Happy Friday!
And welcome to today’s edition of ‘Conscious living with Purnima.’ In today’s post, I will talk about a few points to reflect on in order to create your best work. I hope you find it useful.
1. Know your end goal/ results you aspire to achieve:
This is important, else your energy and effort will be squandered in projects not worthy of your attention. Take this newsletter for instance. I have a few goals for it:
a. Be consistent.
b. Write from my heart.
C. Share it with people who I feel will enjoy reading it.
I am happy that I have a few loyal readers, some of whom don’t hesitate to connect personally to discuss something I wrote. At this point in time, I am content with that.
Now what if my goal was to increase my subscriber base? Then I would need to prioritize a whole different set of actions. Writing the blog post alone would not suffice. I will need to consistently announce the post on all other social media channels available to me: Instagram, threads, notes, Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn etc. I may need to come up with something catchy to attract people’s attention and prompt them to check out my Newsletter. I may need to talk more about it in other communities that I am part of, I may need to incentivize post share in some way, perhaps collaborate with someone more popular, research and learn about how people have grown their subscriber base on Substack from scratch & start paying attention to what other writers with a wider subscriber base are doing and follow their footsteps.
But if that is not my goal, then I can conserve all of that time and energy to spend on something else that matters to me and not be bothered by other people’s subscriber numbers.
But most of us don’t think too deeply about what we truly desire. If we knew, we could direct our efforts and energy better, stay true to our personal goals and experience greater satisfaction.
2. Identify barriers to creating good work:
Once you are clear on what your end goal is, pay attention to the barriers that come in the way of creating your best work. In the essay ‘Getting Unstuck’ from the book, “Manage your day-to-day”, Mark McGuinness talks about how writer Vikram Seth once found himself blocked after writing the first hundred pages of a story set in post-independence India. Let me quote him verbatim:
“Inspite of his best efforts to move the story forward, it stubbornly resisted, until one day he realized he had overlooked the real problem: he didn’t know enough about the period. Once he understood this, Seth switched from writing to research, reading old newspapers, visiting key places, and interviewing people who had lived through the era. This gave him so much material that his planned short novel grew into a 1500-page doorstop. The finished work, A Suitable boy, landed him a rumored $ 1.1 million advance and established him as a literary superstar.”
I found this story particularly insightful to illustrate my point. You could be in an environment that is too restrictive, or like Vikram Seth you may need to do more learning or meet new people that spark your creativity. Whatever it is, you need to first face your own demons, & call them out.
3. Mindset Matters:
Keep your mental state positive. That’s essential to creating good quality work.
When you find yourself stuck either in the work you are doing or any other aspect of life, pay attention to your internal dialogue & state of mind. Every setback can be looked at as an opportunity to learn & perhaps discover something about yourself, your life, environment and so many other things you would typically miss when you are drowning in self-pity. Today, I feel I have the maturity to look at setbacks as an opportunity to see things as they are.
One of my favourite Buddhist teachers of current times is Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. I follow her teachings on Instagram. In her latest talk, she speaks of cultivating the right attitude in life. She says, “Normally when things go wrong or people are difficult, we get upset, angry & fall into self-pity that just makes us miserable. And it doesn’t help anybody anywhere. So, instead of that, train the mind to look at difficulties as opportunities. To acknowledge that the problem is not the situation but our response to it. And we can work on that. “
It may seem like too much of an ask to not become upset by hindrances, but we can start where we are and put in some effort to deal with what we are facing in a way that doesn’t kill hope or enthusiasm.
I will conclude this post with an invitation for you to reflect on the 3 points I shared:
Do you have clarity on the results you aspire to achieve through your work?
Do you have a sense of the barriers you face to creating your best work?
How is the quality of your mindset/ internal dialogue when you face a setback? Can you think of ways to stay positive in troubling times?
Book Recommendation:
99U’s Manage your day-to-day: Build your routine, find your focus, and sharpen your creative mind. This is a collection of insights from thought leaders and creatives. If you are someone looking for perspectives to improve your productivity and creativity, then consider reading this. I will share 2 quotes from this book for today’s post.
2 Quotes:
“It is not enough to be busy, (the ants are busy) we must ask: What are we busy about?”
- Henry David Thoreau
“The most basic form of human stupidity is forgetting what we are trying to accomplish.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche