A Few Thoughts about Trying Hard

I've been to two amazing sessions here, one led by Jarrod Haning, and another by Skip Ewing. Both men are professional musicians, of some excellence. Both have a strong but not dominating presence.  They are real, all the way down!  Integrity is a beautiful thing to see.

Jarrod invited us to consider "what might I not be seeing?", and Skip suggested that "to be creative you have to get out of your own way".  Which started me on a train of thought.  Toot Toot...all aboard?

At bottom, I don't trust the idea of having what I want without doing penance for it.  I guess my experience to this point has been somewhere between 'eat your brussel sprouts or you won't get any desert', and 'enjoy now, pay later (with interest)'. 

Then I thought, I also believe you reap what you sow.  It's a good analogy, but only if there is a causative relationship between the two things.  Yep, sowing does lead to reaping, one thing causes the other.  Where we go wrong, is we apply that analogy to things that are only correlated to each other, that happen at the same time, like "hard work" and "success". What you work hard at, you succeed at.  Um, no, not always.  They are correlated, not causative.

When you have succeeded at doing (or being) something in your life, do you know what caused that success?  I'm no longer sure I do.  Was it because I worked really, really, hard and tried my very best? Or was it something else both complex and wonderfully simple?

I'm coming up with fairly radical idea that when I "really try", I'm already blocked about something.  There's something I'm missing and I need to get out of my own way and be a bit more creative.

Diligence and application are rewarded, but they're most rewarded where there isn't too much pain, or only external motivation.  There has to be a vision, an internal motivation.

Take Edison and the light bulb.  Sure, there was a strong external motivation:  not to go broke (again) and to get very, very rich.  That motivation alone was not what invented the lightglobe. A genuine vision, an intellectual curiosity drove him.  He could see the answer, tantalizingly out of reach.  If someone had said right at the start, "this will take months and  you'll go through hundreds of failures" maybe he wouldn't have started?  He didn't commit to pain, he was just willing to endure it when it happened.  He took a step, he tried something.  Maybe this will work, he thought.  Nope.  No, wait, how about this?  Nope.  I know, I know, it's that.  His intellectual and (I'm willing to bet) emotional conviction that the light globe filiament was possible, that it was there to be found and he could find it, made each step seemingly impossible NOT to take.  Each step was small in itself, but it led to success.  He kept moving, he didn't sit down and say, "Boy, if only the circumstances were right, I could make me a mighty fine lightbulb."

Do you have a vision that you believe in that much?  Do you believe your own happiness and success is possible (let alone probable)?