Good Life Project - Hacking Momentum: Stop When You Most Want to Go

Episode Date: February 19, 2016

Every large scale creative endeavor, from writing a book to building a body of work, creating a collection or a company, is made up of dozens, maybe even hundreds or even thousands of smaller scale benchmarks, along with the "pushes" it takes to hit each.Every time you hit a benchmark, it feels great. You get to ease off the push and check a box that takes you one step closer to your ultimate quest.But, then, there's also a potential dark side to hitting these micro-goals. There's a break in the momentum. You have to rally yourself to start the push toward the next one fresh. To write the next chapter, start the next canvas, produce the next song, build the next piece of your entrepreneurial greatness.And, the closer you get to end of the bigger endeavor, the more the voice of internal Resistance, as Steve Pressfield described it in The War of Art, rises up and tries to derail you from your work.I've experienced this while writing books in the past. So, when I was working on my next one, I decided to try a momentum hack that I learned from none other than Ernest Hemingway.Stop when you most want to go.I share the details and the powerful results in today's short and sweet GLP Riff. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we're talking about finishing when you already know where you're going to start again. What in the world is that all about? So if you have listened recently, a little while back I shared a podcast called Serial Creation about how I was changing my creative style. There's something I didn't talk about even though I was talking about writing a book. And it's something that I actually learned from Ernest Hemingway a long, long time ago. No, I'm not that a Paris Review interview of Hemingway quite a number of years back. And they were talking to him about his writing process. And the question of sort of how he stops and how he ends and how he begins came up.

And this is a really big thing for a lot of creative professionals because we're constantly, I don't know if you've ever heard the term writer's block, but a lot of people will say it's such a struggle to get something onto the page. And it can be a canvas, it can be paint, it can be, you know, like the computer and can be writing, it can be an entrepreneur who needs to come up with a new idea to test. How do you get to that place? And how do you get blocked? So it's kind of interesting, because for me, I'm not a huge believer in blocks. Maybe it's because I haven't experienced them in a meaningful way. But also, I haven't written fiction, which is, in my mind, massively more complicated and hard than nonfiction, which is where I tend to play. So maybe it'll come up there. But I have started a lot of things from absolute nothing, books, businesses, bodies of work, art. And so I know that process. When you're writing

something, there's a really powerful way to be able to hit the ground every morning. And this probably goes for a lot of other stuff too. And instead of waking up and saying, ah, what am I going to do? Where am I going to do? Where am I going to start? Like, what's my first sentence? What's my first brushstroke? What's my first note? There's a way to actually wake up and just say, oh my God, I can't wait to get this out of my head onto the page. I know exactly where I'm going on a pretty consistent basis. And I experimented with this in finishing my last book, and I learned it from Hemingway. And this circles back to that Paris Review article. So what am I talking about already?

Fields, just spit it out, please. So here's the deal. Hemingway said that he would never finish a day. And I'm probably butchering this a little bit. But essentially, what he said is he would write, write, write. And then before he would stop writing, he would finish in the middle of something where he already knew where he was going the next day. And that's where he would stop. He wouldn't finish the thought or the paragraph or the sentence or the chapter. He would stop writing in the middle so that when he woke up the next day, he knew where he was going and he could just go right into it.

Like his ramping time was really small. So I decided, let me run an experiment around this. And when I was working on the last book, I did that exact same thing. So the book is structured so that there are actually a series of relatively short chapters for a big chunk of the book. So I did a lot of research. I mapped it out. I outlined it. But even so, any writer, any painter, any creator will tell you that there's the outline and then there's where the work just needs to go. So you're never entirely sure that you're going to be bound by it or stay with it. So what I would do is wake up and say, okay, this is the chapter that I'm working on. And I would write, write, write, write, write. And then I would get to an end of a chapter

and I feel pretty good. And I could have stopped there. I could have said, that was a good day's work. I finished a chapter, I wrapped it, I feel solid about it. Let me put down the pen and the paper, remove the fingers from the keyboard and go take care of myself. But I didn't.

What I did was I stayed in it. And I said, okay, let me start the next chapter. And I would turn the page and I would put the headline on. And I would make sure that I then, whatever thinking I had to do, whatever thoughts I need, whatever quotes I need, whatever research I need to do, I would gather it. And I would make sure that I would get at least a couple of paragraphs into the next chapter, enough so that I was

starting to gather just a bit of momentum where I didn't actually want to stop writing. And then I would stop. Just stop. And so there were times where I actually had to really stop myself from stopping because I so wanted to finish because I actually had to really stop myself from stopping because I so wanted to finish because I was just getting my groove and I was like sliding back into another process. But what I knew was if I did that, it would be later in the evening and I would have been really empty and I wouldn't have had the ability to then start the next logical spot and do the work to like get it rolling again. And I would have ended at the end. And then the next morning, I would have just sat there and spent a chunk of time

actually trying to figure out where to start and probably been massively distracted rather than waking up the next morning and being like, ah, I can't wait to get back into this because I started, I know where it's going. I can't wait to get writing again. So I did that as an experiment. And what I found was that it worked astonishingly well, at least for me. The writing process went more powerfully, went faster than it's almost ever gone in that window of time that I was doing that. The creative output was at a level that was really solid. And I felt great because I felt like a lot of the struggle had been removed from the process. And when you start to write like that, that ritual starts to build a pleasantness that leads to, in my experience, better ideas coming faster, more productivity, more writing that begets more momentum. Writing begets writing begets writing and momentum

becomes this thing that becomes a bigger and bigger part of your process and starts you rolling and rolling and rolling. So really fascinating experiment for you to run. So whether you're a writer, whether you're an entrepreneur who's working on a long-term project, whether you're working in a company, whether you're just working on a personal project, whether you're an artist, no matter what you are, ask the question, how can I actually finish my work session or my day around this particular thing and not complete it, but actually start the next logical part of it and get just far enough in so that I have a real strong sense of where I'm going. Start telling that story and then stop, pull away, knowing that you're almost like, you know, yearning, you know, like you're interrupting your creative process in the name

of being able to wake up and just want to run and start creating again. Works really powerfully for me, apparently. Worked really well for Hemingway. And maybe it'll work for you. As always, thanks so much for listening and for allowing me to think through the processes that I'm exploring and testing as I pursue my own good life. Talk to you next week. Thanks so much for listening to today next week. us, give us a rating. Every little bit helps get the word out and it helps more people get in touch with the message. I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.