The Under-appreciated Benefits of Creative Consistency

The Under-appreciated Benefits of Creative Consistency

I wanted to excerpt tis who article. From Sparring Mind:

Consistency begets consistency. A person in motion stays in motion, unless acted upon by a Netflix binge session. The creative mind is much like machinery. Too much work and you overload it, too little and a decrepit state of rusty thinking awaits you. Keep the process humming by allowing the steady flow of work to never let the mental cobwebs settle.

When you’re consistent, it means never having to restart. “I’m getting back into the swing of things,” famous last words uttered by countless people with schedules as reliable as the weather. Constant progress keeps morale high, keeps enthusiasm brimming, and increases your investment in a project

A propos of routine, I found this in my feed reader today. Constant progress keeps you motivated and your work top of mind. When you can relax into something, you form better connections with it to the world outside.

Consistency is integral to creativity. Writing doesn’t just transfer ideas, it creates them. The same can be said for all creative work. There is a risk, as Bruce Lee says, that “If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.” The inverse is rarely true, as doing something requires thinking about it. Consistent work puts you where the good ideas can find you.

With constant work comes constant inspiration. This is how you build inspiration, serendipity.

Routine makes your muse.

Routines of People Way Cooler than Me

Want to develop a better work routine? Discover how some of the world’s greatest minds organized their days.
Click image to see the interactive version (via Podio).

The greater part of success is routine. You have to show up and do the work. This is the biggest thing I have learned from the last 6 months of living with a morning protocol.

Before I started Wrestling with Franklin, I changed up my daily routine to something pretty similar to his (5th line above!). I don’t remember if that was intentional but it’s been such a useful thing, especially recently as I am writing more.

This is what my daily routine looks like:

5am: Wake up; Feed the cats; Make coffee.
5:30a: Write, research.
6:30a: Get ready for work.
7-11a: Work.
11a:L0nch!
12-4/5p:Work.
5:30p: Exercise.
6:30p:Dinner
7:30p: Relax.
9p: Review the day.
10p: Zzzzz….

There’s some variability with work - deadlines or meetings or big projects will keep me later which usually means taco’s for dinner so I get an approprite amount of recouperation time.

My weekends look the same though much more flexible. I’ll typically spend the whole morning each day reading and relaxing, make me and Alyska breakfast, before doing some Bunny Rope business stuff or errands for Doomsday(1).

I do sleep in occasionally if I’m having a bad allergy day and didn’t sleep well or to just catch up a little if I’ve been exercising hard and need it.(2) In those cases, I just start my day when I’m up - I got up today, made coffee, and immdiately started writing.

Routine creates space in your day to accomplish specific things. The more you do a thing the easier it becomes. You build muscle to lift that weight, create neural pathways to remember that language. Its evolutionary - respond to new stimulus or die.

When you create routine for creative work, you’re body contours itself to that purpose. You build a creative habit which gets strong the more you use it.

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<a data-preserve-html-node=“true” name=“3Source” <=“” a=““>I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.
- Peter DeVries.(3)

1. As an aside: I wonder about my industriousness. I feel like I spend waaaaay too much time in the internet when I could be researching. I see valie on a little brainless time but I feel like reading on topics for projects should be more satisfying if not more pleasurable. More on this later when I get to the week on Industry. Probably. ↩︎


2. Slept until 9 today, in fact, because of a party last night. It was glorious until the cats went crazy because I didn’t feed them… ↩︎


3. This quote has been attributed to Peter de Vries, William Faulkner, Somerset Maugham, and Raymond Chandler. There’s a little investigation available here. ↩︎

Draplin Design Co. on Logo Design

I effin’ love logo design. This is similar to how I developed the Bunny Rope logo and banner though I didn’t sketch - I fear my drawing skills. Wish I had because some of the stuff I started with was interesting.

From DDC for Lynda.com- Draplin Design Company.

Aaron Draplin Takes On a Logo Design Challenge from lynda.com on Vimeo.

A Week on Silence

A Week in Silence. More on my blag shortly. #aominaction

I am a quiet person. Solitude in a well-controlled environment is important to me; but I have never attempted to use silence in a beneficial way. This week was really the first time and it was harder than I thought.

I manage a dozen people at work which requires meeting with each of them individually every week to assess priorities, projects, and gather or give feedback. Managing people means working with disparate personalities and varying levels of talkativeness in those meetings. I’ve found that, with a few of my team members, I have a habit of filling the silent time myself. Which means I tend to talk the majority of our meeting time.

This is bad management. Silence in a 1:1 meeting is a tool to understand what is on your team member’s mind. A successful 1:1 is me spending as little time talking as possible while still being informed of all the things that have happened or may happen in the coming week. This summary from Rands in Repose(1) is elegant:

A 1:1 is a place to listen for what they aren’t saying.

