying too hard to stand out instead of genuinely trying to expressing ourselves.

Maybe your novel can have a mix of more than just one of those 7 plots in fiction. Maybe your song can include a chromatic note or two that isn’t in the 7 notes of its original scale. Maybe your painting can blend those 7 colours in a varying degrees to achieve different hues of colours you didn’t think possible. But the most important thing is to use these lucky 7 things to your advantage, rather than something you actively work against.

Originality, then, isn’t about coming up with something entirely new, rather taking pre-existing matter and mixing and matching different elements into something new by design of how you’ve personally conveyed it. If your goal is to be original, you risk trying too hard to be eccentric and esoteric to the point of drawing too much attention to how weird and different your artwork is instead of actually having something useful to say with it.

“Originality comes from genuine self expression, not concerted effort.” – Marlon from Your Write to Live

Motivation is Random, Discipline is Free Will Power

As someone with ADHD, I have often fallen under the seductive spell of hyper-focus whenever I’ve come up with a new idea or discovered a new hobby. I go at it full force, basking in its novelty with absolute certainty that I will do this forever, until I stop dead in my tracks because I’ve burnt myself out from going too hard at something instead of pacing myself accordingly.

Then I spend weeks, sometimes months, wondering if I’ll ever have the motivation to start writing another song or editing a new video, writing a novel etc.

A lot of people say that they will only create something when they feel motivated and will not force themselves to do it otherwise, and for people who have created some great volumes of work that have only come from allowing their muse to motivate them by her own accord, that’s all well and good.

But for those who haven’t even completed or started a project, this kind of thinking is detrimental to creativity and can often be an excuse for never creating to begin with.

It pains me to talk with people who contend with all of these ways in which procrastination manifests as perfectionism, but when it comes to motivation I probably relate to it the most because it’s the one and only demon on this list that I’ve yet to conquer. But basically you really don’t want to be waiting around for those times you feel motivated enough to create because you’ll either be waiting for a long time—which will then result in small bursts of creativity for a short amount of time before you spend another several weeks, months, maybe even years wondering if it’ll ever happen again—or you’ll be waiting forever.

The decision to create needs to come from you and you alone.

You cannot rely on random happenstance to get you there. If you start feeling bad for not having worked on your creativity for a long time, that anxiety around it is actually unspent energy that could easily be going into your project as opposed to crushing your own self-esteem with the self imposed guilt trip. What you want to do is create healthy habits that prime you to start working, even on your most resistant days, all to the point of turning your routine into a ritual.

You want to get to the point where you can’t not create something on most, if not all days. It’s something you need to get done or the day does not feel complete otherwise. Even if you don’t turn out your best work for several days straight, at least you’ve gotten the crappy ideas out of the way so that when you get back into the swing of things, you’re at least glad that you’ve committed to your practice. That is how you know you’ve turned a habit into a ritual.

While there is the danger of turning your ritual into a superstition where you think, “I gotta have my large coffee and cookie every morning or I can’t create anything!” Having some kind of routine in place to at least increase your chances of getting something is better than having low to no chance in hell that you create anything at all.

We’ll get into overwork and burnout in a future post, but for now, let’s simmer in the idea that maybe we aren’t working enough to ensure we get our creative needs met. And I don’t know about you, but I get pretty depressed if I’m not creating at least one or two things on nearly daily basis, and I’m starting to realize just how much of that depression is a lot of emotionality that is being left unexpressed that can be transmuted into writing fiction, producing music, or even the simple act of journaling.

It’s actually through journaling before almost every writing session where I tackle my demons and empty out my mind to make space for creative ideas. I need to check in with myself and see how I’m feeling about my life and the work laid out ahead of me, otherwise these unchecked doubts will creep up in any given writing session. Only then I’ll feel like I’m strong and smart enough to get on with the project.

Feeling and Being Enough

That’s what this entire post comes down to in a nutshell: feeling enough.

Creative people are notorious for not feeling or being enough and that’s why a lot of us over or under perform where we can be finding a happy and healthy medium between the two. Just notice that whenever you encounter any self doubt, imposter syndrome, or resistance, it’s all pent up energy that is being left unexpressed, and you need an outlet for it.

Personally for me, creating a slew of work doesn’t mean I will guarantee a sense of meaning and contentedness in my life, but it sure as hell increases the probability for them, provided that I am coming at it from a place of stillness. A place where I’m not using my creativity to avoid uncomfortable thoughts and feelings about my life, rather taking them head on with confidence that I will get through it all no matter how difficult it all is.

It’s a tough balancing act.

You want to create because you have something in you to express, and you have to fight your ego every step of the way as to not do it for the wrong reasons like fame, fortune, or fear. Like the fear of not feeling or being enough. Feeling and being enough starts with you right here, right now in making the decision to take your creativity into your own hands, not the whims of fate. And definitely in not submitting to the whims of our egos that hold us back in making us believe we are not good or original enough. That’s not what’s important.

What’s important is giving ourselves the permission to express ourselves as that is Your Write to Live.