Yesterday I was listening to an episode of the How I Write podcast featuring Mark Manson. Manson was discussing how easy it is to get hung up on the wrong things when you’re struggling to write, to which host David Perell jokingly responded:
“My writing’s no good, I’m drinking the wrong kind of coffee!”
I caught a few looks as I laughed out loud in the gym. Although said in jest, that sentence perfectly sums up my tendency to get hung up on all the wrong things whenever I try to do something. Anything!
It hit close to home, and all I could do was laugh at the accuracy of it. Fortunately, as illustrated by Mark and David’s discussion on the subject, I’m not special in this regard. In fact, I think it is a very human way to react whenever we’re confronted by challenging work.
When helping people with running, I encountered this all the time. Many will spend all the time in the world thinking about the finer details of something only loosely related to running. Details like how fast or slow, heart rate zones to cover, which shoes/shorts/shirts/shades to wear and so forth and so on. They’ll spend hours and hours obsessing about these things instead of just going out for a run.
That’s not to say there isn’t a time and a place to obsess over the details. But we should be very mindful of when we’re getting caught up in minutiae as a form of procrastination. As opposed to carefully tuning the variables to actually increase our efficiency. It is very easy to let distractions become the goal in and of themselves.
A clear example of this was on display in my post Craftsmanship and compulsion. In working to make this website a nice home for my musings, I began convincing myself that I will have to redo it from the bottom up.
Make no mistake, there’s art and beauty in building great websites. Just like there’s art and beauty in brewing a great cup of coffee. But in this case, I had rebooted my website not to rekindle my passion for building websites, but to practise writing.
I don’t need to rebuild my website from scratch to make my writing more beautiful.
I just need to write.
And make sure I drink the right kind of coffee.