Soul Shelter

Ever wonder why some people complete in hours tasks that others drag out over days? Or why busy people seem to volunteer most, yet accomplish far more than their leisure-blessed counterparts?

Many believe the answer lies in “time management.”

What nonsense!

I’ve tried to manage time. Once I decided to put the fourth of July into May. Didn’t work. Then I struggled to delay my 40th birthday for a few months. It steamrolled toward me anyway, moving at the precise rate of 24 hours per day.

Believers in time management may benefit by reading Getting Things Done, the David Allen bestseller which I’ve found useful, mainly for two pieces of advice taken to heart:

1. Buy and use only plain manila tab folders
2. Buy and use a label maker to create professional labels for all files and notebooks

The rest of Allen’s advice is no doubt helpful for busy, busy people overwhelmed with long and short-term directives, deliverables, family and civic responsibilities, and general information. A terrific overview of the GTD approach is available at the 43 Folders blog.

But for those who’ve achieved some success in being underwhelmed by administrivia, Getting Things Done seems too long by, well, about 257 of its 267 pages.

I prefer a simpler, “higher altitude” approach advocated by my London-based buddy Mark Fritz, an aspiring achievement guru who recently came out with his second book, The Truth About Getting Things Done.

The Truth’s key point is that “time management” is an illusion. Everyone gets the same amount of time, and no one can “manage” it.

Instead of trying to manage time, says Mark, manage your focus.

“I’ve coached a number of people over the past few years,” Mark writes, “and one of the key problems they face is confusing activity with accomplishment. With today’s business complexity and the flood of information deluging us hour-to-hour, many workers fall into an “activity trap.” They wind up reacting to everything that hits them all day long. They feel constantly busy and active, yet at the end of their day wonder what they’ve accomplished.”

So how to stop confusing activity with accomplishment?

“It’s all about changing from time management to focus management,” says Mark. “Time management is about fitting the most activities into the smallest amount of time. Focus management is about accomplishing your most important goals.”

For one Fortune 100 manager, changing from time management to focus management had a dramatic impact on what he and his team accomplished each week, says Mark. Two new habits made the difference:

1. Weekly Focus Review
This manager invested 30 to 60 minutes each Friday afternoon to list and review the key things he and his team needed to accomplish in the week ahead and weeks ahead. Then, he reviewed both his planned actions and actions he thought he needed to take (the ones he was thinking about but hadn’t yet written down), and made choices on what to do and what not to do.

Benefits of the Weekly Review: First, he clarified his Focus (important outcomes) and the key actions that would deliver it. Second, he went into his weekend with less stress, because he knew what needed to be done in the coming week.

2. Daily Focus Reminder
The manager started each day by reviewing his Focus: the key outcomes and actions he defined during the previous Friday afternoon Weekly Focus Review. He knew priorities often change, and that refining and keeping clarity on his Focus was key.

Benefits of the Daily Focus Reminder: First, the manager reminded himself of his Focus before the pressures of the day started. A clear Focus helped him make wise “yes/no” choices on actions throughout day. Second, he had a chance to refine his Focus based on new priorities that were beyond his control.

The Weekly Focus Review and the Daily Focus Reminder provided clarity that led the manager to better choices on how to use his time: What to do and what not to do. It also helped him guide his team toward better choices.

The way to stop confusing activity with accomplishment, says Mark, is focus management, not time management.

So, if like me, you sometimes find yourself struggling to accomplish goals, give the Mark Fritz approach a try. And stop trying to make Christmas come in July.

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One of the most enjoyable parts of posting on Soul Shelter every week is the opportunity it presents to share the books and voices that mean the most to me. In that vein, today I recommend five books certain to stir and fortify the soul of any reader.

1. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis (1952)

Greek writer Kazantzakis’ classic novel recounts an unlikely friendship. Zorba is a sensualist and libertine who finds his every joy in earthly pleasures, and his friend “The Boss” is an intellectual, monkish type inclined to seek spiritual fulfillment through renunciation and detachment. Their colorful adventures on the island of Crete are an ongoing dialogue between body and soul, spirit and flesh, earth and stars. An unforgettable book.

I looked at Zorba in the light of the moon and admired the jauntiness and simplicity with which he adapted himself to the world around him, the way his body and soul formed one harmonious whole, and all things — women, bread, water, meat, sleep — blended happily with his flesh and became Zorba. I had never seen such a friendly accord between a man and the universe.

2. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck (1961)

Steinbeck is an immensely powerful writer celebrated primarily for The Grapes of Wrath, a fine book in some ways, but not his best by any stretch of the imagination. The Winter of Our Discontent, one of Steinbeck’s last novels, is often overlooked, although a year after its publication the author won the Nobel Prize in literature. Of the numerous Steinbeck titles I’ve read, this one rises to the top whenever I think of his work. It’s a gripping story about a hardworking grocery clerk who comes perilously close to (in the words of the first edition jacket flap) “tak[ing] a holiday from his own scrupulous standards…trad[ing], temporarily, as he thinks, ‘a habit of conduct’ for ‘a cushion of security.’” The novel explores “some of our shoddy [American] attitudes toward honesty and success … the loss of integrity in our world — the decline in our standards of personal, business, and political morality.” Given the current breakdowns on Wall Street, these themes resound with uncanny relevance today, but Steinbeck’s dénouement here is affecting and redemptive. Here’s the author’s own brief preface to the novel:

Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.

He meant America of 1961, but his words could just as well apply to America of 2008.

3. Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (1987)

Another somewhat overlooked novel by a celebrated author, Crossing to Safety is a beautifully intimate story about friendship, family life, ambition, and the ways our well-laid plans go sometimes aright and sometimes awry. Stegner explores the fifty-year friendship between two couples, the Morgans and the Langs, whose lives run parallel at points and at other points sharply diverge. Studded with deep, witty reflections on the most important matters in life — faithful friendship, work/life balance, sacrifice, aspiration, strength and loyalty in times of hardship — it’s one of the most moving novels I’ve ever read. Here’s the narrator, Larry Morgan, recalling his early days of overachievement:

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn an man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else — pathway to the stars, maybe.

4. Emperor of the Air, Stories by Ethan Canin (1988)

Ethan Canin published this riveting short story collection, his debut, at age 28 while simultaneously maintaining a medical school career. Twenty years later, Emperor of the Air endures as a contemporary classic. The jacket flap aptly remarks that Canin’s stories explore “the beauty and mystery in everyday existence: that rare knowledge, denied or pursued, that illuminates the soul … the startling moments when life opens up and presents itself to us.” That’s about as accurate a description of the book as I can imagine. Here’s a little sampling, one of many beautiful moments that permeate the book. It’s from the title story, whose narrator is an aging high school science teacher.

What would be left of the earth in a century? I didn’t think I was a sentimental man, and I don’t weep at plays or movies, but certain moments have always been peculiarly moving for me, and the mention of a century was one. There have been others. Standing out of the way on a fall evening, as couples and families converge on the concert hall from the radiating footpaths, has always filed me with a longing, though I don’t know for what. I have taught the life of the simple hydra that is drawn, for no reasons it could ever understand, toward the bright surface of the water, and the spectacle of a thousand human beings organizing themselves into a single room to hear the quartets of Beethoven is as moving to me as birth or death. I feel the same way during the passage of an automobile across a cantilever span above the Mississippi, mother of rivers. These moments overwhelm me…

5. Meditations from a Moveable Chair by Andre Dubus (1998)

On a July night in 1986 the writer Andre Dubus saw two cars stalled on I-93 north of Boston and stopped to see if he could help. While standing at the roadside he was struck by a car and lost one leg and the use of the other. A former Marine and long-distance runner, Dubus was a Zorba-like personality who’d always nurtured a powerful relationship with his own physical self. After that fateful night, he found himself confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Meditations from a Moveable Chair collects 25 Dubus essays, long and short, on the subject of the human soul, and the ways in which Dubus “finally, found joy in the sacramental magic of even the most quotidian tasks.” A devout — but by no means orthodox -- Catholic, Dubus writes very openly about matters of faith. Here’s a bit from his essay, “Sacraments”:

Between isolation and harmony, there is not always a vast distance. Sometimes it is a distance that can be traversed in a moment, by choosing to focus on the essence of what is occurring, rather than on its exterior: its difficulty or beauty, its demands or joy, peace or grief, passion or humor. This is not a matter of courage or discipline or will; it is a receptive condition.

Read well, be well.  

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Looking across the living room of his expansive flat in Hong Kong’s tony Victoria Peak neighborhood, Peter Hamilton spoke in the calm, slightly world-weary voice of a man who will never again worry about earning a living.

