The Happiness Of Pursuit Part 10

Several years ago, Tina took a sabbatical from her client work to focus on developing her side projects. She's never returned, preferring to work full-time on bringing projects into the world.

Exhibit C: Get in the Box!

Incorporate Structure into a Creative Life

From her home base in Southern California, Elise Blaha is also a compulsive maker of things. Every day, without fail, she makes and shares her art with the world through a website and daily newsletter. This work goes beyond writing and curating; it includes drawing, painting, sewing, knitting, and craft projects of all kinds.

Elise is driven to create. New posts, new photos, and new projects roll out in a steady stream of creativity. One day it's a new set of stamps for sale, another day it's a lesson in gardening. She has posted more than sixty different kinds of sc.r.a.pbooks for all to see, each with its own design and layout-she uses no templates.

Instead, Elise uses the secret that allows "makers" like her to thrive: She clearly defines her projects, and she breaks them down into multiple parts. When she has success with one project, she applies the same format to others. The medium doesn't need to be the same, she told me, but the process for working on them can still be. When she turned twenty-seven, Elise set a goal to create twenty-seven different craft projects using twenty-seven different types of materials. One autumn she baked forty different kinds of bread.

The specifics help, not hinder, Elise's daily creativity. Here's what she says about routine: I'm always surprised about the level of creativity that comes from setting guidelines and boundaries. You would think it's the opposite-that having complete freedom makes everything feel more possible-but in my experience, that's not the case. I like to say that sometimes to be the most creative you have to get in a box instead of the old stand-by thinking outside the box. Often, limitations force you to think differently about challenges and lead to better innovations and ideas.

Lesson: To be creative, don't think outside the box. Make yourself a box and get into it!3

A Year in the Life

I've long been fascinated by the work of people like Seth, Tina, and Elise, but sometimes I can't keep up. One time I was on a trip and wasn't able to read blog posts for ten days. When I finally connected and downloaded, I had a flood of content from each of them. Sometimes the act of seeing their posts is motivation of its own, even if I'm not able to read each one.

Since it's hard to track, I decided to take a closer look at all of their work over the course of a year-at least as much as I could find. For good measure, I included Thomas Hawk, the manic photographer, in this collection. Here's what I came up with.

ELISE BLAHA 211 blog posts 11,949 words Thousands of photos (the exact number is difficult to count) 52 crafts (1 new craft project per week, recorded in detail) TINA ROTH EISENBERG 972 blog posts 2,209 shared resources 67 cities partic.i.p.ating in Creative Mornings 863 Creative Mornings talks posted online SETH G.o.dIN 365 blog posts (1 per day, no breaks, no exceptions) 76,349 words 3 published books (released on the same day!) Numerous keynote speeches, interviews, guest writing contributions THOMAS HAWK 11,697 photos published on Flickr 176 photos published on the blog 141 blog posts As I pondered the efforts of Seth, Tina, Elise, and some of their peers, I wasn't sure this intense focus on a certain kind of work qualified as a quest in the cla.s.sic definition-there were clear endings to particular projects, but not to the overall effort. Nevertheless, I found in these individuals commonalities with people who pursued more traditional quests. They chose to focus on a specific series of outcomes, deriving satisfaction from both the creation process and from sharing it with others. When they finished one piece of work, they moved on to another. They seemed happiest when building a set of interconnected pieces, and they'd structured their lives to allow the work to take preeminence. It was as if they'd chosen a particular kind of life and then changed other circ.u.mstances to accommodate it.

The Devotion of Stand-Up Comics

I was surprised to learn that some famous comedians, who've achieved household-name status and banked hundreds of millions of dollars, continue to focus relentlessly on the steady craft of telling jokes onstage. For example, despite appearing on television five nights a week and being viewed by millions, Jay Leno spent the weekends during his final years of hosting The Tonight Show getting ready for a smaller performance. Every Sunday, instead of taking it easy, he took the stage at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, California, for a traditional stand-up routine. Why bother?

Leno sees his routine as a form of self-a.s.sessment. If it goes well in the club, he feels OK. If not, he gets worried. "When you work in TV," he told a magazine interviewer, "you get these odd notes on little slips of paper that say you are or aren't doing well with boys between the ages of 9 and 13 or you need to make more cat jokes because the people with cats aren't watching often enough. But if you walk into a 1,500-seat theater and it's packed, you know you are doing fine. If it's only two-thirds full, you know you have some more work to do."

