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.