“The ones who made it,” he said softly, “are the ones who weren’t in it for the money. The fortune-seekers couldn’t sustain their passion through the hard times—and there were hard times.”

A transplanted Brit who launched a Web production company in Hong Kong in 1995, Hamilton was one of a handful of Internet entrepreneurs in the island colony who enjoyed a multimillion dollar payday after his firm was acquired by a company that later went public on NASDAQ.

Hamilton’s not alone. In interview after interview throughout Japan, Asia, and North America, successful entrepreneurs told me the same thing, in different words and in different languages: “It’s not about the money.”

What, then, is entrepreneurship about?

Exploiting a market opportunity? Fame? Fortune? Proving yourself?

First, a tip as to what entrepreneurship’s not about: Entrepreneurship is not about you. It’s not about you getting rich, you proving something to the world, you struggling to overcome the odds.

Rather, it’s about you helping other people achieve their goals.

This is obvious when you think about it. Business is all about satisfying customers, right? Well, to satisfy customers, you need to help them save money, solve annoying problems, experience more satisfaction or pleasure, or earn a better living.

Put simply, in order to succeed as an entrepreneur, you must help other people.

Entrepreneurship, therefore, is about helping other people achieve their goals. It’s not about you (I’ll try to minimize repetition of that phrase in these final lines).

Successful entrepreneurs focus on others. Take Derek Sivers, for example. As the leader of a successful touring band, he needed a way to make his CDs available to fans everywhere, all the time—not just at concerts.

But Derek and his group were unattached to a major label, and big sellers like CDNow and Amazon required bands to have in-place agreements with large distributors. What was a hard-working, independent musician to do?

Derek decided to set up his own modest online sales channel, and soon friends from other bands were asking for help selling their music. Within a couple of years, the store, renamed CD Baby, was distributing the work of more than 90,000 artists. To date, it’s paid out more than $80 million to the more than 200,000 independent artists it now represents. Derek focused on helping others.

Successful entrepreneurs undertake ventures that benefit many people. My personal theory is that ventures are successful to the degree that they generate social benefits. I’m no fan of Microsoft’s products or business practices, but who can deny that the company enabled personal computing for a billion citizens? (Too bad Apple missed its chance to make that contribution—we’d probably all be a mellower bunch.)

So success as an entrepreneur is not about you. Ooh—I feel another Clark’s Rule coming on—I think I’ll call this one Clark’s “About” Rule for Entrepreneurs (CARE): It’s Not About You.

Now the question is, what do you CARE about?

This essay first appeared as a guest post at Get Rich Slowly in a slightly different form.

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David Foster Wallace, a talented fiction writer and essayist, died tragically a few weeks ago at age 46, a suicide. It’s impossible to know the kind of clinical angst Wallace must have suffered in order to make so horrific a final decision. The man’s work offers immense thoughtfulness and insight.

A cursory glance at Wallace’s writing appears to show a hyper-intellectual mind which probably regards faith as quaint and outmoded and any talk of the soul as either New-Agey or flattened by platitudes. Actually, Wallace used his prodigious powers of scrutiny in a mammoth attempt to peel away cliché, ingrained thought, or tried-and-true philosophies, all in the hope of achieving — truly achieving (and not merely taking it second-hand) — a real apprehension of Meaning. In other words, things like faith and the soul were important to him, as they are to any good writer. He believed we needn’t all be stuck inside our own heads.

These traits are evident in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. It’s a strange speech to give at a college graduation (although maybe not for Wallace). It meanders through the banalities of road rage at rush hour and shopping cart warfare at the local supermarket. But toward the conclusion something almost transcendent happens. Wallace provides powerful counsel regarding the importance of what we choose to “worship” in contemporary society, and the dangers of allowing intellectual habit to replace real thoughtfulness.

For today’s post I want to share the following remarkable excerpt from that speech. I believe readers will find it as moving as I do.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death…

(Read Wallace’s commencement address in its entirety here.)

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“So, boy. You wish to serve me?”

Silhouetted against the blue-black sky, the horse-mounted samurai with the horned helmet towered over me like a demon as I knelt in the dirt before him. I could not see his face but there was no mistaking the authority in his growling tone, nor the hint of mockery in his question.

I tried to speak and managed only a faint croak. My mouth had gone dry, as parched as a man dying of thirst. But I had to respond. My fate—and though I didn’t know it then, the fate of all of Japan—rested on my answer.

