How To Actually Do Hard Work: filling in the blanks between the actual and the ideal

This newsletter is going to start a bit differently. It starts, in fact, with a poem by Wallace Stevens. You’ll see why soon enough.

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm


The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.


Take a moment to let all that sink in.
Read it again. You can do that – this isn’t a race.

He’s describing a high state of attainment –
The reader became the book.
The summer night was like a perfection of thought.
The scholar to whom his book is true.

He paints a picture of a student, or seeker, craftsman, or practitioner who is totally at one with the craft itself: the words were spoken as if there was no book.

And yet, there is still the faintest indication of strain, of effort:

The reader leaned above the page.

Wanted much most to be the scholar to whom his book is true.

It’s the leaning above the page, in an attempt to lean into this final arrival at mastery, that concerns us today.

I’m going to grant the assumption that you want to become your own version of the reader described in Stevens’ poem: at one with your craft, whatever that is. Wherever your skill and fluency levels are now, you want to take them further. As far as you can.

And, you should want this for yourself. Engaging in highly skilled activities at an expert level makes you happy. Learning and growing makes you happy.

When you sufficiently challenge yourself to the point that your capacity grows as a direct result, you cannot help but become an optimist: you have hard evidence that progress is possible, and that you are capable of it. The future could theoretically be spent making progress in all kinds of ways, toward a goal or goals of your choosing.

A future filled with positive possibilities is a source of meaning, inspiration, and happiness.

As Stevens says at the end, “the truth in a calm world…is the reader leaning late and reading there.” The meaning of life is found in the expert striving at ever greater excellence.

In just a moment, I’m going to give you some strategies to enable you to cultivate higher levels of skill.

Before I do so, however, I want to get some unpleasant, sobering truths out of the way.

Yes, this has to be difficult.
No, this cannot be fun and easy.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and So Good They Can’t Ignore You (among others), clued me into a significant concept – the distinction between what is commonly called dopamine-driven motivation, and what I’ll call aspirational motivation.

Let me explain.

Dopamine is about immediate response to stimuli. I do this and it feels good: I’ll keep doing it. For the sake of brevity (yes, I’ve heard of it), we’ll leave it at that.

Notice anything about that framework? It feels good, so I’ll continue? It doesn’t account for the people who persist in unpleasant, even gruelingly difficult work for the sake of far off rewards.

Surely you don’t think that learning a foreign language, or writing on a highly technical subject, or lifting weights until you wish your parents had never met, or practicing an exceptionally unwieldy passage in a classical composition, or running long distances feels good.

I can tell you now: it does not feel good.
And yet, all of those activities can be totally absorbing.

I know that I’m doing something right when my brain feels like it’s about to snap as my eyes move over an especially difficult paragraph in a book, or when I find a way to make my hands play some passage from a piano sonata by Mozart on an electric guitar, or when I read through the sheet music of a solo by tenor saxophonist John Coltrane.

I know I’m doing something right when I’m not totally sure what to say or how best to say it but I continue searching my mind for the words, striving to advance a conversation, to make myself clear, to elicit further clarification from someone else, and to establish real understanding and agreement about what has happened and where we go from here.

It’s the exact same way my muscles feel when I’ve actually gone to failure:

I don’t know if this can go on for even one second longer, but let’s try to keep going.

Why do I know that means I’m doing something right?

Because this is how I know I am becoming “the scholar to whom his book is true.”

I know that the actions I am taking, and specific ways in which those actions are stimulating growth, are deeply connected to the fulfillment of my ideals.

This is what leaning above the page feels like: there it is, the abundant garden of knowledge, the shelter of expertise, the security of knowing oneself to be solid and competent, and all I have to do is enter into it.

Every moment spent at the limits of my capacity is a moment in which I grow stronger, smarter, wiser, and happier.

This is aspirational motivation: emulating the conduct of people I admire, even and especially when it means doing unpleasantly difficult things, because it advances me in the direction of the fulfillment of my values, not just my concrete objectives. Hyperbolic as it may sound, when I am struggling through something difficult in a literary or musical context, I feel as though I am fulfilling my destiny.

The way this actually works, in scientific language, is by tapping into Episodic Future Thinking, or EFT.

EFT is a fancy term for thinking about the future. Specifically, it means thinking about it with enough clarity that your brain interprets the imagined future scenario as something you’re about to do.

For example, if you imagine yourself standing at home plate, holding a bat, and a baseball hurtling toward you, can you visualize yourself swinging the bat?

