Showing posts with label artists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label artists. Show all posts
CREATIVE MINDS: Psychotherapeutic Approaches and Insights by Dennis Palumbo
Creative individuals navigate the fine line between solitude and loneliness, discovering how isolation can fuel artistic expression or lead to despair.
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“Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”
-Louise NevelsonIn the early-1960s, a British film was released called “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” It was a predictably dreary, angst-ridden story about a rebellious loner trying to find his place in an unforgiving society.
This column might just as well be called “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Artist,” because one of the issues creative patients often struggle with is the sheer loneliness that is required by most artistic endeavors. Whether the patients are just trying to realize some creative dream, or they are successful veterans in their respective fields, they are usually in it for the long haul. In other words, they plan to “go the distance.” Or as one of my creative patients put it, for a true artist, such loneliness, or what feels like self-imposed isolation, is “the cost of doing business.”
Even film and TV directors, orchestra conductors and the like, whose creative efforts involve working with others, spend many hours alone in preparation for those admittedly group-oriented endeavors. Regardless, my interest here is in those creative patients—writers, painters, composers, designers, etc—whose workday is characterized by being alone. Alone with their thoughts, alone with their creative concerns, alone with their doubts and fears and hopes—and, literally, alone in the sense that there is rarely anyone else in the room.
Now for many creative patients, this time alone is a wonderful luxury, a period of grace bestowed on artists that frees them to focus on their work. They are liberated from the noise of the outside world—the emotional demands of others, the burdens of everyday responsibilities, the endless cacophony of worrisome world events. What one person experiences as loneliness, another appreciates for its most profound aspects: it is quiet, usually unhurried, and blissfully unpopulated.
As novelist Saul Bellow once remarked about writing, it can possess “a stillness that characterizes prayer.” For many artists, regardless of their particular field, this is demonstrably true.
But not every artist experiences those long hours alone as either inspiring or profound. For them, there is only the aching emptiness and despair that loneliness can invite, particularly when the creative work is not going well. In such cases, as I have seen in my practice, loneliness can give birth to a set of painfully familiar (usually family of origin-based) meanings. An artist suffering from crippling loneliness is subject to doubts about their talent, questions about the validity of the project they are engaged upon, and vulnerable to the heightened suspicion that they were not cut out to be artists in the first place.
In such instances, the desire to pursue a creative career is, to paraphrase one of my patients, “either a blessing you’ve been cursed with or a curse you’ve been blessed with.” This ambivalence about endeavoring to be an artist lies at the heart of many a creative patient, regardless of level of outward success.
I know this from personal experience, having been a Hollywood screenwriter for many years before becoming a psychotherapist. Writing—for both veterans and those just starting—is time-consuming, frequently frustrating, often terror-inspiring, and bad for your posture. Its other prominent features include long hours of typing, frequent intervals of staring at a blank page or screen, and no guarantee whatsoever that anything you produce will be worth the effort. In addition to which, in the words of screenwriter Ben Hecht, “fun is the enemy.”
Which reminds me of a novelist patient of mine, the author of a successful series of thrillers, who once complained: “I can’t go in that room anymore. It’s so damned quiet.” Divorced, his children grown and flown, he worked alone in his office at home.
“I mean, writing these damn things is hard enough.” He shook his head. "Plus, it’s so lonely in there by myself.”
“It can be,” I said. “But let me suggest something. Maybe you’re not in there by yourself. You share that room with the memory of every person you’ve ever encountered—parents, teachers, friends and enemies…”
He frowned. “Listen, my office is eight-by-ten feet. If anybody else is skulking around in there, I sure as hell don’t see ‘em.”
“You know what I mean. Besides, in one sense loneliness can just mean being disconnected. Not just from others, but from your interior self. You carry a whole world of feelings, experiences and fantasies inside you. Maybe if you let them out, and explored them fully, the office wouldn’t feel so lonely.”
He didn’t buy this approach. Nor any of the others I offered. We returned to this issue again and again in therapy. Some days his loneliness overwhelmed him, leaving him lethargic and unmotivated. Yet at other times a patch of solid writing made him so excited, so anxious to get back to “that room” that he actually felt lonely—in essence, disconnected—when he was not writing.
Over my years in practice, I have seen many creative patients wrestle with this issue. Especially when contrasted with its seemingly adjacent (though quite dissimilar) circumstance—the solitude necessary for most artistic efforts. And there is a difference. Loneliness is usually experienced as a loss of connectedness, either with oneself or others; an interior emptiness that can feel both soul-crushing and self-invalidating. As opposed to solitude, which can inspire a felt sense of coming into contact with yourself, taking ownership of your interior world. Which, paradoxically, seems expansive rather than inhibiting.