Raising my head just enough to brave a glance at the demonic figure, I saw him staring at me, like a hawk poised to seize a mouse in its talons.

When I managed to speak, my voice was clear and steady, and I drew courage with each syllable.

“That’s correct, Lord Nobunaga,” I said. “I do.”

It was a time of carnage and darkness: the Age of Wars, when the land was torn by bloodshed and the only law was the law of the sword. A peasant wandered the countryside alone, seeking his fortune, without a coin in his pocket. He longed to become a successful samurai—a career all but impossible for an uneducated peasant unskilled in the martial arts. To be sure, nothing in the demeanor of this five-foot tall, one-hundred-ten-pound boy could possibly have foretold the astounding destiny awaiting him.

His name was Hideyoshi, and on that fateful spring evening in the year 1553, the brash young warlord Nobunaga hired him as a sandal-bearer. Driven by a relentless desire to transcend his peasant roots, Hideyoshi went on to become Nobunaga’s loyal protégé and right-hand man. Ultimately he became the supreme ruler of all Japan—the first peasant ever to rise to the absolute height of power—and unified a nation torn apart by more than a hundred years of civil strife.

Hideyoshi’s true story has inspired countless novels, plays, movies—even video games—for more than four centuries. Born the weakling son of a poor farmer at a time when martial prowess or entry to the priesthood were the only ways for an ambitious commoner to escape a life of backbreaking farm toil, he rose from poverty to rule a mighty nation and command hundreds of thousands of samurai warriors. For generations of men, Hideyoshi became the ultimate underdog hero: a symbol of the possibility of reinventing oneself as a man and rising, Horatio Alger fashion, from rags to riches.

Hideyoshi was driven by a burning desire to rise in the world, and rise he did—beyond his wildest dreams. Sheer hard work, dedication to service, and force of will enabled him to become the first-ever peasant to achieve supreme civil and military power as Taiko, or Imperial Regent—the Emperor’s proxy. Along the way, he pacified dozens of warring clans, built roads, bridges, and Japan’s greatest castles, instituted currency reform, and laid the foundation for a federation of states that would later become Japan’s social democracy—and Asia’s mightiest economic power.

But absolute power, as they say, corrupts absolutely. In the evening of his days, Hideyoshi stained his legacy by ordering an ill-advised invasion of China via Korea (so illogical was this move that many scholars believe mental illness sparked Hideyoshi’s astounding hubris). The debacle turned into a disastrous seven year war costing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. To this day, Hideyoshi is reviled by many in Korea as history’s greatest villain. Today the lessons of his life could not be more timely.

In The Swordless Samurai, my second book, Hideyoshi reveals secrets of organizational leadership and success in an imaginative exposition of the peasant-turned-samurai’s personal philosophy, based on true historical incidences and what is known of his enigmatic personality. The work is now available in paperback from St. Martin’s Press.

This essay, excerpted from parts of The Swordless Samurai, first appeared as a guest post at the Art of Manliness.

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(The following is a post from Sara, author of the always thoughtful blog, On Simplicity. We quite like Sara’s practical and life-affirming approach to the complexities of hyper-material modern existence, and we’re sure our loyal readers will too.)

A while back at my blog, I asked my readers for their definitions of simplicity. Many included the importance of having less, but enjoying more. When it comes to actually giving stuff up, though, it can be easier said than done. In that spirit, here are five ways you can make it easy to enjoy a life with less stuff.

1. Use what you do have.

Go through your music collection and make a playlist of forgotten favorites. (I love doing this!) Pull a favorite book off the shelf and give it another read. Pull a passed-down antique out of the closet and give it a place of honor. Using and enjoying what you do have gives you a feeling of abundance that’s incredibly uplifting.

2. Keep a list of free and fun things to do.

You could take a photography walk, teach the dog a new trick, snuggle with a loved one, incite a family wrestling match, write bad rhyming poetry, take a nap, or dance to the radio. The more items you can dream up, the more fun you have at your fingertips.

3. Start seeing empty spaces as packed with freedom.

Celebrate every empty shelf, bare wall, and exposed square foot of flooring as the ultimate victory. If freedom equals happiness (or at least a big component of it), then not having something just brings you closer to your personal nirvana.

