I don’t consider myself to be a particularly creative person. I can appreciate creative things and people more knowing that I probably can’t paint/act/sing/dance for shit.
But one feature of creative people I acutely identify with is writer’s block – not when it comes to writing necessarily, but life in general.
Sometimes you have a thousand things to do and accomplish none. The constant math of – “do I attend to this first?” or “can I cross this off the list?” becomes enough to overwhelm the system enough to lead to hour 3 of The Office clips on the couch.
I’m sure the people who wrote, acted in, and directed The Office have felt the same – and I think the reason is – we’re all afraid to fuck up. There’s a palpable grade school mental paradigm of getting an F on a task in life. That shame, which permeates deep into your being, is primal. And paralyzing.
It’s been a journey to admit that I’m going to fuck things up. A lot. And what I didn’t realize was that there’s an inverse relationship to the time I consciously spend considering something and how good the result is.
When it comes to big decisions – the more factors I have to pore through or the more I delude myself into thinking research is moving towards accomplishment, the more difficult and slow and ultimately compromised the decision is. For some reason, it just feels really good to rip the Band-Aid off.
Fact is – some days I just wake up and decide to do something. Buy a car. Move apartments. Pay off a debt. Solve a longstanding problem.
I remember being horrified when my dad saw an ad in the paper for a car he thought looked nice and he just went that day to the dealership, my bewildered mom and I in tow, and just bought the damn thing. He didn’t sit at home and calculate financing payments or compare fuel economy. It was confounding to me that someone could just make such an immediate decision on such a big-ticket item.
I realized recently, however, that he actually did an insane amount of research – subconsciously. He’d read an article reviewing new cars one day. Ask questions at work dinners of his colleagues about the new wheels they bought. See enough commercials and ads on pricing to where his intuition was with what was a good value or wasn’t. He didn’t make spreadsheets or spend hours poring over volumes of books – he just used the sum of accumulated passive knowledge to make a choice.
It could’ve been a terrible one too – the car might’ve been a lemon, or from a particular model year fraught with poor build quality, or something better might have come out a month down the road. But he was comfortable with letting the chips fall where they may.
I get paralyzed by overdecision and overopinionation (and just pulled those words out of my ass, but we’re gonna roll with it). If I’ve got more than two voices to deal with and more than two limiting factors (money, time, effort, expected result, historical example, identity) then I might as well just go back to bed.
I’m learning to listen to the only voice in the room that matters “at the end of the day”, who has to live with the consequences of that action more than anyone else: mine.
As the kids say, I’m “making money moves”.
And Jim and Pam ended up together in the end.
