Archives: Work

Dmitri Shostakovich composed extraordinarily quickly. Once he heard the piece in his head, he would pour the notes onto the page. He could manage 20-30 pages of score a day and rarely made corrections.

I can’t write that fast. I can’t write music at all, but let’s leave that to one side. Words vs. music may be an indirect comparison, but even with the benefit of technology I can’t come close to that speed (or endurance).

Shostakovich, however, constantly worried that he worked too fast. He wrote a letter to a friend saying, “Undoubtedly this is bad… composing is a serious business.”, an idea that is so clearly ridiculous that it left me hoping his friend wrote back to tell him as much.

We must never get caught up in the idea there there is one right way to do something – a proper way or, even worse, the “done” way.

My wife and I make tea totally differently, but they usually taste the same. 

Lee Child’s writing process is totally different to Haruki Murakami, but they have both written bestsellers.

Clint Eastwood, when he directs a movie, shoots as few takes as possible, while David Fincher is renowned for shooting 20, 50, even 100 takes of a single shot before moving on. They’ve both made masterpieces. 

The way we succeed is not by doing things the way someone else does them, but by finding the way that suits us and owning it.

After all, for all his worrying, Shostakovich was a pretty solid composer all things considered.

We all know the people.

The people who work 18 hours a day, sleep for four and spend the other two in the gym. The people who post screenshots of their 4am alarm clocks, their “getting my pump on” Insta stories or their late-night “I’m still at it” Tweets.

When we see them, we often forget a simple truth: they are not us.

We mustn’t get sucked in to living someone else’s life. Other people’s productivity is their own. Their habits, their lifestyles, their beliefs aren’t who we are. We can aspire to be as successful as someone else, but we should never aspire to be someone else.

My body won’t let me operate on less than seven or eight hours of sleep, so I’m never going to work 18-hour days. My brain won’t let me go through a day without spending time with my wife, chilling out, eating together, watching TV, so I’m never going to spend all my waking hours at work.

That doesn’t mean I can’t be successful. It just means I’ll do it differently to someone else. Which is the point.

The moment we start to build our lives according to the way other people build theirs, we lose touch with who we are and how we achieve what we want to achieve.

You do you, not them.

Share your work, even when it scares you. Pick up the phone, even when it scares you. Tell someone what they mean to you, even when it scares you. Apply for that job, even when it scares you. Be honest with someone, even when it scares you.

Yesterday I sent the first draft of the first three chapters of my first ever novel to my wife and my brother. I’ve never written anything like this before and I’m not ready to share it yet. I’m not ready for other people to read it. I’m scared of what they’re going to say.

Which is why I had to share it.

Fear holds me back more often than I’d like to admit. It holds me back even in those times I refuse to admit to myself that I’m scared. In those times, fear manifests itself as perfectionism, it surfaces in excuses. Those are the times I need to share my art.

Not despite the fact that it scares me, because of the fact it scares me.

Doing things, even when they scare you, is a mantra I’ve had for myself for a long time. It’s also one I rarely listen to. So I’m trying harder.

When I’m pottering around the house, making tea, washing up, vacuuming or any of the other household tasks I don’t do often enough, I listen to podcasts. Yesterday while doing some extended kitchen cleaning after a messier-than-necessary roast chicken dinner, I was listening to Tim Ferris’s latest podcast with Seth Godin and it helped me to realise that I need to move on from my current state of fear, confusion or just plain laziness and start doing the work.

I frequently battle with Seth’s work. Some of it is inspired, inspirational and intrinsically motivational. Other books and posts seem more polemical, more dictatorial, more out-and-out instructional – the kind of thing that I bump up against. But it always makes me think, which is why I’m so addicted to listening to him talk.

What stuck in my mind listening to this conversation was the same thing that stuck with me in the first conversation Tim had with Seth on his podcast, the same thing that stuck with me the second time Tim had him on the podcast and the same thing that stuck with me reading Do The Work 1 , which seems like the least imaginative and best book title of just about any book you’ll find on the virtual shelves of the Kindle store (if, like me, visiting physical book stores it out of the question at the moment). The idea of showing up every day, doing the work and not making excuses for failing to do something every day has always, always resonated with me even as I’ve consistently failed to do it.

“Just do it” may be one of the best-known and most cited inspirational instructions in the world, but it’s also an inappropriate attitude, Seth says. “‘Just do it’ implies ‘what the hell’, ‘it doesn’t matter’ [which] pushes you to be a hack who’s not responsible for your own work.”

By contrast, “merely” doing the work takes us away from time spent catastrophising the work and its results. And catastrophising is what I do best, both in work and in life. I’ve shied away from continuing to post on here or on my YouTube channel because I’ve been spending too much time worrying about what image I want to project of myself. I’ve worried about how people will see me. I’ve worried about people disagreeing with me. I’ve worried about a lot of things and I am still worrying.