4. Engage all five senses.

Don’t just put on your shirt in the morning. Take a second to feel the weave, to take in the color, to smell the freshness (it is clean, isn’t it?). Okay, you don’t have to taste it, but you’re starting to get the idea. Same with your food. Don’t just eat it; savor the smells and sights of a delicious meal. By packing the mundane with meaning, we create a luxurious lifestyle out of nothing at all.

5. Make a list of the things you get in return when give things up.

My list includes freedom, peacefulness, and room to think. Keep the list at the bottom of sock drawer and reference as needed. It’s a powerful reminder of exactly why I’m not filling my drawers with endless new things.

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“The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.” Thoreau

Several months ago I wrote about something I hadn’t done in nearly 20 years: Apply for a job. In that post, I promised an update on what happened. Here’s what I’d planned to write:

“I was offered the job, and I accepted it …

Now, you may well wonder why a successful company seller and teacher of entrepreneurship would, in the midst of writing a three-month thread exhorting others to go solo or become more entrepreneurial in their work lives, would suddenly become a university employee.

Let me explain.

First, this job is all about my lifework over the past 24 years. Never has a job seem to so well-suited to my interests and skills.

Second, I wanted to reengage in a community. For the past five years I’ve been writing, teaching, investing, and working on a new publishing-related venture. But aside from the periodic bursts of interaction each new class brings, these activities involve working either alone or with one, or occasionally two, other people. I like working solo, but I’m no hermit. I miss the community of the workplace. I love the work-at home-or coffee-shop work style, but I’m also feeling the need to be part of a larger community—and to have a place with my name on the door, where I can go to be part of something bigger, and where I can help others.

Third, my work is computer- and data-intensive, and can be done just about anywhere quiet where one can think, write, research, or compute. That’s fine, but it means I work a lot from home, library, and coffee shops, and tend to exercise the same skills over and over. I want to go to a place that requires new and different behaviors, where colleagues are available for face-to-face chats—and where my name’s on the door (or at least a mailbox).

Fourth, it’s a half-time job, so it leaves room for doctoral studies and my venture, which fortunately is something I can work on rather than in. Teachers should be practitioners, and I want to keep practicing. But the experience of applying, interviewing for, and accepting this job has renewed my appreciation for salaried employment.

Which is a good thing, because let’s face it: Most people are better off working as salaried employees rather than entrepreneurs.

A company is a community, and we all need community. Being a solo or small businessperson can be lonely and socially isolating (I think the most satisfied entrepreneurs are those who succeed in building companies big enough to become true work communities). Telecommuting or otherwise working alone sounds like a dream to those stuck in cubicles, but there’s a dark side, too (see reader Sarah’s Five Ways to turn Telecommuting into a Nightmare for a hilarious but provocative take on the work-at-home lifestyle).

Financially, too, it’s tough to beat a steady income for building wealth. While entrepreneurship can lead to outsized rewards, slow and steady saving and investing is the most reliable path to prosperity for most workers. Ignore financial news and sock away as much salary as you can.

A salaried job provides emotional stability along with financial security. The truth is that most people are happier and better off being employees. A workplace provides community, a belonging-place, camaraderie. At worst, it’s a place to commiserate with coworkers; at best, a place where lifelong friendships grow …”

But! as I wrote back in Paragraph One, all this is what I had planned to write. Here’s what actually happened.

I didn’t get the job.

Though I became one of three finalists, another candidate received and accepted the offer.

I was disappointed. I’d been confident of success, and had good reason to be so. Nevertheless, I had to face a bitter lesson life teaches over and over again: There’s always someone smarter, stronger, and more qualified.

So I’ll remain self-employed, and trod steadily toward my goal of becoming a half-time, salaried university professor. And in the meantime, I’ll continue to sing the praises of both entrepreneurship and salaried employment.

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“When I do [my] first draft, I shut the lights off and pull a stocking cap over my head and eyes, and I’m typing blind. It’s the old paradox that you see by blinding yourself.” – Novelist Kent Haruf

I’ve heard lots of different writers tossing around a particular little quote. I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s been variously attributed to Joan Didion, W.H. Auden, and Saul Bellow. Here it is:

I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.

Writers cherish this epigram because it gets to the mysterious heart of the creative process. Often we sit down to our work at a loss for ideas. We find, at such moments, that we must relinquish control, step back, and welcome the surprise of whatever comes through.

Whether you’re a painter, songwriter, or creative thinker of any kind, your process of creation will be the same in one important respect: it will require surrender.

