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Slay your dragons

By Patrick Gant

“We define the entire outer scope of our outer experiences based on our inner problems. If you want to grow…you have to change that.”
—Michael A. Singer

Every day, you face a choice: either you do what you did before or you do something differently. That works fine when faced with a simple matter like: “what shall I make for dinner tonight?” But it can be debilitating if you’re engaged in avoidance behaviour, either in your personal life or your work as a creative pro.

For some, that comes in a low-grade form of procrastination. For others, it’s something more elevated where the behaviour is repeated, chronic and anxiety based.

The effect is the same: the thing that you avoid doing aggravates the pain you’re seeking to avoid. That is unsustainable. Eventually you have to confront what you’re running away from and slay your dragons. To do that, here’s what’s worked for me and maybe it can do the same for you.

Put a name on it
We only understand things we can name, and we only name things that are familiar. Thus, behaviours and thoughts only begin to have a shape once you assign labels to them. Otherwise they are limited to how they make you or others feel. If you consistently avoid taking a call from someone because you’re dreading having a difficult but necessary conversation, you’d likely be feeling a little guilty and the other party will probably be growing increasingly annoyed. Once you name it—“This is avoidance behaviour”—you take ownership of it and stop projecting it onto others as excuses.

Build a better model
If your choices are framed around either I do something or I don’t, you’ll forever be susceptible to the pull of choosing to not do something. Don’t make that an option in your decision-making system. Instead, build a model of thinking that’s built on the premise of having done something. For example: “Once (not if) I get my boring accounting work done, I can reward myself with something nice.” The quality of our assumptions determine the quality of our outcomes.

Schedule tasks and hold yourself accountable
Anxiety is sometimes described as a fear of the future. Avoidance is the manifestation of anxiety but all it can do is offer you delayed suffering. Instead, name the task that needs to get done and put it in your calendar. Next, find a trusted accountability partner who will hold you to your promise of doing what you said you would do. If you’re in a creative line of work, making a pledge and delivering on deadline is very familiar to you. Leverage that skill.

Know the cost
Numbers don’t lie. Create a ledger that keeps track of your most difficult tasks. This will hold yourself to account for each time you engage in avoidance behaviour. Put a sum on the cost of your avoidance behaviour. Measure it in units of time or energy spent or spirit wasted on not doing a job that needs to be done. How has it affected your wellness? How has it affected your relationships? You’ll be shocked by how much gets wasted on avoidance and on the ensuing guilt of not getting things done.

Know what home is to you
We are hardwired to repeat patterns because they are familiar. For many, familiar is safe. Familiar is like home. Even the root of the word “familiar” has its origins in the notion of that which pertains to one’s family. But for some, the figurative act of going home to what is familiar involves feelings that are unpleasant or facts that are painful. In that sense, home isn’t always what and where you think it is. This is why avoidance behaviour is so enticing. It gives the illusion of that painful feelings can be eliminated. In truth: we all go home.

Experiment

“If you really want to see why you do things,” writes Michael A. Singer in his book The Untethered Soul, “then don’t do them and see what happens.” His point works just as well the other way around. If you want to see why you avoid things, do them instead and watch what happens next. Having named your avoidance behaviour and having installed an accountability system, treat what happens next not as a consequence but as an experiment. This is where understanding happens. The pain you’re seeking to avoid with avoidance behaviour isn’t a root cause: it’s a symptom of a deeper unmet need. Your experiment will show you what yours is.

Avoidance behaviour is a tendency to remain stuck in a way of thinking that’s rooted in judgement and consequences. Focus instead on choices that are consistent with what you value. As I’ve talked about before, it’s important to keep seeking that sense of agency we each have within ourselves to build deliberately the life of our own choosing. Do that now.

Recipe for being a creative pro: think like a chef

By Patrick Gant

Your best work does not come from your ego: it survives in spite of it. To be serious about your craft and the outcomes of your efforts, focus instead on your work methods and allow the self to become small.

Just as master chefs treat their kitchen, their methods and their menu with respect, so too must you with your studio, your process and your product.

To illustrate how this works, consider how restauranteur Daniel Boulud concludes his book Ten Commandments of a Chef: each one resonates with anyone who is in the business of being creative.

1. Keep Your Knives Sharp

Your thinking must remain sharp, but that means far more than filling your head with facts. Sharpness of thought is much more about agility now. We underestimate how much our world is changing. We’re networked now like bees in honeycomb rather than tethered to the world by a single telephone line. Performance is rewarded best now for being adaptive rather than predictive. Empathy defeats self-centeredness. And yet we carry around this brain that’s still hardwired for hunting sabretooth tigers. Make regular exercise out of the notion that your assumptions about the world might not be correct.

2. Work with the Best People

Notice how this is framed. It’s not about surrounding yourself with people who are just as good or just as talented as you are. In fact, how good you are doesn’t even enter into this equation: look for excellence in others and they will seek it in you.

