Why Great Artists Struggle With Self-Discipline

I was aware of it at the time but only in retrospect do I look back and it's like wow the destructiveness of that on my own marriage and relationship was profound don't say a word stay uncommon amongst uncommon people don't stop when you're tired stop when you're done I've been having dreams dreams make good stories but everything important happens when we're awake cuz that's when we make things happen you got to be where in tune in alignment now make the same mistake if you've been watching TV scrolling Instagram for your morning coffee or even minding your own business trying to enjoy a quiet beer at an outdoor bar near the new bassi Power Station you will have overheard the voices and rhetoric that tell you self-discipline is the ultimate answer to all your problems the biggest poison in US is regret can't get your work seen by that Mentor you need reach the Excellence you've been looking for in your new mixtape or find a suitable mate and have a shot at that idea of a love that you've been trying to find all your life forget complaining it's your fault and with a few easy steps and a little bit more applied willpower you'll easily put all these problems to bed are you not embarrassed get a hold of yourself literally you guys are lazy but then you guys complain that you don't have the life that you want don't complain that in this video we're going to take a bit of a journey through this topic looking at some useful and practical strategies that we can pull from that world of self discipline let's go beyond what we've done before and make something new people haven't seen and also pointing out a few of the holes in these strict and simple stories that we're going to want to avoid you're are a great warrior Anakin but you need to prove yourself as you're undoing maybe a being over careful here but I wanted to mention that the grounds that we're about to walk into can be a little bit sensitive or sticky I wanted to say that the examples I've used to represent the voice of self-discipline in this video are not chosen because I think they are necessarily the worst or most problematic voices in that space it's actually something like the direct opposite where the people that I've chosen to represent that voice are actually very direct examples of the specific discussion on these themes of self-control or self-discipline and unlike some of the other people who operate in that space these voices that I've chosen Don't Stray so far off into the political or other messy grounds that this video is not about you know I'm just not big on that stuff even today I'm just not a big fan of it man I'm a I'm a big uh introvert I get a lot of my strength from being introverted it's about having the discipline to control your ego so so your ego doesn't get out of hand and control you it's about treating people the way you would want to be treated in those clips we can hear voices that encapsulate the self-awareness and softness of tone that allow them to come across as supportive but some of the upcoming discussion in this video is based on a pretty simple distinction here the difference between what is said by Voices in some content especially in the long form and what is actually heard or interpreted by a certain subsection of the audience how some of this content is digested by the internet and what the people who come to it are actually finding engaging or comforting within the voices get a David come on yeah there you go there you go energy let it out 7even eight in order to most fairly navigate these topics here I wanted to textualized my opinions on these issues by starting with a little about my own personal background that means that a lot of the examples I use in the early part of this video are focused on a particular type of male experience my understanding is that similar counterparts exist that engage different types of people in similar possibly problematic or limited narratives I greatly value all of the viewers here and I'm proud that have tried to work to create a community where not everyone looks exactly like me and if you do have other opinions and experience es I hope you feel comfortable to support others in this community by dropping a thought or piece of your own specific story or perspective below thanks to everyone who's been so active in the comments over the past couple of videos and understand that I really do value what you're adding to the pages on this channel right okay enough said on that I'll shut up now and jump into the video but yeah thanks for listening well I'll meet you at that little Bary near su's house about 6 that way I can tell you how she took it part one how to be lonely sad and deeply afraid you just going to sit here yeah yeah I'm tired I fall in love too [Music] easily throughout my own life I think I'd recognize that I've always been relatively impressionable and easily led by exciting new things when I was a kid that was probably a new sport or hobby that I'd see on TV and want to try but going into adulthood it's manifested more in an openness to ideas around transformation self-help or gathering up a lot of online mentors I did pretty poorly at school and I didn't really learn a lot or perhaps even more importantly pick up many skills or strategies that made me feel able to learn things and have success in those environments even when I got into higher education I remember that some of my tutors were having specific conversations with me about how my emails and essays really didn't have anything of the level of communication that was necessary this is not a sad story at all and I'm not blaming anyone else for my inability to learn at that earlier stage but yeah when it comes to making things and figuring stuff out a lot of of the tools and strategies that I've learned have come from mentors in that online space here's where you can see my background that's led to me picking up all these creative advice interviews in the past and it's also where I encountered a lot of the ideas around narratives of self-discipline and the techniques I could use to get what I wanted done there was a period in my late 20s specifically where I started to build up a lot of the habits that have informed my work since this is where where while surrounding myself with a lot of those narratives around self-discipline I started doing some of the classic stuff waking up at 4: in the morning to get a couple of hours working taking jobs where I'd mostly be alone so I could record my writing and other little creative bits into voice notes while I worked and just generally becoming more obsessive and itchy about moving whatever my own creative project was at the time forward okay hey um yeah so hey guys checking back in it was energizing to always hold on to something for myself and although I was jumping around a lot in terms of the work that I was doing in my own time I was definitely starting to gather a lot of momentum but in all these voices and stories of self-discipline self-realization