Turning hated tasks into personal gold :: Feb 2009

Turning hated tasks into personal gold

Volume 3, Number 02  |  February 2009

I'll be the first to confess to having fairly narrow interests. With the possible exception of "disaccharide-free cooking" (when I'm actually following my Crohn's diet), my so-called hobbies are virtually interchangeable with my purported work.

Even so, I've found that the more I pay attention, the more the very particular lessons of one endeavor bleed into another, creating a sort of "rising personal tide raising entire personal fleet" effect.

Take, for example, this strange little (or not so little) project I began at the start of the year, The Virgo Guide to Marketing. Essentially, it boils down to me working my way through a marketing plan/calendar created by my coach and co-collaboratrix, Ilise Benun (with a nod to her business partner-in-crimefighting, Peleg Top), and blogging it out loud.

I'll be blunt: I signed on primarily to hold myself accountable to some changes I wanted to make in marketing my business, such as...well, actually marketing my business. (Dirty details available at least in part here, for now. More soon!)

In my search for meaning (a.k.a. "2008"), I let a lot of things slide:  the blog, expanding my network--basically, everything but my monthly acting column and this newsletter you're reading now, which I clung to like a precious (if precarious) inflatable raft on the stormy seas of my personal odyssey. (And thank you, gentle reader, for keeping me accountable and on track--I kiss you, three times!)

I approached the project the way one might an extended session of vigorous spring cleaning--a tiresome, if necessary, evil on the road to a clean house. Only the strangest thing started to happen as things progressed: the more I threw myself into the hated tasks (cold calling, networking with new groups, the tyranny of daily blogging), the more my "real" creativity blossomed. In one month, for example, I wrote two original songs, posted both the clean one and the not-so-clean one to YouTube, and performed one for a crowd of people at a friend's birthday party.

I think a few things are at work here. One is the power of regular exercise: do something enough, and even if a part of you hates the thing, you will get better at it. I can strum and finger chords better now than I could a month ago because I've done it every day; having even that kind of low-level technical facility with the instrument means my creative mind is freer to wander and create.

Next is the blessed mundanity of the Everyday Thing. If you write and write, or act and act, or speak and speak, you start to see that creativity is just a flow of energy you can tap into every time. Some days will be good, some days not so much, but instead of that being a bad thing, it's freeing: the mandate that every precious session with the Muse must produce a work of brilliance evaporates. With, of course, the added bonus that the more you do it, more your ratio of lousy-to-good diminishes, because, well, you're getting better.

Finally, there may be something to the saw that stretching yourself in a new thing makes you better at things, period. Having to learn strumming patterns forged a few neural pathways, I'm guessing, which may have been the key to me coming up with a little hack for making cold calling less loathsome and even mildly enjoyable. And in just three weeks! (BTW, if you really want to burn in some new neural pathways, apparently dancing is the thing. Who knew?)

Here's how I'd look at the above snarl of information as helpful and actionable steps:

1. Find some fringe area of your chosen field of endeavor and create a plan for mastering it. We have limited time and attention these days, so if you choose something that could more likely be of direct benefit to your current goal, you may be more likely to be motivated to stick with it. If you're an actor, that can mean a memorization technique, learning dialects or a new type of study (film/tv for theater actors, stage combat or vocal coaching for film/tv).

2. When a light bulb goes off, make a note of it, then revisit it later to see what you can learn from it, process-wise. Believe you me, when I found myself looking forward to who was next on my call list, I noted it. (And I'll share my tricks with you on the Virgo Guide soon!)

3. Set up some kind of accountability arrangement with fellow travelers. The fear of humiliating oneself publicly by bailing is a strong motivator to work through the rough spots. But what also happens when you're all hoeing your individual rows but checking in with each other is you do start to see patterns in how you work best, and how your mind works. One-on-one, group, real-life or web probably doesn't matter so much as just connecting with other people who are going through the same (kind of) process.

I would love to hear any stories you have about hated tasks and how you've come to cherish them--if not on their own, for what they've taught you.

Until next month, keep slogging up that hill and shining upon the world like the big, brazen ball of fabulosity that you are...