This week’s Humoresque contains inspiration from two people with terrific insight. One is Seth Godin, whom I’ve mentioned before. He blogs every day, and many of his short tips really make me think. The other is Oliver Burkeman.
Burkeman is a British journalist. His best-known book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Godin is an American entrepreneur and marketing expert. His latest book, This is Strategy, takes us into strategic thinking and choices.
Here are some ideas for you to think about.
From Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks:
- What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is.
- The solution to the feeling that there isn’t enough time isn’t to try to fit more in. It’s to stop trying to fit more in.
- Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.
- Missing out is what makes our choices matter.
And from Seth Godin’s various books:
- Your job is not to find great ideas, but to recognise them when they appear.
- The only thing worse than starting something and failing is not starting something.
- Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.
- You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.
While their tones differ – Burkeman more philosophical, Godin more action-oriented – they both urge us to embrace limits, act meaningfully and choose purpose over perfection.
I was particularly struck by Seth Godin’s blog post of 11th July. I reproduce it here in its entirety:
Agency and contribution
What’s possible and what’s required? It’s still surprising to me that some of these ideas aren’t widely held, because they seem so clear to me:
Skill is a choice. Talent is overrated, and if we choose to get better at something, we probably can.
Responsibility is a privilege. It’s not given to us, it’s taken. When we choose to be on the hook for something, it makes our work better.
The benefit of the doubt creates connection. When we exclude people based on surface judgments, we penalize each other.
Agency is our recognition of all three of these ideas, in one.
I also loved Oliver Burkeman’s “dailyish” philosophy, which he published in his newsletter The Imperfectionist. Here’s what Burkeman says:
I once asked Jerry Seinfeld about the Seinfeld Technique, the amazing productivity secret that supposedly explains his prolific joke-writing and consequent global success. It goes like this: every day that you manage to spend at least some time on your most important creative work, you mark a big red X on your calendar. The goal is not to break the chain of Xs.
It turned out he’d suggested it, once, to some guy in a comedy club, then largely forgotten all about it. “It’s so dumb it doesn’t even seem to be worth talking about,” he told me. “If you’re a runner and you want to be a better runner, you say, well, I’ll run every day, and mark an X on the calendar every day I run. I can’t believe this was useful information to anybody! … Really? Are there people who think ‘I’ll just sit around and do absolutely nothing, and somehow the work will get done’?”
I was struck by this exchange, because in productivity-world, the Seinfeld Technique has come to mean “work on what matters most to you, every single day, without fail.” But to Seinfeld himself it mainly just seemed to mean that you have to put in effort, repeatedly, over the long haul. No wonder it didn’t strike him as a particularly astounding system.
In fact, I’ve come to believe that the every-single-day version of this advice (which novelists are especially guilty of dispensing) is actively terrible. You can guess why: an every-single-day rule is so rigid, so intolerant of the vagaries of life, that you’ll inevitably soon fall off the wagon. And once that’s happened, you lose all motivation to continue – so you end up doing less, in aggregate, than if you hadn’t been quite so exacting in your demands. Instead, I’m a proponent of Dan Harris’s excellent alternative, offered in the context of developing a meditation practice, but relevant to many other important goals in life: aim to do it dailyish.
If you’re prone to making yourself miserable by holding yourself to unmeetable standards, like me, “dailyish” probably sounds a bit self-indulgent. But it’s the opposite – because it involves surrendering the thrilling fantasy of yet-to-be-achieved perfection in favour of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete progress, here and now. Besides, it isn’t synonymous with “just do it as often as you can”; deep down, you know that if you never average more than a day or two per week on your novel/fitness plan/meditation practice/side business/whatever, then you won’t acquire the momentum to move forward. “Dailyish” involves applying more pressure to yourself than that. But (crucial distinction coming up!) it’s a matter of pressure rather than of forcing.
The appeal behind much productivity advice, I think, is the bewitching idea that there might be a technique or set of techniques that would force accomplishment to occur, making it automatic and inevitable. But there isn’t – and in any case the yearning for such techniques usually arises from some buried insecurity or other psychological agenda. Maybe you don’t know how to do the work in question, and you’re hoping relentless effort might serve as a substitute for that knowledge. Maybe you don’t really want to do it at all, but just think you ought to want to do it, so you’re using “productivity” to try to force the missing desire into being. Or perhaps you think you need a flawless record of achievement in order to justify your existence on the planet – and if the stakes are that high, clearly you can’t afford to put a foot wrong.
“Dailyish”, on the other hand? I’m not sure I quite have the words for this, but something about “dailyish” shifts the focus away from your particular smorgasbord of psychological problems back to the thing itself – to the creation you’re seeking to bring into existence, whether that’s a piece of writing or work of art, a happy family, healthier body, meditation habit, or anything else. It’s a reminder that in some fundamental way, real productivity – provided you’re working on something worth producing to begin with – isn’t about you. It’s about what’s being produced. What matters, in the end, is what gets created, not whether the person doing the creating has an impeccable record of red Xs. Did anyone ever really think Seinfeld owes his success to a productivity technique? Clearly, he owes it to talent, perhaps also to luck – and then, on top of that, to showing up and doing the work, more days than not.
So, yes, holding yourself to a more flexible standard, such as “dailyish”, is more forgiving than the alternative. But it’s not solely a matter of being kinder to yourself. Crucially, it’s also about getting you – with all your weird hang-ups and neuroses and ulterior agendas and other psychological nonsense – out of accomplishment’s way.
What can we as musicians, students or teachers, take from Godin and Burkeman? Well, I love “If we choose to get better at something, we probably can”. Insert that into the “dailyish” philosophy, and there’s no doubt in my mind that we will improve. Always providing you can somehow dodge your “weird hang-ups” and “ulterior agendas”!
I’d love to know what you think of all this. You can put a comment in the box below this post, or you can email me directly. I read and respond to everything.
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Humoresque = a whimsical or fanciful piece of music. Be whimsical, be fanciful, but play in time!
This is Humoresque Number 15
Really good. I like the ‘dailyish’ in particular.
I agree, Peter. “Dailyish” is fine, and much better than stopping doing something because you feel disheartened that you can’t do it every day.