Listening to Yourself

Here's another reposted from my new blog.

Recently, I saw a motivational quotation on the order of “Do what you love and it isn’t work.” It struck me as unrealistic and unhelpful. It fails to capture the difficult and intimate interplay between love and work—whatever kind of love we may be talking about.  Love calls on us to do things that are difficult, even unpleasant or painful. Often we surmount difficulties and minor discomforts for our proudest achievements and best experiences. But it’s possible to face too much difficulty, and too much pain, and then love can be destructive.  To have a healthy relationship with the things we love—whether people or activities or otherwise—it helps to be able to listen to ourselves and make good judgements about how much difficulty is the right amount of difficulty.
Passion often lies where there is great difficulty. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that the best moments in people’s lives occur in activities that present significant challenges—the “Flow” state that Csikszentmihalyi has researched occurs in difficult activities, not easy ones. The activities that he describes as flow activities are ones where there is a danger of failure and a possibility for growth.
Shortly after seeing that motivational quotation, I was out for a run. (I’m not sure I go fast enough to call what I do “running” anymore, but I’ll call it running.) While running, I was thinking about the practice of listening to myself and the value of self-knowledge, and thinking about that in the context of writing and developing a writing practice, as well as the context of going running.
Going running is difficult and it is also something that I love.  When running well, I feel better than I do at any other time.  But I’m liable to aches and pains.  Tendonitis is a frequent issue, as is tightness or cramping.  Understanding these pains and being able to self-diagnose—listening to myself—helps me decide when to run harder and when to stop and engage in some treatment (like stretching).  You don’t want to keep running if running is going to cause more damage or prevent damage from healing; you do want to keep running if the exercise will help resolve the problem. Being able to listen to yourself helps you make a good judgement.
This ability to listen to oneself is valuable in all cases where love leads us to a difficulty: do we continue to follow our passion, or do we pull back because our passion is causing damage?

To develop a successful writing practice, it’s important to listen to oneself, and to understand which difficulties are a sign to stop and tend to yourself, and which are just difficulty and discomfort to work through. 
This is true at both the physical and emotional levels. Physically, to write, and to work on writing has real dangers—I have known more than one researcher whose work was brought to a near standstill by repetitive stress injuries.  RSIs are better understood now than when I was in graduate school, so fewer people are crippled by them—partly because we better understand the danger and the danger signs (as well as appropriate responses).
Danger of overwork also exists on the emotional level, I believe. It is possible to turn a work practice into something so unpleasant that it becomes hard to work.  The idea that obstacles to writing stem from psychological issues is hardly a new or inventive one. Two sources where I have seen this idea are Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit and Keith Hjortshoj’s book on writing blocks, both of which discuss different psychological issues that inhibit writing.
Whether the pain is physical or emotional, being able to listen to yourself and correctly diagnose the severity of various discomforts can help you develop a more effective writing practice.  And that understanding can help your realize a project that is important to you and also difficult—a project of the sort that is often called a “labor of love.”
A labor of love requires a positive and beneficial practice that provides sufficient rewards to justify the difficulties involved, and part of that requires the ability to listen to yourself in order to understand what the costs are relative to the benefits.

The “do what you love and it isn’t work” trope fails to explain or understand the idea of a labor of love, and so cannot support such a work. If you think that doing what you love means that you don’t have to work, then you will almost certainly interpret all difficulties as a sign of something wrong—perhaps, even that you don’t love what you’re dong enough.  A more realistic view of what constitutes a good relationship recognizes that significant difficulties are part of the best things in life.
For me, the difficulty and frustration of not knowing what to write, of feeling that my ideas are weak or of limited interest, of not knowing how to make a coherent argument, of feeling that my hoped-for and intended argument has totally fallen apart, all of these are real pains. There is real difficulty and distress related to these things.  But is it suffering that will cause long-term damage? Knowing yourself and listening to yourself helps prevent engagement from becoming unhealthy. 
Doing what you love takes work. It involves real frustrations and difficulties. That work and those frustrations and difficulties are not necessarily signs that you’re doing something wrong or that you don’t love enough.  That’s where listening to yourself is about: by listening to yourself, you get information about your processes and you can use that information to develop better, healthier practices.
In this post, I have focused on listening to yourself with respect to managing a writing practice, but as a final note, I want to point out that for a writer being able to listen to yourself—hearing your own voice, and trusting your own judgments—is crucial not only in managing the practice of writing, but in finding material to write.  To write original work, there is no other source than your own voice—but that’s a subject for a different post.

Writing from the heart and writing exercises

Last week I wrote about a scholar who does great work, but whose dissertation has not satisfied its reviewers. I am, to some extent, writing about that same or a tangential concern and a related idea that came up in my creative writer’s group. A poet in the group was talking about submitting work to various journals/e-journals and about his recognition of the tension between writing what he wanted to write and writing what would suit the journal/editor. This is a similar tension to that experienced by a scholar who is trying to please an audience that is in some way hostile to their work.  To what extent do you change what you say to please the audience? Especially when the audience has power—power to accept or reject your work? This is, in a way, one face of “selling out”: doing work that you don’t really believe in for financial gain.

To speak of “selling out” focuses on a sacrifice of integrity, and that’s not really where I want to go. I think there is a lot more to the dynamic between writer and audience than a simple, clear assumption that pleasing and audience is always a sacrifice of integrity. There is a balance that can be found between (1) writing for yourself and to be true to your own vision and (2) writing to please an audience, especially one that doesn’t want the same things you do. There’s a lot in this dynamic that I’m not going to discuss in this post. I want to focus on just one suggestion: view the task of writing to please a specific (possibly hostile) audience as an exercise in developing your ideas and your skill as a writer.

A scholar—or any writer—should be aiming to write about things that really matter personally. Write about things that you really care about and believe in. If you’re working on something that you care about and believe in, it’s much easier to do the work, and much more satisfying to work, and that generally means that there’s less danger of writer’s block or avoidance.

But what do you really care about? Is that something that can be expressed in only one way? To what extent can you shape your work to suit your audience without sacrificing your own integrity?

It seems to me that any idea can be expressed in many different ways.  It seems to me that most really substantive ideas have multiple dimensions that could be discussed in varying proportion to suit varying audiences.

To put this in terms of poetry, one might choose to express some thought—the transient nature of life, for example—in different poetic forms—sonnet, haiku, etc. Each form shapes how the idea is expressed, but none fundamentally change the underlying idea (or at least none need change the underlying idea—but most writers learn as they write, and learning does change ideas).

