Time, Discipline, and Mentors
'How to Do Great Work' Pt. 2
I broke from this series to report on 3 days at Pane e Circo, in Halifax. On the importance of the cafe scene and a dynamic small business environment for a place to be truly livable. On people spending time, wasting time, and enjoying time - rarely alone - because aloneness (at least the chronic kind) isn’t good for us. It’s the myth of the digital nomad.
Back to regularly scheduled programming - a series on how to do great work that started with this post.
The First Step to Doing Great Work
This newsletter project began 43 essays ago - in the summer of 2023 - because I had a hunch that people weren’t doing so well. We had just emerged (or seemingly emerged) out of the confusion and hostility of the COVID19 pandemic, and something felt wrong - we just couldn’t say
We pick it back up with a combination of time, discipline, and mentors.
Time is a conundrum and it’s becoming more of one as - rather ironically - the tools that could and should give us more time become the very things that all but ensure we have none of it if we’re not disciplined. The original promise of technology - that it would give us more time, not less, has proven exactly false and we’re all beginning to update our thinking on this.
In the first newsletter I made the argument - one Chris Arnade made before me - that culture’s can be path dependent. They don’t know exactly why they do what they do, but they do it anyway, even if it’s not in the best interest of the average person.
It’s cultural accelerationism - the idea that we don’t know why we’re doing what we’re doing, we don’t know where we’re headed, and we don’t even know if we actually want this, but we can’t figure out how to stop and so we get up and do it every day even if it’s bad for us.
Examples are everywhere and can no longer be ignored. Loneliness, deaths of despair, addiction, unhappiness at work, unsustainable birth rate1, and the inability to pry ourselves away from the screens - without asking - does anybody actually want this? Is this what we really want for ourselves and for our children? Why are we doing this and why is the rate of change of these things so alarming? We want to press the breaks - in our own lives and in our built environment (politics and planning) - but we don’t know how and we can hardly articulate what exactly feels so wrong about it.
One good first track is dealing with the curious case of time.
Stutz would say that being in right relationship with time means you honour it and allow it to work with you. Pressfield would say a recognition of time and your limitedness is what allows the muse to make her entrance. Oliver Burkeman would call this the limit-embracing life, and even the highly practical Jocko Willink says that Discipline = Freedom.
For us moderns - especially from a culture obsessed with the individual and individual gain - structure, discipline, ritual, and routine are the death of spontaneity and a life of excitement. In reality they are all critical ways in which we engage with time and with each other.
“I know what you’re thinking because I’ve heard it said many times, “But if I structure my time, I’ll lose my freedom.” The truth is the exact opposite. When you honor time, your freedom expands.” - Stutz
This makes doing our good work even harder because we are confronted by constant distraction. The tools that once promised us the gift of time are the very tools that take all of it. We can’t possibly keep up with all of the things we could do and so we become unable to do the thing we should do.
Try this. Pick one thing you want to accomplish. Commit to a time, every day that you’ll work on whatever this thing is. For me it’s writing my new book. I get up and I write. Same time, same place, same duration, no excuses. In reality the actual time doesn’t matter. The commitment does. Father Time rewards your discipline. - Stutz
Discipline = Freedom
Discipline - joyful rhythm - is the only way to do your work and do it well over a long period of time.
“You don’t just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals.” - Graham
Life is unpredictable and as much as you’d like to imagine each day will go precisely as it means to, it won’t. It never will. Life has to be more fluid than that if you’re going to do your work and enjoy the process. I am among the ranks of people who have caught themselves wishing this wasn’t true, but it is true, and so it’s high time you and I make peace with that.
Stutz and Graham agree that you can set the foundation for this acceptance by simply booking yourself the time you need to do good, solid, uninterrupted work, ideally at the same time each day. Especially if the work involves craft because craft demands consistency.
I struggle with this on a weekly basis because I like to do my work at my local, surrounded by others like me, drinking, reading, talking, and sitting by the winter fire. That naturally leads to interruption - sometimes a whole mornings worth of it - and you either accept that or you don’t. If you don’t, you might as well not even be there because you will secretly be stewing in your inability to not do the thing you wanted to. Either be there and accept it, or don’t be there at all.
