Like It’s The First Time
A few months ago, I went to a comedy show that I later learned was one stop on a world tour of more than a hundred performances. It struck me as one of the job’s less obvious challenges: performing the same material with the same energy, the same animation, the same apparent spontaneity, night after night after night after night. It made me think of a story about the playwright and performer Lin-Manuel Miranda, who apparently often tells the same people the same stories dozens of times because he loses track of who has and hasn’t already heard them. Once, while talking with his longtime collaborator Tommy Kail, Miranda launched into a story about something that had recently happened to him. Kail listened patiently to the whole thing, then said, “That happened to me. I told you that story.” They laughed, then Kail added, “that’s why you’re cut out for theater”—a profession whose relentlessly repetitive nature wears many others down—“because you can keep telling it like it’s the first time.”
The challenge of doing things again and again—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Don’t Be Overly Romantic About It
Most jobs that we romanticize and idealize turn out to be just like most jobs: they involve a lot of mundane, unglamorous, repetitive work. “I like to remind my computer science friends,” Jeremy Giffon says, “that they’re just bricklayers. Yes, a small percentage of them are doing difficult, innovative, cutting-edge work. But generally, it’s basically just bricklaying. There’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t kid yourself. It’s just building things with existing tools and methods. There’s established codes, frameworks, infrastructures, and blueprints. And so you don’t need to be overly romantic about it.” Jeremy’s observation isn’t meant to diminish computer science. Rather, it’s a useful corrective. When we think about professions we’re not in, we tend to focus on their most appealing aspects while the mundane, tedious work that occupies most of the day stays largely out of sight. That incomplete picture can make us unnecessarily unhappy, feeling like our work is uniquely monotonous and unexciting. It can help, then, to remember that nearly every job—even the most romanticized and high-status—is like nearly every other job, eventually settling into a small set of actions one has to perform day after day after day.
Try To Have The Time Of Your Life
When the economist Steve Levitt once guest lectured in one of Daniel Gilbert’s classes at Harvard, he was stunned by the energy Gilbert still brought to teaching some forty years into his career. It was the kind of enthusiasm Levitt more often saw in new professors—and had watched fade in many of them over time. Gilbert decorated the classroom, curated a playlist for each lecture, and knew the names of all 400-plus students, even saying something unique about each one before they asked Levitt a question. Afterward, Levitt asked Gilbert how he’s managed to maintain such energy and enthusiasm in a job he’s been doing for decades. “Somewhere very early on in life,” Gilbert replied, “I discovered that to the extent that you put your whole self into almost any task—even if it’s washing the dishes—it stops being work and it starts becoming play.” Instead of thinking about the drudgery of washing dishes, for example, he’ll think, Can I wash them by holding them in my right hand and scrubbing with my non-dominant left hand? Is there an interesting way to stack them to maximize space on the drying rack? Can I scrub, rinse, and stack dishes in sync with the beat of a favorite song? “Anything that you are creative and playful with is a joy,” Gilbert continued. “So I have to teach—it’s part of my job. I could go into the classroom and spend 10, 15 hours a week just going through the motions, which would make it feel like drudgery. Or I could try to spend that time fully engaged, having the time of my life. And so I do.”
Look Back On When You Were Motivated And When You Weren’t
Of course, not every job requires the visible first-time energy and enthusiasm of a comedian, actor, or teacher. More often, doing it again and again requires the ability to do so even when you don’t feel especially energetic or enthusiastic. Andy Weir, author of The Martian, was asked how he motivates himself to write on days he’s not motivated to write. He said he thinks about what he ultimately wants: to produce good writing. Then he reminds himself that there’s no correlation between how motivated he is and how good the writing is. He has days where he feels extremely motivated, where the words pour out of him. And he has days where he feels like crap, where every word takes work. What these days have in common, Weir said: “if you wait a week and look back on the stuff you wrote, you can’t tell the difference between when you were motivated and when you weren’t. This helps me a lot—remembering that the quality of your work isn’t greatly affected by the amount of enthusiasm you had in the moment.”
Do It When You Don’t Want To, So You Can Do It When You Do Want To
For decades, every day, the dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp has woken up at 5:30 AM, put on workout clothes, walked outside her New York City home, hailed a taxi, and asked the driver to take her to the gym, where she works out for two hours. Asked if she’s been able to maintain this habit simply because she enjoys working out, Tharp said, “No. I’ve never enjoyed it. It’s boring and loathsome.” Why do you keep doing it, then? “It’s simple,” she said. “If you don’t do the work when you don’t want to, you’re not going to be able to do the work when you do want to. End of story.”
The Best And Hardest Thing We Do
“The best thing we do is every day,” the college basketball coach Buzz Williams likes to say, “and the hardest thing we do is every day. [Practice] proves who’s an Every Day Guy. And if you’re not an Every Day Guy, it doesn’t mean we love you less, it just means you’re going to have to sit over there on the side. You have to be Every Day … There’s no, ‘We’ll do it tomorrow.’ No. We’re doing it today…You gotta do it every day. And if you can’t do it every day, then you’re going to struggle because it is every day.”