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.

Feedback and Flow

I've been slowly making my way through Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

He talks about how important it is to have immediate feedback to get into the flow state (the flow state is the state of deep concentration that Csikzentmihalyi identifies as the common element in different reports of optimal experience). He talks about how the tennis player knows immediately (almost) whether the shot is in.

But does the dissertation writer have any such immediate feedback? Obviously, at one level, no: the dissertation writer depends on the professors who will ultimately sign off on the dissertation.

On another level, every writer has feedback: is there anything on the page? how much is on the page? is there anything useful on the page? Writers also have the experience of writing--are we engaged? are we focused or wandering? Those experiences themselves can tell us how we are doing.

Often I write something, or rather, I start to write something when I don't really know what I want to say and I'm just saying something for the sake of writing. Often, at such times, I am not focused and my attention is wandering; often my topic is something that I think might be interesting but don't know how to discuss. But as I expend effort to continue to engage with the writing, I begin to find greater concentration, and often I begin to find a greater sense of what I could say, and this helps me focus more: the actual process of writing helps me gain focus. Each word that I put on the page is something to reflect on, and I try to add to it, to refine it. In this way I have continual feedback that helps me focus my attention and move closer to both a coherent written form and to a sense of flow. But, though I strive for such coherence, and find it a nice challenge to see if I can manage to bring coherence into a single, completely unrevised draft, I have no expectation that I will get such coherence on the first draft. Or the second, for that matter. By the third, maybe, but...The more easily that you can write the first draft, the more time you have to revise, and the less intimidating it seems to have a revision ahead of you. If you have a day where you write very productively--you write a good ten pages, perhaps, or more,--then it's much easier to believe that you can have other such days, and so writing becomes that much less intimidating (and therefore that much easier).

In order to get your writing to generate immediate feedback, you need to write something. Let's, for a moment, just think in simple terms. If you're writing and you're struggling to write, and you write a sentence, isn't that a decent feeling? At least for a moment you can say to yourself "ah, I've written that sentence." And if you can write a whole paragraph, you can say "yes, I've written a whole paragraph," and so forth. So it's a good idea, if you're having trouble writing something, to just write anything. See how it looks on the page. See what could follow it; see how it could be built up. Put words on the page.

Sometimes I wipe away what I've written, but if you're struggling to write, you want to get words on the page. I have no trouble filling a page or three (in a blog, certainly, where it's a one-shot deal, and I won't usually even go back to clean up the typos and errors that come from changing my idea in mid-sentence), so if I wipe away a sentence or paragraph, or even page, it's no big deal. But if you're struggling, put words on the page. Give it a try. If you write a first sentence and say "that doesn't work", instead of erasing it, ask yourself, what would have to go with that sentence to remedy the error, and write that. Put words down on paper (or computer).

We have our best experiences when we're working hard, or so at least Csikzentmihalyi reports from his studies of people reporting on their optimal experiences. So how can we create a situation where we're working hard and that work becomes an optimal experience?
Csikzentmihalyi may give suggestions on how to achieve flow--I haven't finished the book--but, if flow states are characterized by concentration and by feedback, we can see that writing is a situation where those conditions apply, and it certainly takes effort. If we want to find flow in writing, the implication seems to be that we want to actually put words on the paper, because these will help us focus and will give us feedback.

Make mistakes. They give you feedback. If you make lots of mistakes, you can write several sentences in a minute. If you try to write a perfec sentence, you can wait hours with no result. Make mistakes, get feedback. Look at the words on the page and say "how do these help me write the next sentence?"

Do you have to force yourself to work?

I was talking with a writer this morning and he said to me something like "I have to force myself to work on this." This seemed to me problematic in some ways, though correct in others.

He brought up the analogy of working out: "When you're working out regularly, you don't need to force yourself because you almost have to work out; it doesn't feel right if you don't; but if you've had a lay-off and have to get back into it, it can be hard, and you do have to force yourself." This I liked much better, because it contains an important element that the first statement didn't. In this statement there is the recognition of and focus on the good that comes along with the investment of effort. And this is the key.

My yoga teacher told the class something to the effect of: "At the moment of greatest difficulty, something beautiful is waiting to be born." The idea being, I think, that it is through the difficulty that we grow into new appreciations.

I just started reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In it he says

we have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like....
Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times--although such experiences can also be enjoyable if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen....
Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur.

The emphasis on "make" is his. But this is the kind of forcing that is positive: when we recognize that in the reaching and in the stretching to our limits, there we are going to be the most satisfied. So yes, we need to put in effort, and to push our comfort zone, but if that effort is motivated by our sense that this is a route to feeling good.
Yes, he notes that there may be some sort of discomfort, but that discomfort is not certain--and once in "flow" easily put aside (at least in my experience).

So, if you're thinking you have to force yourself to work, remember the optimal experiences in your past. What are the moments in your memory that stand out as the most pleasurable? Are any of them flow moments? Are they memories of things that required effort? Can remembering how good those moments felt help you engage with the project at hand?