and self- ownership there was something else coming along too where the artists and creatives that I would listen to before spoke about the complexity of their practice and the in ability to control every aspect of it I'm absolutely allowed not to do anything I'm allowed to sit at my desk I'm allowed to stare out at the world I'm allowed to do anything I like as long as it isn't anything these new mentors were far more prescriptive and would offer more direct answers this is a time when I realized I was listening to less music and audio books and veering off instead to plug in into these really direct and prescriptive voices it's about facing your fears takes discipline to face your fears so you can conquer them at the back end of my 20s and early 30s I had a bit of a period of breakdown and ran into some decently worrying panic attacks now I see this in a variety of ways but one way that I understand it is that my identity had become so focused on control and these routines that I developed in order to regulate myself that I'd slowly lost the ability to deal with the regular pressures and uncertainties of an actual real human experience your life's like the movie screen messed up if you know what I mean 30 was supposed to be a stable year what I'm trying to say here is that something about this disciplined and controlled way that I was trying to see my life had got a little bit out of hand but these stories were helping me in my work so what exactly was it about them that had led me to this space part two for those who sleep with headphones [Music] in [Music] why do you build me I was listening to a podcast the other day by a video essayist alike called FD signifier and he in his guests were discussing parenting and how they speak to their kids now I'm paraphrasing a bit here but the guest spoke of how when he finds his child encountering a piece of toxic or possibly divisive material he asks kid a simple question you know why why does this excit I love to ask questions you know what I mean and if they can't get to the answer yo just ask mad questions why does this excite you now as soon as I heard that question it really hit me in terms of the themes of this video and it seems to me to be a key question that every individual who is creating or consuming art TV any kind of content in 2024 can find really useful when you just watch that clip online read that book about self- ownership or had the idea to promote some of your music in a certain way what exactly was it about that idea that Drew you in and excited you I'm not trying to say that these intentions are always going to be negative or bad in some way but doing those consistent checks around why we're engaging in a project or a piece of material and exactly what we're being gratified by when we watch that online video is a great way to try and parent ourselves and keep our eles on that Solid Ground one thing in life this applies to everything in life anytime you move from being normal to trying to be exceptional people aren't going to like that those normal people it makes them feel like so they're going to judge you I wanted to jump into a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm where he tells us all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others when I think about this phrase it allows me an entry point to to discuss the simplification and possible toxicity that might be exciting Us in these narratives of self-control and self disipline you're powerful these stories tell us and with a few simple steps you have the ability to individualize yourself and Achieve exceptional things it's here within these stories that we can see some of the simple and possibly problematic ingredients that they include the stoic wise man is a man who has trained his soul trained his mind so that he is not afraid of apparent evils he's only afraid of real evil the stoic man is The Honorable philosopher the man who stands at his duty and is steadfast and serious-minded in the hero's journey an archetypal story structure on which 90% of the films and other media that surround us are based on the character faces a point of resistance that they must overcome they are offered a path of great meaning and Adventure but don't want to take it on at first I told my father I didn't want this either then with a few more story cogs moving they push themselves over that barrier and threshold and through struggle and determination fight through a host of trials and tribulations to emerge with a new and greater understanding is you doying with him PA has never killed a man [Music] now there is some truth in this story reminding us that a lot of the most exciting things that we can attain in life will often require some discomfort a push against fear and some kind of increased effort but the power of that story and how engaging it is can make it very dangerous too and when it's being sold to us through Hollywood online content or advertising that Journey can often lose the important Explorations that make it complex and true and instead in an effort to tell a simple story that grabs at the human psyche in a more instantaneously compelling way everything becomes stripped out in favor of the Baseline desires of power sovereignty money and individual exceptionalism here we go the last one to stop riding phones it's going to win $10,000 look this simple storytelling is what it is but it ain't what it ain't either and as artists or maybe just humans in general it's important to recognize the simplistic stories for what they are do this measurable activity show yourself to be strong enough to suffer through it a little and you can trade your weak and insecure existence for one defined by strength power and Leadership maybe but we have to sleep sometime agreed but nature set a limit on that as it did on eating and drinking and you're over the limit you've had more than enough of that but not of working there you're still below your quota you don't love yourself enough or you'd love your nature too and what it demands of you now don't get me wrong I do recognize that shoving yourself out of bed at 400 in the morning or pushing through some tough work session and realizing in a successful product at the end of it can bring more positive energy space and ownership or Independence into our lives for the most part my daytime my day job is a full-time 50 plus hours a week focus on my new company so then where do I make this Vlog where do I work on this Vlog I had to steal some hours here from sleep these hours otherwise from 10 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. would be sleep from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. that would be sleep time is the most precious resource for me right now in life this is the most valuable thing I have and that's why I'm so protective of my time so yes simple stories can give us simple controllable aims and programs that can help but if we get too caught up in these stories and form whole identities based on these simple control mechanisms the