I’m sitting here thinking about how I set myself up pretty good with my first post. It talks about starting something not being the hardest part, that following through and continuing to produce is where it gets truly difficult. It seems I’d tempted Fate by putting that one out there.
What I was doing before that thought emerged was sitting here staring at a blank page on a screen. A now formerly blank page on a screen, thank god.
Before that I was thumbing through several of my draft ideas for articles, digitally scribbled in my Notes app and Notion. No luck, nothing was clicking.
My lovely inner monologue was scolding me for having nothing to say. Or, more accurately, “nothing worth saying.” Thanks, buddy.
But then I noticed something. I noticed how, despite that inner critic, I actually was feeling pretty great for some reason. (Hint: it wasn’t due to feeling like I was already failing in this venture.)
No, I was feeling good because I had been sitting in silence.
For the first time all day it was just me.
No music. No Slack. No phone. No overload of Chrome tabs. No email. No social media. No notifications. No meetings. No code. No girlfriend. No coworkers. No children.
Nothing.
Aural silence—white noise.
Visual silence—white screen.
The clock on the wall. The crackling of a flickering candle. My dog Appa’s light snoring downstairs. My own breath.
Connection Errors
It’s not that I don’t love those things. It’s that I forget—way too easily and far too often—that I need to unplug.
In fact, I’m so bad at it that during an advisory call this morning I gave the advice without even recognizing how much I was in need of it. A good reminder that wisdom is oftentimes simply taking your own advice.
And it’s not that I need to unplug in the sense of a Walden experience, though that wouldn’t hurt, but that I need to have some level of quiet time during the day. Preferably a few times throughout the day.
Quit Slack. Pull the AirPods out. Leave the phone at the desk.
Shhhhh.
Walk, sit, breathe, drive, think, look around the room, whatever—so long as it’s not plugging into some new source of noise: TV, books, people, etc.
It’s sitting with life, so to speak, rather than racing through it towards some goal. It’s being at peace with what is, content with things rather than searching for something to consume.
It’s in the spaces between that the magic gets a chance to take root, both personally and professionally. It may not hit you till you’re back at the desk with all of the stimuli back in place, but make no mistake: that’s not where it actually happened.
If I were a better Buddhist or more Zenful I’d have some great teacher’s quips here about how god prefers to create in the void, that you only see when you stop looking, or that silence is truth’s medium of choice. (Not so bad for first attempts, eh?)
On to the point: sometimes the greatest, most effective work you can do for your work is to stop doing the work. And for many of us, especially in the startup space, the hardest work possible is to not work.
Chilling the fuck out is no easy task, but it’s essential all the same.
So next time you’re feeling like the work you’re doing is shit and you are hitting a wall, try a little shhhhh.
Shhhhh it and see what happens.
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