As a well-known conceptual artist once explained it to me in session, “I only live in the solitude of work, God help me. It’s everywhere else that I feel uneasy, like I’m faking it. Because I am.”
Obviously not a “people person” (her own words), our clinical work lay elsewhere. But there was no question in her mind (nor in mine) of the value of solitude when it came to her art. In fact, many artists have noted the value, if not the necessity, of solitude, both in their work and for personal growth.
For example, Leonardo da Vinci said, “If you are alone, you belong entirely to yourself.”
And according to May Sarton, the distinction was clear: “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”
Rilke was even more blunt. “What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.”
When working with creative patients, particularly those for whom loneliness is a salient, presenting concern, our job as clinicians is to help them reframe the meaning of their experience in terms of solitude. For one thing, it can be empowering to choose solitude in pursuance of your artistic goals, as opposed to seeing loneliness as a condition imposed upon you merely because you are alone. In which case, loneliness thus feels like a punishment for the mistake of attempting to be an artist; in contrast, choosing solitude can support the experience of feeling proactive and self-affirming.
Moreover, as I have written about elsewhere, I believe it is crucial for any creative person to have a positive, engaged relationship with their process. If you can help patients see that the choice of solitude supports the requirements of that process, is in fact a necessary aspect of it, its benefits become self-evident.
As Henri Poincare said, “to invent is to choose.” So, I feel it is vital that the creative patient embrace the solitude of artistic endeavor as a choice. Conceptualized this way, solitude then is not mere isolation. It is a return to the self, a reacquaintance with the patient’s inner world, including both its turmoil and its riches. The darkness and light from which creativity is birthed. Admittedly, such a commitment to solitude can risk an occasional slide into loneliness, a disquieting sense of isolation. That “cost of doing business” that my patient above mentioned. A price every artist pays at some time or another.
Which brings to mind a somewhat snarky quote attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre: “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
But that is a topic for another column.
Mr Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist and author in Los Angeles. His email address for correspondence is dpalumbo181@aol.com.
Obviously not a “people person” (her own words), our clinical work lay elsewhere. But there was no question in her mind (nor in mine) of the value of solitude when it came to her art. In fact, many artists have noted the value, if not the necessity, of solitude, both in their work and for personal growth.
For example, Leonardo da Vinci said, “If you are alone, you belong entirely to yourself.”
And according to May Sarton, the distinction was clear: “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”
Rilke was even more blunt. “What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.”
When working with creative patients, particularly those for whom loneliness is a salient, presenting concern, our job as clinicians is to help them reframe the meaning of their experience in terms of solitude. For one thing, it can be empowering to choose solitude in pursuance of your artistic goals, as opposed to seeing loneliness as a condition imposed upon you merely because you are alone. In which case, loneliness thus feels like a punishment for the mistake of attempting to be an artist; in contrast, choosing solitude can support the experience of feeling proactive and self-affirming.
Moreover, as I have written about elsewhere, I believe it is crucial for any creative person to have a positive, engaged relationship with their process. If you can help patients see that the choice of solitude supports the requirements of that process, is in fact a necessary aspect of it, its benefits become self-evident.
As Henri Poincare said, “to invent is to choose.” So, I feel it is vital that the creative patient embrace the solitude of artistic endeavor as a choice. Conceptualized this way, solitude then is not mere isolation. It is a return to the self, a reacquaintance with the patient’s inner world, including both its turmoil and its riches. The darkness and light from which creativity is birthed. Admittedly, such a commitment to solitude can risk an occasional slide into loneliness, a disquieting sense of isolation. That “cost of doing business” that my patient above mentioned. A price every artist pays at some time or another.
Which brings to mind a somewhat snarky quote attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre: “If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
But that is a topic for another column.
Mr Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist and author in Los Angeles. His email address for correspondence is dpalumbo181@aol.com.
The Inspiration Trap by Dennis Palumbo
"The Inspiration Trap": the belief that a special talent or knowledge or divine gift—something outside of the artist—is necessary.
CREATIVE MINDS: Psychotherapeutic Approaches and Insights
“Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”
-Louise Nevelson
When discussing the origins of creativity, the idea I hate the most is that of inspiration. In my clinical work with creative patients, I have found it to be soul-killing for artists of all stripes and at all levels of professional success.