The sound that surrounds successful regimen of 1:1s is silence. All of the listening, questioning, and discussion that happens during a 1:1 is managerial preventative maintenance. You’ll see when interest in a project begins to wane and take action before it becomes job dissatisfaction.

• The Update, The Vent, and the Disaster

When I’m talking, I’m not listening.

This was the primary practical application of Franklin’s Silence virtue. I spend the whole first half of Tuesday in Wednesday in work plans. I felt the silence in a few situations where my team members grew uncomfortable.

Some of my team members do not treat our weeklies as a conversation, that it is to be as short a “here’s what’s on my plate” as possible. They are the ones uncomfortable in silence when I ask brief, open questions to allow them to fill the pauses between.

Had you asked me last week which I thought would go poorly, I would have guessed the newer team members with whom I had not built a relationship. The golden thread linking the worst of my weeklies was engagement and overall performance.

It seems obvious now that people interested in their jobs and projects can keep a conversation going as they are more likely to detail the tapestry they’re weaving in their work. Open questions to engaged team members creates rich responses.

I think I’ll keep this specific implementation going.

Indiscretions

Otherwise, I feel like I need better ideas of what the other virtues mean. I don’t think I’m applying them consistently and may be too generous in my marking.

For temperance, how do I handle when I’m out and get 1 drink but the bartender is generous (2)? By volume, it;s probably two drinks? Potentially more. I drank it over about three hours while writing. So… was that intemperance or dealing with the potential for intemperance in an appropriate manner?

I did, at least, call that a mark against frugality. Though working away from home can make certain things flow better, the money is spent is ultimately unnecessary. You can argue that for sure.

And though I had more marks against humility, I likely was just missing them before. I believe it useful that I’m catching them now as I’m becoming more aware of of boasting (sarcasm too regarding the Sincerity virtue) but I’m not yet catching myself before I break the virtue.

Others - justice, moderation, and cleanliness - I think I need to consider definitions better but that will come later.

This is a learning process.

We stand at the crossroads, each minute, each hour, each day, making choices. We choose the thoughts we allow ourselves to think, the passions we allow ourselves to feel, and the actions we allow ourselves to perform.

• Benjamin Franklin, The Art of Virtue

1. If you’re in tech and are a manager, you should read Rands in Repose. It is always as relevant as it is well-written.↩︎

2. That’s a glass of Ardbeg and the fireplace at a coffee shop in town. I am lucky that local coffee shops serve alcohol let along good whisky poured generously. ↩︎

Virtue ≠ Piety

Morality does not require religion. Morality is not dependent on sort of spiritual belief. Morality is not piety, or a devotion to goodness, as a method to acquire salvation. Much of the rason I’m doing this - living by Franklin’s 13 virtues - has nohing to do with attaining religious salvation. I am attempting to increase my own happiness in life and society.

I don’t believe in salvation insofar as I do not believe a benevolent creator would make a thing just to tell it its not good enough and has to prove its love. And if a deity exists that created the universe and requires me to jump through hoops to get into the good afterlife? Fuck that guy.

The word piety has its roots in the Latin pietas which is translated variously as “duty”, “religiosity”, “devotion” and others with various levels of denotative religious fervor. Usage for “piety” was likely less religious at the time and considered more like duty to ones’s country and family. It was not, however, part of the “Cardinal” virtues in Roman society.

The first four virtues were enumerated by Plato in The Republic in the mid 4th century BCE - wisdom, temperance, fortitude, and justice - where each were considered integral characteristics of a healthy society. Though members of each class were expected to display all virtues, fortitude was the primary virtue of the warrior class, wisdom primary for the ruling class, and temperance primary for working/craft classes. Justice was the expectation for interaction between the classes where Plato considered that no class was necessarily better than another and should respect the rights of each individual as an individual. The intent was to increase over-all happiness or the State ratherthan allow devolutioninto hedonism (vice).

The interesting thing about the definition of the virtues is the timeline. Protagoras is believed to be one of Plato’s early works - somewhere in the 390-380 BCE range; whereas The Republic which outlined classical Roman virtue was written 380-360 BCE. Though he attempted to define Piety and considered it virtuous, it was not critical to proper function of society.

It wasn’t until Christians came along and tried to instill reverence and fear of an all-powerful deity that Piety became an essential virtue to people and place. St. Paul of Tarsus is credited with describe the three religious virtues- faith, hope, and love (charity) which eventually were added to the Roman virtues to describe the 7 virtues in Christianity.