When writing to an audience that wants something other than what you want—if you really want to write haiku and your audience is expecting or demanding a sonnet, you can say “I’m not going to do it! I write haiku!”  That would lead to something of an impasse. What I am suggesting is that you approach such situations saying to yourself, “Maybe I can learn something from the exercise of writing a sonnet. Maybe I can learn something about my ideas and something about the craft of writing that will help me write better haiku in the future.”

Approach such situations is as an exercise—opportunities to stretch your communicative repertoire.  If you don’t want to write what the other person wants to read, and if you think of the task in those terms, you can easily feel resentment for having to work on something that you don’t want to work on. If you say “can I choose words that will satisfy my critical reviewer and also stay true to my purpose?”, then your challenge may not be flavored with resentment—and that’s worth a lot (especially if you are one of those people for whom resentment fuels procrastination).

There is a lot that can be done to shape a presentation of your ideas without sacrificing them or your integrity.  Let’s set aside extreme cases where you are called upon to make a statement that directly contradicts your beliefs—if the editor at the journal wants a poem on a subject you don’t want to write about, don’t write it. If your professor wants you to say “Marx was right about everything” and you don’t agree, don’t write it. But if you’re not being forced to a direct contradiction of your beliefs, then look for the challenge of writing your own ideas in a way that will reach the difficult audience. Look for the opportunity to develop your skill as a writer and the opportunity to find a new way to express a familiar idea.

You may need to (temporarily) abandon the ways in which you have previously tried to write about your work.  This can be frustrating and difficult, but it can be a great learning experience for a writer—both in terms of developing a greater discursive repertoire and skill as a writer.

Looking for new ways to communicate and old idea doesn’t change the underlying purposes, the underlying quality, or the underlying value of the work. It doesn’t stop the underlying message from being shared with others in other forms.  What it does do is stretch the scholar/writer’s ability to bridge communicative and intellectual gaps.

There is a problem in trying to write in a way that reaches people with whom you have fundamental disagreements—trying to write in their language often requires adopting some of the conceptual structures that they use.  This makes the exercise in trying to write across these communicative gaps quite difficult while still remaining true to your own vision.  But, if you remember to think of the exercise as an exercise—an attempt to develop the ability to write/speak to disparate audiences—then these dangers are challenges to be surmounted, rather than causes to abandon your beliefs.

My problem with non-objectivist philosophies

Frequently, I quote from the opening verse of the Tao Te Ching: “the Tao that can be named is not the absolute Tao.” It’s an epistemological statement of limitation—a statement about our ability to know and communicate ideas—and one that reflects my understanding of our ability to know things. Knowledge, I believe, is not absolute. I do not, in short, accept the existence of “objective knowledge”—but that has implications for a scholar, philosopher, or researcher, and it becomes a problem.

Objective knowledge (if there is such a thing) is, by definition, true for everyone. That’s a great standard on which to drive a research agenda: “I’m going to discover something that everyone can agree upon!”
But if there is no objective knowledge—as generally asserted by post-modern and other philosophies (e.g., American Pragmatism, Hume's Skepticism, the Tao Te Ching)—what then prevents the slip of research into knowledge that is only meaningful for the individual?  If there is no objective knowledge, what makes my work valuable to anyone else?
This is one of the struggles for non-objectivist scholars: on the one hand, the limitations of knowledge are made central to any argument, and on the other, there is a desire to do work that is meaningful and even useful to others.

A lot of research strives to serve important social goals, but if the work is only “true” for a select group of people and not for others, can that serve the larger social goal?  This idea of being able to generalize is central to research methods, even those that accept limits to objective knowledge: the point of those methods are to give research work a foundation that others will accept, too.

For me, personally, I want to espouse ideas that will be “true” for everyone—ideas that any person would accept, given the evidence.  When I write about issues in writing and research, I want to write things that help others, and that requires other people to be able to apply my ideas to their view of the world.  But at the same time, one of the ideas that I write about is how ideas are limited, and how they are imperfect and uncertain, and that makes it difficult to make any claims.

So how to do I convince other people that my work has meaning and value to them?  This is especially difficult when dealing with people who generally accept the idea of objective truth.  After all, objective truth is a very comforting notion—even if the objective truth is unpleasant, it is, at least, certain and undeniable. A truth that is contingent on my limited knowledge and perspectives, on the other hand, is much more easily dismissed.

The problem, then, with non-objectivist philosophies, is how to convince others that they are meaningful and useful without resting on the idea that the claims are universally true.
My answer is generally driven by pragmatic concerns: because logical, certain proof is out of reach, and because I need to commit to something in writing (otherwise, I don’t write), I do my best. I accept what I accept for the best reasons that I can find and go from there.

On a certain level, that’s fine: personally, I’m ok making decisions in the face of uncertainty, and even though I’m sometimes wrong, I don’t belabor the decisions that were the best decisions I could make. But on another level, it’s a big problem if the audience doesn’t like what you have to say, or doesn’t accept what you have to say, especially if they want something certain—something solid that, if not objective, at least makes a claim to objectivity.

I don’t really have the answer to convincing a hostile audience. But I suppose on place to look is at your own concerns: what benefits might accrue from your research? If you suggest looking at some field of endeavor from a new perspective, what benefits could accrue? What can motivate interest in that view beyond just saying “here’s a different way of looking at things?” Focusing on benefits can reveal problems: if using a new perspective leads to doing things “better” in some way, that area of improvement could be viewed as a problem that you are addressing.

On advantage of focusing on benefits of a new idea is purely emotional for a writer—focusing on benefits keeps attention on the strong points of work, and helps sustain confidence.

I don’t have an answer for this. Without the anchor of objective certainty, how does one prevent the slippage towards ideas that are meaningful to the individual alone? If I am certain of anything, it is that there is no certain knowledge, but where does that lead me?

Somehow the scholar/philosopher/researcher who rejects objectivist philosophies needs to be able to make some claim that will convince their audience that their work is worth the time. But I’m not sure of the means of accomplishing this.

Trade-offs, perfectionism, and self-promotion

Recently, someone posted to my facebook page that they had bought a copy of my dissertation book. I am thrilled whenever anyone buys it, it goes without saying. I worked hard on that book and getting some positive return on my efforts feels good—just hearing that someone likes the idea is nice, for that matter. But there’s also a certain tinge of fear—what if someone doesn’t like it? I worked hard on it, but it’s not perfect. And ironically, the more successful my book, the more likely it is that I will hear from people who are disappointed.