Meanwhile, Jerry Seinfeld, whose estimated worth is $800 million, regularly hops a plane to perform in small clubs throughout the country. Again, why bother? For him, it isn't about reinforcing a success elsewhere. Instead, it's about refinement. "If I don't do a set in two weeks, I feel it," Seinfeld told the New York Times. "I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don't I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop."

Both Seinfeld and Leno believe that continually getting onstage without a safety net is key to their ability to thrive. Not only that, but in some ways the journey is the destination-telling jokes and connecting with audiences, however small, is the point itself. According to Seinfeld, the goal is "refining a tiny thing for the sake of it," and he has no plans to stop flying to small cities and putting on unexpected shows in tiny venues.

What do the best stand-up comics have in common? They're driven by obsession. The obsession with continuously refining a small thing can be a quest of its own.

Climb the Right Ladder

Stephen Kellogg has been an independent musician for more than a decade, releasing a dozen alb.u.ms and playing more than 1,200 concerts. I heard Stephen at a TEDx event, where he shared a story before his performance. When he was a kid, all he wanted to do was play music. He grew up listening to Bon Jovi and practicing air guitar in his bedroom. Somewhere along the way, the air guitar changed to a real guitar, and Stephen got his first gig.

Times were hard in the beginning, with only a few people coming to concerts that paid almost nothing, but Stephen didn't care. He was a musician! He had the chance to play! At that point in his story he said something that has stayed with me ever since: "It's better to be at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than the top of one you don't." Compared to a traditional career that might have offered more security, Stephen's struggle to play his own music and cultivate his own fan base made him far happier.

He wrote me later to follow up. When I asked what had changed after 1,200 shows, he said something else I liked: "I've just grown from a boy with an inclination into a man with a focus. It all started with a dream, but then I followed that dream. Following the dream made all the difference."

I felt the same way when I started writing. The early work I published wasn't very good (and the work that I didn't share was worse), but it still felt good to be doing it. When I woke up in the morning I immediately thought about what I'd work on for the next few hours. At night I'd go to bed thinking about how I could improve the next day. When I started speaking at events, I was terrified-but in a good way. When I got the chance to write my first book, I was thrilled! I, too, felt like I'd found the right ladder to climb, even if I was at the bottom, and even though I had a long way to go.

If you're doing something you love, it doesn't matter that it's challenging. You can keep going for a long time as long as you're motivated-just make sure you choose the right starting point. If you're lucky, as happened with Stephen, your inclination may even become a vocation.

Remember Some people are motivated primarily by creating and sharing. When they finish one project, they immediately look for another.

Effort can be its own reward if you let it.

To be creative, "get in the box"-create structure and routine that allows you to keep working.

1Ron: "Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive."

2If anything, posting "only once a day" is restrictive for Seth. "I have about six blogable ideas a day," he says, "but people get antsy when there are a lot of unread posts in their queue."

3Readers, take note: This concludes all box metaphors for the rest of the book. You're welcome.

Chapter 11.

Joining Forces

In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.

-HARUKI MURAKAMI Lesson: SOME ADVENTURES SHOULD BE SHARED.

A funny thing happened to Tom Allen in Yerevan, Armenia. The young British cyclist had been on the road for eight months with barely a break. His friends.h.i.+ps with the guys who'd originally left England to see the world with him had suffered, with Tom feeling frustrated that they didn't value exploration as highly as he did. The first friend had returned home after ten weeks to be with his girlfriend, and the other chose to stay behind in Tbilisi, Georgia, a few weeks later.

That's why it was odd, though perhaps also predictable, that Tom would encounter his greatest challenge not in the frozen Alps or even the deserts of Sudan, where he struggled with malaria and disorientation. The greatest challenge came through a more ordinary experience: Tom met a girl and fell in love.

Tenny was unlike any girl he'd known in England. Though she hadn't seen much of the world, she shared Tom's curiosity and longing for adventure. Right from the early days of their romance, Tom knew he'd found someone special. Although he'd planned to stay only a few days in Armenia before continuing to Iran, this wasn't a relations.h.i.+p he wanted to let slip away. He found himself adding a day or two to the itinerary, ostensibly to sort out provisions and repairs, and then an extra week because he was so happy to be with Tenny.

