“The key to meaningful work is in the decision to keep returning to the efforts you find important. Not in getting everything right every time.”
Or in other words, putting in the reps.
This morning I finished reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity. This pair of sentences struck me when I came across them, to the point of leaving that page up on my Kindle for a little while. Honestly, this book coming off of my holds list and being ready to borrow was excellent timing.
It’s easy to fall off the wagon with anything that takes more than five minutes to fully complete. And it’s easy to take that as a sign that maybe it’s not worth doing, or to throw your hands up and admit you just can’t be consistent and shouldn’t even try.
But the point isn’t that you got distracted or fell out of your routine—it’s that you crawled back up on that wagon, a little dirty and scuffed up, and decided it was worth it to start again. And that it’s worth it to keep plugging away, a bit at a time, until your work is complete.
A lot of the examples Newport uses are works like musical scripts, or novels: a single piece of art requiring lots of time and energy over months or years. I think it’s important to emphasize that “meaningful work” doesn’t necessarily mean one crowning masterwork.
One of my hobbies is drawing and painting. In recent years I’ve mostly done portraits of my family and friends’ pet dogs: brightly-colored, on an 8” by 8” canvas, thick enough to freely stand on a shelf. Each of these takes me one four-ish hour session, with maybe thirty minutes on another day for touch-ups.
Taking the quote above literally, you could say an individual painting isn’t “meaningful”, since it’s an effort I spend time on once and then never come back to.
I’d respond that here, though, the meaningful work is the hours, years, lifetime of collective practice. It’s not the individual pieces I make, but the effort to practice and improve my skill.
And after experiencing the reactions of friends and family who have had their beloved pets immortalized in handmade artwork, I’d challenge someone to say each individual effort isn’t meaningful, too.
So next time you mean to make time for a project you value and just don’t get to it, or think about picking up a hobby you enjoy but haven’t done in a while, be kind to yourself. It doesn’t matter that you got tripped up or pulled away.
What matters is that it is genuinely important and meaningful to you, and that you come back to it. No matter how many tries it takes.