Getting negative feedback is a problem that every author faces, and it can feel very personal. The rejection of your work might not be personal (it probably isn’t, given that most of the people who reject your work don’t know you personally), but whatever their cause, such rejections are failed hopes and disappointments (even if you can find silver linings in rejection).  

Rejection of work can be particularly difficult for perfectionists. When you’re a perfectionist, and you struggle to make the compromises demanded by practical tradeoffs, it can be hard enough to stop working on something just because the work itself feels incomplete.  The feeling of incompleteness is frustrating and drives many to say “I’m going to keep working.” It’s uncomfortable to stop working on something if you can see problems with it and think you can fix those problems. The idea that you have to show the work to someone else—to someone who might reject it—adds a layer of emotional complexity: not only is it necessary to stop working on something with known imperfections, but you have to show that work to someone else, creating the opportunity for that other person to see and potentially complain about those imperfections.  That’s not easy. At least it’s not easy for a lot of people.

The perfectionist doesn’t want to turn in imperfect work. That’s fine—having high standards is great. But the problem of tradeoffs—the practical limits created by conflicting issues—means that works are always imperfect. So the perfectionist is going to submit imperfect work (or no work at all). But, it is good to remember, that all work is imperfect, so imperfect works can still be of high quality relative to other similar works.

Beyond just “submitting” a work, is the question of getting attention for that work.  Professors are supposed to read the work of their students—and they often do so in a timely fashion. But when submitting a work to a professor, you can improve the response by how it is presented: you don’t have to focus on the problems that you see. You can focus on the strengths of your work—and that can help how your work is treated. Some self-promotion is valuable even when dealing with people who have a responsibility to read your work. But, if you’ve written something, there’s a good chance that you want it to reach beyond a small group of professors. You may want to get published somewhere, and that means reaching out to people who have no responsibility to you whatsoever.  

Practically speaking, to get your work under the eyes of people—from editors and publishers to readers, you need to promote your work, even if you’re a perfectionist who sees flaws. The facts don’t speak for themselves, quite frankly. No matter the quality of your work, it’s unlikely to be recognized if you don’t promote it. That may be submitting to journals or to publishers or some other avenues. Getting into any of those venues, requires self-promotion. In some cases, it’s obviously and explicitly about promotion, not about the quality of the work itself.  Academic journals don’t worry about whether an article will sell, only whether it satisfies review criteria, but journals are the exception.  Book publishers and non-academic publications all have a clear eye towards selling a work.  If you propose a book to an academic publisher, part of the proposal will be dedicated to describing the potential market and competing titles. And part of the proposal may ask what you do to promote your work.

There are some people who are utterly confident in themselves, and such people don’t necessarily struggle to promote themselves. But for perfectionists, it can be a real problem to self-promote, because the critical, perfectionist eye does not create glowing promotions. For creating promotions, a forgiving eye is more useful and effective.

Some perfectionists can promote their work because of their vast enthusiasm for the work itself: if you’re doing excellent work on a subject that you find exciting, it’s pretty easy to promote that, even if you do see weaknesses.  But perfectionism can drain away such enthusiasm, especially if you’re focusing on problems and not on the strengths of your work.

There’s a part of me that really loves my dissertation book. I would love to say that it’s the absolute best book in its class. On a certain level, I absolutely believe it is excellent and presents ideas that don’t appear in other competing books.  But my perfectionist tendencies get hung up on the compromises and choices I made: should it have been shorter? Should it have been longer? Is it too dense? Is it too lightweight?  Should it have been for a more focused audience?  None of these questions can really be answered by any objective standard, and so my answers—my choices—are uncertain.  This makes me doubt my work, even though I would like to believe that it’s the best in its class.  

Such tradeoffs and the choices made to negotiate those tradeoffs make works seem imperfect—but if the tradeoff is ultimately unavoidable, can you let such a tradeoff stop you from finishing your work and extolling it for its virtues, even if it is imperfect? Keep an eye to the strengths of your work so that you can promote it appropriately.

Too many ideas and writer's block

On his 1932-1933 work schedule, Henry Miller wrote a list of “commandments,” the first of which was: “Work on one thing at a time until finished.” In many ways, it’s not a commandment that is entirely practical, but in others, it’s crucial to having a successful experience as a writer.

In the long run, it’s good to have lots of ideas and to start lots of projects. That way, when a forced lull comes in the work on one project, there is another project to work on. This is especially true at the later stages of work. If, for example, you’ve just submitted a final draft of something and are waiting for page proofs to come back for proofreading, then there’s no work that you can do on that project.  It’s a time to start a new project, even though the current one isn’t finished.  And, from the other perspective, it’s good to have an active curiosity, which will suggest many projects of potential value. Exploring those projects can be good to some extent—so long as they don’t confound focused effort.

In the short run, however, having many projects demanding attention can be very counter-productive. Having a lot of ideas that demand attention can prevent giving any one idea sufficient focus.

Here’s what happens to me often:

I have a great idea!

I start to write about the great idea! and decide it’s flawed.

I have another great idea!

I start to write about that new great idea! And then I realize it’s flawed.

repeat ad nauseum

When an idea first comes to me, it’s not fully developed or fully thought out. Writing helps me develop it and work out the problems, but that’s the thing: in the process of working out an idea, I discover problems. Discovering problems can lead to frustration. Frustration can lead to avoidance.

If I have a lot of ideas, then frustration can lead me to briefly engage many different ideas and abandon them all in frustration.  But if I only have one idea—if I stay focused—then, when I hit a problem, I work to resolve the problem, or at least I work to find a resolution.

I can get stuck if I don’t stick to one idea because I can shift through a number of ideas, get frustrated with each, and then get frustrated with the whole process and stop working altogether. 

Working through an idea carefully can be time consuming and difficult. Working with an idea tends to reveal dimensions that I had not previously considered, and then it takes effort to deal with those dimensions. All of that requires focus on the one idea—thus the value of Miller’s “work on one thing.”

If you have a lot of different ideas, they can compete for attention, and each one will seem more exciting and viable from a distance, where the difficulties are less obvious. If you have writer’s block, cut down your focus. Pick one small thing to write about, and put aside all the other cool things that you could write about.

In Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there is an anecdote of a writing student who was having trouble writing about her town. The teacher told her to write about one street, then about one building, and she continued having trouble. Eventually she tried writing about one brick in one building, and from that point of focus, she was able to produce a lot of writing.