Like the quote by Mary Chase, when asked how she got the idea for her famous play, “Harvey.” Her reply? “I looked up from the breakfast table one morning and there he was.”
This is the kind of story that gives new (and not so new) artists acute and potentially shaming grief: the belief that brilliant ideas just “come to you,” that the lucky few are visited by the spirit of creativity and originality. Even Shakespeare, in his prologue to “Henry V” implores the gods to inspire him: “O for a Muse of Fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention…”
Most of our creative patients, when having breakfast, rarely encounter an invisible 6-foot rabbit, or a Muse of Fire, for that matter. Most encounter the empty canvas, the blank computer screen, the inert, unhelpful lump of modeling clay.
The idea of inspiration, as it is commonly understood, does a great deal of damage to those of our creative patients who succumb to its siren song. For one thing, it devalues craft, which I believe is the most important attribute to be cultivated by every artist. It also reinforces the notion that the creative patients themselves are somehow not enough. That some special talent or knowledge or divine gift—something outside of the artist—is necessary. I call this “The Inspiration Trap.”
It is an understandable misconception, since the word inspiration—from the Latin inspirare, which means “to breathe into”—certainly reinforces the notion that a creative burst comes from the outside of a person; that a divine spark animates the literary, musical, or visual artist, leading to new and innovative work.
Conceptualized in this way, inspiration, by its very nature, cannot be grasped or looked for, and certainly not commanded to show up. (Though many artists give it a try. Hence the various rituals I have heard from creative patients when starting work, everything from earnest prayer to vigorous hand-washing to wearing “lucky” socks. More than 1 writer patient has pointed out to me that Jack Kerouac famously made the Sign of the Cross before sitting down at the keyboard.)
This conception of inspiration can do tremendous damage to our creative patients. I have known artists to give up halfway through a beloved project because they “no longer feel inspired.” (As if you are always supposed to feel good about what you are working on! In my previous career as a Hollywood screenwriter, this was rarely the case.)
Then there was a composer patient of mine who consistently refused to begin a new orchestral piece until he “heard the goddam Muse,” which meant he spent more time listening for that elusive, ethereal helpmate than risking the possibility of composing badly.
(Which reminds me of an old Zen Buddhist story about a monk who patiently tilled the soil in his garden for 20 years, hoping to attain enlightenment. Then, 1 day, his hoe struck a small rock in the dirt and he heard a soft “ping.” Suddenly, he was enlightened. So then the question is, did hearing the “ping” bring him to the state of enlightenment, or was it rather the 20 years of sustained effort tilling the soil that prepared him to recognize and understand the significance of that soft sound when it happened?)
What the 2 aforementioned patients fail to grasp is that— like the experience of the monk in the story—the artistic struggle is, and has always been, something of a grind. It requires persistence, which means one usually spends more time slogging through the valleys of frustration than standing at the peaks of fulfillment. To put it bluntly, if inspiration is going to strike at all, it will emerge unbidden; embedded, I believe, in the deepening levels of craft the artist develops. As most professional artists—and creative types in all fields—seem to understand.
For example, the novelist Albert Morovia said, “I pray for inspiration…but I work at the typewriter four hours a day.”
Writer Peter De Vries goes him one better: “I only write when I’m inspired, so I see to it that I’m inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.”
In other words, good creative work results from the doing itself. As Pablo Picasso said, “Action is the foundational key to all success.” In a similar vein, he reminds us that “inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.”
Or as I often tell my writer patients, “Writing begets writing.” As doing any creative task tends to beget more of the same. Conversely, not working while waiting for inspiration to strike begets more work undone and, ultimately, unfinished. In such instances, there’s very little difference between waiting for inspiration and procrastination.
Of course, leave it to an engineer and entrepreneur, Nolan Bushnell, to cut to the chase: “The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.”
Pragmatic as that comment may seem, I think the best way to help our creative patients wedded to the idea of inspiration, and often therefore its shaming byproduct, is to challenge the underlying meaning they assign to this belief. By which I mean the notion that they themselves are untalented, fooling themselves, or simply fated not to succeed.
Usually, this meaning is birthed in critical or shaming childhood dynamics, which the patient believes they can only transcend by means of a sort of inspirational jump-start. (Frequently, when hearing of another artist’s seemingly “overnight success,” these patients usually attribute it to some inspirational notion the artist suddenly had. Rather than the fact that most “overnight successes” are the result of years of toil, false starts, and bitter disappointments.) As well as that most fickle of gods, luck.
