Book Ponder

The Passion Is Still Hard Work

 Being a content creator is fun, whether you are creating YouTube videos, podcasts, or writing blog post articles, most of the time people do it because it was originally a hobby that turned into a passion.  Everyone’s goal is to be able to do their passion as a full-time job, but the dirty little secret is that there is still hard work involved.  When the research phase is done and it’s time to sit down and create the product, we realize that the easy part is over, and we must concentrate deeply to create something special.  Over time as you become experienced this step becomes easier but as a new content creator, this is the step that causes people to call it quits.  Once the boredom seeps in and they have trouble concentrating, they realize that this wasn’t as fun as they expected it to be and that a passion does not mean it’s always fun and easy.  Some people get past this, others quit, but a select group does what I call productive procrastination.  Tiago Forte explains this well in his book Building a Second Brain:

“When you sit down to finish something—whether it’s an explanatory email, a new product design, a research report, or a fundraising strategy—it can be so tempting to do more research. It’s so easy to open up dozens of browser tabs, order more books, or go off in completely new directions. Those actions are tempting because they feel like productivity. They feel like forward progress, when in fact they are divergent acts that postpone the moment of completion.”

Tiago Forte

Productive Procrastination

 Just because it has the word productive in it, productive procrastination is still procrastination, and procrastination is a bad thing.  The only difference is that productive procrastination sugarcoats it into letting you think you are still being productive when you are just avoiding the hard work.  Let me give you an example in the blogging world, I base most of my content on books and extracting lessons learned from the reading I do and how we can apply it to our lives.  For me, the hard work starts when I sit down in front of the computer with a blank page staring me down.  To avoid this, I have many notes and prompts to help me jump-start a blog post, but it’s still hard work.  My productive procrastination in this scenario is to go do more research and read more books.  Reading books is the fun part and I find myself escaping back to it when the writing gets hard.  The research has been done, the book has been read, and there is no excuse to not get my thoughts on paper. 

Embrace the Boredom

 Sitting down and doing hard work that takes deep concentration is a skill that can be practiced.  In Cal Newport’s book “Deep Work”, he talks about boredom being a skill.  With distractions easily available to us, we have lost the skill to just be bored. We need to embrace the boredom; you will notice how hard it is to just sit quietly for 10 to 15 minutes and how many times you get the urge to take out your phone to pass the time.  If you are good at being bored you are good at concentrating, when you are doing hard work that is mentally taxing, you get that same urge to pull out your phone and give yourself a little distraction.  If you want to improve at the hard work of creating content, then practice being bored for a few minutes each day.  After that, you will know when productive procrastination is setting in and how to avoid it.   

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