That anecdote captures the sort of writer’s block that a lot of writers face, I think: there is a torrent of ideas waiting to come out, and their competition to come out blocks the process.

Write one thing at a time until finished.

Don’t get blocked because you have too many ideas. If you think that you have nothing to write about, reconsider. Try finding one really small idea that you could write about and work on that idea, and that idea alone, until you’ve made progress.

I partly chose this subject today because I was having trouble finding something to write about—I had skipped over a number of possible ideas and was feeling frustrated. And I recognized that frustration as related to my unwillingness to put in the effort to make any of my ideas work.

Writing without inspiration

For people who have writing projects to complete, a regular practice of writing is valuable and effective. But keeping a regular practice means that sometimes it’s necessary to write even if you have nothing in particular to say. 

For people who don’t write regularly, it can be pretty common to slip into the feeling of not being ready to write, or of needing some sort of inspiration or focus.

I’m writing this today partly because I don’t have any particular inspiration, but want to write something to post on my blog.  And not writing, and not practicing writing, are big pitfalls that many people struggle with when engaged in a writing project.

If you’re not producing enough writing, or if you’re struggling with writer’s block, starting to write—writing anything—can feel like an almost insurmountable hurdle—one that can be overcome with inspiration. But inspiration is elusive.

For me, at least, it’s especially elusive when I sit down to actually write.  If I’m waiting in line at the grocery, or out for a run, or otherwise occupied, I may feel some momentary inspiration—but such inspiration often fades as soon as I sit down to write about it.

I have three suggestions for people who have writing projects to complete and who are struggling with resistance:

1. Do something small and simple
2. Write about one thing and one thing only
3. Make mistakes

1. If you’re having trouble getting engaged with your project, do something small and simple. Fix a citation. Fix one typo. One little thing at a time, pick up the small and simple tasks that don’t require heavy thinking.  Consider such activities as a form of “warm up” exercise: start thinking about the project without having to worry about the large-scale difficulties.  Fix one thing; Celebrate fixing that thing; Feel good for having accomplished something. Repeat frequently.

2. I strongly believe that one of the biggest problems that many or most writers face is that they have too much to say.  Having a lot of ideas can often start to feel like having nothing to say at all: A variety of ideas compete for attention, and every time you try to focus on one, the others draw your attention away, suggesting that you’re not writing about the most important issue. It's a pretty short series of steps from "this isn't the most important thing I have to say" to "this isn't very important" to "this isn't worth writing about; no one will care." You don’t have to write about the most important issue—just write about one issue. Get into detail. Tighten your focus. Don’t get stuck because you have five equally good things to say, and all are imperfect: pick one, say something about it, and try to discuss the concerns that you have about that one idea. Write about whether that idea was worth the effort you put into writing about it. You’re never going to write out all your ideas—make a focused presentation about one thing. And then move on to others later.

3. Ideas that seem great at a distance, look more problematic when you put them down on paper and examine them. If you write something and it looks wrong to you, don’t cross it out, unless you have a better alternative. Instead, try to write about why it looks wrong to you—what is the weakness of the claim? What is the strength? Where do you agree and disagree with what you just wrote? Write with a willingness to be wrong, and then you can explore possibilities to see if you find something you like.  Researchers will often go through mountains of material looking for the few pieces that matter for their research, and at the same time, as writers, they will expect to get their writing correct on the first try, when they would benefit from a similar willingness to spend time on something that might be worthless in hopes of finding that one elusive thing of value.

It doesn’t take much to have a lot to say and a lot to write. Writing it all down, however, is difficult and frustrating, and can often make a person feel incapable. The feeling of inspiration can be elusive—chased away by the difficulties of the task. But inspiration isn’t always necessary. Engage in the practice of writing in some small and simple way—free writing, fixing grammar or citations, etc.—and keep at the practice until you come across some issue that you do feel motivated to write about. Inspiration blooms more easily when supported by a practice. Rather than looking for inspiration that will enable you to write, practice writing as a method of finding ideas worth examining.

What's a dissertation good for? Practice.

What’s a dissertation good for, anyway? My answer: it's practice that develops valuable skills.

Last Friday, I made a video about practice. It was a sort of follow-up on the previous video, which had talked about a willingness to make mistakes. Practicing involves making mistakes, and working to stop making those mistakes.  My video suggested looking at the dissertation as a practice—to focus on the process, and to take each step as part of a practice in which mistakes are merely part of the process—one makes a mistake and one learns to iron it out.

It’s easy to get focused on the product of a dissertation project: the dissertation itself, or its theoretical or intellectual content.  With that focus, it can be easy to get sucked into negative considerations about the limitations of research. Dissertations are usually written with limited resources. Even those that contain publication-quality research usually require significant revision before they are suitable for publication. Many doctoral candidates get discouraged that their work is so small as to be meaningless.

But the dissertation could be viewed differently.  Maybe the dissertation project is not about creating research, but about creating researchers? You can view the dissertation project through this lens to your benefit.

Approaching the dissertation project as a practice means taking action for the purpose of developing skills that you can use.  The skills needed by a researcher are often skills that are of valuable in many areas: the ability to express oneself clearly in writing and in speech is certainly valuable in many contexts. The ability to plan, organize, manage, execute and complete a project is a valuable skill in many contexts. The ability to use research literature effectively is important for professionals in many or most fields.

Every day that you exert yourself to work on your dissertation, you are exercising some or all of these skills. And the more that you work at practicing these skills, the more your skills develop. And as your skills develop, the scope of your endeavors can increase.

Consider, by analogy, a musician. Each day, the performing musician practices to hone skills and mistakes made in that process are nothing but part of the process of refining and improving the performance. But in the process, the skills necessary to perform improve, and the musician who starts with simple pieces for performance moves on to more complex ones. At each stage of the advance, there are moments when the musician is at the limit of current abilities and struggles. And, with practice, those struggles are often overcome, and skills increase and the complexity of the music that can be formed increases, as does the pleasure that comes with performing well.

If you are a dissertation writer, you are probably working on your first independent research project, and perhaps you are unsure of your steps in that process. That’s perfectly natural. And that’s why you practice. When you view your work as a practice, you can approach each day saying “this present day is only part of the practice; whether today goes well or ill, tomorrow will still just be another day in the practice.”  OK, sure, there may be exceptional days when something really bad happens and makes the next several days more difficult. But on the whole, the dissertation process is one that can be used to support your development of skills that will serve you well.

