Huh..?

A close friend recently suggested that what this blog is all about is an attempt to salvage or justify all the time and energy I've spent working, when I may have prefered doing something else, instead.

That may be true to some extent, but this is also about articulating the revelations one encounters once one realizes that there may be, and may have been, no other way. It's easy to dream, but many things need to come into confluence in order to create the right conditions to, let's say, publish one's novel with enough critical and commercial appeal that one might land oneself a tenure track job, or get paid handsomely enough for a screenplay to be free of working, in the typical sense.

Yes, I agree, teaching is work too, but teaching sculpture, if you are a sculpter, is very different from writing business system specifications, or answering tech support calls.

But having had to work teaches things that luck may not, and I think, at this point, after over twenty-five years of fulltime work, I'm an expert. Not only am I an expert at getting things done, but I'm also an expert at not getting things done, and being efficient, inefficient, of creating the appearance of doing a great job (sometimes actually harder than doing a great job), and numerous other operations and subterfuges one must learn in order to survive work.

The conclusion I draw more often than not is that it is best to do the best job you can possibly do, since that is really what makes things easier. The better you work, the better you get at working, and after a while it's almost like cheating. You have all these skills you're not even aware of, and you get things done in half the time, or less, than it might take someone else.

This is common sense, and not a very hard conclusion to get to. Sure, but one has to know how to work in order to accomplish this. Hard work is not enough. Very hard work is not enough. These are things some people never learn. I was actually quite stupid at it myself, and very resistant to learning as well. I didn't wanted to have to work, I wanted to be discovered. Right.

Like most work, this blog is also a fiction. Because there is no one way to work, and there is no possible way to do as I suggest. There is, in actuality, really no difference between work and anything else we do. But we don't generally live in actuality.

In order to do as I suggest, to approach your work with some of the same forces you approach "art," you have to leave all the meaning of what you are doing and why you are doing it behind, at least for periods of time, so that you can track what you are doing in purely formal terms. For instance, NLPers suggest that if you map out the linguistic, sensory-cognitive and subjective physiological processes you go through when you are either making art or doing work, you could figure out ways of supplanting parts of each into each other. There are those who even believe that if you simply pretend to believe you are making art when you are actually performing tasks at your day job, that you will make huge shifts in the way you do them.

Of course, as I said above, this is all fiction. But then, so is work, in a sense.

It would be completely up to you, if wanted to make yourself an experiment.

I'll say this, the better your refine your skills, and learn to approach your work creatively, the more subtle you will become, and the more values you will be able to satisfy at once. It is even possible to learn to reap satisfaction from activities that you shouldn't be able to reap satisfaction from. Think of it as a form of yoga, and doing -- using -- the work that is absolutely the worst suited to your disposition may actually be the most ideal work for you to do, from this perspective. That is if you wanted to take on a project of this sort, this magnitude.

I think it was Gurdjieff who said that you can learn more from a polished floor than a famous painting, if the floor was polished by someone with knowledge. Think of that knowledge, not as mystical knowledge, as he may have suggested, but an integration (and therefore, simplification) of multiple, and possibly conflicting, complexities into one's subjective arsenal.

Still, it may not make life any easier.