Brick Laying

Imagine you are building a house. The foundation is already there, you simply have to start by laying the first layer of bricks.

So you start by building the first section of wall. You lay bricks down, and sort of get into a rhythm. You eventually build a wall in a week, look over it and see that it is sturdy, and begin on the next wall. Overall, the outer walls of the house take about four weeks to build.

Now let’s take another instance. You are building seven houses, all along the same street, but scattered around the neighborhood. So one day, you lay the first bricks of house #1. You get tired, go get some rest and come back. You think to yourself “House #1 has a good head start, let’s begin on House #2.” So you go and begin laying bricks for House #2. This goes on for a few weeks, and maybe you build a few walls. But eventually, you start to look at your progress and you just take a break, never finishing the houses, letting someone else finish the work, satisfied to watch.

Overall, you are discouraged and burnt out. Over the entire time you spent building houses, you may have finished a few single walls on the separate houses, but all the progress did was remind you how far behind your other houses were. Laying the first bricks felt rather the same on all seven houses, but eventually it all started blending together, and you got nowhere.

This is, in my opinion, what multiple creative projects can feel like. It’s a lot like what I used to do. I would write a screenplay treatment one day, part of a novel the next, maybe a comic strip or a funny poem the day after. None of it amounted to anything, because they were all separate houses and projects. No purpose came out of it, no real progress, I just had a bunch of bricks lying around the street.

You can do 7 different projects over the course of a week to a certain degree. You might get the first 5 pages of a book, or the opening lines of a song, or the rough sketch done on these seven different ideas.

But you are basically throwing your bricks away. No real progress is made. Because your focus is shifting.

Again, your brain has tricked you into thinking you are being productive with your time. Your creative juices may get flowing, but overall you still get discouraged with the total lack of progress on any one project, which discourages you from ever continuing, until the thing that once excited you so much is reduced to a dusty pile of papers sitting at the bottom of your workbag again. Then the cycle of endless start-ups comes back to it, and it gets revitalized for another five-page treatment.

This happens to me all the time! I have so many folders of 30 page book drafts on my One Drive, waiting for me to come back to them and start again! So many song concepts that never got past the opening riff, so many sketches that never saw inked details. I always used to say I was reallyyyyy good at writing the first ten pages of a novel, but never finishing them. And I didn’t realize that I was doing it to myself until much later in life.

True focus, and therefore true progress and mastery, comes from discipline. You have to decide, before you even sit down to create, what it is that you are going to be creating. Remove the decision before you even give your brain the chance to fuddle with it and pretend to be excited about a brand new idea.

Our brains want us to be excited, and so they try to push you away from the idea that you have to work for, and that’s normally the one that you have already started. Beginnings are always more fun than middles.

But the ending is the most important part.

My newest in a series of challenges, and one that I am going to have a major amount of difficulty following, is to devote yourself to one project at a time. Don’t start a new one until you have finished!

Let me know your guys’ struggles with this lack of creative focus, and tell me how it’s affected your drive to continue! Thanks for reading once again. See you tomorrow