I support this attitude with respect to writing, in particular. Practice writing: don’t focus on the product, focus on the process of putting words on the page. Putting ideas into words is absolutely a skill that develops with practice. Put a lot of words on the page. And the next day, put a lot of words on the page. Revise a lot, and throw stuff out. Develop your skill as a writer, and then the quality of your writing will increase and you will be able to write necessary pieces more easily—whether that means writing emails, applications for jobs or grants/fellowships, or work for publication.

Practice isn’t glamorous. Practice can be tedious and frustrating. Practice requires coming face-to-face with your mistakes, and requires a willingness to try and try again, despite mistakes. Practice also unlocks the expertise that allows people to excel in their chosen fields.

So, as you work on your dissertation, think about your work as practice, and as a chance to develop skills that are useful in any profession. Oh sure, getting that degree would be nice, and getting published would be, too. But if you develop the skills, you have the ability to create new works of equal or greater value. The famed “give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for life” saying is an apt parallel here, which I’ll twist to this context: “Finish a dissertation, and get yourself one reward (a degree); Learn valuable research skills and get yourself rewards for life (a career).” 

Whatever else a dissertation might be good for, it’s good as an opportunity to practice.

Writing and More Writing

The other day I wrote about 5000 words in the day. That's maybe fifteen pages, double spaced. In one day.

At that rate, someone could feasibly write a 100-page dissertation in six days.

Of course,when I write that much in a day, I also throw away a large part of what I write. This is ok if I can keep my eye on how things add up. If I write 5000 words in a day, and then throw away 80% of what I write, I finish my 100=page project in 30 days, not 6. And if I throw away 95% of what I write, I've finished my dissertation in 120 days--one semester.

All it takes is to write 5000 words a day, and then find that 250 of them are useful.

If you were to keep every word you write, then you would only need to write 250 words a day to write a dissertation in a semester. But that would be far harder, and would probably lead to a worse dissertation, than trying to write 1000 words a day with the conscious acceptance that you were going to only use 250 of them in the long run.

As a writer, what is harder: to write one coherent, well-formed page or to write four, rambling, poorly written pages? My personal opinion and experience say that I can probably write ten times as fast when I don't care about the quality of the outcome as when I do. When I worry about the outcome, each word is a struggle. When I write, on the other hand, just to put my ideas on the page to see how they work out and to discover if there are any weaknesses, then I write easily. I may hit many dead ends; I may struggle with obstacles, but in the end I produce more.

In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott titles a chapter "shitty first drafts," and says "all good writers write them."

Write and then write more. Don't worry about making it good; worry about making it express your ideas. Worry about it saying all the different things that you want to say. In whatever order it comes out. Just write. And write more. And try to learn as you go.

If you write regularly, the writing adds up. If you're too intent on getting it right the first time and therefore you don't write, you're not doing yourself a favor. Be willing to get it wrong first, and then fix it later using what you have learned.

Champions

I was watching a little of the television broadcast of the Australian Open last night and saw an interview with world #1 Jelena Jankovic, who had just lost. Jankovic was very courteous, giving a great deal of credit to her opponent. Seeing the interview made me think of what I had read of Jankovic--that she is extremely courteous, and that she also might not be quite the competitor that the really top players are--that what keeps her from really dominating is her head. By contrast Serena Williams is known for being ungenerous to her opponents in losses--she has the reputation for blaming a loss on her own play and not giving credit to her opponent.

Along these lines I was thinking about the figure-ground reversal I had recently discussed and the general success that we can create in our own lives.

Serena Williams is known for her competitive will--for her ability to play even better when the competitive stakes grow, and for her unwillingness to lose. How strongly is that competitive will related to her belief that it is her play that determines a win or loss? Is it easier to rally against an opponent if you think "wow, s/he's really good, maybe better than me" or "well, s/he's good, but if I were playing my game, s/he wouldn't have a chance"? It seems to me that one is much more likely to succeed if one believes that one can exert one's will to succeed.

When we view our projects, when we get discouraged, is that not a type of perspective in which we are surrendering our power?

If Edison was right in suggesting that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, doesn't this imply that we have to continue to believe in the validity of the inspiration through extensive struggles? We have to believe that the power to succeed lies in us.

Or, perhaps, we need to act on the premise that the power to succeed lies in us. Many writers struggle with believing that their writing is good enough--the emotion of belief may be hard to create, but we can still logically think through: "what would I do if I believed that I had the ability to finish?"

The character of plans made by one who is confident are radically different than the plans made by one who is expecting defeat. Different plans lead to different results. In addition to the emotional boost that accompanies confidence is also the difference in plans. I wonder whether the plans of the optimist might be more focused on the strengths of the individual, and thus will focus attention on the places where the richest opportunities are to be found?
How much does the pessimist look at weaknesses and thus make plans that fail to take advantage of places where the strengths lie?

Warmups

I was thinking about writing as a practice, and as an exercise that builds ability even as you use it. I was thinking about the athletic metaphor and ways in which an understanding of athletic processes can shape understanding of similar aspects of writing. I was also thinking of music as another metaphor.

For both music and athletics, when one begins the exercise/practice, one begins with a warm up. No musician would begin a practice by trying to master the most difficult passage in her/his repertoire. No athlete would try to perform at the highest level without warming up first. But we sit down to write and expect to be able to write instantly.

There are differences between writing and athletics or music that might lead us to reject the need for a warmup: writing is not physical--you can't pull a muscle by writing too hard right away.

This is true, but isn't it also true that if we sit down to write and nothing happens in the first fifteen minutes we get frustrated? What if you had a writing warmup before you start in on the real work--a period in which you began to get used to the general process of putting your ideas in words, and the focus on your writing that is necessary to work on it.

Warmups should be easy; they should be done for the experience of doing them, not for the outcome--a musician plays scales not for the sake of playing the scales, but because the scales are a relatively easy way to begin the process of warming up the muscles and nervous system.

What could a writer use as a warmup? Almost anything--a list of things to work on after your writing period is over, or a list of things to work on during your writing period, or a note to a friend or anything that might be drawing your attention that you can work on for fifteen minutes as an attempt to get settled into the desk chair and into the writing state. You don't want to get absorbed in something that will take too much time, but if there is something distracting you, writing it down as something to return to when you're done with the writing might be one way to put it out of mind for the period of a few hours in which you're writing.
Writing something easy related to what you're working on might be a reasonable warmup, but you don't want it to be something that you're placing too much stock in--the warmup has to be easy to write--something that is free from judgement, something that is about getting started more than it is about production.