Though, as golfer Ben Hogan once remarked, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
Maybe that is a clue as to how we might reframe inspiration, both for ourselves as clinicians and for our creative patients. What if we conceptualize inspiration as the lucky idea or notion that sometimes emerges as a result of a determined constancy in our work, a love of the practice of the artistic project itself. After all, we can love people who sometimes disappoint us. Perhaps we can extend to our creative work that same loyalty and regard.
Given the shifting winds of fortune that accompany any creative person’s life, the smart money is on craft, practice and the love of doing the thing. If luck—or inspiration—shows up, so much the better.
Mr Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist and author in Los Angeles. His email address for correspondence is dpalumbo181@aol.com.
Via Psychiatric Times
Former screen writer and current psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo talks about procrastination, the dangerous myth of inspiration, and why writer's block is good news.
Listen at Apple Dennis Palumbo – Writer's Block is Good
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Stealing Time for Your Dream in 2025 - Part 2: What is Time?
What is time?
Unlike oxygen, an element which is objectively, scientifically definable, and more or less beyond our control, time is relative to perception and subject to choice. “Time,” Melville wrote, “began with man.” The Type C (creative) Personality learns to redefine time subjectively, in order to become successful by his own standards. Objective time, dictated by Greenwich Mean Time with an occasional correction for NASA, leads only to the conformity of repetition. Subjective time alone allows us to distinguish ourselves and to achieve our dreams of success.
Logos vs. Mythos
According to the classical Greeks, the two primary ways of perceiving the world were known to them as logos (for the Accountant’s logic) and mythos (for your onboard Visionary’s simultaneity). The Visionary’s belief in eternity in every moment is what makes the dreamer’s life change from barely bearable to ever enthusiastic. “To himself,” Samuel Butler wrote, “everyone is immortal. He may know he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.” The Visionary’s eternity is the experience of mythic time that occurs when you “lose yourself” in the pursuit of your dream. Its Brer Rabbit’s “briar patch” speech: “Throw me anywhere, but please don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The briar patch, of course, is Rabbit’s favorite place, his home.
Sometimes you’ll meet an old schoolmate after years and have the experience that “it seems just like yesterday” that you were having this exact same argument, or laughing for the same reason known only to the two of you. A moment passes, as the Accountant wrests control from the Visionary: “But, on the other hand, it seems every bit like the twenty years it’s actually been.” Has it been twenty years, or was it just yesterday? Faulkner said: “There is no such thing as was; if was existed there would be no grief or sorrow.” To the Visionary, time exists always in the present.
Accountant’s time
To the Accountant, who’s kept track of the years--and also the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds--precisely, it’s been exactly twenty years, and he can prove it by reciting all the things that have happened to both of you in the interim. The Accountant clocks time with digital precision, obsessive checks with the Internet’s time services. The Accountant’s time is what keeps society sane, if you call today’s society sane.
But when the Accountant’s insistence dominates, you are denied making your dreams come true. The Accountant, nervous about anything intangible or “unseen,” doesn’t believe in dreams; or, at best, assumes the worst about them: “They¹re only dreams.” Human beings can’t fly.
Visionary time
To the Visionary, whose relationship with that same friend is/was intense, it’s just yesterday. The Visionary clocks time only by reference to intensity. Lovers live from embrace to embrace, the time that’s passed between them not counting. Have you ever felt like life would pass you by when you’re stuck in an endless left-turn lane during rush hour? How long does a second last if you’re perched at the parachute door of a plane at 15,000 feet about to make your first jump? How long is forty seconds during a 6.6 earthquake? Or at the edge of a cliff, about to rappel for the first time? A friend of mine described an encounter with a problem customer, “I spent an eternity with her for an hour and a half yesterday.”
The Visionary brings you mythic time when you engage in your dream with all your heart, mind, and soul; when you are occupied in doing something that "takes you out of time," or "takes you out of yourself." You're literally ecstatic--which, from its Greek origins, means "standing outside" yourself. "I don't know where the time went," is what you say when you've just passed fourteen hours creating the whole magical kingdom of Timbuktu on your drawing board--and your spouse, sent by the worried Accountant to tell you you've missed an important dinner party, is banging on the door because you've taken the phone off the hook.
Like Alice's White Rabbit, the Accountant would always have you believe that you’re late for a very important date. And the Accountant doesn’t like it one bit when your Mind’s Eye stops to question how important that date may be; or, whether you made the date in the first place or whether it was made for you. Dreamers insist on making their own dates because their Mind’s Eyes (the Mind’s Eye being that part of your mind that’s aware of the conflict between the onboard Accountant and the onboard Visionary) have learned how to insure that mythic time gets preference over logical time.
