Until it sticks… Turning up every day…
Engineers can learn a lot from artists. Quality work over a career doesn't come from chasing short term fires but rather the discipline of turning up every day and just starting.
Following up last weeks theme of the importance in a learning culture of learning from your mistakes this week I would like to look at the related concept of long term process and systems over short term opportunism.
This theme is common amongst many in the artistic community from Neil Gaiman’s wonderful commencement speech — “Make good art”, Steven Pressfield’s “the war of art” which introduces the great concept of “the resistance”. It is a theme I see has many parallels to the work of an engineer and being successful over the long term. Are you chasing the short term fires and noise in your role or deliberately plotting a longer arc?
Two blogs I follow that frequently come back to this theme are that of Austin Kleon and Seth Godin. They write how important it is as a creative professional to turn up every day and do the work, that is the process that you follow. People who sit around waiting for inspiration to strike have it backwards, it is only through doing your craft repeatably, frequently badly, that you hone your skills and eventually create something to be proud of. Writes Kleon:
You need to do a lot of work to make sure something is good — most of it will be shit!
You realize, that just like everything else, 90% of your work is mediocre at best. Most of it is crap. Still, there’s that 10%. (Is the binder 90% empty, or 10% full?) If 9 out of 10 poems are mediocre, there’s that 1 left that’s pretty good. And you couldn’t have gotten that 1 poem without those 9 bad ones. One poem that’s pretty good is better than no poem at all. Better than nothing.
Whether an artist or an engineer, our first attempt does not have to be perfect, expect that it will be far from the final product, but it is only through starting, iterating and building up your body of work do you get the skills and the luck to strike success. Seth is fond of saying:
Show me someone with a lot of good ideas, and I’ll show you someone who has even more bad ideas.
These are the people I think we should be looking to for inspiration —
the people who every day of their lives, they get up do the work, regardless of success or failure.
Because you don’t know if or when success will come for you. The best thing you can do if you want to be an artist is to set up your life in such a way that you’re sort of insulated from success or failure…there’s no tomorrow, there’s no chance of success, there’s no chance of failure, there’s just the day, and what you can do with it.
Building a body of work… is all about the slow accumulation of a day after day’s worth of effort over time. Writing a page each day doesn’t seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel. You do it your whole life, and you have a career.
So what to do? Seth has some advice for us all:
Merely beginning.
With inadequate preparation, because you will never be fully prepared.
With imperfect odds of success, because the odds are never perfect.
Begin. With the humility of someone who’s not sure, and the excitement of someone who knows that it’s possible.