quality of our work is going to suffer and some of the work around investigating the root causes of what might be driving all this need for control or transformation in our lives can become pushed down and create a kind of growing blindness to some important and useful parts of our experience there your weapon's gone it's over your need for victory Anakin it blinds you part three a wealth of incentives for main characters I was talking to someone recently about the World building in video games in a video game like Zelda they told me whenever your character is looking at a certain view of the world in front of them only that single field of view is actually being rendered by the game engine I know it sounds kind of obvious when you think about it but nothing else in that fictional world actually exists in that moment other than what the character actually sees unlike the real world then the landscape of that game is entirely instrumental by which I mean everything inside it has been created in service of feeding that single perspective of the player I had a fiction teacher once who told me the same about reading books you need to remember she said there's nothing inside a novel that hasn't been put there without reason if there's a dog barking out a window at 4 in the morning that dog has been put there to serve the perspective of the reader and will carry some sort of significance to the story that's being told within the highly individualized and progressively digital experience that a lot of us are engaging in we can recognize the dangers of taking this main character energy into our lives in the real world I do wonder about like the amount of work you put in your dedication to your job at the time how that did affect your family and your home life and and essentially uh the consequences of working so much no my relationship with my wife was a big part of the narrative my relationship with my kids as far as me being a father was a big part of it and I think the social implications of that were as um impactful if not more than the sheer hours I was working and the implications of that were things like if Candace and I weren't in a good place to our marriage there's noing way she was going to like be chipper when I pointed a camera at her and by chipper I mean willing in any capacity I mean anything but her putting her hand over the lens saying turn that thing off so I you know I used to like avoid fights with her avoid arguments with her I very very deliberately used to quell any disagreements we'd have cuz I needed her for Content yeah and looking back crazy what a crazy thing that is yeah it's like I'm I'm disturbing the the way that the world should work because I need content yeah this experience of the world being built for you or everything in it being instrumental to your needs is a dream and idea that modern capitalism feeds us is good will you marry [Music] me when we're trying to engage in interesting and developed work that funnel is one that we most probably want to avoid at all costs toast when we make our worlds more linear and restrictive like this just like that computer game character our perspective becomes smaller and we close off our abilities for awareness and tapping into the deeper forms of emotional presence which can characterize powerful and effective forms of creative flow as creatives and just humans in general cultivating a wide and open point of view that tries to grow your awareness in terms of your understanding of the world and other people around you is going to be a necessary superpower is keeping your antenna up and paying attention to the things that are going around along mhm or going on in your life inside your body and outside you know you got to be aware in tune in alignment with nature and the things that are going on so you can not make the same [Music] [Music] mistak that open mind can allow you to come up with original takes make links between seemingly desperate material ideas and reflect in more truthful or full way about the world and your experience adversely then when we become too hemmed in on a single goal and rely on this main character energy or a purely instrumental way of viewing the world to inflate our ego and drive us forwards it can be hard to maintain the ability to engage in the more vulnerable and reflective practices that the really important work will require even in more complex games where freedom and creative thinking is pushed push as far as possible every problem that the player needs to overcome is underwritten by the promise that it's been designed to be achievable we can frame these problems as closed loop something that we know is in some way solvable by using the tools or information [Music] available but reality has not been designed by humans and many of the problems or Adventures that we might go on come with nothing like those same promises the novelists setting out to write their first book must sit with many uncertainties and problems that they don't know how to solve yet if there's an answer or how long that process might take so between the Martian and Artemis you know Martian was my first book Artemis was my second between them I was working on a completely unrelated book called jeck I got about a year into it and about 70,000 words for reference the Martians about 100,000 words and I realized that it sucked I couldn't strip it down or calm it down or anything to make it more reasonable so I I asked my um editor if I could have another year and then hit the big red reset button and write a completely different book which is what I did but there were a couple elements to Jack that I thought were really awesome and those those became Hail Mary which is a completely different book than je one writer said have taken on this more open loop problem that writing a novel is like driving through a foggy night with the headlights on you can see so far ahead and you can have that ability to keep driving but at the end of the day a lot of the territory that you're pushing into is full of unknowns and questions that are yet unanswered the creative at that stage then needs to be comfortable sitting in those open loop problems and accepting the level of discomfort that they might present when we go the other way and become smaller minded or prescriptive about our work in the end of the day the quality of that product is going to suffer and funny I've been thinking recently a lot about the difference between participating and contributing I was actually talking to to my friend Blake Mills about this the other day Blake was also playing with Joanie Mitchell at the Grammys which I was a couple days ago but the the first time we played both sides now we were all participating right but by the time we played it for the fifth or sixth time we were all contributing but it took that moment of time to to see a a space for yourself or or make a space for yourself and then and visualize how that would feel and extend your limit into that space and at first you know you're you're you're put