Posts Tagged ‘motivation’

The Paradox Point of Work Load

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I usu­ally have lit­tle trou­ble moti­vat­ing myself to get my free­lance work done.  My gen­eral anx­i­ety about mak­ing a liv­ing is usu­ally very good about keep­ing me mov­ing for­ward, fin­ish­ing things, build­ing stuff out.  However, some­times I take on a lot of work simul­ta­ne­ously, and quite sud­denly I real­ize that I have a lot more than I expected to.  And I get hit with a pecu­liar kind of paralysis.

Rather than this pile of work moti­vat­ing me fur­ther, to work harder, my nat­ural instinct appears to be to hide from it and hope that it will go away on its own.  Logically, I know that the only way to eat an ele­phant is one bite at a time.  But so biz­zarely, it becomes much harder to move for­ward when there’s so much to do.

The ele­phant apho­rism is apt here, because I find the best way to get over this is to tem­porar­ily pre­tend the work­load is smaller, and trick my brain into this by parcel­ing my work blocks smaller.  Typically, I will start a task in the morn­ing and work until lunch with­out inter­rup­tion.  When I’m hav­ing a hard time mov­ing for­ward, I break my time down into half-​​hour incre­ments.  Within a cou­ple of hours, I’m in the flow and the anx­i­ety lessens.

I don’t know if this prob­lem is unique to me or some­thing oth­ers expe­ri­ence, but I thought I would share my approach to it.  If you have the same issue, share your solu­tion in the comments.

Like Wearing Beautiful, But Uncomfortable Shoes

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Last week, I turned down a new client because I felt the bud­get wasn’t enough for me to do the job I wanted to do.  It was a client that I’ve really wanted to work with, and I thought long and hard about bend­ing my rates to accom­mo­date them, but ulti­mately, I decided to stick to my ini­tial reac­tion, even though I was uncom­fort­able with the deci­sion. As I often do when I worry about some­thing, I posted a note on Facebook to the effect that say­ing no to work would never be some­thing I could be com­fort­able with.  A class­mate from high School, closet writer, and astute observer of  peo­ple, Stacey Hoover Coleman, had this to say:

This might not make any sense to you, but hear me out. You remind me of a lady in REALLY beau­ti­ful, high, high, high, heeled shoes. She loves them, they’re the right size, and wouldn’t trade them for the world, but they’re uncom­fort­able as all hell.

At first, I didn’t quite fol­low what she was say­ing, but she clar­i­fied further:

…I’m say­ing YOU run­ning your own busi­ness is like wear­ing fan­tas­tic but uncom­fort­able shoes. You love it, you don’t want it to change, but it makes you mas­sively uncom­fort­able, too.

Instant les­son learned.  She’s right.  It does make me uncom­fort­able. And I think I would be much more wor­ried if it didn’t.

The thing about run­ning your own busi­ness based on project work is that you have to be hus­tling con­stantly.  There is no “coast” set­ting on a busi­ness like the one I am in.  There’s no secu­rity (not that your aver­age office job offers much either). 

If I were ever to become com­fort­able, then I would lose an edge, and I would run the risk of my busi­ness fail­ing. Which would be finan­cially dam­ag­ing, but it wouldn’t kill me.  Let’s just state that’s an out­come that I wish to avoid, and not talk about the impli­ca­tions of fail­ure right now.  I’ll save that for another post.  Back to discomfort.

Discomfort is a moti­va­tor for me.  I think most peo­ple, in a state of dis­com­fort, are moti­vated to seek com­fort.  The way that I react to the dis­com­fort of a lack of finan­cial secu­rity is to seek more work and more ways to make money, to put more dis­tance between me and the unde­sir­able busi­ness out­come described above. It’s not likely I’ll ever achieve com­fort and com­pla­cency, but that’s okay.  So long as the moti­va­tion is there, I’m going to survive.

