Flow with motivation

I believe that there is only a certain amount of tasks that humans can do where the prime motivator is that we have been asked or told to. I think these tasks use a very specific type of energy in the body and brain that needs to be replenished before it can be used again, and that this energy is different from the kind that is used when we are in a flow state where we want to do things. The motivation for these type of forced tasks is often money but it can also be things like household tasks or other obligations.

The interesting point for me is that how our mind interprets these things that we have to do can be informed, heavily, by how we frame them. A diary filled with tasks that NEED performed can easily begin to feel like work and tire us out, using up this precious slow renewing energy. The problem is that we chose to fill our diary with them so it feels like they shouldn't tire us out because we picked them, but they are still things we now feel obligated to do. If they don't get done, we will feel a similar guilt to missing a deadline or failing to deliver on a promise.

So how do we deal with this? The answer, in my mind anyway, has to do with motivation and minimalism. There are obviously some tasks that we will actually need to perform, but we can minimise the number of tasks that we perform in this way and try to ask the question "Do I really need to do this right now?". In this way we can simplify our lives and focus on the things that really matter and that we wish to do. Spending more of our time on things that we feel motivated to do allows us to tap into the state of flow that affords frictionless performance, fueled by our desire to work in the task space while in our current state of mind. Asking this question also allows us to weed out tasks that actually offer no value to our lives but we've been performing basically because we always have, or feel that we should. 

The hardest part of creativity

I think the hardest part about creating anything is not trusting yourself to come up with something good. It doesn't seem to matter how many things you put out, and how much you improve, you always have this nagging doubt that the thing you are currently working on will turn out trash and you have no idea what you are doing. Having the best ideas often seems to be a magical occurrence, largely outwith your control, and that is extremely frustrating.

The natural reaction to this, for most people, is to try to nail down what makes you most creative and then try to re-create that situation or circumstances. The problem with this is that we forget that our mind is working in the background, churning away on ideas. It's doing its best work when we aren't having anything to do with it. In some sense that is the true genius, the real artist in all our creative work. It's also the part of the equation that doesn't sit well with creative people because they like to see themselves as the artist, they are the creator, not some part of their brain buried deep in the background. Why do we think of our 'self' as only our conscious brain? Why do we disassociate that ancient part of our brain from our sense of self when it is clearly so important in how we view the world and what we put out into the world as our creative message?

The psychology of asking the right question

The human brain is a really weird, dysfunctional, thing. Often we know the answers to questions but we can't pull them out of our brain for love nor money. The key, sometimes, is actually asking a different question.

When i'm working on a track i'll sometimes find it difficult to know what the track needs. I can listen to it and not really understand where to go when I ask "What is the track needing?". Instead what I now try to do is instead ask "Is the track actually done?". If the answer is no then I start finding it easier to point out what makes the track not yet done. Its a shift from thinking about what my next step is to thinking back from my end-point and looking at what the scope of the gap is. For me it works and I can answer the second question much easier than the first. As an aside I also find that thinking in this way actually allows me to work for longer periods of time on a track without getting distracted. This simple loop of assessing whether the track is done often sparks my desire to immediately do the action I come up with there and then, making the move towards the finished track.