Patience v. Procrastination
Hello, I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement.
My purpose in life and business is to teach, coach, mentor, and (hopefully) inspire. To support my purpose, I am a content creator—books, music, podcast recordings, motivational snippets, and this Muse are examples of the media through which I pour my creative heart and soul. Sometimes the words and music flow freely, and sometimes my creative process borders on the painful. There are times when directly confronting the pain of creativity yields positive results and there are others when such a confrontation is futile.
The consistent truth to the creative process is that the only way “there” is “through.” There are typically no shortcuts, no workarounds, just a winding, circuitous route to a successful outcome. If you’re still clinging to the hope that life is full of straight lines and A yields B yields C with no loopbacks, it’s time to let go and embrace the messiness that is creativity. Yes, you can adopt a continuous improvement mindset that will reduce the waste that litters the path along the road to the creation of original content, but to imagine that it can be eliminated is itself wasted effort.
To cut straight to the point today is that the skill of patience is woefully underrated and under-appreciated. Knowing when to push forward and when to let a project or idea sit is an incredibly important skill—for content creators and leaders.
Patience is key. Sometimes, some things, just need to sit.
Here’s a case in point. About six months ago, I had a spark of inspiration while bouncing along on my subcompact tractor, mowing down grass and dying wildflowers as we prepared our property for the onset of the western Wisconsin winter. The melody line and chorus of a new song, along with a lyrical theme, formed in my head. As the afternoon progressed, I hummed, sang, and refined these threads over the din of the whirring mower blades and roar of the diesel engine.
When I’d had enough, I jumped off the tractor, ran into the house, and scribbled down what I’d accomplished. In the moment, I thought that I really had something and that I’d experienced one of those rare moments of inspiration where everything just fell into place. I thought that I’d be able to get into the studio and crank out a new tune in short order. But after dinner and a shower, I revisited what I’d scribbled down to find that while the idea had merit, I was nowhere near having enough of the pieces in place to yield a great result.
So instead of moving forward and forcing the creative process, I decided to let my idea sit. For me, I’ve learned that if I let an idea sit and it comes back to me unforced and without prodding during a bike ride, mowing session, or airplane ride—my main sources of creativity-enabling white noise—it has merit and I should pursue it. If the idea vanishes into the proverbial wind, then it was never meant to be. This song idea just had to sit.
As I let it sit, the song did resurface—unaided—on numerous occasions. I would periodically pull out the scribblings I’d done the day it came to me, make a tweak here or there, and decide that its time had not yet come. As the winter passed, I noticed that my feelings about the song had changed. Initial optimism that a fully-formed song could be derived from my scribblings began to turn to self-doubt. With each successive interaction with my scribblings, a voice in the back of my mind was getting louder: “Andy, you’re not going to be able to turn this into anything. You should just give up. You stink at songwriting!”
My purposeful patience with the songwriting process was beginning to spill over into procrastination.
So fast-forward to earlier this week. The melody line of the song crept back into my working memory once again and I knew I had to make a decision. The voices of insecurity and doubt were starting to drown out my optimism. I knew from experience that I was on the brink of losing this particular song idea to the scrapheap of procrastination. I knew that the only way “there” was “through.” I locked myself in my recording studio and got to work. Testing, iterating, “failing,” learning, and BAM! I broke through.
I’m proud to report that although there are still many steps to work through before my new song sees the light of day, I’m far along enough to know that it will indeed be something that should be released.
What are today’s lessons?
Did the song need to sit? Did I need to be patient? Looking back, the answer is a resounding YES! Should it have taken six months to get to this point in the process? Did I let self-doubt and insecurity get the best of me? Also YES! I’ve learned another hard lesson that I still have work to do on balancing the need for patience in the creative process with wrestling the demons of insecurity and self-doubt that are my personal drivers of procrastination. What are your drivers of procrastination?
Translating my story into a business context, if you’re a leader who wants to promote creativity and innovation in your organization, it’s important to understand the difference between pushing too hard for short-term results, the need to exercise patience and allow ideas to “sit,” and enabling the drivers of procrastination. It’s easy to push too hard for results from the creative process—to be impatient. The result is usually a hurried, substandard outcome. It’s also easy to enable procrastination by not effectively coaching and mentoring your people to build confidence in themselves and their ability to engage with the creative process. The irony is that pushing your people too hard to be innovative and creative can exacerbate their natural feelings of doubt and insecurity—the very thing that you should be coaching and mentoring them to work through.
Have a great weekend! Be sure to do something for you today.