“From social drinking, to smoking, to hugging, to simply existing in the moment, without guilt, because we humans are a social animal and we need, to our core, to be close to others. And if you are going to emphasize that, and make it central to who you are, then it’s even more fulfilling, if you do the best you can to make it as comfortable, and as enjoyable, as possible.
To turn providing the necessities of life into an art, because at it’s core, art is about elevating life above the mundane, even if only briefly.” - Arnade
Even in the face of distraction, it is always better to do something with the time you have than to do nothing at all because you don’t have the time you want. In fact that is the entire difference between making something and making nothing, even if the something takes longer than you expect.
“Writing a page a day doesn’t sound like much, but if you do it every day you’ll write a book a year…People who do great things don’t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing".”
5 Year Minimums and Being Yourself
I like Stewart Brand’s philosophy that a good project takes at least 5 years. It takes that long because you don’t know what it is until that much time has passed. You could be on the cusp of exponential growth, but all you can see is the 0.0 to 1.1 period where growth looks slow. This is simply the engines being warmed up for take off, and so if you quit at year 2.5 or 4, you will have missed the rewards or the knowledge gained at 5 years. It’s okay to move on at 5, but not before. I don’t like platitudes either but this seems to be true on some kind of fundamental level. A founder I admire once told me it’s more like 7 years. It probably is.
“If you do work that compounds, you’ll get exponential growth…The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn’t…”
Many of the great compounding opportunities in life having nothing to do with the technical (although they certainly can). Often it’s the personal and practical things - like building a deep network of people, or a global audience of likeminded people. It is remarkable to see young, smart people like Dwarkesh grow, engage, and nurture a community overtime and it is some strange life arbitrage when it really takes hold. It’s as natural as breathing because we humans gravitate toward each other naturally2.
Kevin Kelly - a protege of Brand - and an equal as a mensch, believes that to do great work that compounds, over a long period of time, a strong rest ethic is a necessary ingredient. You can’t burn the candle at both ends for any meaningful amount of time - regardless of how much pop-culture tells you that you can. Burnout ends in sickness and sickness means doing your work is that much harder. Graham agrees.
“By letting your mind wander a little, you’ll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack.”
Whenever I feel like I’m approaching the exhaustion cliff, it’s often because I’m filling every waking moment with noise. Sometimes figuratively, in the form of frantic work and too much thinking, sometimes literally, with a podcast or YouTube show I’ve been meaning to watch. Filling the quiet or bored bits with information and more stuff is exactly the opposite of creating the space we all need to do something great. This requires discipline and it requires saying no, regardless of how interesting your next-up-queue is.
I’m as guilty as this as anyone and it’s a work in progress. Being a work in progress is the default state and, rather pleasantly when you think about, this process of figuring it out will last until we die. There is no figuring it out. There is no done. There is no avoiding the 3 constants of pain, uncertainty, and constant work. The dream - given that this ride never ends - is that the constant work part is your work because ‘…the reward for good work is more work.’ Think about it.
In our modern times this is really hard and, as crazy as it sounds, young people do need help being themselves. Having the courage to say I am this and it’s good to be this. In our modern (misguided?) project, that currently means being anyone you can possibly imagine being, and everyone has to accept it outright, never saying boo or asking obvious questions, because that might risk an individual having their feelings hurt, and in our culture the individual is of greater important than the collective.
A possible problem with telling our young people this is that, as Paul Kingsnorth has pointed out, ‘…they have no idea what that means.’ We no longer have the structure, archetypes, and mentors that we need to walk the path of life and so we get lost. This is not surprising.
Mentors and Making Contact with the Real World
If I was coaching a young me - let’s say in the important 18-23 period or so - I would tell him to simply put your unique work into the world and see what, and who, comes back. Put it out, regardless of if it’s perfection, and attract others like you, both peers that can do the work with you, and mentors that have done the work before you.
“Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them.”
This is a default optimistic position (like having lots of children) because it proves that doing good work matters in and of itself. Doing work - doing anything of meaning at all - is by it’s very nature an optimistic thing to do, because if you didn’t believe the world was default good, you wouldn’t do anything at all. Optimistic people attract collaborators and mentors like pollen attracts the hive.
