Your Life is Not a Masterpiece
On Momentum
I sat down at my desk this morning to write more novel and, as always, I read back what I wrote the previous day. It felt like something a child might write. Awkward and cliché and awful. It felt like I’ve done all this work, and there is still so much more work to do to make it good.
So I took a deep breath and just started writing more words. Which, depending on how you look at it, is either making the problem bigger or smaller.
I choose to think it’s the latter. Because writing no words is the worst outcome of all.
Momentum is important. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Not least because it’s been a while since I’ve written a substack and this loss of momentum has created paralysis. I have an idea about what I’m going to write about, then life intervenes, then I have other ideas, then it’s been such a while that it seems super-important that I choose the best thing to write about, because I need to make it count. So I do nothing at all. Because none of them are the best.
You may be familiar with this pattern from other walks of life. Personal, professional. You’ve not spoken to a friend for ages, and you keep meaning to text them, but it’s been so long that you feel like you need to justify yourself, or offer some lengthy backstory about what you’ve been up to. So you never do it because it feels like a really big task and you’re busy.
Or deciding what’s the best course of action on a tricky topic at work - the longer you and colleagues agonise, the more important it seems that you must make the right decision, and the bigger the expectation and the stakes.
Or getting back to the gym - you’ve not been in ages and so you want to make it count, but you never have the time you think it deserves.
And, yes, part of the problem here is about being able to prioritise and being able to wade through the time/effort overheads that every email, gym visit, or work interaction entails (the total of which far exceeds your available capacity): but, putting those things aside, momentum makes it easier to do the stuff that you are able to prioritise. Even if part of you is screaming that your effort at said stuff will be woefully inadequate. It doesn’t matter. Some words are better than no words.
And, to be clear, I am not advocating blindly ploughing on with any activity just because you can. In How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner identify numerous instances where activity commenced on big projects too quickly, leading to massive problems (the Sydney Opera House, for instance, which took sixteen years to complete and cost 1,400% more than originally conceived; work was commenced before answers to the architectural and engineering challenges had been found). Plan slow and act fast is their main advice when it comes to big projects.
If, for example, I decided to accelerate my novel by sending the incomplete manuscript out to agents now, then it would have an adverse effect on my goal of publishing a novel. Or, if you decide to go back to the gym with a bang and begin by deadlifting twice your body weight, you’re going to injure yourself.
I’m talking about creating momentum in activities where we know what needs to be done, but we just can’t bring ourselves to start. Perhaps the task seems so big that it’s overwhelming, or you’re scared that your efforts will be so inadequate as to be ineffective (which is essentially the same problem).
As my father was fond of saying when I was growing up, how do you eat an elephant? In small bites, of course.
It’s About Time
Yes, okay, this sounds obvious - but to achieve momentum with something you should allocate time to it. The point here isn’t about scheduling, though, it’s about goal setting. You’re setting your goal to be time spent on a project, not that you will achieve a certain level of success in the project. When writer Michael Cunningham sits down to work, he doesn’t think of success as being how many words he’s written, but in terms of time spent: “…if I am in my chair ready to write whatever arrives - ten pages or one sentence - I’ve fulfilled my commitment.”
It has been painful, and not without some agonising, but I have adopted this approach in my writing. In this way I have written about 70,000 words over the past ten months. Which is both a lot, and not a lot for that amount of time. But, whatever, it’s 70,000 words more than I had before.
This is an approach that James Clear argues for in his book Atomic Habits - getting 1% better at something isn’t particularly notable or noticeable, he says - but get 1% better every day for a year and “you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.”
And as for the quality of what you’re trying to achieve - your self-imposed paralysis because you want it to be perfect - well, quality comes with practice, repetition, reiteration. None of which can happen unless you first do the thing. It will not be a masterpiece, it will not be optimised. My writing certainly isn’t.
But the second, important, part to this time allocation approach: if you miss a day of getting 1% better, or a workout at the gym, or a day spent on your particular project - it doesn’t matter. Channeling advice on meditation from Dan Harris, Oliver Burkeman suggests aiming for dailyish. Don’t exchange an aim for perfection in the product for an aim for perfection in the amount of time you spend on it. Aim for imperfect consistency.
Whilst I’ve been on this career break I’ve been keeping a journal; reading back some of my earlier entries, it’s largely me beating myself up about not starting writing early enough in the day due to various unavoidable life things. It’s quite boring. Don’t be Franz Kafka. Tomorrow is another day.
Finally, something that I have been trying to remind myself as I read back the sometimes cringingly bad words that I wrote yesterday, is that success is born from failure. Speaking about her massively successful novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - which was her ninth novel - Gabrielle Zevin has said that failure is a much more creative space to inhabit: “When you succeed, you are asked to repeat the thing that you did the first time. When you fail, you — at least hopefully — won’t repeat that exact thing you did before.”
I, personally, can barely conceive of writing one novel, let alone nine. But tomorrow I do know that I will turn up at my desk to write, and hopefully will produce some words. For whilst I’ve not had momentum with the substack, I have had momentum with the novel, and the end of the first draft feels achingly close. Three months later than I intended, but it’s close enough for me to be considering a sprint finish.
So here’s a final word on momentum from novelist Tim Winton. This is my every day at the moment - and, yes, he’s talking about writing, but it applies to so much else in life as well:
“You have to convince yourself that you can do it… When you arrive with yourself at the desk in the morning you’re not convinced that you can do anything… that you can write a real sentence. And so you just have to chivvy yourself along with charm or shame or hypnotise yourself into thinking that you can do it. And if you get enough momentum and you find your nerve then the trick is to hold your nerve and to believe that you can take risks.”
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INPUTS
What I’ve been reading/watching/listening to/thinking about…
- Non-Fiction: I've recently finished Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Pang (nice summary here). This is a book from 2016 and I can't believe that I've only just read it. It's a fascinating read, and through numerous academic studies it shows that the most successful people across multiple fields are those that don't spend all their time focused on their professional lives. They have hobbies, they engage in forms of deep play, they travel. All of which sounds like a much better way to live than working every waking hour.
- Podcast: Always Take Notes interviews novelist Australian Tim Winton - he's very down to earth, humane and funny. I've never read any of his work, but after listening to him on this I definitely want to.
- Fiction: False Value by Ben Aaronovitch, in the Rivers of London series. Have you read this series? It's great, the perfect holiday read. A combination of police procedural and fantasy. This wasn't my favourite of the series by a long margin, but there's something about inhabiting a fictional world that you know and love that just feels comfortable. I took great pleasure in it.
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