As wonderful as falling in love was, meeting Tenny presented Tom with an unavoidable conflict. The girl he loved was in Armenia, a place he was enjoying and where he could possibly stay for a long time. Yet the outside world, starting with the Iranian border sixty kilometers away, was calling to Tom. Was it right to be alone? What do you do when you've promised yourself to go on?

Tom had by then completed the difficult task of obtaining a visa for Iran. The stamp was glued to his pa.s.sport, growing closer to expiration by the day. After leaving England and riding farther and farther away, the road was all he'd known for the past eight months. Sensing no other option, Tom said good-bye and hit the road again, hoping to be reunited with Tenny at some point in the distant future.

He regretted the decision almost instantly. As he pedaled mile after mile up the steep hills that separated Yerevan from the Iranian border town, he thought about what he was leaving behind. By midafternoon he'd made it all the way to his campsite, but felt racked with guilt over moving on. Finally he did what he should have done before: He chose the girl. "This is for the betterment of my life," Tom said to the handheld camera he'd brought along for the ride. He looked ahead to the border of Iran, then back at the sixty kilometers that separated him from Tenny. Tom turned back and began pedaling, retracing his route to the girl he'd left behind.

The Family Who Doesn't Understand

In the course of all the interviews I did with people undertaking quests, I learned that when it came to support from friends and family, the results were all over the map. Some family members were highly supportive, others merely tolerated the endeavor, and in a few cases family and friends were actively opposed.

John Francis made two big choices that didn't make a lot of sense to everyone else. Choosing to avoid vehicles and walk everywhere was strange enough, but adopting a vow of silence went too far for some people. When he wrote home to his parents to explain his decision, his father got on the next flight to California, more concerned than curious. A friend picked him up at the San Francisco airport and they ran into John walking on the road back near his home. When his father greeted him, John smiled and reached out his hand, but didn't speak. "d.a.m.n, son! What is this?" his dad asked, exasperated.

At John's home over the next few days, the older man tried his best to understand. He'd grown to accept the walking, but the vow of silence was beyond comprehension. They had a good visit, but it was clear that John's dad thought something was very wrong. At one point John overheard a phone conversation with his mom, where his dad said he hoped John didn't show up in Philadelphia.

Even a decade later, after John had earned a master's degree from the University of Montana and served as the first-ever silent teaching a.s.sistant, his father still didn't get it. "You have to talk," he told him. "What are you going to do with a master's degree? What kind of a job are you going to get? You have to drive a car and you have to talk."

But while John would listen to what his dad had to say, he wouldn't change his mind about the vow of silence for five more years. After graduating from Missoula, he prepared to enter a doctoral program in applied technology. The program was at the University of Pennsylvania, 2,300 miles east. John repacked his day bag, said good-bye to friends, and set out for another long walk on his own.

Alicia Ostarello, who toured the United States to complete her "fifty dates in fifty states" project after a painful breakup, encountered an unexpected challenge early on: her parents. To put it mildly, they were not pleased. Having gathered support from a few friends, Alicia presented the idea to her mom and dad at her birthday dinner. Here's how it went down: We had just poured the wine and said "Salute!" (we're Italian, it's true) and taken sips, when I brought up the topic. My dad actually thought I was kidding. I described what the plan was and how it would work, and instead of telling me it was a horrible idea, he looked puzzled, laughed, and changed the subject. I got the joy of telling him again two days later after my mom told me he thought I was being silly.

Alicia told me later that while she was grateful for all the support from friends, sponsors, and strangers she met along the way-and also her parents, who eventually came around-in the end she was able to maintain stamina and well-being by focusing inward.

I think the best support I had was from myself. I had to know what I truly needed, and what I could live without in order to get everything done in a day. It was an interesting process to simply be my own everything. In a project that was all about dating (and thus in some ways about codependency and the idea that we all want partners) it's ironic to think that one of the reasons I survived was because I was able to support myself.

If your family doesn't get it, it's hard. But you also need to find people who do get it. In the long run, perhaps the best thing you can do is prove it to them. If you're excited about what you're doing, sometimes the opposition will come around, as they did for Alicia.

Juno Kim says that she doesn't expect some members of her family to ever understand. "Is that sad?" I asked. "Well, sometimes," she says. But other people get it, and she still has her family when she goes home.