Combinations

I was talking to a writer who was feeling overwhelmed.

"I'm starting a new chapter, and have a lot of material to manage; I also have issues managing my work space; I also have a trip to take; and, oh yeah, I also have an injury."

Well, that's a classic description of being overwhelmed: to be drowned beneath a mass.

Combinations of problems are made more difficult because each problem demands attention, and each has negative impact on emotions. The fact that all the problems demand attention also tend to take us away from the most efficient way of dealing with the problems: one at a time. We can't do everything at once; no matter how good we are at multi-tasking, the truth of the matter is that we work more efficiently if we can concentrate on one thing for an extended period. Partly we will work more efficiently because we will spend a smaller proportion of time switching between tasks, and partly we will work more efficiently because our attention being focused on one task, and being able to deal with that one task will give us better emotional stability to assist us as we try to deal with all tasks.

Feeling overwhelmed by problems that are not life threatening is something different than literally being overwhelmed by e.g., a tidal wave or a horde of hostile soldiers. Although, perhaps even in such situations the best strategy to keep from being literally overwhelmed is to act as efficiently as possible to stem the onrushing flood.

Problems in our personal lives ought to be dealt with as a doctor in an emergency room does triage: which problems demand the most immediate attention?

So, here was my general plan for trying to manage feeling overwhelmed: first you take an overview of the situation: what problems do you have in the moment? Then you prioritize: how are you going to schedule and allocate time to each problem? And then, only once you have gotten an overview of the situation, and made a plan for how you will address the situation, only then will you take action on any specific problem.
I recommend this course of action as a general schema for dealing with large problems or complex problems. It is useful in that, when feeling overwhelmed, it gives one specific general steps to follow, and having a plan of action can help focus attention and calm one, rather than letting the negative emotional impact of the competing problems drag you down. And though it suggests specific steps to take (1. take an inventory of problems; 2. prioritize; 3. schedule; 4. act), it is not highly restrictive and is generalizable to all situations, with the possible exception of split-second decisions. We can adjust the effort we invest in each step to the situation at hand. If the issues that we face have to be handled in a matter of minutes (e.g., a quiz in class, or even a difficult question in an interview), we simply allocate less time to each task: in the quiz we might allocate one minute to looking at the questions and getting an idea of which ones will be hard and which easy, as well as which ones will be most valuable; in the interview we might take a few seconds to think through the different parts of the question and try to assess which are of greatest concern to the interviewer. If our time is short, then we keep our initial overview short, but we can still benefit from it.

By breaking down the combination of problems into a set of discrete steps, we most effectively respond to situations. And the same breaking down of the situation into separate parts and separate steps, and focusing on one step at a time, we can most effectively counter our emotional sense of being overwhelmed.

This is hardly news, right? The idea of planning first and acting second is hardly a surprise. But we have to remind ourselves of its value when we're feeling overwhelmed. And we have to remember that it is a behavior that can be carried out at different time scales.

Framing effects, reason and planning

Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman, along with his primary collaborator Amos Tversky, and many colleagues showed that we do not always reason "logically".

For example, a patient faced with a life and death decision is more likely to choose a treatment that has a 90% survival rate than to choose one that has a 10% fatality rate. But, of course, a treatment plan with a 90% survival rate has a 10% fatality rate: the two are identical. The only difference is in the framing: one is framed in terms of life (which is positive and desirable) the other in terms of death (undesirable).

In terms of motivating ourselves, and in terms of doing good work, I think that results of this sort emphasize the importance of choosing positive framings for how we see our project. The same project can be both boring (during much of the work) and exciting (at the moments when the work comes together and progress is made), etc. How we choose to frame it can affect our plans with respect to the work, and can affect our mood, and therefore our ability to work (at least to the extent that I believe that we work better when we're in a good mood).

We want to work on building a positive framing for how we see the project and for framing the project outcome, and let that serve as the primary focus. We want to be able to plan for the worst cases, and we want to have the ability to respond to unexpected obstacles--we don't, in short, want to be naive, imprudent or impetuous--but generally we want to focus our attention on what we are trying to create and how we are going to bring that into existence. We want to frame our analysis of our past behavior and results in terms of how we can learn to do better in the future. Such framings are more likely to contribute to active plans and less likely to create negative emotional drag.

There isn't just one way to look at the world. The same thing can be seen in different ways: the glass is half full and half empty. What the results of Kahneman, Tversky and their colleagues show is that the two different framings have an effect on plans (and on emotions, too, I speculate, though I don't know if that is a reported result). That is to say that if someone tells you "the glass is half full" you are likely to make a different decision than if someone tells you "the glass is half empty;" the fact that you make a different decision is indicative of a potential emotional effect of the framing.

Losing its Luster

When we have something that we're working on for a long time, it can begin to lose its luster. What seemed interesting when it was new, becomes less interesting as its familiarity increases.
I've been facing that with this blog recently; I just haven't felt like I had something new to say that I really wanted to say. and I haven't felt like I had anything that I really wanted to say that I wanted to try saying again in a new way...or at least not in a new way in this blog.

But what to do when it's your dissertation project?
The key, it seems, is to keep the project seeming new by learning constantly. That may not seem to be likely or possible with something that you have been working on consistently for a long time, but realistically, we can learn something new, even about the familiar if we are seeking new insight and new wisdom.

When you're an academic and a writer, there are any new things to learn. The do not always lie in the plane that one expects: when writing a large project, for example, one can learn about the subject itself (as expected), but one can also learn about managing projects and about writing, not to mention the possibility that we can learn about ourselves and learn to better control our emotions and our thoughts so that we can be more productive, and so that we can gain the greatest value from those abilities that we have.

None of these things are easy to learn. Indeed, learning is usually associated with some level of difficulty--without difficulty are we really learning, or are we just storing a little bit of new information? But it is in the learning that we can see the project in a new way, and through that new vision, we can find a new spark of interest--or even we can begin to find some of the luster that was lost as the project became familiar.

In a way the academic writer should have an easy time learning new things--that is, in fact, the purpose of research--to learn. What a shame, then, that so many academic writers have lost sight of the reasons that they began their projects.

