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When you can’t think of what to write, write. I’ll be very blunt with you, I have no plan for the words that will come next from my brain to the keyboard. I just know that sitting and staring at the page well, that’s called staring at the page and what I’m doing now is called writing (typing).
“Just punch the damn keys!” as Sean Connery’s character says in Finding Forrester. It’s damn true. It’s true of so many things. Punch the damn keys, start moving, get going, make momentum. This is true for so much of life. Want to write poetry, start writing poetry. Want to make a song, start making a song. What is the next physical action? David Allen talks about asking yourself “What is the next physical action?” (On this project or task) This is just so true it needs to be tattooed on most of our hands to remember to ask it all the time. What is the next physical action on starting a business? (It’s not buying a domain name that’s for sure!) What’s the next physical action on your job application? Well, I’ll tell you what it isn’t: “Apply for job.” This is not an action, applying for a job is a series of actions and steps. Here’s a series of next actions: Open laptop, open google drive, search for “resume.” These are things you can physically do. Essentially if it’s not as specific as that, then our brains will not be able to tolerate it. ESPECIALLY not at scale. Everything is at scale these days. To do lists, content coming at us from all sides, alerts, spam phone calls and on and on. Your brain needs you to treat it as it is, not as you wish it were. What happens when your brain sees the words “Apply to job”? Your mind probably starts breaking that into smaller tasks, but sometimes this turns into overwhelm because all those tasks (physical actions) can not be done ALL AT ONCE! So ask “What is the next physical action?” So here’s the thing, you might say “When I go for a run I don’t write down on my to do list ‘put on running shoes’ I just write ‘Go for a run.’” Yes of course, this makes sense if you have gone for a run numerous times before, then your brain knows what to do. It doesn’t need you to write the next physical action. What if you are going for your first run ever? Or your first run in a long time? Then you may well need to write down: “Look for my running shoes in the closet.” This helps with creative tasks, this helps with overwhelm. You’ll also be surprised by how many actions you can learn to no longer do in order to get things going.
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I've come to one of those realizations that feels painfully obvious. It's painful to think that it's as simple as changing the order of words in a sentence:
I am inspired so I do the work. I do the work so I am inspired. Looking back as far as my teenage years, I can remember thinking these same thoughts over and over as I sat in my room on the third floor of my parents house trying to write a song: "I need a good idea" "I'm not inspired to write this" "it's already been done before." and so on and so forth. These were very true and very real to me. The were certainly not necessarily the capital 'T' Truth though. As that truth, well it doesn't really exist as we know. As always I digress. I've been a little stagnant in my creative work lately, and I think I have a tiny taste of what Dave Chappelle went through when he was offered a big contract for his show and he wanted to run away. I've been given so many resources to create videos, and a budget and yet, the creative in me is suddenly feeling all this pressure! Trust me, I'm not complaining, but it's worth asking yourself the question: "How do I keep doing what I'm doing" The presupposition in this question though is this: That doing what you're doing includes: growing, learning, making mistakes, putting out work that isn't perfect, but is pretty damn great! You do this by knowing that some days you will be inspired and most days YOU WON'T, but that every day you need to get out of your own way just enough do the work. For me the work varies day to day but if we take a simple example: (just insert your own work into the sentence here, naturally). I need to edit a podcast episode. I don't want to, I don't feel like it. I don't really know what the next step is. I'll go make coffee. Oh look instagram. Oh look my friend is calling etc. All things being equal. What happens if you put your phone on silent. What happens if you put it face down nearby (or gasp, in another room!) you open up your editing software and start mucking about. I'm not even talking about things as directed as Step 1. adjust the clip Step 2. move the clip to the timeline. I'm talking about a messy process, where you just start touching things, playing around! You open up the project, you pull some files in and just see what happens. You do this for a little while, suddenly you step back and WHAT? You've got something, is it an episode? maybe yes maybe no, but you've got SOMETHING and something is more than nothing. Something is more than "I just scrolled my instagram feed for 10 minutes and my life sucks." "Suddenly" you've been doing the work, and you're inspired to do more of the work, because you've been doing the work. It builds on itself. Not just that moment, but daily. So, if you're looking for inspiration, you may consider stopping that, and starting to doodle, starting to muck about (is this a British phrase?), starting to sing, starting to_________. |
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