Your Huge Volume of Work

The above video nails it, in my opinion. I’ve got to thank Mark Stanwyck for sharing it with me. If you work in a creative arena, you’ll be able to relate.

The message I believe worth sharing here is the disparity between what Ira calls “taste” and our current performance. The bridge between what you want your results to look like and what you’re currently putting out as Ira puts it is “a large volume of work.”

If you can muster the courage to look at your work, whatever it is, be dissatisfied with it, and continue to put forth a huge volume of work to reach the level of performance that you know you want, then you’ll be the master you wish to be. Like the video says, however, most people quit before they go through that process.

Ira has articulated something that I’ve run into every day since I can remember. I’d take a swing during batting practice at age nine and I’d hate the result. I knew I wanted it to be better. Rather than quit, I’d set up a batting tee in the back yard and evaluate millions of swings to my taste. That relationship never stopped until my playing career was over.

This shows up for me with writing. People ask me how I got so good at writing, and I often disagree with them. If you knew how long these little blogs took, you wouldn’t say I was good at this at all. I’ve written over a thousand blogs and articles in the past three years and I’m still not good. I’ll write a sentence, think it sounds terrible, and I’ll rewrite it ten times before it meets my taste. I think most people, however, will write a sentence, not like it, keep it anyway, and hate their work. Many of them will avoid writing and/or quit as a result.

Whether it’s art, math, writing, swinging a baseball bat, or the clean and jerk, you’ve got to stare down that gap between the ugly, below average work you just put out and compare it to the result you want with honesty. Then, it’s a matter of trial and error to close that gap.

If you quit everything you aren’t good at right away, you’ll quit everything. Furthermore, saying you’re not an artist, writer, mathematician, ball player, or weightlifter is bullshit, you just haven’t done the work yet.

Literally anything and everything is available to you with a massive volume of work. The question is, do you want it?

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach