The War of Art (and other things)

Hello, world!

I’d like to welcome you to my first step in taking my personal discipline to the next level.

As a creative, I’ve justified a lot of my lazy and sloppy habits on “the creative process”, things like procrastinating, letting my working space get unreasonably messy and spending hours reading instead of doing. And while I think to an extent some of those things can definitely be beneficial, especially reading before doing, I’ve found relying on all of the above and building them into my process had been a cause of stress in my work and has carried over into many of my personal habits including neglecting the importance of proper exercising and nutrition.

In my professional life, I’ve found that creating structure has been the key to our business’ ability to grow and create higher quality services by allowing us to do what we do best, which is be creative. It’s allowed us to create and gather a set of tools that allow us to facilitate many of the more time-intensive tasks into a semi-automated system that allows us to focus on creating quality content that focuses on our clients business goals instead of just being able to execute the creation of a website or a marketing campaign.

Although I’ve had success in creating functional and well thought out websites, brands and marketing concepts for my clients I have yet to carry over that level of organisation and discipline into my personal life. For the last few years, I had really been focused on staying “in the loop” online and I fell into the trap of consuming content without self-control or any limitation.

Now it’s not all bad, the content that I was consuming was both productive and useless but I was having trouble distinguishing between which would benefit me and which wouldn’t. I discovered how I fell into the trap while I was doing some research on how Facebook marketing works.

While I understand that there needs to be promoted content in order to run a business that makes money and can support your employees and stakeholders, what I didn’t realise was how far Facebook was going in order to get you to keep scrolling. Now I won’t get into all of the details, but from what I understand they recycle a lot of old content and omit a lot of other content just because they believe positive reinforcement is the best way to keep people refreshing and scrolling past those ads.

I’ve been Facebook free for a couple of weeks now and I’m still in touch with my reading and up to date in my industry thanks to RSS feeds and Twitter and in touch with my family and friends thanks to Instagram. After finally breaking this constant need I had developed for that psychological reward by the chemicals released by scrolling the same curated information over and over I find I have more time to focus on achieving those types of chemical rewards via more productive means like creating art, exercising, meditating and participating in activities that I thought I was too busy to do.

A large part of my recent resurgence in motivation that I hope to build a habit out of is due in part to motivation I got from the Joe Rogan Experience podcasts most recent episode with Dr Rhonda Patrick (linked below) that really drove the point home when Joe talks about how many intellectuals understand the benefits of exercising and nutrition but still see it as a form of vanity. But it’s not vain to take care of yourself.

Tonight I plan on starting to re-read Stephen Pressfield’s “The War of Art” to continue to refresh my motivation to building positive habits so I can perform at optimal levels in all aspects of my life. On top of my good habits, I want to MAKE THE TIME to:

• Do more writing
• Make music
• Exercise
• Meditate
• Care about my health