Embrace frustration

Doing things well is difficult. As a general rule, if you want to excel, it’s necessary to work hard for it. Talent helps, of course, but to perform any task at a really high level, talent alone is not enough. (If there are any exceptions to this rule, they are few and far between.) To excel, it’s necessary to practice and to learn and work to improve your results, no matter how good they may already be. And that means looking for the things that you did poorly (or relatively poorly) and for the mistakes that you made.  And a focus on things that you did poorly can be very frustrating.

Emotionally speaking, it’s much more pleasant to when things are going well, but at the same time, things that come too easily are often less worth while.  If psychologist Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi is right, the best experiences in our lives occur in realms of experience where we face challenges—and facing challenges means facing failure—if there’s no chance of failure, then there’s no challenge.

Failure is frustrating. It’s not the only kind of frustration, but maybe all kinds of frustration stem from some sort of failure on a small scale: frustrating things are things that don’t go well—they don’t go the way you want, which could be viewed as a failure. The frustration, for example, of dealing with customer service, is that not only do you fail to get the product or service for which you initially hoped when you bought the product or service, but then you have to spend your time trying to get the thing you initially paid for.

There is nothing fun about frustration. But, it does feel good when you break through. Dealing with the frustration of a difficulty often leads to a breakthrough that really does lead to some sort of desirable improvement.

If you’re struggling with a writing project, pushing through the difficulties can lead to finishing the project. It may not be fun to proofread or to edit, or to rewrite sections that had taken a lot of effort the first time. Or to rewrite the whole thing, if that is necessary.

The difficulty of pushing against the frustration of a work is often tinged with the resentment of some sort of rejection: rewriting and revision generally follow on having someone suggest the need for revision! Or, perhaps better, perhaps worse, rewriting follows a work being ignored.

When a work is not accepted—after all the hours of effort—it is no fun. And going back at that project to change it—to try to make it better, when it likely feels like the best you have to offer—is frustrating.  Still, in that frustration, and in a positive, persistent response—one in which you keep working and trying to move forward—is the opportunity for growth and new opportunities. And possibility—the pursuit of happiness—is itself important and feels good.   

Many years ago, I got a fortune cookie fortune that said something like “your strengths grow out of your weaknesses,” and I have long considered how there is an interplay between strength and weakness—how an ability in some area may become a handicap in another—and how, at the same time, in facing a weakness, one has the opportunity to develop new strengths. Frustration arises in dealing with issues where one is not effective (or not effective enough), and that’s a form of weakness. And an opportunity to build strength.

Personally, I tend to avoid frustration. Even though I know that frustration is a sign of an opportunity. But when I can push through the frustration—if I keep working on the thing that is frustrating—I create a better piece of writing and become a better writer.

Cooperation, compromise, and celebrating what you have to give up

One thing I’ve recently given up in favor of other things is getting a blog post out on Mondays.  It’s Wednesday, so this is two days behind, and my last was also a day or two behind. That’s relatively minor as far as sacrifices go.  It’s on my mind because it follows up the theme and the issue that I was writing about in my previous blog posts, which were both interested in the necessary sacrifices that accompany the process of working with other people. And it’s still part of my personal situation, as well: in my last, I was writing about how a query letter led to the need to write a proposal. This week, I get to celebrate the fact that the proposal also received a positive response.

Once again, however, the positive response was also tied to more work and more need to satisfy the concerns of the editor.  The acceptance requires my willingness to work with the desires of the editor/publisher—they are not, after all, going to publish my book because they want to do me a service. If they decide to publish my book, they’ll do so because they think they can make a profit by publishing it. If they stop thinking they can make a profit, they’re going to stop thinking about producing my book.

One way to respond to this tension pulling on my work is to insist that it remain unchanged and that they accept it as it is.  Sometimes work is so good that it warrants such an attitude, and sometimes the specific changes requested are obviously stupid. But often, the requests made by others are useful, even beneficial.

Personally, I don’t view my book as such a masterpiece of English that it couldn’t be improved.  Throughout the process, I made choices that seemed like good ideas at the time, given my sense of what the book could be, but were not central to what I wanted to discuss. One such choice was whether to aim the book at a smaller or larger audience—I went for the larger, but the publisher wants the smaller. Now that I’m speaking with a specific publisher, some of those choices don’t suit the publisher, because their vision of what the book could be differs from mine.  To me, as long as their vision doesn’t clash with what is central, I have no complaint about making the change, even if it is something that I am sacrificing.

