Still thinking about the conditions needed to do your best stuff.

I find myself going in cycles of high productivity and low productivity, and am wondering if that cycle is necessary or if there are ways to avoid the low productivity part of the cycle.  One part of me says that the low part of the cycle is necessary as a way to rejuvenate between periods of high productivity.  One reason for weekends.  But through practice I’ve learned that my high/low productivity cycle rarely adheres to the 7-day week. Hence all the books, right?

I have long had a funny theory about the nature of passion. My theory is that passion is merely caring about something more than it’s worth. It makes sense that passion is not rational, because otherwise rationality wouldn’t have the stigma of being somewhat passionless. Right?

If passion is, at its core, a mistaken accumulation of caring, you would think that it’s something that should be corrected. Rather than take that route, I think that the fact that passion is rationally a mistake says more against rationality than it does about passion.

I justify this because there are a few passions that we all have which are completely irrational, and yet are core to our sense of selves.  For example, the desire to live.  We all know that in the long run, we’re going to die.  That the things we are striving for now will all have to be given back at the grave.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have to care about life.  We should have a strong passion for the short lives we’ve been given, and this is the same spring from which we get most of our passions.  As a way of fighting back against the futility of our own mortality.

Back to the high/low productivity cycle. One could argue that the low part of the cycle is about resting. But the truth is that the low part of the cycle, at least in my case, is about 10x more stressful than the high part of the cycle. During the low part, I endlessly pace back and forth and wonder why I’m not getting as much done. Wondering where my motivation has gone. Question my own ability to produce, or be creative.

In a way, the low part of the cycle is like death. It feeds my fear of incompetence, and throws log after log into the fire for the need to produce.  Then, when some threshold is met, and I’m able to pull my head around and get working again, that accumulation of energy, fear, fight, and will burns brightly during the high productivity part of the cycle.  It makes me care more than I should about working, about creating, about building.

But of course, passion is exhausting, and that fire eventually runs out.  Motivation without passion is about caring about things exactly as much as they should be cared about. And maybe that isn’t enough to really make significant progress. And self-doubt comes in, and the low productivity part of the cycle begins.

If this is true, then rationalizing it out as I have could be dangerous. If I start thinking about the low productivity part of the cycle as being a necessary part of the creative cycle, I might become too lax during it and not generate the same level of panic, fear, and passion that is required to launch me into the high productivity part of the cycle.

And this is where I usually end up, after having thought about it too much.

How many years does it take to find your stuff? That stuff that feels like it’s yours, that’s an expression of your true self and as much a part of you as your personality. It’s what you do, it’s what you were meant to do.

Once you find your stuff, be it a job, a creative pursuit, or a role in life, how often will you do it? How interested are you in doing it? How high of a priority does it have over all the other stuff that you do, that isn’t yours? The stuff you do because you have to, or because it’s easy, or because it helps pay the bills, or because it’s what others expect from you.

Once you find your stuff, how do you get good at it? Is it important enough to get good at? Do you have enough time to get good at it?

What about the best stuff that you do… how often does that see the light of day? How often do you do your stuff in such a way that it truly feels like it’s the best stuff you’ve done?

How did you get there? How can you stay there?