Why Splicer can’t create

2011 has so far been an almost com­plete­ly unpro­duc­tive year. That’s a ter­ri­fy­ing thing to admit about the last five months of my life. I haven’t been on sab­bat­i­cal or fam­i­ly leave or vaca­tion; instead I’ve been sit­ting at my desk in front of my com­put­er accom­plish­ing noth­ing. I’ve been accom­plish­ing noth­ing and won­der­ing why.

I’ve tried a myr­i­ad of solu­tions to address and cor­rect this sit­u­a­tion: spo­radic attempts at phys­i­cal exer­cise, hyp­no­sis, bin­au­r­al beats, read­ing moti­va­tion­al arti­cles, prayer, medi­a­tion, jour­nal­ing, chi­ro­prac­tic adjust­ments, GTD, sup­port groups, motor­cy­cling, and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals (as sanc­tioned by my doc­tors, of course.) I would have tried com­pul­sive shop­ping, but being this unpro­duc­tive I can’t afford it.

One of the things I’ve done to pass the time (and it seems like a long time to have let pass) is lis­ten to talks from the Com­mon­wealth Club, TED, and oth­er places. I recent­ly men­tioned two talks I lis­tened to while run­ning. In addi­tion I’ve watched almost all of the TED talks that looked inter­est­ing. That’s a lot of TED.

Three of the talks recent­ly stood out to me. With­out any intent to put them togeth­er, I watched these three in suc­ces­sion, and each pro­vid­ed one piece of the puz­zle that has been plagu­ing me:

First, Sir Ken Robin­son’s TED talk on the need for a learn­ing rev­o­lu­tion focused on the field of edu­ca­tion but touched on two points rel­e­vant to a forty-one year old whose aca­d­e­m­ic life is prob­a­bly all behind him. First that there is a great diver­si­ty of kinds of abil­i­ty, and sec­ond that work in a field where one’s tal­ents and pas­sions match the task at hand is both sat­is­fy­ing and enjoy­able. He said that how we teach must match the indi­vid­ual. Inas­much as Sir Ken Robin­son’s talk was about cre­at­ing cir­cum­stances that allow the indi­vid­ual to flour­ish cre­ative­ly and pro­duc­tive­ly, it relates direct­ly to my sit­u­a­tion. The dif­fer­ence is only that I have to be both teacher and stu­dent as I cre­ate those cir­cum­stances in which I may flourish.

Chip Con­ley’s 2010 talk about mea­sur­ing what makes life worth­while pro­vides a bridge between busi­ness and hap­pi­ness. He sug­gests that we must find ways to mea­sure suc­cess oth­er than GDP. He quot­ed Robert Kennedy say­ing that GDP, «mea­sures every­thing in short, except that which makes life worth­while.» Though GDP is a ruler held up to a nation’s econ­o­my, it is clear that the prin­ci­ple must apply on the indi­vid­ual level.

I’ve been close to that truth for some time now and I have cer­tain­ly nev­er entered into a blind pur­suit of wealth rather than well-being. I’m about as finan­cial­ly unmo­ti­vat­ed a per­son as you’ll ever find. But this dis­tinc­tion is impor­tant because mon­ey has a way of mak­ing itself impor­tant when it is scarce. It’s an old saw, but the only peo­ple who say that mon­ey does­n’t mat­ter are peo­ple who have enough of it. While I may not have grand finan­cial aspi­ra­tions I can’t deny that each day I get up and try to kick myself in the pants with my finan­cial inse­cu­ri­ty. I’ve had days—thankfully very few of them—when I’ve gone with­out a sin­gle meal for lack of the few pen­nies it would take to pro­cure ingre­di­ents. That ought to be a strong moti­va­tor to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, but mad­den­ing­ly it is not. Still, every thought I have about work is focused on money.

This brings to mind Ger­ald Wein­berg’s Fifth Law of Pric­ing: if you need the mon­ey, don’t take the job. Coun­ter­in­tu­itive? Yes. But it is near­ly impos­si­ble to avoid one of two traps. Either one will set the price too low out of des­per­a­tion to land the gig or one will set the price too high think­ing the wind­fall will solve the finan­cial prob­lem. Either way has its own set of draw­backs but at the heart of the mat­ter the focus is on solv­ing the needs of the con­sul­tant, which under­mines the con­sul­tan­t’s abil­i­ty to solve the needs of the client.

The last piece that fell into place, mak­ing vis­i­ble a direct rela­tion­ship between all these aspects of the dol­drums was Dan Pink’s TED talk on the sci­ence of moti­va­tion.

If you haven’t yet watched the oth­er talks, I encour­age you to go watch Dan Pink before read­ing on. But in case you don’t, here’s the nut: reward-based moti­va­tion tends to hin­der rather than aid the cre­ative thought nec­es­sary for prob­lem­solv­ing. That kind of moti­va­tor caus­es focus to nar­row when what’s need­ed is for focus to broad­en. Solu­tions become more dif­fi­cult to find when reward is offered.

This flies in the face of con­ven­tion­al cap­i­tal­ist thought which claims that dan­gling mon­ey in front of a prob­lem­solver will yield the best results. It’s fright­en­ing for anoth­er rea­son. It’s exact­ly the sort of infor­ma­tion that will be used to jus­ti­fy under­pay­ing the most cre­ative work­ers. I’ve heard it more than once: «if you’d do it for free, why should we pay you?» Now add to that, «if we pay you more, your work will suffer.»

Though this is the tac­tic of a would-be client or employ­er with­out scru­ples, the response has noth­ing to do with scru­ples. Instead one must appeal to self-inter­est. It comes back to Maslow’s hier­ar­chy of needs. At the bot­tom of the pyra­mid are phys­i­cal needs like air and food, shel­ter, secu­ri­ty and safe­ty, while cre­ativ­i­ty and prob­lem­solv­ing belong at the top with self-actu­al­iza­tion. In short, one can­not expect to put ener­gy into cre­ativ­i­ty and prob­lem­solv­ing while more basic needs are unmet. There is, or at least should be, strong moti­va­tion to com­pen­sate those peo­ple one wants at their cre­ative and inno­v­a­tive best. Skimp on com­pen­sa­tion and you guar­an­tee that you won’t get results.

And now some part of the strug­gles I’ve encoun­tered in the past five months become clear­er. It’s lit­tle won­der that I can’t per­form at my best either cre­ative­ly or tech­ni­cal­ly while I’m beset by uncer­tain­ty regard­ing basic needs. For this I don’t have a spe­cif­ic solu­tion. It’s a self-ful­fill­ing cycle: the less secure I am the less cre­ative, the less cre­ative I am the less secure.

That’s not the end and it’s real­ly sec­ondary to the break­through I’ve seen here. The break­through is not a solu­tion, but an insight into the actu­al nature of the prob­lem. In a few hours my sit­u­a­tion has ceased to be a prob­lem in the sense of a hand­i­cap and begun to be a prob­lem in the sense of being a maze to nav­i­gate or a puz­zle to solve.

Per­haps a short win­dow of secu­ri­ty is need­ed as lever­age to achieve the men­tal space and wide focus need­ed for pro­duc­tive cre­ativ­i­ty, and that cre­ative burst will bring with it more secu­ri­ty. If it’s a self-ful­fill­ing cycle on the way down, there’s no rea­son it can’t be the same kind of cycle on the way back up. Per­haps there’s some­thing else that I will need to do to boot­strap myself back into action. All those specifics remain to be seen, so at this moment they don’t mat­ter. So long as I know what I’m up against, I have a fight­ing chance. You’d be a fool to bet against me.