You’ve had this experience: You’ve told yourself you’re just going to steal "two hours" to work on your dream. You go into the briar patch. One hour and fifty-five minutes have gone by, during which you've been lost--fully engrossed in your quest, without a thought for the outside world that operates on the Greenwich clock. The hours have passed "like a minute" (the Visionary’s way of talking makes the Accountant crazy). Then, you look up at the clock to discover that only five minutes remain of your bargained for two hours. How did you know to look up at the five-minute mark? Because your Accountant never sleeps, even when he’s been taken off duty. If you decide to remain in the mythic time of your dream work beyond the five minutes remaining--that is, beyond the exactly two hours you set aside--the Visionary has won this particular encounter. The Accountant has lost. If you decide to quit "on time," you may think the Accountant has won, and the Visionary lost.
What’s wrong with this win-lose scenario is that it’s exhausting, and impossible to maintain in the long run. Most people, faced with this constant natural strife between the two aspects of their minds, have allowed the Accountant to take over entirely as the only peaceful alternative. They’ve chosen the Accountant’s conservative, safe way of behaving because the daily battle is too costly in energy and emotion. If the Visionary "wins" the five-minute battle, for example, and you continue working on your new invention for another four hours instead of the two you’d set aside, guess how hard it’s going to be for the Accountant to agree to the next two hours you want to steal. The Accountant will use every instrument in the arsenal of procrastination to postpone the trip to your dreamer’s workshop.
How to avoid losing time
Francesco Petrarch: It is appointed for us to lose the present in the expectation of the future.
Petrarch, the first "Renaissance man" and precursor of Eckhart Tolle, was aware that we spend a large majority of our time "somewhere else" than in the present moment. Planning for the future, worrying about the past--so much so that by the time you reach middle age the two horses, Past and Future, are engaged in a life-and-death race along your internal timeline. Competing for your vitality, stealing your present. The time you spend on past responsibilities, past regrets, past relationships, eats into the time available for growth and progress toward your future goals.
If we don't recognize "what’s going on here," as Accountant time and Visionary time battle in our perceptions, we can get very confused. When we get confused, the Accountant can take control of our lives. For most people, the Accountant has been in full control. Consequently, they are frustrated, bored, caught in a rut. With the help of Mercury’s powerful wand--whose two snakes represent the taming of past and future around the strength of present awareness--the entrepreneur’s now-open Mind’s Eye can transform the bloody battlefield into the altar of your hopes and dreams. Awakening his Mind’s Eye, Jack London said:
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
This anti-Accountant declaration is made by your Mind’s Eye--which knows that only by marrying the Accountant’s logic with the Visionary’s myth will the present be captured for effective dream work, in lieu of the Visionary wasting the present in daydreaming, or the Accountant in obsessing about the past and the future. When your Mind’s Eye takes charge of these constant time wars, productivity combines with peace of mind. The photographer Ansel Adams said, "I’m amazed at how many people have emotional difficulties. I have none. If you keep busy, you have no time for them."
Next: Work-management doesn’t work
Writing while the World is on Fire - An Interview with Dennis Palumbo
How do you keep doing creative work when the world is falling apart around you? To sift through the despair and doubt, John welcomes back legendary Scriptnotes guest, writer-turned-psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo. They discuss the many feelings that catastrophic events can bring up in artists, the personal narratives that often inform those feelings, and how to keep moving forward when you feel like the band on the Titanic.
In our bonus segment for premium members, Dennis guides us through the best examples and worst mistakes of portraying therapists on screen.
DENNIS PALUMBO, MA, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice who specializes in creative issues. He co-wrote the award-winning My Favorite Year screenplay and other films and TV—Consulting Producer on Hulu's The Patient and author of the Daniel Rinaldi Mysteries.
Stealing Time for Your Dream in 2025!
Jack Smith: “God created time so that everything wouldn't happen at once.”
Atchity: Then how come everything keeps happening at once?
Dreamers know that if you follow your dream, by definition, you can't fail. Success lies in the pursuit. If you have a dream, you have the responsibility to yourself and to the source of dreams to make it come true.
But that means finding time to do what you have to do--the very opposite of "marking time." Our minds experience life on a timeline of their own invention, a continuum that stretches from our first moment of consciousness to our last. "The end of the world," said Bernard Malamud, “will occur when I die. After that, it's everyone for himself.”