What I need to be com­fort­able with is the real­iza­tion that I prob­a­bly won’t get to be com­pla­cent or com­fort­able in this busi­ness.  I need to let go of the notion that to be happy, I need to have com­fort and secu­rity. I can be and am often quite happy while being discomfited.  

So my busi­ness is like a pair of beau­ti­ful, uncom­fort­able high heel shoes.  I’ll never give them it up will­ingly.  But from time to time, and mostly pri­vately, I will com­plain.  Quietly.  

On Writing Motivation

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Quaero_​verum asks:

You’ve prob­a­bly already writ­ten about 1,000 posts on it already, but moti­va­tion is my sore spot at the moment. As in, “sit thy butt down and just write!”

Also, when I do write, I sit and stare at the blank white screen for a lonnnng time. I am find­ing it hard to even churn out “free-​​writes”.…

My advice to you is sim­ple. Don’t force it. If you’re going through a period of low moti­va­tion, you may need to recharge your cre­ative bat­ter­ies. This is some­thing that I’ve had to learn the hard way.

Creative energy is a very poorly under­stood topic in my expe­ri­ence. Some man­age it very well and are able to be con­sis­tently, highly pro­duc­tive. See Jay Lake write a novel in a hand­ful of weeks. Others strug­gle for a decade. The prod­uct isn’t nec­es­sar­ily bet­ter in either case.

It’s very impor­tant to give your self oppor­tu­nity to write. But if you don’t write, it’s not nec­es­sar­ily because you’re lazy. Your energy could be low. You might not have any­thing to say right now. Maybe you’d rather draw, or take a pho­to­graph to express what you’re feel­ing. Who knows. The impor­tant thing is not to beat your­self up.

Lastly, I’d like you to go watch this pre­sen­ta­tion by Amy Tan from the TED Talks recently. She talks about how we per­cieve cre­ativ­ity, and she makes some very inter­est­ing points.

Watch the Amy Tan talk here.

Do any of you have any fur­ther advice on the sub­ject? I’m really curi­ous to hear what oth­ers think about cre­ative energy. It’s a topic that I’m only just start­ing to develop some the­o­ries about, espe­cially as it per­tains to my own work.

The Dancing Guy Stands For All That We Do

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s a video mak­ing the rounds.  It’s not shot very well, and it might even make you a lit­tle motion sick, but if you can make it through it, I think it’s really worth it.   Try to get at least halfway through.  Here’s the video.  More after you watch it.

Here’s my expe­ri­ence of watch­ing this in a nut shell:

For me at least, the guy looked like a fool!  What a crazy way of danc­ing, and danc­ing all by your­self like that?  How embarass­ing!  I could never do tha–oh wow, some­one joined in. Hey,  here comes another.  Holy Shit.

I felt a shiver run down my spine when I real­ized what I was watch­ing.  Then I started to grin.  And I’m still grin­ning about it.  This is one of the more uplift­ing things I have seen in a long time.  I’ve been pon­der­ing why that is.

It feels like a metaphor for every cre­ative endeav­our.   Writing espe­cially, or blog­ging.  You’re on your own at first.  Dancing all by your­self in front of an indif­fer­ent crowd.   It’s harder than hell to get over the feel­ing that what you’re doing could be just a lit­tle ridicu­lous.  You keep doing it though, because it feels good.

Then some­one starts pay­ing atten­tion.  Your friends, maybe.  Then their friends.  You accrete fans, or fol­low­ers, or read­ers, what­ever.  The next thing you know, you’ve started that.  It’s a brave damned thing to do, and it’s never struck me until watch­ing this just now.

I hope this moti­vates you like it has me.  Keep danc­ing.  Just keep danc­ing,  no mat­ter what.

Expedition Update

Wow, I have some amaz­ing friends.  We’ve raised $160 towards my pho­to­graphic expe­di­tion to Yellowstone.  Proving that I am the AntiChrist or some­thing, I now only need to raise $666.   Please con­sider throw­ing a few bucks in the pot. The pic­tures are SO going to be worth it.