Research shows a reward can trigger action. Rewards can also lead to complacency.
Research shows a punishment can kick you into gear. A punishment can also incite rebellion.
Research shows a goal can be a guiding beacon. A goal can also be a limiting barrier.
Research on motivation is essentially useless, when it comes to your creative projects.
Maybe freedom gives you energy, or you crave structure. Maybe you love competition, or you prefer collaboration. Maybe stress lights a fire inside you, or it burns you out.
It depends on the project or the stage of the projects. Most of all, it depends upon you.
You must become a master of your own motivation. Constantly attempt to motivate yourself, and see what happens. But when you fail to do what you intend, don’t be crushed – be curious.
Anything can be motivating, or de-motivating. Become the world-renowned expert on what motivates you.
Forget the research and do your own me-search.
Aphorism: “Learn from other people’s successes and failures, but do your own thing.” —Mark Zuckerberg
A book is outdated the moment it’s printed. The tech improves before a product is shipped.
The universe is in a constant state of change. Your bananas go bad, a hole wears through your favorite socks, your go-to cereal gets discontinued, and the rotation of the earth is slowing as galaxies grow farther apart.
So to finish a creative project is an unnatural act. Your thoughts, skills, tastes, and the nature of the matter you’re trying to wrangle change. There are a thousand decisions you could’ve made differently, and the moment before you ship they leap out in high relief.
Whenever I “finish” a project, the moment Doc plugged those wires together in Back to the Future comes to mind.
Your challenge as a creator is to grab the loose ends, pull against resistance, and bring them together for just long enough to proclaim, “it is done!”
Then hope lightning strikes.
Aphorism: “In story, we concentrate on that moment…in which a character takes an action expecting a useful reaction from his world, but instead the effect of his action is to provoke forces of antagonism.” —Robert McKee
Book:This is Strategy (Amazon) is Seth Godin’s new guide to making better plans and thinking strategically in a complex world.
Best, David P.S. One form of resistance keeping you from finishing is The Finisher’s Paradox.
Just because you expect it to fail doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build it.
There are three kinds of projects: white swans, black swans, and gray swans.
Black swans have little chance of succeeding. You’re not sure why you’re building it, who it’s for, or how it will turn out.
White swans are nearly certain to succeed. You know exactly why you’re building it, for whom, and how it will turn out.
Gray swans mix together elements of white and black swans. It fits into a clear category, but you’re adding a twist.
If white swans are nearly certain to succeed, why not just build white swans? Here’s why:
Black swans are nearly destined for failure, but there’s a tiny chance they’ll succeed beyond your wildest dreams. White swans are likely to succeed, but their potential is limited. Gray swans aren’t as assured of success as white swans, but more so than black swans, yet with more potential than white swans.
White swans fit right into a category. Black swans create new categories. Gray swans are a twist on an existing category.
The white swan is your how-to book. The black swan is your impassioned manifesto, free on ebook. The gray swan is your conceptual self-help book.
The white swan is your corporate training video. The black swan is your immersive choose-your-own-adventure project. The gray swan is your experimental horror flick.
The white swan is your freelance Oracle database consulting. The black swan is your whimsical AI experiment. The gray swan is your SaaS with a few more features than the competitors.
The projects you’re most sure will succeed often have the most mediocre potential. So choose wisely.
Book:Good Work (Amazon) is Paul Millerd’s exploration in redefining work and reclaiming your inner ambition.
Cool:Motion built what we were trying to build at Timeful: an AI-driven calendar that plans your tasks around your schedule.
Best, David P.S. The graphic above is from my upcoming book, How to Sell a Book. This week is your last chance to preorder for 10% off.
No matter how much we glamorize failure, it’s not necessary to succeed. But you shouldn’t hate the taste of failure.
Sure, if you hate to fail, it’s possible that motivates you to work really hard to avoid it. The more likely outcome is you don’t try at all.
Failure has a bitter taste, like the first time an adult let you have a sip of beer. But like many bitter flavors, beer included, failure is an acquired taste.
It’s not good to fail, but having failures is a better sign than having none. Because failure is proof of effort and if you aren’t failing you probably aren’t trying to succeed.
Like beer, if you get addicted to the flavor of failure, it will ruin your life. Like beer, some of your most interesting and memorable experiences and even successes will be thanks to having a few too many failures.
Failure. You’ll go far if you have one once in a while.
Aphorism: “Make an effort. Just pure stupid, ‘no idea what I’m doing here’ effort. Effort always yields a positive value, even if the outcome of the effort is absolute failure of the desired result.” –Jerry Seinfeld
Cool:Virtual Post Mail has for more than a decade provided me with a U.S. address to receive mail and sign up for services.
Best, David P.S. I once enumerated my year’s best rejections, and should do it again sometime.
You’ve got something good. You worked hard for it, and learned a lot.
But at some point good is a burden. It’s a source of comfort. From one perspective, walls of security, from another, a prison.
You can’t see beyond those walls without knocking them down.
If exploring your potential and living an interesting life are important to you, you must quit what’s going good. The chances that you’ve been presented by default the goldfish bowl most-suited to your growth are nil. Even if you’ve made the bowl yourself, they’re low.
You can’t leave what you’ve got for something better. Better doesn’t come unless you’ve cleared the space to build it.
Quit something going well to be free for unknown but better.
Aphorism: “One becomes a painter by painting.” —Vincent van Gogh
Book: Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties (Amazon) is either a trip down memory lane, or a glimpse into the past.
Best, David P.S. My new book, How to Sell a Book, is available for preorder at 10% off here (customers outside U.S. here).
More done, less time. That’s the point of time management, in a nutshell.