And finding time for dreams in our accelerated world where we hear of "flextime," "time-elasticity," “the sweet spot in time," “virtual time,” “time shifting,” and "time slowing down” is more confusing than ever before. A little over a century ago, if you missed a stagecoach you thought nothing of waiting a day or two for the next one to come along. Today you feel frustrated if you miss one section of a revolving door! So many of today's "time-saving devices" prove to be frauds---requiring more time to select, install, maintain, and update than it used to take without them. It's hard to believe that a few short years ago we had not yet become addicted to email, voicemail, FAX machines, microwaves, VCRs, earphones, IPods, I Phones, blackberries. All these inventions, as helpful as they can be to your onboard Accountant’s output level, suck up our time in ways that, unless they are examined and acknowledged, become quite destructive to the realization of the dream. More and more demands are being made on our time. Faith Popcorn (The Popcorn Report) puts it this way:
We're pleading to the big time clock in the sky: "Give me fewer choices, far fewer choices. Make my life easier. Help me make the most of my most valued commodity--the very minutes of my life.”
Things have gotten so bad that we can¹t really manage time any more. We’re now forced to steal it, invoking the assistance of Mercury, messenger, salesman, trickster, and thief of the gods. Like any professional thief, Mercury insists on knowing as much as possible about the object of his theft and its natural habitat and characteristics before he goes into action. This series combines observations about the nature of time and work with practical suggestions about employing Mercury’s caduceus--that magic wand with the snakes entwined around it--to steal the time you need.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Bokonon: “Busy, busy, busy.”
Ecclesiastes: “Consider the ants. Yes, you are busy. What are you busy about?”
Our Puritanical upbringing has led the Accountant to want us to keep busy. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” One day I was consulting with an attorney who, by everyone’s standards but his own, is quite successful. We were talking about forming a new marketing company. “Why do you want to do this?” I asked him.
“Because I want to get rich.” He added: “I have to stop selling my time.”
I nodded. “That’s interesting.” I was thinking of the reversible equation I’d written about in A Writer’s Time: “Time is money, money is time.”
“What brought you to this conclusion?” I asked him.
He told me that a self-made, wealthy, genius friend of his kept coming to
Finally, on one visit, the friend had to sit in the attorney’s law office for an hour waiting for him to complete some phone calls. He observed what was happening in the office.
On their way to lunch, his friend said: “You know that question I’ve been asking you all these years?”
“Yeah, of course I remember it--it drives me crazy. If I’m so smart, why aren’t I rich?”
“I know the answer now.”
“Tell
“You’re too busy to be rich.”
Doing the wrong things, no matter how fast, or how well, you do them, or how many of them you do, will not advance your dream. One of my partners put it this way: “Don’t confuse efforts with results.”
Those who break out of busy work and into the success they’ve dreamed of have learned to redefine time. If you recognize that time is merely a concept, a social or intellectual construct, you can make the clock of life your clock; then determine what you do with it. More than the quantity of activities or completed projects I’ve experienced in my various career transits, what I value most is the quality of time I’ve managed to steal from all those committees and examination-grading sessions. When someone asked me years ago to make a list of “things I do that I don’t enjoy” I was happy to realize that it was difficult to think of anything other than my two or three hours per week of desk work that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy. Then I found a way of enjoying desk work, too! By hook or crook, you need to steal the right kind of time for your dreams.
[first in a 5-part series] next: “What is time?”
The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People
The daily life of great authors, artists and philosophers has long been the subject of fascination among those who look upon their work in awe. After all, life can often feel like, to quote Elbert Hubbard, “one damned thing after another” -- a constant muddle of obligations and responsibilities interspersed with moments of fleeting pleasure, wrapped in gnawing low-level existential panic. (Or, at least, it does to me.) Yet some people manage to transcend this perpetual barrage of office meetings, commuter traffic and the unholy allure of reality TV to create brilliant work. It’s easy to think that the key to their success is how they structure their day.
Mason Currey’s blog-turned-book Daily Rituals describes the workaday life of great minds from W.H. Auden to Immanuel Kant, from Flannery O’Connor to Franz Kafka. The one thing that Currey’s project underlines is that there is no magic bullet. The daily routines are as varied as the people who follow them– though long walks, a ridiculously early wake up time and a stiff drink are common to many.
Read more
Dr. Ken Atchity: Anxiety IS a Motivator
Have a listen: Ken Atchity on WillCast Podcast Hosted by Patrick Will
Ken and Patrick discuss how to manage time better, what it means to be a real artist, and why The Meg took 22 years to make.
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