On Spaghetti Western Awareness Systems and Creative Hardship
My blog post about our new amazing San Francisco studio space and echoes and ambient awareness and spaghetti westerns and such on the Adaptive Path blog was never intended to be a blog post. It started as a brain dump at 750 Words, which developed an emergent purpose and before I knew it spawned 1,200 words.
That told me something was there. I obviously had something to say. So the next day I threw down another cool grand in verbiage, hoping some themes would coalesce out of my brain haze. Three mediocre drafts after that and more than 6,000 words later, I finally started pulling together a pre-rough draft for the next Adaptive Path newsletter.
A newsletter is like a blog post, but has more of a Purpose. It makes a better Point. It had a Takeaway message, gives the author an opportunity to Deeply Explore a particular idea, presents a long-form medium to share a single well-developed Thought. But my final product, weighing in just shy of 1,000 words after eight hours of writing and no less than thirteen drafts, was a castrated wisp of my original idea.
I shared it around Adaptive Path, hoping no one would notice it wasn’t very good. They did, of course, because they’re all fucking smart like that. They helped me understand that in all honesty I had not written a good newsletter, but perhaps a good blog post.
Somewhere in there I committed a great creative fallacy, one that I believe we all fall victim to on occasion. As a culture, we like to assume there is a tight coupling between level of effort and quality of return. We celebrate those who sacrifice everything in pursuit of their work, their passion. Those who wake up early, put in long-ass days inventing something great, those who toil and ultimately reap the rewards of their efforts, man if we don’t ever get off on that stuff. Suffering is the matter from which success is made.
We assume there’s a relationship between hardship and reward, effort and effectiveness, pain and greatness. And while overall this may be true, there are cases where it is utter, destructive bullshit.
There is only the faintest, loosest coupling between level of effort and quality of output. I agonized, suffered over that newsletter for more hours than would be proper, writing and whittling and editing and tearing my goddamn hair out. No matter what I did the words all felt dry and wrong, like ashes in my mouth, like those shitty wooden spoons that came with those ice cream cups you got as a kid.
Writing that thing was painful, utterly painful, in stark contrast to many of the other things I’ve written over the last year, which have flowed effortlessly. Some of my dashed-off work has been cited in articles for Harvard Business Review. Today’s tripe? Despite the agony that went into it, it probably has a shelf-life in tune with sun-dried mayonnaise.
I guess what I learned from this is that if something feels wrong, if it feels like pulling teeth, perhaps you are indeed doing it wrong. Ambience and physicality and our new studio space are all topics that I am super passionate about. Indeed, I must care, given I was able to throw down 6,000 words of pre-writing with nary a fart’s worth of effort. But slashing and burning those words into a coherent article that still sounded like it had a pair of balls to its name, that act proved impossible, despite the toil and sweat and frustration that went into it.
I’m with everyone else that I wish the harder the work, the harder you work, the more glorious the return. Universally. I wish you could just, always, muscle through this stuff, and when it’s turning out bad, just throw the hammer down hard enough to make it good. But, there is only correlation, not causation, between level of effort and quality of output. There is only the loosest of coupling between the two.
And yet, as humans our lives are spent trying to pixelate a fractal planet, breaking down all its myriad complexities into discrete, independent, irreducible units. At the scale of writing an individual newsletter, yes, the spaghetti western blog post was a deadweight loss.
But, take a wide-angle view, for a moment. Consider that I will be authoring thousands and thousands of things over the course of my lifetime. Some of them will be good and most of them will be bad, but all of them will lead to some incremental level of increased lucidity about my craft, about the ideas I’m trying to convey.
This painful process and its sorry results may have resulted in a truly weak-sauce blog post, but it also yielded some desperately valuable reflections.
Namely, these.