you're you're you're along for the ride you're you're paying attention and then gradually you you learn how to be like there I am that's me or or and I can pull and I can push and then it starts to flow it's a beautiful feeling but I think there's a rush nowadays to feeling the need to contribute off the bat you know it's like hey find your voice and then make a record that's crazy to me because you have to make a bunch of Records in order to find your voice at all and you don't have to you don't have to come in blazingly contributive you know you can come in blazing ly open and and and um when when people say you know you have to just know what you're doing constantly and you have to come into the industry with a with a plan and all this stuff I didn't think about having a plan or the industry when I was starting I just thought about trying to find a way to make things that felt like they mattered to me there's creatives in all different forms of art who have made a career closing the loop around that artistic practice but chasing that path that they've made and trying to access that success around measurable knowable targets is only going to make our work massively derivative and struggle to fill that idea around making something that matters to us more open artistic practices often take longer to engage in and struggle to be justified within the short-term goals of measurable economic activity author Juno Diaz talks about teaching graduate students on a high- price College writing program these students would be paying tens of thousands of pounds to be in the the room and will come onto the course with a tight idea of the novel they wanted to workshop and execute at the end of it in the hope for publication this led to a closed process driven directly towards a pre- ascribed idea of success there's no way out [Music] Master admit you are beaten when outside reading was recommended to the students and other Pathways to explore their themes were suggested anything that fell out of the tight boundaries of this pre ascribed idea of the project was pushed back on and rejected the need for Speedy and linear growth in line with the measurable outcomes of that economic framework was overtaken the longer more explorative process of real artistic progression I think part of what's happening is that most folks you know they want to do the work but they're they're they they're not imagining what it's like to be on the receiving end of their work you know it's like I think that perhaps the most important stance if you're going to be a writer is to deeply imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end of your writing like you should write way lot less because writing is a great way never to have to imagine what you need to imagine to be really right you know if you could if you wrote a lot less read a lot more thought about it a lot more you'd be way more successful in his book The creative act Rick ruin sets out a pretty good philosophy for the need to approach creative work with a softer more complex and reverent attitude think of the universe as an eternal creative unfolding the world pulses with productive energy and everything that exists on this planet is driven by that energy just as trees grow flowers and fruits Humanity creates works of art the Golden Gate Bridge The White Album gica each of these is Humanity being true to itself as a hummingbird is true to Itself by building a nest a peach tree by bearing fruit and a nimbus cloud by producing rain here we see the creative act more as a journey towards remembering and opening up the inherent nature that lies buried within you catching ideas is uh very tricky it could happen tomorrow or it could happen next week or 5 years goes by so uh you have to stay alert and watchful uh but you never know when is going to happen sometimes on location scouting you can't find the thing that appeared in your head so you find the closest thing and then you work to make that even closer sometimes in location uh you find new things that give you new ideas and so that's part of the business of staying alert because many things come in that affect the final thing all along the the trip a practical tip that I've taken into my own process recently is creating more distance between the means of production of the work and the distribution simply put when I write the first draft of these scripts now do the research and try to encapsulate what I want to talk about in the videos I've started doing that freehand in a notebook as opposed to doing it directly on the computer this might seem like a small difference but I think it can have a huge effect on how the brain works and the final product that's produced if you look at a lot of modern apps or online platforms that are trying to entice creators into use them the systems that they're trying to build are vertically integrated by this I basically mean that every part of the creative process is held in one space and the Creator is surrounded by The Branding and the approach of that application from the Inception of the idea to the PO posting there can be a huge amount of power I think from pulling ourselves out of all that and going back to more analog methods of production where we're creating that distance away from the places that we might end up Distributing this work to invent instruments that don't exist invent sounds that don't exist for instance I work with a chap called CH Smith he's either a great sculptor or he's either a great musician and he builds these sculptures that you can either hit or you can bow like like a violin or a cello but then there's another part of it which is where it gets very complicated he has basically built himself in Northern California a house which is a musical instrument a lot of the sort of metal being excited in in in unconventional [Music] ways when I write my script straight into my computer or if I'm creating something directly in app or on an online platform then I'm creating an environment where my brain is going to be thinking a lot about the outcome of that piece as opposed to allowing it time to sit within a more free and exploratory production thinking about the formats that we use to make our work or distribute our work can be seen as choosing different games that we're going to play and I'm staring into space like a mannequin in clars I ain't panicking I ain't had a random change someone says why did it take 11 minutes why is the song so long I think fitting in the the the normal story arc of a film like beginning middle problem resolution end like that is okay yeah cool might take you 4 minutes might take you 3 minutes depending on the tempo of the song but adding the layers of like you said I guess intricacy and telling stories within stories giving you things that I guess towards the end of the song make you think I should have known this from the start and yeah I guess doing all of those things that make the story feel like you've heard something that is completely cohesive was definitely the challenge when I was growing up I would go to shows and I'll be in a crowd just like you guys and I I'd come back home I'd sit down in the keys and I would just mess around I come up with some ideas and this is how I come to songs so I might sit down and [Music] go I'm going to link a podcast in the description that I listened to recently which focused on the idea of always prioritizing craft and quality and how at the end of the day it's those aspects that are going to actually allow us to separate in the interview Cal Newport spoke about his ideas around slow productivity ity and how if we're actually trying to get to a place where we control our time control the production process and really have the freedom to push for the best quality of our work then we need to step back from a lot of the modern incentives around speed of creation and relying on those quick measurable outcomes to rate our own success Georgia O'Keefe as an example her productivity as an artist didn't really pick up until she began say you know what in the Summers I'm going with Alfred stiglet we're going to Lake George I'm just going to paint and be inspired and then I'll come back after the summer and finish the artwork and show them and do all the other sorts of stuff most productive years of her life by actually slowing down for a season every year her productivity exploded she became you know one of the most famous early modernists of that whole era of painting she wasn't part of the hustle culture there was no hustle culture that's the interesting thing so when you go back and study people producing things things of real value using their brain they were smart and they were dedicated and they worked really hard but they didn't hustle and they didn't work 10hour days day after day they didn't work all out year round they didn't push push push until this thing was done it was a more natural variation they had less on their plate at the same time and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality before we jump into the next section I just wanted to jump in here very quickly and say that I hope you can tell that I spent a lot of time and Care on this piece because topics like this deserve development and a sense of nuance in order to dig down into something that presents as truthful you can probably also understand that this isn't something I'd be comfortable putting a third party advert on so if you do value this more developed approach and want to support these longer projects as well as get access to audio versions of the videos and extra discussions and content you can help me build these out with the price of a coffee per month over on the patreon on your page substack come check it out if you think might be interested thanks for listening and yeah back to the video to build yourself a value system so we've talked about how creative work even in an industrialized setting cannot always be grinded through or controlled and will have stages where it's going to require a softer more exploratory approach to look at this more deeply I wanted to think about how creative discipline functions in that more industrialized framework and how we can jump from the simple idea of self-discipline to more Progressive and developed approaches around managing our projects there's a show on this Wednesday we don't even know what it is and like like even though that's the way we've always done it there's this little thing going oh you're screwed you're screwed and then I tried to get a diversion and play a little Xbox last night and a big ad for South Park came up on the Xbox and you know starting Wednesday and I was like just can't get away from it let's do this let's go till 11:30 trying to kick come up with something completely new okay then from 11:30 to 12:30 we'll pick which of these shows we're going to do then we'll come up with a scene for that and then we'll be done a whole another show within the world of large scale Industrial creative projects different departments and management systems are put in place workflow software Solutions are brought in and other expensive ways of trying to formalize collaboration and that creative process with the independent or small group of creatives the tasks to complete a project successfully are exactly the same we simply have to split our brains across multiple roles and responsibilities and create our own forms of prioritization and management structure in our heads so from there I guess it was a process of slow refinement I had a basic get sort of game engine renderer in place with physics and and and PBR and everything but it was a bit ugly and it had problems and it just it was so far I didn't realize at the time how far away it was from being ready to actually ship as a game I was trying to optimize things in a way that that just wasn't useful for what I ended up with I guess you know these trees they don't look great and and they were optimized for how they look now I've got trayes that have a lot more polygons I can't do what I was doing here as a way of rendering lots of fast trads so anyway it was all good learning experience and yeah it had to be done I guess most Studios have a storyboard department and all they do is storyboard um and then you'll have a character design department and all they do is character design and then they'll have a background design department and they'll all get a couple of days or 3 days or so to at least do their job everybody in here does all that and in one/ tenth of the time of normal Studio usually Simpsons and Family Guy those shows take like 8 to 10 months and we're doing it you know 6 days no one does an animated show like this new IPS are really hard they're hard because you don't know what's fun yet you're building new tech new AI establishing new characters new art all this you don't get to get that controller in your hand for like 6 months to a year you don't know you don't know what it is yet I remember like ago coming on the project and what what are the infector going to do like what are they going to do they're going to behave like this I'm like okay we're like trying to imagine what's going to happen fast forward like 4 months they don't do that at all cuz it didn't work obviously a lot of the difference between these large commercial projects and our own is going to be the money it's easy to place negativity around the relationship between commercial concerns and the creative process but if we push those simplistic ideas away we can recognize ize that within a well functioning system proven Financial value can create a really powerful neutral engine to the work walk into a games development office on a Monday morning and you'll see a bunch of skill creative professionals gathered in a formalized way perhaps within teams and hierarchies there might be a glass office where a group of project leaders discuss direction or upcoming deadlines and a technical staff member might walk in and log onto a software program to see where a piece of work is in terms of review or progressing towards the stage