But the worry and the outright fear is stopping me from doing anything. It’s paralysing. So the time has come to start trying2 to spend some time everyday merely doing the work. Merely spending time each day on an act of creation, whether that’s written word on here, a video to share on YouTube or working on the edits to the novel I wrote during lockdown that I’m feeling massive resistance towards.

I don’t want to be afraid of making or sharing my art any more. But the only way I’m going to defeat that fear is, paradoxically, by making and sharing my art.

This post, then, is the first step. One step, every day, will eventually lead me somewhere. Where that is—for now—I’m not sure. I simply know that I can’t wait until I’m certain of my destination to set out because I’ll just spend all my time poring over maps and weighing up the options. Perfection will never happen. The sooner I understand that, the sooner I’ll be able to keep on keeping on.

This might not work. But it also might.

1. This is an affiliate link, which means I get a small amount of money if you choose to purchase the book. If you’d rather not do that, you can use this link instead. [↩]
2. Note: I try a lot of things that don’t work, so who knows where this will end up going? [↩]

I’ve not been quite so grateful for flexible working as I was today. Struck down by the lurgy (a really nasty cough with nothing to shift off my chest and no streaming nose to be able to call it a cold) and hardly sleeping, the prospect of a 5am alarm to get me into Bromley for the various meetings and epic To Do list that faced me this morning wasn’t a good one.

So I switched things up, slept in until 8am and worked from home taking all my meetings over Lync (the rubbish Microsoft “official” version of Skype) and cracking through my To Do list like a demented giant-omlette-making chef gets through eggs.

Flexible working FTW!

The highlight of my day was not (surprisingly) the 6 hours I spent in the car driving to Bristol. I do love long car journeys, especially when it gives me a chance to listen to some of my heavily-stacked Podcast queue, but even 6 hours is pushing the enjoyment factor when I’m in the car on my own.

I did however, love chatting to BBC Radio 5Live Breakfast and BBC West Midlands Drive about the rising CF population and the predictions that it could almost double by 2025. Not sure I agree with the numbers entirely, but we know the number of people being born with CF is relatively stable, so the prediction suggests a definite rise in longevity, which can only be a good thing.

This week on Tuesday it was Kerry’s birthday, then Emily’s, then Jess’s. All three of them no longer with us, all three of them succumbing to the ravages of CF and the complications it brings. The fact that we could be looking at a future where no one is dying from CF is incredibly exciting and definitely brought a smile to my face. What better way to mark their birthdays than helping spread the word about our fight to beat CF for good?

Coincidentally, I had a meeting in the very same area this afternoon that gave us chance to explore the area and find the best local watering hole for us to re-christen our Meeting Room 5.

The move is exciting in itself. The pub we found tonight (two minutes from Aldgate East station and a fast train home) was lovely. As was the company.

Many reasons to smile.

I had a meeting with the lovely people at the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme today, finding out how we might be able to assist people with CF to undertake the award and also how we might be able to support them and all young people taking it on to complete their volunteering section. CF is still a young people’s condition, so it’s vital that we support young people with CF as much as we can, a huge part of which is helping them do things that everyone else does, as well as raising everyone else’s awareness.

It wasn’t until I was sitting across the table from my colleague at lunch just outside Victoria station that I realised the meeting would be in the same building as World Vision UK’s London office – they’re all in the same charity office complex there – and it made me smile to walk the familiar roads up from Victoria to Belgrave road and into the familiar surroundings of the slightly dowdy-building with the always almost friendly security guards.

It did cause me to reflect on the downside of an overly-scheduled day, however, knowing that straight after the meeting I had to head back to Victoria to get back home in time for another meeting in the afternoon. With a little more breathing room in my schedule I’d have had time for serendipity to jump in and lead me back up to that familiar fifth floor to drop in on my old colleagues and catch up. My day was missing the Big Orange today and although the building made me smile, my inability to take advantage of the visit made me just a tiny bit sad.

For many reasons I can’t go into much detail about today’s smile moments (yes, more than one), but I can say that I walked from work to the station home with a smile on my face the whole way tonight.

A nice work-related smile today as we presented some initial creative concepts for a big piece of work that is rapidly descending on us.

Any creative will know presentation of concepts to a senior leadership team is always slightly nerve-wracking as you face that awkward “what do I do with this if they don’t like it?!” thought process.

Luckily they not only liked it, some of them even mentioned that when they first heard the concept they really didn’t get it and thought it would be a dead end, but seeing the execution and possibilities they got almost excited.

Score one for the creatives today!