Create momentum anywhere building on whatever comes naturally to you

Loving your work isn’t just a saying, it’s a strategy.

Considering how many hours of hardship your creative projects will require, you had better find a way to get your heart in it.

Otherwise don’t even bother. Because if you can’t derive at least some kind of pleasure from the process of making things each day, then the journey is going to be one hell of an uphill battle. Even if you have to delude yourself into thinking you’re doing something that matters, fine.

Whatever it takes to make peace with it.

Besides, what’s the alternative? Most of us are spending hours and hours of our lives creating things that nobody needs or wants. Art is fundamentally irrational no matter what the circumstance. And so, putting in the work each day is never going to feel like anything but an exercise in absurdity. May as well take our joy wherever we can create it.

Sisyphus was meant to suffer when the gods sentenced him to rolling that boulder up the hill for eternity. And his labor may have seemed futile to those who witnessed it, but the man still found a way to make meaning and contentment in accepting his fate.

Who knows? Maybe he drew pictures on the side of the rock. Or he placed bets with his friends about which animals would get squashed under it. He also could have ridden the rock like a sled and tried to stay standing the whole way.

Or wouldn’t it have been cool if he rigged up a bunch of evergreens like a giant bowling alley and tried to hit a strike three times in a row?

Sounds fun to me. If that guy can spend eternity finding new facets of his heart to engage in this otherwise absurd and impossible task, then surely each of us can hang in there for what is a relatively short life.

What’s your unique motivational currency? What helps you override excuses and activates your natural inclinations?

The good news is, each of us has a small collection of intrinsic triggers that stoke our creative fire regardless of circumstance. We can create momentum almost anywhere by building on whatever comes naturally to us.

Here’s a heart based exercise you might try is plugging yourself into the following formulas:

You can feel like you’ve achieved a return on investment, as long as ____.
You can rationalize anything, as long as it has something to do with ____.
You can stick with a new behavior, as long as you can find a way to incorporate ____.
You can trick yourself into doing something daily, but only if you get the chance to ____.

Answer those questions, find commonalities, and soon you’ll be able to hack your heart into rationalizing, executing and enjoying mundane work.

How will delude yourself into loving a process that is fundamentally irrational and absurd?