where they can pick it up as employees walk in sit at their desks and have a little chat over their coffees dangerous creative blockers like self-doubt the motivation to continue and the idea of whether you should start something different today or pick up that problem from yesterday and carry on pushing through are removed by that system of proven value that all of this exists Within as we're trying to develop the look of the infected um we went through so many different iterations some that looked really alien and subhuman um some that looked just essentially like zombies uh and we couldn't find like an original place for them but one of our artist uh just did this kind of photo mashup where he took a bunch of images of diseases or images of fungal overgrowth uh and he kind of mashed it all together and he threw it on this person it was a very inter process making sure that the fungus felt properly integrated like it was part of the body it was evident that we were onto something that was quite a bit different and something that we hadn't really seen before which was eily human but very disturbing and it seem so creepy and so unique that right away we're gravitated towards it and it's like this is our base infected everything should kind of come out of this look just like Rick's album production process when you're building a video game or a new piece of software you need to expect to hit full Summits and you have to plan for the space to turn the car around at points and choose a different direction so with Quake we're creating a new engine one that can do full 3d one that that has a completely different look to it has more advanced gameplay code everything about it was different here game designer John Romero explores the overwhelming weight of creative work when you're constantly pushing up against unknowable problems with no ability to scope out how long these might take to solve when we got to November of that year the engine was finally ready but the team was burnt out because of the massive effort that it took to create the technology and the fact that they had been making a lot of data that couldn't be used because the engine changed so much that what they made was too primitive the engine could do more than what they had created so it was a lot of like wow all the stuff I worked on can't really use it you know so people were burned out from that and the team did not feel like they were up to the task of doing research on a new style of game which is what Quake was going to be it was not going to be a first- person shooter they basically suggested that we should just make a shooter because we know how to do it can nail it this is brand new tech that's awesome already if we just do a shooter we can all just like ship a game and take a rest kind of thing what the team around John wanted was not to stop working but just for him to close up the loop around these problems that they were trying to solve the stress wasn't coming from the hours on their computer it was coming from a journey that they were having to make into the unknown and something that they couldn't scope out and manage in that measurable way and so they just really didn't want to do another unknowable Mountain they to climb like when is it going to be defined you know like we don't have a scope that that has an end on it now like we we didn't either with the engine so and we didn't change course while we're doing it either which is what really harmed the team so I basically just kind of gave in and said I will design a firstperson shooter that will use all of the stuff and what we've done to date to the best that we can and then release it as fast as we possibly can because we wanted to get it done as fast as possible we went into what's called crunch mode which at that time was s days a week all the hours that you can which is at least 10 a day and we did that for seven months in large industrialized projects the process of building management and workflow Styles becomes complex and really interesting but as smaller groups of independent creators or working alone even we need to think in just as sensitive and subtle ways about our own systems of self-management and project building at this point in development of such a large scale game is that the progress just feels so slow and you have to keep so much stuff in your head uh for this these times in between when you're developing and it's just it just gets really frustrating so yeah I just decided it just wasn't going to work if if I was going to try to um keep developing over this period so yeah so yeah I just kind of experimented with a few random things over the time I used webg to make this animated these animated weather maps which was quite a nice little side project I also got outside and built a built a garden which is something I've always kind of wanted to do so that was a nice little project and it was kind of tied in a little bit with sapiens as well you know I sort of Justified it a little bit because I wanted to learn a bit more about sort of how you know the actual farming process I guess and you know making a slightly larger scale Garden than anything that I've done before I added some uh beetroot plants uh let me just try to find some here we go uh little beetroot plants I guess this was tied in with my sort of gardening and I I kind of thought that I would try to add in a few little plants uh so that's just another food source and you can uh plant them as well just like you can plant apple trees and stuff uh so I just yeah I want to have a huge variety of different plants and things so I just uh you know thought i' get started on that and I also even though we might not be fueled by that neutral proven value of money and the world around us might not value our work to the extent that we do ourselves that doesn't mean that just like that creative company we can't respect ourselves enough to reflect on our practice in just as a developed way recognize good habits things that are going wrong places of crunch and overall just trying to build up a more realistic way to manage ourselves with the aim to be slowly and deliberately confident about the value of our work I think there is this constant conversation internally for all of us creatives who share and play and create and improvise um between what you know and what you feel and actually what you feel is always closer to the real world than what you know thoughts are a few steps removed from reality away from feeling which is which is interesting so if you if you're learning from here um but then you're reinforcing from here there is like an amazing sort of balance that you can find at certain moments that where we're both kind of catapult the other into this new place we can see that one of the main reasons that hustle culture or grind culture is leaned on so much especially when the individual isn't immediately getting paid for the stuff that they're doing is because by working so hard and desperately they can still see their efforts as fitting comfortingly