Headphones & Hoodie

Image from user louisponce on Midjourney.

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

I’ve entered a new phase of my work-life balance, in that I’m really trying to find a balance that is more life-life. I am spending far more time calculating when work can end and life can begin. Scientists have speculated that life began about 4.5 billion years ago, but for me I’m ready to kick off in the late afternoon, early evening at the latest. Yes, I’m spending a lot of my time matriculating when I can retire.

I say “retire” but I really mean stopping working for someone else and starting doing the things I want to do for once. How many years do you have to keep doing someone else's projects before you can start working on your own? Of course, I ask this from a place of privilege. I've worked for over 30 years and for many of those years I've contributed to retirement savings plans and other investments. Some years (the 2008 financial crisis say) a lot of those savings were wiped out, and other years economic downturns have wreaked havoc on those plans. That's sort of what's happening now. Economically speaking, "Orange" is the new red; a chaotic American administration is destroying markets and all of my savings are in those markets. Also, it’s not a good time to have Canadian dollars and portfolios of stock made up of companies that are leaking value with every fart from below the 49th parallel. The losses are such that I should probably put the retirement abacus aside and focus on getting back to work.

Focus is the hard part. For a few years I've managed a crew of incredibly talented and competent people who needed very little management. My role was essentially to go to meetings, share information, facilitate collaboration and pass that status up the chain. My job was not to design much of anything. Yet, recently I've had to roll up my sleeves and get back to the drawing board. The high level design isn't so hard, in fact, much of my work has been seeing a plan or a design from a pretty high level and waiting to see the details emerge from someone else's efforts. Now I'm trying to fill in the blanks and connect the dots (in a software that went from almost too simple to something much more complex) and that requires some muscles I haven't used in a long time. The muscle that atrophied the most? Concentration.

At first I struggled to not get frustrated by options and details but a trick I discovered, that frankly I forgot, was to block out any extraneous information such as noise. When I really have to get work done, the headphones are on and the hoodie is up. What's playing on the headphones? Nothing. They have noise cancelling which, when engaged, is sort of like a white noise machine. The hoodie acts as a type of blinder to discourage my peripheral vision from even the tiniest distraction. There are other tricks too, such as hiding or quitting any application other than the one you are working in. E-mail, messaging applications and notifications extract a terrible toll on the mind. It's like I've built a maze with no turns or corners, inside a sensory depravation tank. The only way out, is through.

It's strange to me now that I need to invoke that environment. Often if I'm reading, or sketching, my mind already goes to the that place. It's probably because I want to go there, the very focus of my mind creates the walls I require. If it's a task, such as work that I essentially have to force myself to do, I really need to erect the hoarding that keeps the curious out and the workers of my mind trapped inside until the job is done. For months my work has been neither taxing nor interesting and the idea of forcing myself into a corner where the only way out is to fight through it is similar to advice from some writers, artists or animators working through a mental block. Whereas some wait for the "muse" to arrive, others contend if you sit at your desk or piano all the time, you'll actually be where you're supposed to be when the muse strikes. Disney animator Shamus Culhane wrote about animating a scene he was having trouble with by powering through it, redrawing it again and again. When he finally "got it", he sat at his desk throughout a weekend, working feverishly. Eventually he redrew the entire sequence but for him it was a turning point in his career in which hard work was the cure when inspiration lagged. Thomas Edison reportedly said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." I'm not even sure I'm looking for inspiration anymore, but I have found that work can be hard and that's why they call it "work". Until the day when the work I'm doing is inspiration enough, it's going to have to be headphones on, and hoodie up.