In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield describes what finishing his first manuscript was like. The author says “But that moment when I first hit the keys to spell out THE END was epochal. I remember rolling the last page out and adding it to the stack that was the finished manuscript. Nobody knew I was done. Nobody cared. But I knew. I felt like a dragon I’d been fighting all my life had just dropped dead at my feet and gasped out its last sulphuric breath. Rest in peace, motherfucker.”
That is poetry. Few writers can eloquently articulate what the final moments of creative work feel like, but Pressfield does an amazing job. Unfortunately, most creative people will never experience what “slaying the dragon” feels like and that’s a mistake because they’re depriving themselves of one of the greatest achievements one could experience.
In the same book, Pressfield also describes what working on a book was like in the 1970s. He says he was so devoted to his craft that he lived in a house without a TV. He never read newspapers or watched movies. When Nixon resigned, he overheard his neighbor’s radio. He had missed Watergate.
Things have changed since the 1970s and certain technologies have become more ubiquitous. Avoiding the news or giving up television, sports, or movies is impossible. But as John Cleese once said in his book Creativity, “The greatest killer of creativity is interruption”. Inadvertently, we might deprive the world of our gift only because we can’t stop watching Peaky Blinders or a Friends re-run.
Entrepreneur Derek Sivers wrote in his book Hell Yeah or No, “All the best, happiest, and most creatively productive times in my life have something in common: being disconnected. Not internet. Not TV. No phone. No people. Long interrupted solitude.” You think you need to pursue all these little distractions, but you don’t. What you need to do is to harness your attention and focus it on a singular thing. Here’s Sivers again, “You get no competitive edge from consuming the same stuff everyone else is consuming. It’s rare, now, to focus. And it gives such better rewards.”
Our job, then, is to identify what we want to do. Often, this takes the form of something that scares us. Once you’ve found it, do it with reckless abandon and if you’re persistent enough, you might slay the dragon.