I happened to notice it the other night while we were having a family night catching up on a couple reality shows. I made a note that I should write something about it.

Victimhood.

You don’t fall into that trap, do you? You don’t trip over the wires of opting to blame everyone else for failure. You don’t catch on the snare of looking for external factors every time something goes wrong.

We were watching that show—you know the one—where pairs of contestants race around the world and do challenges.  One of the teams was lagging, severely, and it was never about them. They played the perpetual victim. Other teams were picking on them. The challenges were so hard. The world was against them. Oh, I’m sure it felt good to dump their successive losses at the feet of everything and everyone else, but wow: it’s a game, it’s supposed to be competitive and challenging and stacked against you at every turn.

Maybe, sure, it was played up by the editors of the show, but I also recognize that as a personality type. I also know that there are a lot of people with big ideas and ambitious dreams who hit a few little obstacles—and oh, will there be obstacles on the path to creative endeavours—and out come the excuses and blaming everything and everyone else.

The list is endless, but you’d recognize it the second you heard it: someone or something is preventing those people from the win, so they give up trying.

But the game is always stacked. The world is always working against most of us. That’s just the universe. 

For something like twenty years there was an online challenge called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month (poorly named because it was really a borderless event, little ole me here in Canada participating). A bunch of scandals^[1] left the organization which was behind the event-proper now but a footnote creative history. Yet those of us millions who participated while it was still in good standing are left with memories… and in my own case, a small stack of unedited, mediocre novel manuscripts.

Controversy aside, something about the urgency of a deadline broke the procrastination hold that I all-too-often find myself tethered by and… well, simply, productivity resulted.

 It is a fallacy of a sort, this whole writer’s block thing.

When pushed by something as simple as a pretend, arbitrary deadline, I found that I was suddenly able to crank out thousands of words of coherent fiction every day for an entire month. 

Secret writing formula? Or another lie I tell myself when I sit at the keyboard that needs to be pushed aside so that the productive side of creativity can happen?

I don’t think that struggling to put words on the screen is an issue of having nothing to say, I think it is more often an issue of having too much to say… and not having anything driving one to say it.

No timeline. No urgency. No pressure. 

There you are, just a guy in front of a keyboard waiting for inspiration to strike?

I have found more and more over the last couple years that as I sit down to write my 500 words of fiction each weekday that one thing has been driving my production of that volume of words: writing to a deadline has helped me overcome so many instances of block. 

Maybe it was knowing that I need to get words in while my coffee was still hot. Or perhaps it was knowing that I had somewhere else to be in a couple hours. Could be it was knowing that I wanted to go to bed at a reasonable time. But all of it also knowing that I had a quota to meet before any of those things.

All other concerns got pushed to the side to meet the deadline. I was doing time, writing words, and breaking blocks.

Generally it is so obvious a thing when you write it or when you read it, but often it is the least obvious thought when we find ourselves mired in a situation or relationship where respect has been compromised.

If you are one of the lucky few who is bolstered by self-confidence and unhindered by self-doubt, congratulations. Because I would wager the bulk of us need the occasional nudging reminder that when it comes to your creative hearts and souls no one is looking out for you and your interests, your time, your experience and expertise, nor you as a human being with the same attention and care as you are.

Respect yourself.

Guard your talents.

Own your schedule.

Stand by your skills. 

And don’t work with people who either disrespect or take advantage of any of those things for their imbalanced benefit.

But enough whinging… now go make something.

I get it. I really get it. No. I really do get it.

You just gotta push publish. You just gotta climb up on that stage and share your voice. You just gotta, gotta, gotta!

It’s February and as I publish this post I have no idea yet if the Groundhog has seen her shadow, but whatever the outcome I suspect I have a couple more months of weather too cold to be outside doing creative outdoor things like sketching or nature photo expeditions. (I mean I could and I will, it’s just uncomfortably chilly.) That is to say, I suspect I have a couple more months of indoor time to write words and play music and dabble in code before the allure of summer tempts me away from those projects.

I need to share something before the end of February. I gotta.

The turning of a calendar page can be a motivator to step over a threshold, to overcome a mental obstacle. Deadlines, are great motivators. 

Perhaps this one will serve to help step over the performance threshold. It oughta.

Resistance is the force, says Pressfield, that keeps us from doing our work as creative people.

Today, I found my day full of resistance, derailed and amok.

I will spare the details of the chaos in this post, but needless to say that I ran up against a lot of external resistance in the hours when I would usually be creating something worthy of the concept.

And yet, here I am and I have opened my laptop late into the evening to fight the resistance that swelled up over this day and to finish off the waning minutes having done at least a little of something.

It is easy to get derailed, but it is important to find one’s way back to the tracks sooner than later. Resistance is tricky like that, always tempting you to take the easy route, go to bed having accomplished nothing, when all it takes is to resist right back.

If being a dabbler bothers you, how does one stop dabbling and start honing and refining—especially if one is inclined to be more of a dabbler than a deep diver?

I admit, I am a bit of a shiny object guy when it comes to my hobbies. I see something new and interesting and yeah, admittedly I often do dive deeply into it for a while—that is, usually, until I’ve learned enough about said shiny object that learning about it becomes less interesting than it was at the beginning. And then often, said shiny object goes on the shelf, forgotten.

Dabbling done… next.

To fight through and beyond the honeymoon period for any new project my personal tactic has generally been to use goals or public accountability or external commitments. It’s neither complex nor especially obscure. Signing up for a language class for group accountability… or telling everyone you meet your running goal race… or planning a trip to sketch in another country. All are examples of great counter-dabbling tools.

These sorts of external motivators create a kind of reward system to overcome the raw dopamine drop when the innate rewards of dabbling fade. 

Or… just don’t do any of that. Dabbling in countless interesting hobbies to sample what life has to offer, well, that’s fine, too.

I broke out a fresh sketch book, I gave myself a few basic constraints, and I drew one sketch for each day in October.

Can you guess how many of those sketches were amazing?

Basically none.

Sure, there were a few solid works and I even shared a half dozen of them. But if I was seeking perfectionism—or worse, waiting for it to even get started on my artist journey—I would have drawn one thing on October first …and then very likely given up.

Instead, I embraced it as an incremental effort of modest improvement.  The goal wasn’t to create thirty-one great sketches, no, the goal was to sketch thirty-one times.

The goal wasn’t fame or a viral drawing or something I could sell. The goal was creating on a routine.

It’s easy to aim too high. It’s easy to think that anything and everything we create should be a final, salable product to hold up to the whole world for judgement.

It’s actually pretty tough to recognize that almost everything we make should start off as something just for our own selves and maybe never become more than that.