A Golden Heuristic

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

-- Paul Graham, How to Do What You Love

Subjecting oneself to above-described discipline is indeed demanding as it requires consistent application of effort but is at the same time truly liberating. How? It unshackles us from many ill-conceived notions about people & work, such as, most of the people around have a clue about what they truly love doing perhaps because of being more self-aware or being more self-confident. Though it may seem so from a cursory view on people around us, a deeper perspective on how work provides substance to one’s life comes when one sees work as a vehicle to more self-awareness and more competence (ultimately more self-confidence).

Common impediments to this discipline include fear, doubt, boredom, and laziness.

Fear makes us anxious and is a natural response to change. More effortful or large the change, the more anxious we shall become. It fans the winds of doubt hindering progress. If left unchecked, our motivation sags. In order to drive ourselves, it’s necessary to tap into why we want to do something on a frequent basis. Even love requires renewal. Also, this saves us from wasting our effort in case our motivation changes.

How often does one find oneself initiating some activity with enthusiasm and then foregoing it just because it has become tedious. Scientists ascribe two reasons behind boredom which may be simultaneously present: 1) lack of meaning 2) lack of attention. Who likes doing laundry? Connecting laundry to one’s need/desire for cleanliness can turn an unrewarding chore into a bearing one at least. Who wouldn’t recall how pouring over an uninteresting book or preparing for a dull subject felt like? (Yes, boredom is an emotional response after all) Reserving periods of effort and breaks alleviated this emotional dilemma.

Some say laziness has no cure. True. Our brains are wired to shirk effort. That’s why we form habits and routines. We are engaged in a continual evaluation of task duration, task difficulty (or effort) and task salience. So a wise thing to do is to form helpful habits and routines that will serve us in the longer run.