That first happened in the epic Psychomachia in the 5th century CE where the author, Aurelius ClemensPrudentia described the efforts humans must make to live a life of faith. It outlines the struggle between virtue adn vice. The popularity of the poem helped spread the ideas widely which eventually was incorporated into biblical scripture. An example passage of Charity fighting Greed:

The valiant Virtue gripped the trembling Vice in her hard motted muscles and broke her neck and rent her dry, bloodless throat. Charity’s arms, like binding chains, tightened under her chin and wrenched from her strangled throat the life which perished not in sounds but in convulsions.

(No wonder it was so popular.)

At its root, morality is not religious devotion. A person can be virtuous by understanding their relationship between what is good for them and good for society. I would argue that it is a better good to conduct ourselves in a way that generates more goodness now rather than some ill-defined life after death. That religion seeks to frighten you to live a moral life feels fundamentally self defeating. Acting out of fear is an instinct to preserve ourselves rather than act in an externally aware manner.

Glaucon: Then if the good and just man be thus superior in pleasure to the evil and unjust, his superiority will be infinitely greater in propriety of life and in beauty and virtue?

Socrates: Immeasurably greater.

• Plato, The Republic, Book II

Silence in Colonial Culture

As an introvert, I implicitly understand the utility of and need for silence. Silence is how introverts recharge in a brash world. But trying to understand how exactly Silence became a virtuous thing is curious.

The phrase “children should be seen and not heard originated in a 15th century from a book of homilies written by an Augustinian clergymen named John Mirk.

Hyt ys old Englysch sawe: A mayde schuld be seen, but not herd. - John Mirk, Mirk’s Festial, pg 230

It is one of few books that survived the time period with so many copies suggesting it was popular enough to be republished numerous times.

Really basic overview of Reformation

The point being that this is the sort of sentiment that informed the reformation process itself. In the 16th century, Protestant scripture spread like wild fire with the invention of the printing press. Luther’s translation of the Bible allowed Christian ideals to take hold in Germany and fueled the already ill-tempered relations with Rome over corruption - thing like papal bulls were at their height as was simony, which is essentially the ability to buy your way into church office.

Rebellious ideals spread to England where super-friendly, lover of all his wives (while they had heads) Henry VIII used the anti-Roman fervor as a veil to separate English Christianity from the supremacy of the Pope in Rome. Forming the Church of England was pretty much about Henry VIII divorcing his wife but I suspect the people were more OK with it than they would have been otherwise because of anti-Rome sentient.

From moderate reform, came the radicalized groups calling for further change. Removing the supremacy of Rome, papal bulls, simony, and much of the corruption was a great start, but radicalized groups wanted a return to “purer” forms of the religions. Ones based on strict adherence to the Bible. But, being satisfied with his own supremacy, Henry VIII stopped short, preferring a relatively moderate path between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

The Puritans were all about strict interpretation of scripture. Deeming it as the only true law of God, Puritans believed that each individual, as well as each congregation, was directly responsible to God, rather than answering through a mediator such as priests, King Henry VIII, the Pope, or similar. They were against ornamentation both in churches as well as those who served as clergy and the rituals they preferred. Hard-liners.

It was this vigorous opposition to standard practice that caused such agitation in the country and what ed to their eventual expulsion from England to Holland and, eventually, America. Which leads me to…

You can’t outrun culture

To their credit, Puritans were open and considerate of other beliefs. They founded American on (some) religious tolerance and encouraged people of all religions to join them in the new world. Other ostracized groups went to America including Lutherans, Anglicans, and Quakers. This what informed the culture. Quakers, in particular, we the founders of Pennsylvania where Franklin spent his adult life. And Franklin’s parents were devout Puritans and attempted to raise him as a devout Puritan. It didn’t really take.

My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought me through my childhood piously in the Dissenting way. But I was scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. - Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Chapter VII

However, the conception of silent as a virtue and tool in one’s arsenal to obtain (moral) perfection makes sense. Puritans, and protestants in general, were of few Christian sects to believe people could interact directly with God - it was the biggest thing they chucked in refromation. Before, only priests had that ability.

Prayer, an act done in some amount of solitude - again, Puritans were’t big on large, church rituals, requires silence. It’s how you connect. I don’t think this was lost on Franklin but better considered in ways that could apply to both personal advantage and societal advancement.

Quakers, too, believed that one could receive divine inspiration through silent devotion to god. Silence in worship consists of participants sitting in a circle at a private home or similar; they were similar, if not more rigorous, in the striping on ostentetation of ritual from worship than the Puritans. “Services” were set for about an hour, anyone may speak if so moved, but the was that any vocalization should be intentional and “inspired.” It is similar to meditation but without a mantra. But that’s likely a different discussion.

It is, however, easy to believe that tis is the sort of context that generated Franklin’s desire for a more valuable version of Silence with which he was raised. Consider it an act of personal, fiscal, and societal devotion that he would not seek to engage in frivolous talk and save his time for worthwhile conversation.