It’s my birthday today and I’m not getting younger. So the thing I experience at the end of every book is stronger than ever.
I was having dinner with a friend also writing a book, and he told me, “If I was in an accident tonight, as I was dying in the ER, I would feel very distraught over not finishing.”
This sounds crazy because you’d expect him to think of his wife and kids. But I understood completely.
The other day, I scheduled a blog post to go out a few months from now. It shares my entire unrevised manuscript.
I don’t plan on dying. But if I do, this post will go live and the world will at least have my book. (If all goes well, hopefully I won’t forget to un-schedule it.)
Scheduling that post has brought me an inordinate amount of inner peace. Because the same desire for significance that motivates us to embark on work that matters makes the final stretch of any masterpiece the most harrowing: You’re in the odd position of feeling you’ve done your life’s work, while also wanting to live long enough to see how it goes.
So the closer you get to the finish, the more you stand to lose.
Yes, it’s supposed to feel that heavy.
Aphorism: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” —Montaigne
Cool: Someone will get rich hacking together an AI-camera and water jets to make a consumer-grade Squirrel soaker 9000
If you’re running a race, you need only put one foot in front of the other, and you will cross the finish line.
As you get closer, you may even sprint. You know how far to go and how much you’ve got in the tank.
But the finish line of a creative project is different.
The desire to express attracts, while the fear of judgement repels
The desire to be done reels you in, while the fear of the unknown resists
The desire to accomplish pulls, while the fear of failure pushes
The desire for excellence is a beacon, the pursuit of perfection a barrier
The finish line is like an ex that texts at 2 a.m., then freaks out about what a mistake last night was.
As the finish line pulls, so it pushes. Unlike in the pursuit of histrionic lovers, though, it’s worth it to persevere through this strange force field.
Book:Open (Amazon) is tennis champion Andre Agassi’s memoir of the paradoxical pain of excellence.
If you’ve ever done something you didn’t feel like doing, or not done something you felt like doing, you already know something about finishing projects.
Finishing projects is unnatural. The world changes constantly and so nothing stays still. The creative process requires an open mind, yet finishing requires a closed one.
But we do many things that go against our instincts.
Maybe you’ve wanted to snap at a colleague, partner, or child, but didn’t
Maybe you’ve been attracted to someone besides your spouse and didn’t act
Maybe you didn’t have just one beer because you knew you’d keep going
Maybe you went to the gym when you didn’t feel like it
To finish is absurd and illogical. As George Carlin said, “Art doesn’t have a finish line.”
But it’s something you do because you value it. When you have a value, you will act in ways that don’t make immediate sense. That’s how an equation works out when one variable has more value than expected.
Finishing is something you choose despite your instincts and impulses. Like exercise, sobriety, non-violence, and monogamy, it’s unnatural, often inconvenient, and entirely up to you.
Aphorism: “To Finish requires a heart of steel. You have to make decisions all the time, and I am finding difficulties where I thought there would be none. The only way I can keep up this life is to go to bed early and do nothing whatsoever outside my work, and I am sustained in my resolution to give up every pleasure, and most of all that of seeing the people I love, only by the hope of carrying the work through to completion. I think it will kill me.” —Eugène Delacroix
Unless you make a change, years will pass and your project still won’t be done.
If you were going to have a baby, or even guests from out of town, you’d change some things. Set up a room, reduce other commitments, etc.
Your life is a glass of water, and all our glasses are full-full, to the brim full. When something new comes into life, something else has to go.
You might feel, Well I’ve had this project in my life so long. With enough time, it will surely be done.
You’ve had this project in your life, but to bring in the finished project, you must make room. You do that the same way you make room for anything else. Set aside time on your schedule, set up a spot for it to live, cancel other plans for a season, and make space to rest and adjust.
Your glass is full-full, and for the finished project to fit-fit, some of that water must overflow.
Aphorism: “Subtracting your dependence on some of the things you take for granted increases your independence.” —Twyla Tharp
Cool:Fatebook is my tool of choice for making and tracking predictions about my goals and business.
The last 10% demands different energy than the first 90%.
As I have been finishing my book, I have entered a mode I call “devastating focus.” I want as much of my thoughts and actions to be centered toward one goal as possible.
Some things I do to switch to devastating focus:
Don’t watch movies or TV
Don’t listen to music
Bored? Ask myself, What can bring this project forward?
Still bored? Default entertainment: read.
All devices set to black and white
Social life cut by 80%
I keep a stack of index cards at my writing spot. If I feel resistance, I repeatedly write reminds to myself, “There is only this. There is only this. Other ideas can wait. There is only this.”
Switching to devastating focus is uncomfortable at first, but day by day it becomes easier, even natural and gratifying. It’s effectively self-hypnosis.
Bringing a project into the world requires entering a new version of reality before it even exists. If you merely press on the boundary with your finger, it will barely yield. Devastating focus condenses that point of contact into a needle that punctures the current reality.
Book:How a Little Becomes a Lot (Amazon) is former heroin addict Eric Zimmer’s guide to making small changes towards a meaningful life.
There’s no getting around it: Long-term projects are difficult.
I have never met an author who didn’t say writing a book felt in some form like torture.
As I have approached the finish line of my own book, I’ve definitely spent hours of my mornings, staring at the ceiling, wondering how I could get up and do it again. Another day alone in a room, wrestling with my thoughts.