One of the things about working with other people, and making compromises when their desires do not perfectly match your own, is that often the other people are right. In addition to my own book proposal, I’ve been working with a client who is trying to get his book through the steps of publication, and the most recent request from his publisher was to revise the opening pages. The book is awesome and a week or two ago, they were pushing the author to change the title. At the time, I supported him in insisting on the title he had chosen. This time, however, the publisher is right in asking for revision of the opening pages: they could be better.

To some extent such judgments of better/worse are personal: my view of those pages will not match those of all potential readers. But often there can be some consensus. I’m thinking right now of the “director’s cut” of many movies: often the director’s cut means adding scenes that had been left on the cutting room floor. And, personally, I think that such revised (extended) versions can often make the work worse as a whole, even when the added scenes are themselves good. The movie Apocalypse Now was re-released as Apocalypse Now Redux with almost 50 minutes of original scenes that had been cut from the original release, and while each scene is good in its way, the added running time takes a long movie and turns it into a test of endurance.

Working with other people—publishers, for example—means respecting their desires. It doesn’t mean surrendering all boundaries, but if you’re never willing to make a sacrifice when your opinion differs from that of a collaborator, that doesn’t show much respect for their desires. Compromise and sacrifice are an integral part of cooperation, and if you want to be part of a larger community, then cooperation is necessary. If you can keep focused on the success of the cooperative endeavor, then it’s easier to celebrate the compromises that you have to make.

Celebrate rejection, celebrate acceptance, and be careful what you ask for

Back in February, after sending a query to a literary agent, I wrote about celebrating rejection.  The agency website says, “If you don’t hear from us in six weeks, assume we’re not interested.” I didn’t hear after six weeks, so I assumed that I had been rejected. After the sixth week passed, I tried to celebrate my rejection. 

And then I began working on a query letter for a publisher (my book is the kind of thing that is at the edge of being mass-market enough for one of the commercial publishing houses—there are several different commercial houses that have related books, and the commercial publishers don’t accept unsolicited queries—if I want to publish at a commercial publisher, I need an agent—but it’s also suitable for academic publisher, who do accept queries from authors). I decided to try a query letter (“would you like to see a proposal for a book” rather than “would you like to see a manuscript of a book”), thinking that a shorter, simpler query might get a quicker response.  I sent my first (and only) query letter to a publisher on the seventh week after sending my previous proposal, preparing to (try to) celebrate rejection yet again.

Celebrating rejection is not the easiest thing. It’s silly to argue that rejection is all good—the central part of rejection is that someone rejected your request, and presumably you didn’t make a request for something you didn’t either want or need (or both).  The possibility of celebrating rejection comes from the complexity of rejection: rejection does force one to consider new opportunities or new avenues of exploration, and those opportunities can be celebrated. It takes effort and focus, but as the saying goes, “if you get lemons, make lemonade.”

This past Monday (eight weeks after sending the proposal), I did, in fact, receive a formal rejection from the agent, which gave me a second opportunity to “celebrate” my rejection. A double helping of rejection to celebrate!

Of course, as I had already sent off a new query letter, my attention and interest were elsewhere, despite the renewed sting of rejection. As it happens, my query letter to the publisher had received a positive response—the acquisitions editor had expressed interest in seeing a proposal and in setting a time to talk with me.

Naturally, I was thrilled that my query had received a positive response. In many ways, celebrating acceptance is much easier than celebrating rejection.

But one does need to be careful what one asks for, because sometimes the request is accepted! Because of the acceptance of the query letter, I spent the last week writing and rewriting a proposal for the publisher. There are elements of book proposals that can be re-used, but different publishers have different interests and different book lists, and that leads to a need for some differences. And once the process of rewriting has started, it can take on its own life, as previous choices come under examination.

Last week, I wrote about compromise and how even when things are going well, you can expect someone to ask you to compromise. And I guess this is in that same vein: things could be going well (by being accepted, for example), and still there is more work to do, there are compromises to make.  I’m pretty darn happy that my query letter received a positive response, but life doesn’t end there. Resting on laurels is rarely possible. I have a next step (a proposal), which could lead to rejection, and then, possibly, a next step (manuscript submission), which could lead to rejection. And if that is accepted, then there are the steps of revising, editing, possibly indexing, promoting, etc.

Since this post is about celebrating things, I’ll wrap by noting that we have some choice over where we direct our attention. And especially, that there are always concerns for looking forward to the future: regardless of whether you were accepted or rejected, you can choose where to direct your attention, and looking at the road ahead, seeing difficulties, one can still choose to focus attention on the positive goals, too. It would be nice to have some laurels to rest upon, even if that rest might be uneasy.

