I’ve been rediscovering lately that I’m too hard on myself. And I don’t mean this in the tedious interview question sense, like “My greatest weakness? Probably that I work too hard.” That answer is typically meant to imply, “You should totally hire me, because you’re going to get more labor from me than a reasonable person would sell you at this price!” Whereas my answer is closer to– I’ll exaggerate for effect– “You shouldn’t hire me, because my attitude limits my output and I don’t get anything done.”
When I say I’m too hard on myself, I’m not making a request to be reassured socially. I’m not really interested in hearing “aw, don’t be!” or “that must be rough,” or “all ambitious people are,” and so on – responses that are meant to soothe a person who seems to need soothing. I won’t fault someone for responding that way, since it’s quite natural for most well-intentioned people to respond that way. What do I want, then? What I’m really trying to do here is accurately assess of the effectiveness of my approach at achieving my goal: to publish good-enough essays at an brisk tempo. And I’d give myself a D here. It’s easy to imagine someone here saying, “you’re doing it again, you’re being hard on yourself!” and I do have to laugh at the recursion. Because if I were less hard on myself, I would have published more frequently, which would merit a higher grade. I published ~20 essays in 28 months. I would give myself an A if I had published 4 per month. 4 times 28 is 112. I’d give myself an A for publishing 100, B for 70, C for 50, D for 25. See, I’m actually quite lenient when it comes to scoring!
The area where I’m harsh– and unproductively, ‘needlessly’, laughably so– is at the threshold of determining is worth writing, what is worth publishing. If we split me up into multiple selves– say there’s Writer-Visa and Manager-Visa– I would seriously consider firing Manager-Visa, because he’s been doing a terrible job. Or, well, I guess me writing this is a way of me having a 1-1 with him first. (I highly recommend bouncing out to reading the linked blogpost, because it’s great context for everything I’m talking about here.) I’m not a very good manager. I’m not being fake-humble here. I can quite confidently say that I’m a competent writer. But my self-management skills are lacking. Which is good news! It means there’s room for improvement.
Have you watched the movie Whiplash? (I don’t recommend it.) Different people have different interpretations, but to me it’s straightforwardly a horror story of a terrible mentor who abuses his students “in pursuit of greatness”. The protagonist of the movie triumphs in the end, but I’d say he does it in spite of his terrible teacher, and that his teacher deserves no credit for his flourishing. But it’s always easier to notice when somebody else is doing a bad job. It’s harder to notice when we’re doing it ourselves.
And… come to think of it, I actually have a few data points of people who’ve worked with me who’ve described me as a good manager, because I do try to make an effort to make people’s jobs easier, help them know what is expected of them, what the targets are, and so on. But ‘for some reason’, I hardly ever give myself this assistance. Which I’m re-realizing is a kind of self-alienation, a self-abdication. Yikes, man! But alright, I have some experience dealing with this class of problem in other areas of my life, and I’ve learned not to get all twisted about it.
What I learned is… you don’t actually need to spend a lot of time and energy ruminating on all of the details about the problem. That can just be tiresome and disheartening. The problem doesn’t need to be maximally detailed, it just needs enough detail for you to take the first reasonable step towards progress. I have a clear goal, which is easily half the battle. I want to publish more regularly. What’s stopping me? It’s that I have these excessive, inflated ideas about “what is worth publishing”. But– I’ve given other people this advice before– when you’re just starting out, it’s literally unclear what’s worth publishing and what isn’t. You aren’t savvy and discerning enough yet to know. Sometimes the things you write off as irrelevant or unimportant actually reveal themselves to be really valuable later on. How do you tell the difference? Here’s the neat thing: you may not actually precisely need to know. There is no context-independent answer.
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Everything I’ve written above is best thought of as preamble that got me to this point.
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A strange, funny, interesting thing used to happen when I was working on my book Introspect. I would wake up bright-eyed in the morning, have a nice shower, a cup of coffee, and sit down to work… and within minutes I would be seized with narcolepsy. I’m serious, I would very seriously feel an intense compulsion to go to sleep. I’d typically lie down on my sofa and fall asleep immediately– which contrasts interestingly with the fact that I’ve had trouble sleeping at night all my life. I would then have these really vivid, emotionally challenging dreams. And I’d typically wake up tired, ‘shaken’. Here I found it helpful to have learned about ‘box breathing’. If I didn’t know how to calm myself down with the breath, I probably would have kept putting off working on the book, because that experience was quite unpleasant. I always felt like I wasn’t ready. I had to eventually come around to accepting that I would never feel like I was ready.
I’ve noticed that the same thing is happening lately with my essays. Whenever I sit down to write my essays, I get really tired and sleepy. But this is complicated by the fact that I have an 8-month-old baby boy, and as such I have been genuinely quite sleep deprived. So things are somewhat murky. But I know that I want to be writing and publishing essays. I know that my standards are too high and I should lower them.
Box breathing is simple enough to explain in a sentence: inhale deeply as you count to four, hold for four seconds, exhale fully as you count to four, hold for four seconds, repeat. I’m not too strict about the timing when I do it. It’s just deep breaths with holds in between. The holds seem to really make a difference.