Surrender to what? Oh, to the uncontrollably slow, fabulous percolations of imagination, memory, mind, soul — or, in strictly psychological terms, surrender to the untraceable workings of the unconscious.

Because I’m chest-deep in labor on a new book now, I muse upon these matters daily. The unconscious is a rascal, but I’d be lost if I didn’t surrender and let it do it’s rascally thing.

I love this passage from Annie Dillard’s darkly whimsical volume, The Writing Life:

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. These truths comfort the anguished. …Most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace. Octavio Paz cites the example of ‘Saint-Rol Roux, who used to hang the inscription, The Poet is Working, from his door while he slept.’

For all of us it’s true: we do much of our work while lying asleep — or while standing in the shower, or sitting behind the wheel en route to our day-jobs. Always, little cogs keep silently turning. Some rich mineral water seeps up through the strata to surface as a glimmering idea.

Ernest Hemingway famously described his working method as a revving-up of his subconscious. As soon as heard the engine’s purr he stopped working and let it run on its own. So, paradoxically, when he left his desk his real work got started.

I always worked until I had something done, and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. …I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.

One must go to the desk, of course, and regularly; nothing will happen if one doesn’t. A regimen is important because it primes the pump. But just as important is surrendering one’s conscious efforts, letting the spout at the back of the mind burble free.

These words of Andre Dubus, one of the twentieth century’s greatest short story writers, remind me that not thinking about one’s work, like Hemingway, is a discipline as indispensable as going to the desk in the first place.

I gestate: for months, often for years. An idea comes to me from wherever they come, and I write it in a notebook. Sometimes I forget it’s there. I don’t think about it. By think I mean plan. I try never to think about where a story will go. This is as hard as writing, maybe harder; I spend most of my waking time doing it; it is hard work, because I want to know what the story will do and how it will end and whether or not I can write it; but I must not know, or I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender.

“Art is long,” wrote Henry James. “If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause.”

Indeed, one must be patient. One must surrender to the slow fruition of thought, image, ideas. Rilke called this “being inactive with confidence.”

And if we reflect, we see that this practice applies to many aspects of life. Essentially, it’s the practice of faith. Surrender, stillness, and trust: all are religious disciplines. T.S. Eliot talks about this religious quality of creativity, and even equates one’s creative actions with one’s destiny:

Some men have had a deep conviction of their destiny, and in that conviction have prospered; but when they cease to act as an instrument, and think of themselves as the active source of what they do, their pride is punished by disaster. …The concept of destiny leaves us with a mystery, but it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.

Stalled as it may seem at times, our work has a meaning and an order. If we care about what we do, if it is real to us, and if we approach it with discipline and surrender, it will germinate night and day — and cannot fail to blossom and surprise us.

You might also enjoy:

“Unleashing Ideas: A Fourfold Approach”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”

“Poverty, the Pulitzer, & the Beauty of Letting Go“

My London-based buddy Mark Fritz is turning into a bona fide business self-help guru.

I’m glad, because I personally witnessed Mark’s effectiveness on the job at the same Dilbert-sized company for two years. During our time together, he flourished while I struggled (the experience taught me, among other things, that competence is a function of fit between the person and an organization, not something inborn and unchangeable—but that’s another post for another time).

Since then, Mark’s worked all over the world: Japan, Singapore, Egypt, London, Holland, the U.K., and Italy. Mark’s no armchair guru; he’s successfully accomplished hundreds of difficult projects, while effectively managing and mentoring difficult people—both superstars and underperformers.

But what really knocks me out is his unshakable good cheer and humor. I’ve never met anyone who maintains such consistently high spirits amid situations that would crush the life from ordinary employees.

Now Mark has a couple of books out. The first one, called Time to Get Started, carried an intriguing paragraph entitled “Power of a Committed Decision.” Here’s my synopsis:

There is nothing more powerful in the world than a committed decision. Many people think they are making decisions, but unless there is a powerful commitment behind those decisions, they are not decisions, but preferences. Add the commitment to ensure your decisions are real decisions—not preferences.

“I always understood the power of a committed decision,” says Mark, “mostly because I’ve seen so many uncommitted decisions in corporate life! But three years ago, the true power of a committed decision became visible to me with my personal ‘committed decision’ to create a unique daily thought for my Web site.

“Now, creating a unique thought for each day would definitely take commitment, and I also knew I would need the motivation to start and the discipline to keep it up. What I needed were the two ingredients of a committed decision: 1) a “Why” to generate motivation, and 2) a ‘No Alternative’ to create the discipline to follow through.