Community, compromise, cooperation and contribution

This is about why I like to pay my taxes.  There are plenty of things about taxes that I don’t like, but on the whole, I like paying them because it’s my contribution to something I believe in.

The United States of America is hardly a perfect nation.  It’s got a problematic history and a problematic present.  Many have been victims of the injustices committed by the US and its representatives.  All the same, the US is something I believe in, particularly the principles espoused in the U.S. Constitution.

My belief in the Constitution is, in fact, so extreme, that I’m inclined to consider people who rail against taxes to be un-American.

These positions stem from understanding the value system espoused by the Constitution.

The preamble to the Constitution makes clear the purposes and the value system being invoked and created:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

What is this saying? Well, the main idea of the sentence is “We’re establishing this constitution to provide certain outcomes that we deem desirable.”  It expresses the values that the government is trying to establish:

1. Union

2. Justice

3. Domestic Tranquility

4. Common Defense

5. General Welfare

and

6. Secure the Blessings of Liberty for current and future generations

Firstly, it should be noted that this is a liberal document in the classic sense of the term “liberal”:  It is concerned with ensuring the liberty of those whom it presumes to govern. It is also “liberal” in the common meaning of “open to change.”  It is distinctly not conservative (i.e., hoping to maintain and establish old forms of government).

Second, it should be noted that it is a fundamentally cooperative document: “We the People,” it says. It is designed to set up a cooperative community: the people are going to work together to achieve the stated aims.  As I have discussed in previous posts, cooperation often includes compromise.  Compromise made to promote some desired value is not a restriction of freedom, as those who rail against taxes often complain, it is a choice to put in the necessary contribution to make the cooperative system work.

For there to be a “perfect union” in which “We the people” work together, there must be people who choose to work together, and that means people choosing to contribute to the common effort, including a willingness to compromise.

The Constitution is not just saying the we think that liberty, justice, etc. are good, it is saying that we—the people working together—are going to accede to a coherent set of rules that will guide (and limit) our actions.  The framers of the Constitution knew that compromise was necessary, and the document sets up a system for negotiating compromises.

The United States is a community. For that community to work, effort and contribution are required. Taxes are one form of contribution.  That people would be happy to take the benefits of living in the US, and would claim to love the United States and its freedoms, and then would rail against paying taxes is, I think, selfish entitlement.  The system only works if we the people contribute to its operation, even when we don’t necessarily like how the system works.

People who live in the US, who talk about how great America is, and who complain that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes, are people who seem to believe that they should get the benefits of living in this cooperative society without making contributions or compromise. Such people, in my opinion, are un-American, and frankly, if they don’t like the way America works, they should move to another country.

To be part of a community working together to reach a goal means making compromises. Taxes are part of the compromise of living in, and benefiting from, the community defined and governed by the Constitution of the United States of America.

I have slightly more sympathy for people who don’t want to pay taxes because they don’t like how their tax dollars are being spent—that, at least, doesn’t represent a repudiation of the basic community and the need to contribute to the community.  But still—compromise is necessary, and paying taxes is a necessary compromise if we, the people of the United States of America, want to do things like establish Justice, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.

I believe in the project and ideals defined in the US Constitution’s preamble and Bill of Rights. I don’t like the compromise made by the original framers that allowed slavery to continue, but that language has been amended. The general project is still worthy, despite the problems. But believing in that project, and trying to realize that project means compromise, including the compromise of paying taxes.  If you consider yourself a patriot of the U.S., you should be willing to make compromises to contribute to the cooperative project that is this nation.

Inevitably, you will be asked to compromise.

You are going to get asked to do things you don't want to do. And you will have to negotiate some compromise. It's difficult, but accepting this inevitability makes it easier to set aside the frustration and focus on what you can accomplish.

When you’re a doctoral candidate, it can be pretty natural to start thinking “once I’m done, I’ll be free; I won’t have to do what my professors tell me any more. I’ll be able to do my work to suit myself.” Feeling adversarial toward your professors is pretty natural, as is feeling resentment for doing things that you don’t want to do. It’s not fun to be forced to write about something that you think off-subject  just to please your professor.  And it is therefore also natural to feel excitement at the prospect of being free of such disagreements with your professors.