It also gives you the best shot at doing the work you’re supposed to do - and thus that will be unique enough to you that you will attract the others. Finding the others is absolutely underrated - your unique band of merry wanderers, traversing the globe (the world is really small now) that resonate with what you’re making and vice versa. It’s a great joy to find these people and you ought to nurture these relationships instead of simply trying to fit in with pop culture. Especially because pop culture in the west seems to be a one-way-ticket-to-misery.
“Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape.”
If you think about this long enough it starts to feel true, simply because it’s obviously true. You are a mere conduit for your ideas. You don’t know where they come from, there isn’t an obvious place to look for them, and when the best work you’ve ever done springs out of you - you barely feel like you were there at all. In fact I’m now such a disciple of this that if you find yourself, and make peace there, you won’t be able to help BUT do your work.
You could take the Pressfield route and call this feeling or thing the muse. The interesting thing about the muse is it can only flow through your head, if your ass is in the seat. Daydreaming, procrastinating, trying to fit in, or talking about the work you will do at silly parties makes you invisible to the muse, and so naturally, you’ll never do it.
“This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.” - Pressfield
Mentors help give you the confidence to ship the work you’ve made. It isn’t real until you’ve published. It’s as good as non-existent until it makes contact with at least one other human, because that’s how you form community. We are the communal mammal - the most populous mammal on earth - and a community is more than one person. Communicate what you stand for, what you think, and why you think it, and if you’ve done this genuinely, you need not be concerned with the opinion of those who only criticize, but do nothing of their own. Don’t even check the comments or likes because both are irrelevant.
“When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.”
I would add - or by talking - to the above and there are places to go in the world where these kinds of discussions feel perfectly human. I recommend going there, even if it is just to be around other people, as an easy first step. Eventually you will gravitate toward others like you and you will make friends as a natural by-product of proximity. This is a learnable skill and if you feel like you can’t do it for some reason, you’re wrong. You can start right now.
We tell ourselves that we have to go along with whatever the culture serves us, but this just isn’t true. We’re naturally fearful of standing out or breaking the rules because there was a time in our not-so-distant past where this had real-world consequences for our survival. That isn’ true anymore, and with the 1,000 True Fans model in full effect, being you is actually perfectly reasonable, exciting, and fruitful. What you fear will happen is probably 5% of what will actually happen when you get to the other side.
There are rules here though - just not the rules you’re thinking of. The rules are defined by nature, not by the culture you’re currently in. It’s tempting to join the herd at every turn - it really is - but what we’re looking for here is our best work - our work that is most true. Graham and Greene both agree that returning to what lit you up as a child is the ideal starting point because that’s when you were most willing to express your true uniqueness, without fear of the consequences.
“Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before - in your childhood…- and couldn’t stop thinking about.”
You are a one-of-one, made by something other than yourself, and so the you that expressed itself as a child was the you that you couldn’t help but be - before the culture got it’s claws into you.
It’s okay if this is high-level, vague, and principled in the beginning. Eventually you will use the tools outlined here to drill-down, get to a frontier of specific knowledge, communicate on it as often as you can, until you’re some kind of authority on the topic and can help others understand it better.
I’ll give you an example - for me it was the question of why the world works the way it does and why people do the things they do. My core ability was writing and connecting with people one-on one. In the beginning what I did with this was vague and high-level - like pouring over maps, encyclopedias, and stories of the wider world beyond Atlantic Canada. Then it became less and less vague, becoming tangible things like internships abroad and wide-spread travel. Then came the first professional application of that sense of unbridled curiosity - the world of immigration, then it’s specific role in economic development, then to the world of entrepreneurship.
I’ve never lost my interest in people and place, I’ve never stopped writing, and I excel in my work - not because of any special talent (I’m very average and I easily could have been the do-nothing type) - but because it’s my work and I’ve accepted that this is who I am and this is what I must do.
You are completely capable of this and you should start right now.
“Being prolific is underrated…you’ll learn faster and have more fun by trying stuff. So err on the side of starting.”
How to start is next week.
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All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.
See you on the road.
What I believe is perhaps the defining thing of our time.
An obvious sign of sickness and imbalance is when you don’t do this naturally. I’ve been there before and if you want to talk about that you can DM me here.