within the stories of that culture and economy that surrounds [Music] them you're a great warrior Anakin but you'll need to prove yourself as you're [Music] undoing this is why the pottery student who should probably spend the next decade digging into their craft and creating something that has the ability to be truly original will instead rush off to Etsy to try and sell their design 6 months after finishing in the first course working and exploring that craft for a decade would entail self-doubt and times when they went the wrong way with the work and almost wanted to quit but there's so much in the culture that surrounds us that co-ops The Passion of that creative into the outcomes that it knows how to measure telling them speed up the process step in and try to distribute and sell the work now and ultimately the value of the time that You' spent on doing this is only equal to the value of of the money that you can sell it for as a practical suggestion for how we can try and onboard these ideas I suggest that the next time you plan or scope out a project a video a script don't think about how quickly you can do it but instead challenge yourself with slowness and depth what would that project look like if you took longer if you made that album that you thought you could do in 3 months actually take 12 what would you do to improve it with all that extra time in terms of Music this could look like additional sound environments stepping back from laying down immediate drum patterns to think about the visual worlds in which they're going to sit maybe that artist would go out and get some found sounds to create that backdrop and all this process can explicitly help the project but importantly it also gives it that extra time where the artist is engaged but not focus on specific outcomes or a need to execute and it's often not those kind of more playful spaces where the real epiphanies and best thinking is going to come so I make a lot of worlds for fun it's just one of my hobbies um and this is a world I made and it's it's one where um oh gosh there's so many different different kinds of ingredients that that make this up aha here it is um so it's just a highly detailed word this is what it sounds [Music] like by allowing myself to take longer with these videos now I've had the ability to create another step in my editing process now instead of cutting the material that I find straight into the video where I think it's most relevant in that longer process I now have another sequence that I've created here I cut up the selects or my favorite parts of the clips that I've found the process of cutting those selects grouping them together and creating that extra step and extra friction allows me to grow my understanding of the Mater material that I use and gives me the time to then walk away from the computer and let my less active or subconscious brain do the work of creating patterns of meaning and possible argument constructions that might not have come into my head in that immediate process of creation this means that when I do come to creating that final sequence and pull those selects in that I want then I've just generally done more thinking on the issue and I'm more likely to hit the right note I was taught to paint like other people and I knew that I'd never paint as well as the person that I was taught to paint like there was no reason why I should attempt to do it any better I hadn't been taught any way of my own a lot of this comes down to that idea of building confidence and enough trust to step back from those more knowable systems of achievement here I want to share with you one of the most important questions I think we can reflect on through our journey and one that underlies how we see see and treat ourselves when we're making our work in a blog post titled I'm not the kind of person who the writer and business mind Seth Goden draws attention to the importance of self-identifying stories that we tell to ourselves as truths we box ourselves in long before the outside world ever gets a chance Goden writes I'm not the kind of person who proposes new ideas I'm not the kind of person who reads books for fun I'm not the kind of person who apologizes I'm not the kind of person who gets a promotion I'm not the kind of person who says follow me this question of how we choose to self-identify is going to be at the very heart of our foundation if we're looking to build enough trust to focus on those long-term quality targeted practices that are actually going to serve us over time think about it for yourself what would you put in the list that follows I'm not the kind of person who when we're growing up it's easy to gather a whole heap of these stories as Society processes us and we go through that Mill of Speedy categorization inter L do you dream about being interl interl what's it like to hold your child in your arms interl interl do you feel that there's a part of you that's missing interl Interlink within cells Interlink only takes your first gym teacher to decide that you are in set free for a whole process of disempowering narratives about your athletic performance to roll out across your life the important thing to remember as an adult is we now have the freedom and competence to lead ourselves in some way and challenging and rewriting those stories is often a lot easier than we think it's going to be there's a simple connection that I want to make here that can be useful when we want to challenge how we view ourselves and what we're able to do take the things that you think you can't do and frame this question in your head would I be able to do this or find a way to do this is somebody was paying me for it in other words if the pre-made value systems in society had told me that my actions were worth doing and valuable would I then be able to find the confidence or engine to actually do them once we've realized the answer to that question is often yes we can just remind ourselves that the creative's job is to step outside of what culture has already deemed as valuable and have the opportunity to create new things part five working routines with the wrong [Music] hand I don't have any sisters and brothers and uh I'm alone in the house so I have three things to help me the cats and the books and the music so now still now music helps me to you right in my own Journey the most important things that I took out the sphere of self-discipline and productivity is to develop systems around when and how I do my work that allow me to guarantee that whatever my life is doing at a specific time Bor anything completely extreme of course there will always be a space for the continuation of whatever create a project I'm trying to work on at the time do you have a routine do you write every day every now and then life will intervene but unless I I write every day and even if I have guests I will slip away to my my um little room where I work and always yes there was a point in this book where I realized I had taken a bad turn and it was just about 8 months of