I got a card from a writer recently that said "we've been working together for a year now; thank you!" There was a part of me that was a little embarrassed, because I thought when we started working together that she had a good chance of finishing within a year, and she thought that there was no way that she could bear to work on the project for more than six months longer. But that's an incomplete story, too. Her aim is now finishing in the spring, and she's confident that she will. Because the project has regained the luster that she had once seen. Instead of facing the project with resentment for the work that needs to be done, as she did when we began working together, now she is excited about the project, and almost every time we speak she tells me about some additional work that she wants to integrate into the project. To grossly simplify, I attribute this to the fact that she has come to find a deeper appreciation for the value of her own work--not just for what she hoped to accomplish with it, but also she sees the depth of her analysis and how that analysis fits into a larger academic discourse that connects her with other writers. One key during the process was that she found (at least) two writers whose work helped her see a new value in her own work--a value that was new to her.

Projects lose their luster; that's natural. As the saying goes: variety is the spice of life. And where there is little variety, there is bland boredom. With a large project like a dissertation, we cannot introduce variety into the project by changing the project itself, so we have to seek a finer-grain of variety--we can see the change of our own ideas as we develop in our sophistication of both thought and expression (the two are not unrelated).

Stuckness and Persistence

I preach persistence a lot. It's important to be able to push through difficulties to get beyond them. But that doesn't mean that one wants to be blindly persistent at all times.

I was talking recently with a writer who was stuck, and not writing. In our meeting, I was stressing the importance of trying to write, and of starting to write. He wanted a method by which he could organize his collection of articles. "There are many different ways to organize materials," I said, "but none is definitive. What's important is to start writing." This answer was unsatisfactory to him, and he insisted on talking about how to organize his articles. I told him that had never seen a book on writing dissertations that talked about how to organize the research materials, and that every book on writing dissertations that I have seen talks about how important it is to start writing, and how starting writing begins a learning process that allows you to organize your thoughts and your ideas about material. This too was unsatisfactory. "I want a simple solution to organizing my material," he insisted.

A week later he wrote to me. "I'm still stuck. I haven't been able to organize my material, so I haven't written." I suggested again trying to start writing--however imperfect that writing might be. Again that suggestion was dismissed.

I know that everyone has a different way of working, and I recognize that having well-organized research at your fingertips can be helpful. But I also recognize that if you're stuck, trying something new can be very effective and very useful to helping move forward.

Albert Einstein reputedly defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If you keep working on a project and you keep getting stuck on a specific task, isn't it worth trying to approach that project from a different perspective? Doesn't it make sense to try a new angle from which to look at the project?

Persistence need not manifest as blind repetition of the same attempt. That may be simply stubbornness. We need to be able to learn and adapt--which are, in fact, some of the primary characteristics of basic intelligence--to be able to learn and adapt.

Edison was persistent, but he also knew that he had to try something new each time. Each failed lightbulb was a way not to do things. Maybe the tasks and methods of writing that lead you into stuckness are ways not to write.

When you're learning to play a musical instrument, or when you're trying to master an athletic skill, blind repetition is often necessary, and the repetition will lead to different results: you just get better and better at the skill you're trying to develop, if you're practicing diligently and your muscles and brain start to wire together new skills. The body learns to perform an action more smoothly and easily. I was giving a friend a guitar lesson yesterday, and I was stressing the importance of playing a given chord change over and over until the motions became smooth and even. With practicing a guitar, this works: playing the chords over and over, leads to different results over time; the practice leads our playing to become smoother and more facile. If repetition is leading to different results and you can feel those differences, then it hardly fits Einstein's definition of insanity, because the change comes, and so it is reasonable to expect--at least for a while--that doing the same thing over and over again will lead to different results.

But then again, those learning curves have their terminus as well. One does not infinitely improve as a musician or athlete, and the practices and exercises that get one to a given level of skill will not necessarily take one beyond that level.

A summary of my thoughts: persistence is important, but one needs to differentiate between persistence that is building skill and ability--useful practice and repetition--and persistence that is stubbornness--an unproductive practice in which one is stuck and not developing. One needs to be persistent, but one also needs to be able to change the angle by which a given project is approached, so that one is learning and adapting, rather than simply trying the same thing again and again, expecting different results.

Three hundred posts

This is actually my 301st post on this blog. That strikes me as a big number. And for the most part, all of it has been done in easy, convenient moments when I didn't have to sacrifice anything except a few minutes of sleep to write.

It's a worthy testament to how volume naturally results from a regular practice. I grant, of course, that the 301 pieces that I've written don't cohere like a good single large work should, but the principle is similar. Over the course of 10.5 months, I've probably written something on the order of 300 pages in my blog, and I imagine that I could take those pieces and fit them together into some sort of larger work, just because they were all part of my general desire to think about writing.

If you want to write--if you have a writing project that you want to complete--then writing regularly will get you there in good time. If you keep at it day after day, the pages start to add up, and you suddenly have good volume. If you're working each day to contribute to a coherent piece, you might not write as much as if your efforts were unconstrained, but then a dissertation (or book) has no need to be 300 pages--some dissertations, maybe, have such a need, but many do not.

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?"

Conceptual Change

"Problems cannot be solved by the level of awareness that created them." This quotation is typically attributed to Albert Einstein. Wikiquote has no attribution for it.
A similar thought, also attributed to Einstein is
"Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different result."
Wikiquote attributes this to Rita Mae Brown, from Sudden Death, Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68.

I've been struggling with changing my patterns of thinking. I was working on a project recently and kept running up against blocks that I have run up against time and time again. My challenge has been to rethink my response to the blocks and to re-imagine the very nature of my work. If I don't change how I respond, I'll end up with similar results to those I've had in the past.

This is the coach's challenge: how does a coach get a performer to perform more effectively? The answer: get them to do things differently. For me, what I typically work with is trying to envision the project in different ways, and to see the different spaces in the project that can be effectively approached with useful tools.

This is, I suppose, partly a left-over of what I learned in my Ph.D. program, which had been set up by Horst Rittel, a design theorist--that is to say, a philosopher who studied the process of design. Rittel argued that there were basically no simple, easily defined steps in design processes, and that there were no grand schemes to follow to guide the designer to his/her goal. Instead the designer had to work towards an uncertain goal, one that shifted as the designer came to see new aspects of the problem, and the best one can do in terms of applying methodologies, or specific techniques, was to find places where those techniques could be used to forward the project without assuming that they would lead to an answer.

