The Toil and the Trouble
Most people miss out on opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work. — Thomas Edison
The phrase “put your head down and do the work” is so cliché that it must have some merit (although I’m personally more of a fan of C.T. Fletcher’s nomenclature). It seems that no matter how many hacks we use or shortcuts we take, there is just no escaping reps. Attempts to skirt around lessons, avoid the direct experience, or deal with the emotional tribulations that come with failure rob us of the genuine process of improvement and the source of our self-worth.
Disconnecting from what is truly earned creates a veil that makes all of us more vulnerable to the stress that will inevitably come from normal life stuff and even more so when the unexpected surely arrives.
Repetition is a Mother
In his classic book on the practice of art, Do The Work, Steven Pressfield wrote, “The most important thing about art is to work.” There is just no getting around it. Writing makes a writer. Dancing makes a dancer. Lifting makes a lift-er. The thing itself must be done. Writing something that obvious makes me want to yell “no shit!” at myself but how often do we all fail to engage in the exact process that makes us become who we want to be or achieve the thing we want the most? There is an old Russian saying that has always stuck with me since my college studies “povterenya mat uchenya”, repetition is the mother of learning (please forgive my phonetics). Gotta love Russian culture for bluntly stating the obvious.
Engagement in the daily toil is actually where the largest opportunities for learning lie. Aha! moments of achievement and understanding are all precipitated through the day to day and even in the moment to moment grind. This is the art of discipline. While nearly everybody admires the sticktoitiveness that leads to achievement very few actually do it. Why? Because it’s not a thirty-second movie montage that summarily ends in the mastery of the task and of course, one’s self. The actual grind feels more often like failure, frustration, and disappointment. It’s boring and repetitive and the worst part of all, no catchy theme music. No wonder the world is rife with constant hacks to help us try to skip steps and avoid the necessary toil of that which is earned.
Hack Job
Hacking is an interesting concept. In computer lingo, hacking is gaining otherwise unauthorized access to a program. More recently it has been co-opted by popular culture to essentially mean a shortcut. I for one am a fan of efficiency but not at the expense of reduced quality and inattention to detail.
Being able to get behind the firewall of my physiology to pull the chemistry levers definitely appeals to the geek in me. If taken too far hacking can result in gimmicks and nonsense that skirt around the real magic and yield only shallow results.
While I do understand the allure to ideas like biohacking there is something innately inelegant about the idea. Blandly chopping away at jungle vines comes to mind here and when it comes to skill-based practices a dull machete may not be how we achieve the best outcome. In my view, all practices are an opportunity to develop skills and more to the point to practice the skill of practicing skill itself.
It’s so easy to get enamored with the allure of outcomes alone we can forget to find reward in the process. This is where we find the alchemy of turning toil into joy. The real stuff we are looking for comes from fully engaging in the process itself and finding internal reward from both processes and outcomes.
Chop wood, carry water as the Zen masters say.
The Long Haul
There is an apocryphal tale about Picasso in which he’s at café table drawing on a napkin when a woman approaches and asks for the napkin. “10,000 francs,” requests Picasso. “But it only took 10 seconds.” “ No, Madame, it’s taken 40 years.” While this story is largely unconfirmed folklore it illustrates an important point about the inherent nature of value.
Value is often represented in time. How many repetitions, how many iterations, how much experience, toil, and failure helped contributed to the arrival at this moment when things appear convenient. Things that are harder to make and more difficult to acquire have intrinsic value for this simple fact. That’s why admiration for a skill (regardless of the particular skill you yourself are interested in) is universally admired.
So then if you are interested in creating and contributing anything of value to your own life and to the culture in which you find yourself — there is no way around reps.
Have I said no free lunches before?
The Art of Failure
Failure and its close cousin frustration are not generally experienced or remarked in a gleeful light. Feeling the annoyance of missing the mark (nerd note: the work sin actually has biblical origin in an archery term that means to stray from the target) and taking responsibility for the failure are temporary and necessary discomforts of full engagement in the process and ultimately getting closer to that which we ultimately wish to become.
Getting embedded in the art of failure can shift the perspective towards the process of true work from one anchored in frustration to one that allows the feeling to pass through without attachment because you know it’s the road to improvement.
The famous stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius said, “The art of life is a lot more like wrestling than dancing.” Our most difficult counterpart to wrestle with is often ourselves. Our ability to learn to continue to make incremental improvements and ultimately overcome our own shortcomings is largely dependent on performing droll daily habits with increasing levels of attention and precision.
Advocatus Diaboli
Let’s examine briefly when things go too far. While the discipline, the getting after it, the toil are essential to progress it’s also important we do not let the tail wag the dog. One downside of discipline is that it can become a hiding place disguised as a necessary routine. The incessant need to keep to the schedule can be a mechanism for perpetuating the desire for constant control. If this monastic rhythm gets disrupted, and it will, those who rely too heavily on its presence will have made themselves vulnerable to the innate unpredictability of the real world. Not only is it important to be prepared to break schedule when it’s forced upon you, but sometimes you just need to crawl back into bed with your spouse. In short, if the discipline itself overrides the purpose of the discipline in the first place you are missing the point.
While American culture at large is nowhere even close to falling prey to this overcorrection it’s still important to remain wary of.
Meta Misery
Real work can be drudgery at the moment of practice. It’s not the flashy thumb flipping dopamine filled ride of Instagram. But it has the promise of leading towards a list of accomplishments, failures, and lessons learned. In other words, a life lived. The next time you’re in the middle of boring, repetitive, frustrating grinding failure know that this is where’s there the most opportunity for growth.