work and I realized to really get to where you need to go sometimes you you must um run through the other options there was no way that I could have gotten to that point had I not spent those eight months they're invisible they're not in the book but I needed to spend them in order to be where to to to get to where I was yeah in a Paris review article novelist Haruki murakami wrote when I'm in writing mode for a novel I get up at 4:00 a.m. and work 5 to 6 hours in the afternoon I run for 10 km or Swim for 1500 M or do both then I read a bit and listen to some music I go to bed at 9:00 p.m. I keep this routine every day without variation the repetition itself becomes the important thing it's a form of mesmerism I Mesmerize myself to reach a deeper State of Mind in his book what I talk about when I talk about running mirami gives us a meditation on the comparison between his running and his creative work Somerset mom once wrote that in each shave lies a Phil philosophy I couldn't agree more no matter how mundane some action might appear keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative even meditative act as a writer then and as a runner I don't find that writing and Publishing a book of my own personal thoughts about running makes me stray too far off my usual path perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words otherwise I'd never know what running means to me in it I think we can see an artist who uses certain measurable cloth Loop problems in his life to support his ability to let go and sit with the discomfort he faces in the openness required for his writing I bought his new book here novelist's vocation where he sets out further discussion of the way he thinks about his work and the rigidity and commitment to which he bends to it I had a whole bit here with readings from that book but I thought this video was probably long enough already and decided to take it out for those who do want to take a look at some of my favorite readings and ideas from the mirac Army book I'm going to be including a discussion of it in my video for the paid subscribers coming up this week now to finish this piece I wanted to jump back into that idea that we looked at earlier of the hero's journey in act one of this video we looked at the resistance the character is going to face as they push Across the Threshold onto their path and take on the trials and tribulations which must be tackled using their known skills and strategies but there is another key part of that story arc that we can look at here as well as the known and controllable world that the character will use willpower to push themselves through another kind of experience or knowledge might find its way into the cogs of that [Music] story these messages or downloads exist in a place beyond the character's control dreams spiritual teachings Omens that represent some message from another place this kind of knowledge requires the character to take on a more passive state of listening or letting go in order to access the Transcendent levels of energy power resolve or knowledge that are actually going to allow them to get through no matter how slow I might run I wasn't about to walk that was the rule break one of my rules once and I'm bound to break many more and if I'd done that it would have been next to impossible to finish this race while I was enduring all this around the 47th mile I felt like I'd passed through something that's what it felt like pass through is the only way I can express it like my body had passed clean through a stone wall I don't know about the logic or the process or the method in involved I was simply convinced of the reality that I'd passed through after that I didn't have to think anymore or more precisely there wasn't the need to try to consciously think about not thinking all I had to do was go with the flow and I'd get there automatically here we come back to the importance of awareness softness and openness When approaching our creative work maintaining routine and turning up for it regularly and using that structure to create a rig ground on which we can then remain open enough to stay aware and confident enough to let go and explore I think a lot of times people are trying to find the PATH and they're looking all around different places and different people and different influences but man I think so often that path you know what the path is and people know what they're supposed to be doing the one thing that made me who I am today is being vulnerable able being a look somebody in the eye and say you know what man I have a whole bunch of character problems and being able to tell people who I am am [Music] am in her essay on the one hand published in 2007 the great writer Hillary mantel gives us a look into how she sees the balance and appearance of the known and unknown in her work using the analogy of an experience she had when she tried working with her weaker hand your hand moves so slowly that you can keep changing your mind about what you're going to say and sentences can end up anywhere at all she writes you might get a message from your psyche something strange like the automatic writing supposed to be dictated by the dead thinking back over my own short career as a columnist I know that my pieces came from my right hand trained clear B able and capable of keeping count I wrote on the computer screen but my dominant hemisphere was in charged my right hand steering the topic I could trust myself not to do anything wild where mantel's biddable journalism was driven by a disciplined frontal cortex movement for her fiction she' require a different kind of engine and approach being a novelist has taught me if I didn't know before that almost all human situations are complex ambiguous and shifting there is always more information and more emerging information then you can process fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the L shreds and senu to be processed into mechanically recovered Pros it's about inner meaning seen with the inner eye always glimpsed always Vanishing always more or less baffling and scuffled onto the page hesitantly furtively transgressively by night and with the wrong hand okay I wanted to end with mantel's sentiment there a true great writer of our time thanks as always to the paid supporters so far and yeah thanks for sticking around for this one good luck in your work and see you next time

Channel: Creative Minds

Views: 85,922

Keywords: self-discipline, Self Discipline, Self-Control, How to be more disciplined, How to be more productive, how to work harder, productivity, being productive, work smarter, creative advice, creativity, how to succeed creatively, creative writing, music production, toxic self-discipline, how to finish work, art student, art advice, make better art, painting, film student, documentary, video essay, how to write more, writers block, writer's block, morning routine, workout motivation

Id: 5T3z8KSFwRc

Length: 62min 13sec (3733 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2024