Because I don't think that we can prescribe methodologies very well, and less so, the larger the task, I tend to try to look for ways to re-envision the task at hand so that it can be seen as a series of smaller related tasks.

At the same time, because there is no over-arching methodological framework to guide the designer/writer, it is important for the writer to seek an overarching vision of the project's goals, to provide the framework to guide efforts.

I had a writer once tell me: "I'm stuck, but I only have six months to finish my project, so I don't have time to learn to work any differently." But I think that kind of thinking eliminates the chance that I can really help: I can't force someone to work with a whip. I can't even entice them to work with kindness and positive support. What I can do is help the writer see the project differently; I can help a writer see positive opportunities to develop his or her interests and abilities.

Having said these things, I now have to go back to the paper I'm writing, lest I let the momentum slack (thus falling into one of the traps that I fall into). And I want to jump into the revision (the third complete rewrite of the 8 pages since Wednesday) before I start to think how hard it is to revise.

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?

Craftwork and art

I was running today at the Albany Bulb--a former landfill, now a park.
For many years after the landfill closed to dumping but before it became an official park, it was an art colony, and much of the spirit of that still remains in the space: many people--homeless, anarchists, young punks--still use the space for artistic expression of some sort.

On my run I passed a small area where someone had laid out brick fragments and concrete fragments, creating a small area of pavement. My first thought was about the amount of effort that had likely gone into laying out those bricks and concrete. The area was small--maybe it took someone an hour or two, I estimate, to gather the bricks and concrete and place them and attempt to get them even and steady. It was a small area, which made me wonder what it would take to pave the larger area in that way.

And that made me think about the process of craftsmanship, or craftwork, to use a gender-neutral term.
Undertaking a task with which we are not familiar, we start by learning how to do it. This may proceed under the guidance of a teacher or simply by trial and error, but as a matter of practice we would begin with the rudiments of simply making the object.
As mastery of the fundamentals develops, and as the task is repeated, the basic mastery develops, and, one would imagine, so too would monotony, which would likely inspire the worker to embellish the work. Which we might view as one possible motivation for the development of decoration: a way to add interest for the craftworker.
Of course things aren't that simple: we don't learn in a vacuum and the novice wants to try to do fancy work even before learning to do simple work well. Which may, in fact, help explain one source of problems we may have in our own work.

Our society is one that demands measurable results. And it demands them quickly. We are used to achieving our goals quickly. Writing is not a skill mastered easily; it takes patience. And when we want it to be artistic, that adds a level of complexity. And yet we may have little time to practice--if, for example, we have to work to support ourselves.

This is a rambling post--no real direction. I started it thinking about the process of growing and learning a skill, and how as the skill matures we want to test it further and further. But I don't that I was convinced by where that argument was going--it was an idea I explored that didn't seem to provide much. Then I was thinking about whether there was anything in that line of thought that might be of use to the writer. And I guess, maybe there are two lessons that I would suggest--1. That it takes practice to engage in the process of writing well; 2. that we are likely to master the simple structures and forms more easily, and therefore if we stick to using the fundamentals, we're more likely to create a solid piece of work.

In terms of sticking to fundamentals and avoiding decoration, I'll note that in some fine books the author starts with a vivid example or anecdote before announcing the basic subject matter. This technique is often used by student writers (I've tried it myself sometimes), but rarely with great success. And my explanation for that is that when we are less practiced/skilled as writers, it is more difficult to get our point down in words. When we hide that point behind an anecdote, it is more easily obscured than when we just state it straight out.

If I were to turn this into a recommendation for writers who are struggling to get their ideas down, I would say: be a craftworker, not an artist. Write down the fundamental ideas; write what is important to you in the simplest form that you can. Avoid embellishment.

Final note: learn to let go of work that is imperfect. I don't like this post much, but I worked on it and now, having written it, I can either throw it away and post nothing (unless I write something else), or I can post it (I could still write something else, too). There may be a time to throw things away and share nothing--say if you have a grumpy professor, or if you have someone special that you need to impress--but sharing prolifically, even if the quality is ragged, appears to me to be the better path.

Wouldn't it be great if...?

I was looking at the book Peak Performance: Mental Training of the World's Greatest Athletes by Charles Garfield. Garfield quotes an athlete he worked with as saying, "Excellence is never limited to the playing field. Of necessity, it becomes a way of life." With the behavior of many of the successful professional athletes in this country making constant headlines, I'm not sure that I believe the generality of this statement. But I like the attitude. Or even better, I like the idea that if one makes a way of life of excellence, it will translate into success in any arena.

As I write this, I realize that I'm heading for a potential trap. What is excellence? And, importantly, how does the search for excellence relate to perfectionism--which, as we all know, can cause problems in finishing work? And I don't want to go down this path of reasoning now, however. For the moment I would like to leave the dangers of pursuing excellence aside, while giving a nod to their deserving attention at some point.

I was talking with a writer who was having trouble getting started on his project, and I was talking with him about just looking at the possibilities. Wouldn't it be great if...? Wouldn't it be great if he got his thesis done? Wouldn't it be great if felt good about the project? Wouldn't it be great if...?

It seems to me that a living a life of excellence depends heavily on having a strong sense of "wouldn't it be great if...?". If you have a vision of what it would be great to accomplish--to win recognition, fortune, fame--that is the first step toward achieving results that might be considered excellence. If you're in the habit of having such a vision in your life, it will pervade all aspects of your life, and thus you will manifest the same quality of excellence in all dimensions of your life.

The ability to imagine what you would like--the ability to day dream, basically--is of fundamental value. Charles Garfield talks about an experience in his own life of using visualization exercises to assist him to perform beyond his athletic expectations--there may have been more structure to Garfield's visualization exercises than in loose day-dreaming, but the basic process is the same.

We want to be able to go beyond "wouldn't it be great if...?" to ask what we can do to bring it about, but still, everything depends on the vision--the sense that something is what we want. But bringing the vision into reality is another thing altogether.

There is yet another benefit of the "wouldn't it be great if...?" exercise: it focuses attention on the positive possible outcomes. I talk to lots of writers who are stuck because they are thinking about the negative reaction that they might receive. The fear of rejection is great in most of us (I'd say all of us, but every now and then one meets a person who appears utterly without such fear). When we start worrying about the negative feedback, it makes it harder to do more work--it drains our energy to battle the negative visions and to move in despite of them. It may be difficult focus on the positive outcomes (for example, getting our writing accepted), but when we are focused on them, it is much easier to maintain energy and motivation.