“The ‘Why?’ was built by viewing the sum of my daily thoughts (over many years) as my legacy—something I can leave behind when I leave this world. This made the “Why” a powerful reason to act. Second, I needed the discipline to make sure I would do it on a daily basis and not miss a single day. This is where “No Alternative” became important. I began to make the daily thoughts more visible by sending an e-mail of the past week’s material to people who found it interesting to read. This way, I had “No Alternative” but to keep it up—or disappoint readers.”

So, if like me, you sometimes find yourself wondering why your decisions, well … don’t actually decide anything, give Mark’s advice a try. And make this year’s decisions stick.

You may also enjoy:

“Daunting Task? Learn to Whip It”

“Three Questions Seekers Must Ask Themselves”

“Trust Thyself“

In my school days I was the painfully reticent kid in the back of the class who paid attention, behaved himself, and made the honor roll every quarter, but would never ever raise his hand or volunteer to speak in front of the other kids. When called upon I would either turn catatonic or talk with a doubt-ridden quiver.

Partly it was natural shyness that paralyzed me. Yet in school theater productions I strutted the stage without fear, happily performing to packed auditoriums. What accounted for my contradictory nature? Simple. While acting in a play, I could rely upon a script. I didn’t have to venture my own thoughts or guesses. Speaking in class, however, I risked saying something silly or giving the wrong answer. In class, I was vulnerable to mistakes — and mistakes are a shameful thing. Or so we’re led to believe.

Ours is a success-or-failure culture. We covet seemingly flawless wins, and avoid at all costs missteps, goofs, or even well-intentioned blunders. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed back in 1841:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.

Success — early, gracefully, and infallibly achieved — is the main idea; God help us if we cannot leap clear over all errors to attain it. We learn these attitudes early: Answer right and go to the front of the class. Ace the test and advance to the top of the grade-sheet. Make no mistakes and excel. But err and you will fail to advance — or fail, period.

Absurd, of course. Human beings cannot learn without making mistakes. We ought to know this, even in youth. The old cliché, Nothing ventured nothing gained, dances in our brains from an early age — yes, but being a cliché it fails to penetrate. And so throughout our lives we must teach and re-teach ourselves that mistakes are natural and even useful – not shameful.

Personally, the realities of adulthood re-teach me this lesson often — as does my writing process, which necessitates engaging mistakes and building successes upon them.

In the wonderful book The Conversations, legendary film editor Walter Murch puts it beautifully:

Truly great lessons can be learned from work that fails, but failure is stamped on the product and there’s a tendency to think everything you did was wrong, and you vow not to go there again. You have to resist this impulse, just as you have to resist the syrupy entanglements of success. These are, almost, religious issues. What the world thinks is success, what it rewards, has sometimes very little to do with the essential content of the work and how it relates to the author and his own development.

Like Emerson, Murch speaks here to our success-or-failure culture, but with different nuance. We tend not to credit the value — indeed the necessity — of the mistake, the attempt, the unprofitable or impractical venture, and consequently we often do not understand the real nature of success when we see it.

In his wonderful book Blue Highways William Least-Heat Moon notes:

The annals of scientific discovery are full of errors that opened new worlds: Bell was working on an apparatus to aid the deaf when he invented the telephone; Edison was tinkering with the telephone when he invented the phonograph. If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.

Thomas Edison faced many a doomed venture, including a scheme to build houses of poured concrete all over America. I recently heard it said, however, that his outlook was always: I never fail, I just find out a thousand ways that something doesn’t work.

My poet Rilke puts it more boldly: “The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.”

I can’t help feeling Rilke is right. Meditating upon the subject long enough, I begin to see that worthy mistakes — and not easy successes — are in fact what life is all about. What a freeing thought!

The writer Paul Zweig wrote, “Making our wish, we make ourselves. We exist in the time between the wish and its fulfillment.” For today’s post I paraphrase Zweig thusly:

Making our attempt, we make ourselves. We exist in the time between the attempt and the attainment.

So throw off timidity, young person at school, and raise your hand! It’s your mistakes that will lead you to the front of the class. Onward through worthy errors. Fail, grow, live, and keep on venturing.

You might also enjoy:

“Measures of Success”

“You’ve Got to Jump”

“Redefining Rejection“