Amongst other things, Nic is a writer and director for theatre and film...
... so doesn't have a lot of time to update this site.
"Insanity", said Einstein, "is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". (But he also said that "a wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat"¹. He had crazy hair. You have to respect that.)
Meanwhile someone else maintained that "some [...] give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before". That was Herodotus. Minimal research reveals flaccid hair but, by the Gods, what a beard!
Sometimes we spend years with a brilliant idea, trying to make it happen. Film-makers want their scripts produced. Businessmen seek finance for their startups. Novelists are rejected, notoriously, again and again. History's greatest artists died penniless or mad or, if they were lucky, both.
There are two explanations for making no headway. Since we are optimists, we will assume the positive.
But after countless defeats, the heart becomes heavy and the will bruised. It's tempting to throw everything away and start a different project.
So which is it to be? Know when you are beaten and quit while you're ahead? Or apply sheer, bloody-minded, even irrational determination to advance towards your goals?
Why, yes. Both.
Perseverance in the face of failure without adaptation must doom one to further failure; the blind repetition of the same actions clearly suggests a detachment from reality. It behooves us to build in discrete points of reflection along the way, to provide us feedback. Are we advancing in the right direction? Are our efforts producing expected results? Triple A: we should assess, analyse and adjust. Yet intrusive self-analysis in the moment of creation stultifies. The best stuff happens mid-flow: mindlessly, totally committed and focused upon the act and not the outcome.
We advance towards goals not in straight lines but in a haze of probing and testing, sending a shower of intent towards our target. In one's creative endeavours, one tries to cultivate the shoshin of an archer the better to cultivate an attitude that permits flow and novelty.
Perhaps the trick is to become better at both our absorption in creative acts and also our dispassionate, logical analysis of their outcomes. The more we separate the two states, the better we can commit ourselves to them. By detaching ourselves from the emotional entanglement with our creative acts we can judge their worth with dispassionate honesty; and by abandoning all of the critical aspects of ourselves that serve us so well in the reflective, editorial phase we can create with greater freedom.
Both of these phases can be served by giving up the trappings of each before moving on to the other.
If we give up completely, we also abandon our assumptions, our chreodes, perhaps even what Robert Anton Wilson called our reality tunnel. We have to give up really effectively to abandon that. But once we've done so, we can see with fresh eyes; eyes that are freed from attachment to self-censorship and self-criticism.
Then, after the ecstasy of abandon, we can give up self-delusion and assess in sobriety and with honesty our efforts and their effectiveness, in order to orient ourselves for our next leap.
Give up regularly. Give up when you've finished the first draft and before you begin your revisions. Give up once you've wrapped the shoot and before you get into the edit suite. Give up between the architecture and the coding. Get into the habit of giving up every night just before you sleep.
By preventing these two aspects of our work from interfering with each other, we are free to lose ourselves in the absorption of both work and its evaluation, and then we can live up to another quote: one of the truest, bravest and most challenging:
"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start." ³
Feedback: What's your secret to perseverance? How do you monitor your progress? Triple A? Other tips?
¹ "A wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." Attrib. Einstein. (Actually, it is unlikely that he said this; instead more probably it was ascribed to him. But why let the truth get in the way of a good story?)
² Herodotus, The Histories.
³ Bukowsi, Factotum.
