Some author friends and I were chatting about waking up early in the mornings to write – or at least, the difficulty of doing so – and one of them relayed this bit of advice, originally given to her by a stranger in an airport:
You either have the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.
I wrote it down with the full intention of putting it on the wall above my desk. With the full intention of waking up at five o’clock in the morning for the rest of my life. It only took me until the next day to realize that it’s exactly the kind of advice that’s never worked for me. I know myself enough by now to know that I’d stick with it for the first few days, go to bed too late one night, wake up cranky and exhausted and feeling worthless, and then take that lost day as an excuse to rebel.
Framing everything as various forms of pain or struggle, using that frame as motivation to do things you don’t want to do, and subsequently revolting from the frame, strikes me, in these first ten days of 2021, as very American.
But I can easily imagine another approach, far more carrot than stick. You could seek out things that are inherently pleasurable. Find work or art that has its own gratifying energy, and pursue it with abandon. Follow hobbies and interest not because they’re stepping stones to future vocations but because they are inherently fun. An approach that’s, maybe, much more Italian.
When I think of why most systems of productivity or organization don’t necessarily work for me – why I’ve rarely been able to fill one journal or planner before moving onto another – it’s because the motivating thing for me wasn’t the system; it was almost always the thrill of trying something new. Once that pleasure was gone, it became drudgery.
