Developing Success

I think in previous episodes we’ve clearly covered that to be a successful artistic developer, you have to be able to do three different kinds of work.  You need to do planning work, actual work work, and growing work.  Or as Todd Henry calls them, Mapping, Making and Meshing.  If you’re missing even one of these three kinds of work in your business, you end up becoming a dreamer, a drifter or a driver.  You get a lot done, but you don’t reach your full potential and achieve the success you hoped for when you started out.

Planning, doing, and growing.  It’s not just three jobs to check off a checklist and then – done.  Those three words represent a huge list of things to do and balance time for.  Just like “publish the finished manuscript” isn’t just one job on the checklist.  It sounds simple enough, until you break down all the things you have to do to check off that one item.  Get a cover, write a sales description, get the manuscript formatted, etc, etc, etc.  And all those things are made up of smaller tasks, too.  When you break out everything involved in planning, doing and growing, you end up with a vast universe of work that seems impossible for any one person to do in a lifetime, let alone by the time you’d like to see things happening.

But in his book, “Die Empty,” Todd doesn’t introduce the person who does all three of these kinds of work as a frantic, burned out husk.  He says that a developer “doesn’t work frantically, but instead works with urgency and diligence, making plans and then executing them, learning from his actions, and then redirecting as needed.”  He says that a developer is kind of like a weaver.  A developer takes the warp of available resources and the weft of opportunity to weave value.  He says if we want to die empty of regret, having put everything we have out into the world in a way we can be proud of, we have to become a developer.  We have to do all three kinds of work.

What he doesn’t say is how on earth I’m supposed to manage doing all of that.  At least in a simple, digestible way.  A way that beginners, or dreamers, drifters and drivers can easily put to work right now.  So for that help, I turn to Tina Seelig.

In chapter five of her book “Insight Out,” Tina explains that thanks to our human focus on things we need to do instead of things we want to do, we end up putting our focus on the wrong priorities.  She says that the key to focusing on the right task at the right time is moving everything we need to do to the background so we can put our attention on our goals instead of on distractions.

As I read this, I imagined that old analogy of a vase or glass that represents all the time I have in a day.  I understood that what she was saying was I needed to put the big, bulky decorative rocks in first, then the sand, and only then, the water.  You’ve probably seen this physical demonstration of setting priorities before.  If you put the sand and water in first, the decorative rocks don’t fit.

The bottom line of this filling the vessel metaphor is that we need to do what’s important to us first, then everything else after.  Only that way will we ever fit what we want to do into a life cram full of things we need to do.  We’ll never have time if we wait to have time.

But that’s not the image in Tina’s head.  She says she imagines projects and obligations as trash that goes into a huge garbage compactor.  When she starts a new project or responsibility, her entire compactor is stuffed full.  Then, as she gets experience with doing the new work, she is compressing her compactor, and the work starts to take up less space.

At this point, I was imagining Leia, Han and Luke in one of the Death Star’s garbage compactors, climbing up to stay on top as everything was crushed and they were threatened with being crushed too, in Episode Four:  A New Hope.

I was a bit confused.  My work and goals are trash?  It’s all going to be mashed?  This doesn’t sound very encouraging or helpful.

But Tina gives an example to help me understand what she means by her metaphor.  She says the first time she planned a conference, it took up all her time to invent and gather everything she needed to make the event happen.  The second time, though, she already had been through putting together a conference, had a list of resources and knew what had worked the first time.  So planning the second conference took way less time and effort.  She could do other things at the same time.  She was more experienced, more prepared, and every time she ran a conference, she was able to do more at the same time she ran that conference.

So instead of imagining the work I want to do as a rock that takes the same amount of space in my vase every day I fill it, I need to think of it as fluffy trash that can be made to take up less space in my life each day I add it to the vase.  Every time I do a job, it gets smaller with experience thanks to becoming more efficient and knowledgeable.

This metaphor makes it possible for me to see that massive amount of work needed to plan, do and grow to become and be a successful author as something that can actually be reduced and made realistically doable.  All I have to do is separate out the tasks, do them the hard way the first time to get experience and build my resources and skill, and trust that I’ll get more efficient the next time.  Each task will get smaller and easier as I go along.

Now that’s encouraging!

Until I realize that there’s still only so much room, even in a garbage compactor.  The trash will only crush so far, and then it doesn’t get any smaller.  Eventually, Tina admits, “the trash compactor is completely full, and you can’t add anything else.”

Luckily, she doesn’t just let the lesson for handling a huge responsibility or project drop there.  She says there are three ways to deal with the contents of a full compactor.

First, you can throw some of the stuff in your compactor away.  Second, you can give some stuff to other people to put in their compactor.  Or finally, you can choose to keep certain stuff in your own compactor.

By throwing stuff away, Tina means giving up doing some things.  Sometimes, you’ve learned as much as you can from something you’re doing.  It was an experiment, or something you did to learn a skill or lesson, and it’s time to let it go.  There’s nothing more to be gained from continuing to do it.  Or, it’s costing you more than you’re getting out of it.  So it’s time to just wind it up and let it go.  Someone else can pick it up if they want, but it’s not going to be your job anymore.

