My journal entries from last year read like a narrated chore list:
“Productive day. Wrote a lot, read for a solid hour. Now to run.”
I was doing things I supposedly enjoyed, but writing about them as though I were clocking shifts at a factory.
Lately, I’ve been trying to approach creativity differently: more lightly, more patiently, and with more interest in the process itself.
Not just creativity, either. Work. Errands. Exercise. Ordinary life.
“This is the real secret of life,” Alan Watts said, “to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it’s play.”
Any moment can become an adventure. Curiosity can turn a walk into an expedition. It can make a dull conversation fascinating. It can turn a mundane task into a game.
Thoreau wrote that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” He believed the wild duck was swifter and more beautiful than the tame one. Good literature, like good thinking, has some of that wildness in it: curious, unplanned, unaffected.
The same may be true of a good life.
A Project of No Importance
After four intense years working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Richard Feynman accepted a teaching position at Cornell.
Some of the country’s most prestigious institutions wanted him. Albert Einstein himself wrote to invite Feynman to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
But Feynman felt like a fraud.
The years at Los Alamos had drained him. He was exhausted, uninterested in research, and unable to write more than two sentences about a scientific problem without losing focus.
“They expect me to accomplish something,” he thought, “and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas.”
Then he realized that the expectations attached to these offers were impossible to live up to—and because they were impossible, he had no responsibility to try.
“It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.”
At Cornell, Feynman decided to return to what had drawn him to physics in the first place: fun.
“Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything . . . I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”
Within a week, he became interested in a wobbling plate someone had thrown in the cafeteria. He started playing around with the mathematics of its motion.
A colleague questioned the importance of this project.
“‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind that I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.”
This project of “no importance” eventually contributed to the work for which he won the Nobel Prize.
The Activity Should Be In-ter-ES-ting
Years later, a young physicist named Leonard Mlodinow arrived at Caltech. Given complete freedom to research whatever he wanted, Mlodinow found himself paralyzed.
He kept looking around to see what subjects were popular and what other physicists considered worthwhile. String theory was gaining traction. Should he study that? Desperate, he went to Feynman for guidance.
As Mlodinow searched aloud for the correct answer, Feynman stopped him.
“Look, selecting a research problem isn’t like climbing a mountain. You don’t do it just because it is there. If you really believed in string theory, you wouldn’t come here asking me. You’d come here telling me.”
Feynman never lost that sense of personal direction. Even in old age, while succumbing to cancer, he was still as “fresh, gleeful, playful, mischievous, [and] curious,” Mlodinow writes.
His method was simple: he actively avoided “any activity that he did not find in-ter-ES-ting.”
Curiosity > Passion
Elizabeth Gilbert had already published three books when she began Eat, Pray, Love—a memoir that she thought people might mock for being so earnest.
But it was a book she needed to write for her own reasons. She was curious whether she could adequately describe her emotional experiences on paper.
When she asked her then-boyfriend if he was comfortable with her writing about him in her memoir, he said, “‘Well, it depends. What’s at stake?’”
As Gilbert writes in Big Magic:
“I replied, ‘Nothing. Trust me—nobody reads my books.’
Over twelve million people ended up reading that book.”
Eat, Pray, Love helped others understand themselves, but she wrote it to understand herself. “If I’d sat down to write Eat, Pray, Love with the sole aim of helping others, I would’ve produced an entirely different book. I might have even produced a book that was insufferably unreadable.”
She did not begin with a market opportunity, an important message, or a plan to change millions of lives.
She felt the tug of an inner curiosity and followed it.
She wrote to interest herself first.
Enjoy Your Life
There’s another story Gilbert tells in Big Magic that I find comforting whenever I start taking things too seriously.
The novelist Richard Ford was giving a talk at a bookstore in Washington, D.C., when a middle-aged man stood to ask a question.
The man said that he and Ford had a great deal in common. They were around the same age. They had begun writing at approximately the same time. They came from similar backgrounds and wrote about similar subjects.
The difference was that Ford had become a celebrated man of letters, while the other man had never been published.
Years of rejection had crushed him.
“I wonder if you have any advice for me,” the man said. “But please, sir, whatever you do, don’t tell me to persevere, because that’s the only thing people ever tell me to do, and hearing that only makes me feel worse.”
Ford expressed sympathy for the man’s disappointments. Then he said something to the man that made the audience freeze.
He told him to quit.
“I say this to you only because writing is clearly bringing you no pleasure. It is only bringing you pain. Our time on earth is short and should be enjoyed. You should leave this dream behind and go find something else to do with your life. Travel, take up new hobbies, spend time with your family and friends, relax. But don’t write anymore, because it’s obviously killing you.”
The room went silent. Then Ford smiled and casually added, “However, I will say this. If you happen to discover, after a few years away from writing, that you have found nothing that takes its place in your life—nothing that fascinates you, or moves you, or inspires you to the same degree that writing once did . . . well, then, sir, I’m afraid you will have no choice but to persevere.”
—
There’s a difference between perseverance and self-punishment.
Perseverance means playing the long game, and playing the long game requires a broader perspective.
You are not tied to your work and dragged around by it. You see your creative work for exactly what it is: something you do because you enjoy doing it. Something that is part of your life, but far from the entirety of it. Something you can smile and laugh about because, while you take it seriously, you know it’s not that serious.
You give it your time and attention, then turn that same interest toward everything else: the people you love, the books you read, the conversations you have, and the ordinary things happening around you.
You take it all in, soak it all up, and enjoy as much of it as you can.
That is how you keep it in-ter-ES-ting.