The thing is, if it’s not your professors, it’s going to be someone else.  This point was really driven home to me when I was talking with an author who was negotiating with the president of his publisher. The book is deep in process. The author has already edited it down significantly in size to suit the publisher. But recently the publisher asked him to change the title. “People won’t understand it. It won’t sell,” the publisher said.

This author is a tenure-track professor and a department chair, with multiple publications and a book manuscript that got rave reviews from the blind reviewers. But this morning, he had to face someone saying “I want you to do it differently.”

If you show your work to enough people, there is sure to be someone who will ask you to change it.  And even if you’re only working with one person (or one institution), you might well get asked to change it. You are not, after all, the only independent actor with plans and desires and expectations.

I guess the message I’d like to boil this down to is that the need to compromise never goes away if you want to work with other people, so you have to figure out how (and when) to compromise on stuff.

You can do awesome work that many people will love, and you can still find people who will dislike it or want to change it. Are those people wrong?  At times, it becomes necessary to make choices that aren’t entirely palatable: does the author insist on the title, even though it might mean losing the publisher? Does the author, give up the title to satisfy the publisher? Of course, the author could also decide that it’s a good idea to trust the publisher: after all, it would be nice to sell a lot of copies, right? And publishers know something about selling—more about selling than most professors, I would imagine.

I’ve been writing about perfectionism recently, and this is another angle on perfectionism: what one person views as perfect, another might view as problematic. What one person views as excellent, another might view as insufficient. Such differences in perception and evaluation reveal that “perfect” is not, practically speaking, the same as excellent.

When working on a project, it’s natural to focus on your own vision and on making a creation that matches that vision, and lives up to the standards that you set.  It’s super important to be aware of your own standards, and to be able to strive for them.

To the extent that you hope your work will communicate with others—and that’s the purpose of writing—and will get good responses, the question of what is “perfect” is problematized: by which standard is the work evaluated? By your standard? By the standards of the audience? 

It can often feel frustrating and even disempowering when someone asks you to change something you do to satisfy their desires. This is especially true if you don’t agree with their position. But at the same time, that very disagreement is important: to the extent that you dismiss their position, you are frustrating and disempowering them. There are times to hold firm to what you believe—I recommended that the author hold firm on the title—and there are times to think about what the other person is asking from you, and why they want it. Communication and community require compromise. If not yours, then someone else’s. It’s not always fun to compromise, and it’s not always appropriate. But it can be taken for granted that you will be asked and that you will have to negotiate it. For me, at least, understanding that reality helps make it more palatable: this isn’t something that I can change by being smarter or working harder; this is the way it is.

More about perfectionism and tradeoffs

A few days ago, I got an e-mail from a perfectionist who does great work, but...

On 3/__/18 8:17 PM, _______ wrote: 

> Perfectionism is killing me. 

>

> [other job] is, too. But that's sometimes an excuse for perfectionism. 

>

> I’m going to try doing the shittiest job ever of reading and summarizing papers tomorrow morning. 

Hi ______, 

How can you find the balance--the point of tension between competing demands? There's [other job]. There's a dissertation that you've already done a great job on and still have to do more (both in terms of getting the dissertation signed off--which is not exciting--and in the longer run as you think about turning it into a book).  There's new research. There's the rest of your life, like friends and family, and self-indulgence. 

I got a fortune cookie fortune once that said something like "your strengths grow out of your weaknesses," which is a worthy consideration (even if I remember the cookie wrong).  In a way, character traits present a two-edged duality: an ability like your perfectionism both promotes and inhibits your success.  You don't want to set that vision and that drive aside, because that vision and that drive are precisely what allow you to create work of the quality that you produce. At the same time, allowing that vision and that drive too much leeway can drive you into a corner. On the one hand, you want to cultivate that perfectionism and encourage it. On the other, you want to keep it in check. 

Any ability is like that. A person with physical strength can do certain things well, but may also choose strength when physical force isn't the best option. Intelligence answers many situations, but sometimes rational thinking isn't the answer. Any ability suits some situations better than others.  How can you apply you perfectionist powers to best suit this situation? 

I heartily approve of your trying to do a shitty job. 

At the same time, remember that brevity is a virtue. If someone asks you to describe your work in one minute, you give it a try, even if the description you produce is a poor description by many standards. An "elevator pitch" is too short to be a good description of any work, and yet it can sometimes be exactly what is wanted.  A short discussion of literature about faculty roles is not necessarily worse for being brief!  There's a different perfection to seek here: the project manager's perfection, which is getting high quality work done on schedule. 

Finish that draft and perfect your schedule. 

best, 

Dave