When the reward for the day’s work is months or years off, I remind myself of this passage from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations:
In the morning, when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being…. Do you exist…to take your pleasure, and not at all for action and exertion? Do you not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their separate parts of the universe?
Even if you love what you do, there will be moments you don’t. Even if the work is gratifying, that gratification may dangling too far away to see.
Book:The Book of Elon (Amazon) is Eric Jorgenson’s compilation of the guiding philosophies of Mr. Musk.
Cool: Robin Greenfield is spending one year foraging 100% of his food.
Best, David P.S. The Preview Edition of Finish What Matters is available for a couple more days.
There’s a generally accepted belief that two hours is all the more writing you can expect to do in a day.
Just a quick perusal of Daily Rituals shows Carl Jung, B. F. Skinner, and Martin Amis amongst many who found that to be a solid day’s work. Hemingway would talk about conserving his “juice,” and allowing the “well” to fill back up.
Don’t get me wrong, if you can get two hours, that’s spectacular, but I no longer believe that’s all a person is capable of.
John McPhee was one of the first anomalies I noticed. I remember reading somewhere that he was writing like seven hours a day.
But I’ve since learned that his “writing” involved taking notes, printing things out, cutting them up, and pasting elements together.
Now that I’m in the last 10% of my book, my days are looking a lot like that – free-writing, taking notes, editing, speaking aloud.
I don’t think it’s a 1-to-1 relationship in terms of effort and output. Like spending eight hours a day probably isn’t four times as productive as two, but when you want a high amount of quality in a short amount of time, it seems to be worth it.
As long as you’re mindful of what mental state you’re in, and what your energy and interest allow for in the moment, you may be able to write all day.
Aphorism: “Hardly any sentence, in public, comes out of my mouth unless I’ve written it down once before.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson
As I’ve gotten close to finishing my book, I’ve noticed something ironic: I probably shouldn’t have finished this book.
If I count the time I spent on a now-unrecognizable book proposal, the Getting Art Done trilogy I’ve almost finished has taken ten years, and I can’t help but think of all the other things I might have done instead.
Yet there’s a Catch-22 here: I don’t think I could have learned there were other things I could have done instead of writing these books, without first writing these books.
When I started working on the series, I had finished things here and there – an entire other book, in fact. But part of the reason I took on the project was merely to prove to myself I could set out to do something, and then do it.
But with all I’ve learned about how to sort through, plant, and nurture ideas, I would approach things differently today. I would make smaller bets with my limited resources and be more careful about which projects I did and did not take on.
Alas, things couldn’t have turned out any different, because early on, less important than what you finish is that you finish – what project you take on isn’t as important as learning to finish any project.
You have to get pretty good at finishing what you start before it’s a better idea to put effort not into that you finish, but deciding what you finish.
Aphorism: “It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.” —André Gide
Cool:Table for Two’ish is Saya Hillman’s interview-ish series (I’ll be a guest in September).
“Pull your shit together,” these days has a kind of toxic tenor.
I’ve in my lifetime witnessed a big cultural shift from emotional and mental struggles being taboo topics, to a part of everyday vocabulary.
People take mental-health days, talk openly about anxiety, depression, addiction etc., and more people are medicated for these than is probably necessary.
On the whole this shift has been good for me. When I moved from Nebraska to California twenty years ago, a source of culture shock was how openly people talked about such struggles. And over the years I discovered just how much severe mental illness was brushed under the rug on both sides of my family, and in milder forms in my relationship with my own psyche.
Throughout my own journey there have certainly been times I’ve felt unmoored, and it’s been liberating to let go of any cultural shame about asking for help, but on the whole I’ve found that the best way to the light at the end of the tunnel is through the darkness.
By now the vocabulary of this “therapy culture” feels as if it’s become its own pathology. Sometimes it feels like a source of identity for in-tribal signaling, other times a replacement for religion, other times a permission-slip to be irresponsible or incompetent.
You’d think the pendulum would swing back in the other direction. That eventually people would say, “Oh, everyone feels this way sometimes. I guess that’s life.”
Because between the extremes of severe issues and no issues is just the state of being human. That inherently will have its ups and downs, and so naturally holding your shit together is just a matter of the apparently dying art of getting a grip.
Book:Beyond Belief (Amazon) is Nir Eyal’s latest, on how to have beliefs that benefit you.
I do not in the least feel that ChatGPT, or any other LLM, is human.
Sure, I tell it please, thank you, and what the f*ck was that? but I don’t think of it as conscious.
I instead see LLMs as magical LEGO-brick organizers: I ask a question, it goes through almost the entire corpus of human knowledge to mix and match “bricks” – that is, words – in the most-average way appropriate for that question.
And as far as I can understand the technical explanations of it, that seems to be exactly what it does.
I also find this an effective mental model for thinking about what questions for which I can and can’t expect good answers. The more that’s been written about a subject, the more bricks there are, the better the chances the answer will make sense and be accurate. (If it matters, I always ask for sources.)
So if I’m looking for advice on how to formulate my next batch of homemade soap, there’s a lot already written about that. If I want it to write one of these emails, forget about it.
This is probably why the most valuable use case I’ve come across is understanding historical information, and stress-testing my own explanations. It’s been an invaluable conversation partner for writing about Leonardo and Raphael. I would probably have had to get a degree to otherwise learn all I have.
An LLM is no more human than a book (if anything, less so).
Aphorism: “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.” —Naval Ravikant
Book:Innovators (Amazon) is David Galenson’s follow-up to Old Masters, Young Geniuses.