Family on Bikes

John and Nancy Vogel were two self-described burned-out teachers from Boise, Idaho, raising twin boys and paying a mortgage. The Vogels had a history of pursuing big adventures. Their boys had been born in Ethiopia, where John and Nancy were teaching, and had spent their first four birthdays in a different country each year. After returning to the United States, John and Nancy's urge to explore exceeded the urge to settle down. The boys' third grade was spent cycling through Mexico and nineteen U.S. states. Fourth grade took place back in Boise, but much of the year was devoted to planning the greatest family excursion yet: a three-year, seventeen-thousand-mile cycling journey from Alaska to the southernmost point of Argentina.

Friends on Holiday ... or Maybe Not Every year, a tour company called the Adventurists produces a "Rickshaw Run" through India. It's a multistage race conducted entirely in auto rickshaws, with up to forty different teams all hoping to raise money for charity and have a good time along the way.

I heard from several groups that had partic.i.p.ated in the Rickshaw Run with good results. One guy described it as the adventure of a lifetime, with shared memories and bonding that he and his rickshaw mates felt would last the rest of their lives.

A member of another group wrote me privately to share a different story. "It was miserable," she said, "And not just from the food poisoning." This group was composed of several women who knew one another online, but hadn't actually met in person before. What a fun story! Except it wasn't. For whatever reason, one of the women didn't click with the others, and the big adventure became a big test in attempting to get along with new acquaintances who weren't really friends.

Lesson: Unless you're feeling especially brave, get to know your companions before agreeing to race a rickshaw with them in India.

Being on the road for thirty-three months as a family, sleeping in tents every night, and riding through changing climates sounds like a disaster in the making-and there certainly were a lot of challenges. At least three times in the journey, Nancy was ready to pack up and go home. The first crisis came while cycling through the jungles of Central America, pa.s.sing through tunnels of trees. The scenery was beautiful, but it was hot, humid, and sticky. Nancy did a mental calculation of how much jungle remained: at least six hundred miles. Somehow she kept going, encouraged by the fact that John and the boys weren't struggling as much.

The second crisis came in Peru, where Nancy felt she was locked in a battle of wills with the country itself. "It's a matter of who can hold out longer," she wrote in her journal, "and I suspect Peru has endless amounts of patience."

Once again she kept going, only to face an unexpected challenge in central Argentina, still 1,500 miles and fifty nights of camping away from their destination of Ushuaia. This was nearly the breaking point. Here's how she tells the story: We pulled into the small town of Zapala as high winds whipped sand into our faces. Tears streamed down my cheeks as my body attempted to wash sand out of my eyes. Communication between my husband and I was unnecessary; he somehow knew I was at my breaking point and another night in the tents would have broken me. We pedaled from hotel to hotel looking for something even remotely within our price range.

After finding a cheap hostel, we dragged our bikes to a spot sheltered from the wind, unlashed all our bags to haul them upstairs, then locked our bikes together before heading up to the dorm room. John and the boys got out the laptop to play video games while I headed to the shower.

Warm water coursed over my body as tears fell from my eyes. I was beyond exhausted. It took everything I had to remain standing in the shower. I thought about what still lay ahead: about all the stories I had heard about the Patagonian winds. n.o.body even mentioned northern Argentina, yet this had been the most difficult thing I had ever done.

Was reaching Ushuaia on two wheels important enough to me to continue on? Was accomplis.h.i.+ng this goal that I had dedicated so many years of my life to worth the pain it would take to get there? Did I really want to do this?

In the end, I decided I wasn't ready to give up. I was determined I would hate every pedal stroke of the remaining 1,500 miles, but I would do it. I would reach Ushuaia if it killed me.

Interestingly, John and Nancy's twin boys Daryl and Davy had adjusted the quickest to the challenge. They were especially motivated by the goal of becoming the youngest travelers to cross the Americas by bicycle.1 An improvised rule specifying "twenty miles per cookie" didn't hurt, either.

Nancy, John, and the boys did make it to Ushuaia, and it didn't kill anyone. One thousand and eighteen days after the Vogels left Alaska, the journey was completed. The boys set the record and many cookies were consumed.

The family eventually returned to Idaho to regroup yet again. The boys went back to "normal school" and began taking advanced science and math cla.s.ses. But their bikes and the memory of accomplishment through striving continued to tug at them.

After two years pa.s.sed, they asked, "When are we going to travel again?" Nancy's answer: "Just say the word."