3. Keep Your Station Orderly

This is my least favourite item on the list. If I define my station as my work desk, then I have a lot of orderly work to do. But if I see my station as my MacBook Air and the flow I count on to generate clients, ideas and products I’m proud of, then I’m doing ok. Or maybe I’m engaged in a tiny bit of sophistry here just to get out of cleaning my desk.

4. Purchase Wisely

This has been a steadfast rule of mine for over 15 years. And I learned it from tradespeople: any tool directly linked to your ability to turn work into money is a tool you cannot afford to cheap-out on. A subset of this rule: own only what you need, not what you desire. I’m selective about what I keep: I sell or give away what I no longer use.

5. Season with Precision

Chefs know that seasoning doesn’t define but accentuates the dish. Writers know that adverbs and adjectives are like salt: there’s a fine line between enough and too much. Designers know that their best work happens when their product is made more understandable without explanation or ornamentation. Consultants know the hazards of over-explaining and that sometimes you have let an idea simmer with the client for a bit. It’s all seasoning. Know yours and use with care.

6. Master the Heat

Fear is fire. Learn to cook with it. And don’t let it burn you. You’re doing it wrong if owning a business doesn’t scare you from time to time.

7. Learn the World of Food

I would have put this one closer to the top. If you choose to make a career out of creativity, you have a responsibility to yourself and to everyone you serve to have well formed, thoughtful opinions on your tools, processes, influences and choices. Learning your world means you know exactly why you do what you do. That is the trademark of mastery.

8. Know the classics

If you’re anything like me, when you were young you assumed classics was just another world for old. Look around you: most things do not survive even 100 years on this planet. The rare things that do teach us two things: having a good sense of taste is a timeless trait, and any problem you struggle with today someone long before you also had…and had the good sense to write it down.

9. Accept Criticism

This gets easier as you get older and realize—paradoxically—that the more experience you gain, the less you are sure of. That’s not an excuse for being thin skinned when you’re younger. You only own the first draft of what you do: after that, it becomes something that’s beyond you.

There are two ways that ideas can be polished. First, through self-criticism and self-reflection. Second, by welcoming a process that allows your work to be challenged by having it bump up against the opinions, beliefs and biases of others.

10. Keep a Journal of Your Recipes

This is why my newsletter, CreativeBoost, exists. It is as much a travelogue as a record of what’s new to me. Keeping track of what you’ve learned is as much a gift to your readers as it is a letter from the past to your future self.

Do you still use browser bookmarks?

By Patrick Gant

There was a time when my browser’s bookmark collection numbered in the 100s, all neatly grouped into a range of categories. Eventually, I realized that most of these links just ended up adding to the cruft in my bookmarks column.

What I also discovered was that a good number of these links I had accumulated over the years were pages that I hadn’t revisited in so long that the material there was out of date or that the pages now resolved to a dead-link 404. Not much point in collecting things that don’t get used, right?

Is browser bookmarking dead? I’m clearly not alone in asking this.

For me, browser bookmarking has been greatly simplified in my work. The biggest change I’ve made in my workflow here is in how I manage my research online. You see, I read an awful lot as part of my job as a writer and presenter…and as someone who is a devoted student of public policy, marketing and human behaviour. I accumulate a lot of “must-reads” and “read-laters” in my work.

Five years ago, much of my research and reading list would have wound up in my browser’s bookmarks. But today, it works something like this:

1) My browser bookmarks list consists of just 30 favourites: half of which form my list of daily reads. I rely on Google and Bing for other URLs that I struggle to recall. I also rely on my Twitter feed plus a very select list of news aggregator for stories that might be of interest.

2) Instapaper is what I use for stories and facts that interest me. It quietly syncs between a web client and my iPad without any effort on my part (the way syncing should be). Things I want to come back to later go here. From here, stories get triaged either with the delete button, archived for further review, or sent to my database for reference.

3) Yojimbo, my beloved jack-of-all trades database, handles links to white papers, academic articles, favourite stories. Some are saved as web links. Others as PDFs. All items are tagged so that searching is a breeze. I sync this with my Macbook and iPad. The outcome is that things are easier to find, and I waste less time filing things that I never will read again.

Thinking your way out of a problem

By Patrick Gant

Making the choice to innovate and be creative in your business and in the products or services you offer—it’s a smart move that can can help differentiate in a competitive market. But does it mean you have to balloon your R&D budget or go on an acquisition spree to make it happen? Not necessarily.

Apple has been rolling out game-changing products in steady succession, while keeping their R&D spending at $4.6 billion, or roughly 10% of earnings over the last four years. And as Steve Cheney points out, that’s at odds with the strategy of some of its competitors.

Example: between 2007 and 2010, Microsoft spent a whopping $31 billion—700% that of Apple—on research and development.

Real innovation starts by thinking long and hard about your customers’ problems, about how solutions to those problems are being unmet, and then finding better ways to solve those problems in ways that benefit your customers…first.