The way you do it is the way you do it

Navigating the obstacle of self-criticism

I return every couple of years to re-read Robert Pirsig’s amazing and difficult book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My relationship to the novel is complex and probably unhealthy, but it has also been one of the touchstones of my development as a thinker.

One of the most important lessons I got from the book, early on, is the simple fact that different people think differently when they approach facts, problems, and solutions. In Pirsig’s estimation, some folks are analytic thinkers— that is, they look at a problem and chunk it down into component parts, and deal with the parts in sequences. Other folks are romantic thinkers—that is, they look at the whole, and make adjustments to aspects of the whole thing as an organic process. They do not dissect in the way an analytic thinker does.

Neither approach is superior, says Pirsig, but a whole lot of effort gets wasted because in a team or a project the participants never take a moment to figure out if the approaches being taken at various steps are compatible. Thus a lot of friction and wasted energy arises, simply because the participants are rowing in different directions but don’t know it

I understood this on a group-dynamic level, but it took many years to figure out that in most cases I was guilty of doing this to myself.

I can think of dozens, maybe hundreds of times through the years when I would get started on a project with excitement and good momentum, and then a ways in, something would feel off, and then the energy would flag, and eventually, I would get discouraged and abandon the effort.

What was happening? What was going wrong?

I came to realize that I had a little script that would start to play in my head when I was at work on something. I’d be puttering along with a kind of improvisation toward the project (a classic romantic maneuver) and the voice in my head would start criticizing the work. I need to have an outline, I’d think to myself. I’m not doing this right.

It took me a long time to get to the bottom of that “I’m not doing this right” script, but I can tell you it has been the source of endless heartache and frustration for me. Again and again I managed to convince myself at some point that the results of my work would be illegitimate, somehow, if I didn’t get the work done in the right way.

Inevitably, that ‘right way’ was a different manner than the way I was doing it.

As a result, I would get so hung up on this script, that I would pull effort and energy away from getting the thing in front of me done, and put that energy instead into troubleshooting the process by which I was trying to get it done.

Now I want to be clear: I am very much in favor of tweaking the process. I go back to the audio I edited two and three years ago and I cringe, because I am so much better now, and the quality I was able to produce has improved so much. That all comes from a rigorous audit and a commitment to the revision of processes that don’t work.

The point is that there is a time and a place for that—but it’s not when you are in the thick of getting something done. There are very few cases where stopping forward momentum in mid-work to tinker with the process is really needed, and every one of these conditions is predicated on some sort of catastrophic failure. That is, you can no longer work on the thing in front of you because of some obstacle that must be dealt with immediately.

But I’m not talking about this kind of after-action audit toward continued improvement. What I mean here are those times when you, yourself, become the obstacle to your progress.

With writing, it most often comes to me in the notion that somehow these are the wrong words. That is, I have the idea in place, but the voice in my head tells me that folks would prefer I said those ideas in a completely different way. My language should be more precise, or more poetic, or my illustrations should be exchanged for ones that are more simple, or more sophisticated, or more exotic.

You begin to see the pattern: o matter what I do, the trap in my skull convinces me that that work I’ve got done, right here, is useless. It’s the work I imagine to be over there that is the real work, the quality work, the good work.

Sometimes I approach a problem like an analytic thinker (break it down and dissect it). A lot of my audio work is like that. Other times I approach my work like a romantic thinker (big picture and organic growth). Most of my writing is like that.

It took me a long time to figure out that, when I locked into one mode, I would very often start beating myself up for not being in the other mode.

So much energy has been wasted over the years with me doing this to myself and not realizing I was doing it. So much time was spent spinning my wheels (and overthinking projects and overwriting and over-revising manuscripts) because I was convinced I was doing everything the wrong way or in the wrong sequence.

These days, I try and be more gentle with myself. I have the advantage of being able to look back over a substantial body of work now: hundreds of hours of audio produced, and nearly a million words written. Over time, like drops of water on a stone, that continuous flow of productivity has softened some of my rigidity.

On the best days, when I am most in my zone, I am able to remind my internal critic that how I work is how I work, and stuff seems to get done most of the time. I may not be doing it ‘right,’ by the standards of my internal critic, but maybe he should back off a bit, or pick up a wrench or a shovel and make himself useful.

After all, there’s work to be done.

Maybe you have had similar experiences to me with your own creative process. If so, I hope my experience gives you some footholds towards hope. Keep showing up, and keep doing the work that only you can do.

Courage.

If you enjoy these reflections, I hope you will share them with folks who need them. And if what I have said stirs you to thought, I hope you will leave a comment. Those links are below. Thank you always for your time.