But the pursuit of more with less leads to perverse incentives. As you get more done with less time, you have more time to fill with more to do.
Doing things quickly and efficiently was how you got extra time, so you must also do these extra things quickly and efficiently.
And you lose sight of why you started managing your time. Wasn’t the point to get what you wanted? Did you want to be more stressed and less happy? Did you want to sleep less, to dream less?
Time management has been taken too far when you feel every moment must be filled with productive action. It’s the spaces between actions that make the actions worthwhile. It’s those spaces between that made you want more with less in the first place.
Use some time efficiently so you can use the rest inefficiently.
Aphorism: “Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.” —William E. Gladstone
Cool:Sweet Home 3D is free open-source software for creating a 3D model of your home, for planning projects.
Since what makes others interested is having done something interesting, the work is the network. So the best way to network is with your head down.
Put your head down and make something others will respect. Write a book, or write a blog. Build a company, or a short campaign. Make something tangible others can look at and see that you care about something and have stepped up to do something about it.
When you’re done, people can point to that thing and say:
“She’s the one who wrote that book.”
“He’s the one who organized that conference.”
“He ran that meetup group.”
“She made that meme.”
Big or small, when you make something, you make yourself.
Aphorism: “For some men, the stronger their desire, the more difficult it is for them to act.” —Gustav Flaubert
Book:The Dictators (Amazon) is a side-by-side comparison of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.
Best, David P.S. Thank you Jim Fitzpatrick for interviewing me on CBT News.
I hold back in my writing. I hear in my mind the objections of readers about why they can’t commit fully and passionately to a creative life. Their day jobs and kids and sacred evenings watching TV. And I fool myself into thinking I’m writing for them.
Meanwhile, I’ve repeatedly done crazy and weird things to make creativity central to my existence. I’ve spent money originally meant for retirement, turned down lucrative and prestigious job offers, and moved to another country and started from scratch a new life in a new language.
And I’m still such I pussy I think to myself, “Nah, I can’t write that. Norm McNormie can’t dream of taking a pay cut from his $250,000-a-year job.”
Sadly, I’ve been trying to be reasonable so long I can hardly access the passion with which I once could have told you how I really felt about the creative life to end up where I am.
And it bothers me there are others who might live more creatively if only I spoke up and set an example.
For those readers, take my best relay of the faint message I can barely still hear from myself decades in the past.
Be violently creative.
Be passionate and uncompromising about the pursuit of your creativity and curiosity. Bang against and break through barriers that stand in your way and guardrails trying to guide you into what’s considered normal, socially acceptable, or even safe or healthy.
Quit your job. Spend your savings. Abandon your family. Live in the forest. Move to a foreign land. Establish an entirely new identity and disappear from anything you’ve ever known. If the image of your lifeless body face-down in a gutter in some alleyway doesn’t seem as bad as you think it should, so long as you got there by giving your creativity a chance, by all means send yourself down the path you fear might lead you there.
If you’re meant to live the creative life, nothing will stand in your way. The “reasons” of the normal are mere excuses.
This is life. Not a dress rehearsal. Your one chance.
Do things and make sacrifices in the pursuit of your creativity that other people think are crazy, weird, even sick.
Maybe others will think you’re a loser. Maybe you’ll genuinely ruin your life. But at least you gave that gnawing little voice a chance to speak up.
Aphorism: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” ―Gustav Flaubert
Book:Eat, Pray, Love (Amazon) is Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir of self-exploration.
Best, David P.S. If you have no idea how to get to there from here, Surround and Conquer.
Some job posts read: “7 years experience with HTML required,” and that is so confusing.
I have more than twenty-five years of experience with HTML. I haven’t done it every day for twenty-five years. That’s just how long ago I started.
Someone with one year of experience could possibly code faster and cleaner than I.
But even if I had coded HTML every day for twenty-five years, how much better could I be than someone who’s been doing it for one year?
Not much. HTML just isn’t that complicated.
I remember reading something by the guys at Basecamp that, paraphrased, said, “You can’t have seven years HTML experience. You can have one year, seven times.”
With AI tools available to us, the list of things that are complicated is shorter and shorter. There’s no reason you can’t know a little of everything. If you knew no HTML, you could have a short conversation with ChatGPT and have a month’s experience within an hour.
All you need to learn something is a problem to solve, the belief you can learn, and ChatGPT.
Don’t have one year of experience seven times, nor twenty-five. When you get the hang of one thing, learn the next.
Book:How to Be Everything (Amazon) is a guide for “multipotentialites,” or those who (still) don’t know what they want to be when they grow up.
If you’re going to be a person who does things, you can’t use that as an excuse. You do your homework again. People who do things know, once you start justifying your failures, you start a vicious cycle.
More insidious than justifying failure is justifying success. That is, convincing yourself a failure was actually a success:
“Nobody bought my art, but I handed out lots of business cards!”
“This book didn’t sell, but I learned a lot writing it!”
“The restaurant isn’t profitable, but we made enough to stay in business another month!”
There are times to find the silver lining. If you’re starting out, everything is a learning experience, failure or not.
But at some point you’re grown up enough to have known better and done better. You aren’t doing yourself favors by reasoning that a failure or even a middling success is actually what you wanted.
It takes discipline to do your homework again, but it takes courage to take a hard look at what’s just-okay, and decide you could do better.
Aphorism: “A succession of tiny paragraphs is as annoying as a paragraph that’s too long.” —William Zinsser
Cool: These golf pants (Amazon) are great for flying comfortably without looking too sloppy.
Best, David P.S. To evaluate success or failure, know ahead of time whether you’re playing a sure bet, or wildcard.
P.P.S. Thank you to Dan Cook for writing about me in the Bone Zone, which I promise isn’t what you think.