This option is good for giving up the genre you’re making less money writing than the one you really click with, the blog that isn’t fun anymore, or the social media stuff that isn’t turning readers into buyers or patrons.

By giving your compacted stuff to someone else to put in their compactor, Tina means outsourcing or delegating.  You pay someone else to take responsibility for the job, or you hand it to a student or assistant who wants to learn by doing that work under your supervision.  Because this person is focusing on that particular work, they’ll not only get more efficient and skilled at doing it (like you did) but they also may be able to do more with it than you did while you were multitasking that work or project.

This option is the one you’re taking when you hire a housekeeper or virtual assistant, or put your willing and eager fans to work as a street team.

By choosing to keep certain projects or work in your compactor, Tina is alluding to passion.  Some things we keep as our own work despite the fact that other people might be able to do them better, or they aren’t profitable on paper.  We keep doing some work because we love doing it, even if we suffer a bit for doing or keeping it.  After all, that’s what the original meaning of ‘passion’ is.  It’s not a synonym of pleasure.  Passion means something you’re willing to suffer for to make happen.  It’s something you love enough to be miserable doing, and yet still be happier in misery than doing anything less worthwhile to you in perfect comfort.

There is always work that can be dropped or delegated around your “core commitments” as Tina calls them.

The key to finding these core commitments and being successful, according to Tina, is not just focusing on what you’re spending your time doing.  She also says it’s important to be aware of what we’re spending our time thinking about.  She says, “In essence, your mindshare is just as important as your timeshare.”

In other words, at the same time we’re deciding what our hands will be doing, we need to be deciding what our minds are doing.  Our thoughts are always whirring around something, so we should choose what that something should be.

I’m going to do a huge quote here, because Tina puts it so powerfully:

“You can spend your thoughts frivolously, or you can spend them reaching clearly defined objectives that will lead to a large return on that investment.  In fact, your attention and your thoughts are your most valuable asset.”

Being an effective leader, according to Tina, requires not just controlling your thoughts, but also your state of mind.  What you think about affects your body, and your mood.  When your thoughts are anxious and spin your body and mood into a cycle of stress, they are getting in the way of you accomplishing your goals.  Mindfulness isn’t some unattainable, zen higher mind sort of thing, it’s just paying attention in a patient, non-judgey way to what you’re feeling, and thinking right now.  It takes a massive effort to focus this way at first with all the distractions around us.  However, once we practice this skill enough and take control of our thoughts, it takes far less effort.  The work of focusing gets compacted, just like other work.

Tina, Stanford professor, faculty director, PhD in Neuroscience, management consultant, entrepreneur and author of 17 books (in case you’ve forgotten) says that multitasking, handling constant interruptions and distractions has been shown to significantly reduce the quality and quantity of what we can achieve. I’m sure she would know this not only as an expert, but personally from chasing all those achievements and balancing all those obligations.  In fact, she says, frequent multitasking damages our ability to focus.  If we want to have more creativity and productivity, Tina says that all the studies say we need to focus on one thing for a large block of time.  How much time?  Luckily, not hours.  Only 30-50 minutes actually counts as a large chunk of focus time.

You know that advice successful authors give about dividing their days up into chunks of time focused only on one kind of work?  I think this totally validates that suggestion as real and useful.  It’s good brain science to focus on one thing at a time.

To take this one step further, Greg McKeown in his book “Essentialism:  The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” teaches that focus is both a noun and a verb.  It’s an act and a choice.  He breaks it out this way:  When you’re good at focus as a noun, but not as a verb, you get the wrong thing done.  When you are bad at both, you get almost nothing done.  When you’re good at focus as a verb but not a noun, you get a bit of everything done.  However, when you’re good at both, you get the right thing done.  Stephen Covey also pointed out this same principle in all his books about not wasting time by doing urgent things instead of important things.

Apparently, if we spend most of our time doing things that are important but not urgent, like planning for the future, building relationships, and keeping our progress loop rolling, we not only get the most important things to us done up front, but we are also prepared for future challenges.  How?  Because we’re chopping at the roots of the tree instead of at all the leaves with our focused priorities.

We manage all the work of planning, doing and growing necessary to succeed in our careers by taking good care of ourselves, getting control of our thoughts, and putting both our hands and our attention to work doing the most important things first.  We fit in, delegate, or toss out everything else according to how we personally feel about the importance of doing that work, and doing it ourselves.

I find it so interesting that every stage of learning to manage creative work has cycles and paradoxes.  Don’t you?  No wonder we get so confused and frustrated as creative people and creative managers.  It takes time to figure out and spell out how the process of creation works and why it works that way.

Some of it is universal, and some of it is highly individual and personal.  I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to feel like having more knowledge about how these cycles and paradoxes, psychological principles and management techniques work is giving me power over that huge emotional wall that shows up every day.  The one looking thinner and shorter every day.