Delight in mundanity

Some days creativity is easy. I know what I want to get done, and all the pieces come together in the right way. I might be tired, I might be worn out from the effort, but it's effortless. I love those days, and they're part of why I got into this career—that joy of stretching myself, of pushing for something great; it's addicting.

But that's not most days.

Most days the work I do, making something delightful; building something creative, pushing the boundaries—well, it's hard. It eats at me, it requires dedication and pushing to find a way through. And, if you catch me in the middle of that work, you'll see a person desiring to do anything but the task in front of them. I'll find ways to distract myself. Check Slack, check email, see if someone somewhere needs me—anything to avoid the challenge at hand, the sisyphean task that requires my full attention.

In fact if we're being honest, most of the career of a creative is akin to avoiding the hard stuff and looking for shortcuts. Sometimes that's fine, sometimes that leads to breakthroughs, workarounds, unexpected solutions. But a lifetime avoiding the hard things, looking for the easy ways—well, if I wanted that I wouldn't have gotten into this work.

So, if I'm faced with a future of mostly hard days, a desire to look for easy ways out, and the occasional bouts of sheer delight. The question I have to ask, is how do you brace yourself to get through it all?

For me, it's a combination of things. I've tried brute force, I've tried pomodoro, along with every technique under the sun to make myself focus harder. But, the best thing, when I'm not feeling it, is to turn it into a game. I look for small puzzles and challenges to stimulate my brain.

There might be a project I need to undertake (the details of which don't really matter for the sake of this argument). But let's say it's something like redesigning a dashboard (I've had my fair share of those). The overall task itself has to be done, and I may have less discretion that'd I'd want on the overarching strategy. But, what I can do is look at parts of the puzzle that solve my itch for curiosity, that scratch my desire to create something delightful.

In that work, in those little pieces, lies the majority of my time. And now, approaching my forties, I've realized that much of my life has been made up of work just like that—something that could easily be considered drudgery, but which I've taken to calling life.

So, in that work, instead of abandoning myself to an atmosphere of despair, I've found ways to make every project, each day, every task in front of me a challenge unique to itself. Often, when I need to approach a project that isn't particularly novel, I'd look for some angle that is uniquely interesting. It might be a new technology I can learn as a result, a new insight in how I might do it, or a way to do something I've never seen done before.

By pushing myself, finding ways to stretch learning, I'm able to turn the mundane into something interesting. And, often as a result, my interest and excitement have been contagious, and serendipitously led to more interesting work because others see in me the joy I see in the work and want to throw more my way.