Can you hear the loud crack of the wooden bat connecting with the ball?

Can you feel the shock of the successful hit hurting in your hands?

Can you see the ball shrinking as it goes up and away from you, and the uniformed members of the opposing team chasing after it on bright green AstroTurf?

If you’re a painter, imagine yourself walking someone through a gallery installation of your work. How many pieces are there? How big or small are they? How are they lit? What do they depict? How do the colors appear? How are these pieces made?

This is Episodic Future Thinking. According to an article by Jane McGonigal, there are 3 basic steps when you engage in EFT:

1. Scene Construction: using your memory and experience to construct as lifelike and detailed a picture of the imagined scenario as possible.

2. Opportunity Detection: what does the scene represent to you, and what actions are required to bring it about?

3. Emotional Response. If done properly, you’re going to feel feelings. These are just as real as emotions caused by actual events.

EFT is how you get yourself to do the difficult, necessary, and not necessarily dopaminergic activities that bring about the realization of your goals and ideals. Why? Because you see the future clearly enough to see the road you must walk to arrive there, and you experience the emotions that follow from doing so well enough to feel familiar with it. It becomes real in your mind.

In Cal Newport’s words, EFT motivation beats dopamine motivation. It simply comes from a deeper place, even physiologically: 11 regions of the brain are activated when it’s done properly. Read Jane McGonigal’s article on EFT here:

https://ideas.ted.com/mental-time-travel-is-a-great-decision-making-tool-this-is-how-to-use-it/

Finally,
FINALLY,
We can discuss how to actually work hard.

When you’re in step 2 of EFT, “Opportunity Detection,” the part of your brain called the putamen summons the right actions from your working behavioral repertoire. These are the actions that your brain believes to be causally linked to bringing about and fulfilling the scenarios you imagine.

Here are the requirements for effort that expands your capacity and moves you toward your better future self:

Work on more challenging material.

How do you know material is sufficiently challenging? Mistakes are inevitable, even when you try as hard as you can to avoid mistakes.

You should feel physically uncomfortable, and maybe even a little tickle in your brain.

If you know to aim for a palpable level of discomfort, to the point where you really have to struggle to maintain focus, then you won’t quit when that discomfort surfaces.

Even if you can’t endure it for longer than 30 minutes at a stretch, negotiate with yourself to try to do just a little more. Try to actually get to the end of your capacity to continue. Read about the Zone of Proximal Development to understand this better.

You need feedback on your work.

You are working beyond your current capacity in the interest of achieving things you have never achieved before: you are not the expert here. Expert feedback is critical.

Find people in your life who consume the sort of material you are trying to produce at an expert level. For example, I show my newsletters to people who have worked as counselors, who have been published, and who read the experts in my field. They will be honest with me, regardless of how it makes me feel.

You can and should use YouTube and Twitter/X to supplement this. Videos by people like Cal Newport, Alex Hormozi, or Dan Koe can be a valuable “reality check.” Similarly, you can change your life by simply watching five minutes of David Goggins YouTube shorts a day.

“Do something everyday that sucks.”
When David reminds you, you listen.

Rest and recover.

If you work hard, pushing yourself past your limits, striving to reach a standard modeled by an expert and professional, you will be exhausted. In some ways, you haven’t worked hard enough if you’re not exhausted. But hard work has to be followed by intentional rest.

Sleep is what allows your work to move into long term memory, where it eventually becomes muscle memory.

You do not need to perform more than 60-90 minutes per day of truly focused, intensely demanding work. Even world class performers recognize an upper limit of 4-5 hours per day.

Take breaks, refresh yourself, and sleep deeply for as long as necessary. Be kind to yourself.

In conclusion, I again encourage you to fall a bit more deeply in love with an ideal that inspires you.

For me, it is the scholar to whom his book is true, for whom the summer night is like a perfection of thought.

Where has your ideal best been expressed? Is it in a book, a poem, a movie, a painting, a song? Is it in the example of a historical figure, or a relative, a mentor, or a friend? Think about it. Find something that seems to embody greatness, and imparts a hunger for greatness to you when you think about it.

For me, I imagine myself climbing a staircase carved out of a mountain, leading to a kind of temple where Igor Stravinsky, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Claude Debussy, Wallace Stevens and John Coltrane are waiting for me, waiting for me to earn the right to be counted among them.

Who is it that will be there to welcome you?

Thanks for reading, talk to you again soon.

-Jas