3 Life Fundamentals To Lean On During Your Battle With The Slumps
Plus, how one of the greatest writers of our time got so much done
Hanging onto a side hustle like writing feels like a bloody street fight.
Scratch that, hanging on to anything you care about feels like a bloody street fight.
In writing, it’s called writer’s block. In a relationship, it’s called the doghouse. At work, it’s called the 4th quarter.
I got writer’s block last month. My day job entered its “busy season” right as I moved to a new city. And, oh yeah, my car broke down somewhere in the middle of all that.
Mercury had hit retrograde.
The first step to overcoming a slump is accepting that you will not be good every day. You must. Not every episode of Seinfeld was a cult classic.
The important thing is your response. That’s what makes one great.
How should you respond?
Lean on the fundamentals. As John Wooden wrote,
“I believe in the basics: attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might be commonly overlooked. They may seem trivial, perhaps even laughable to those who don’t understand, but they aren’t.”
Here are the fundamentals I lean on whenever I hit a slump.
1.) Make light your transition
In Ryan Holiday’s new book “Discipline is Destiny” he immediately quotes the novelist Toni Morrison.
“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make contact. Where they become the conduit or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal. It’s not being in the light, it’s being before it arrives.”
Toni Morrison was one of the greatest writers of her time. She was also one of the most productive. Throughout her career, she wrote ten novels, five children’s books, and two plays. Her body of work won her the Presidential Medal and a Nobel Prize.
And it wasn’t like she had all day to write this stuff. At the beginning of her career, Toni worked a 9–5 at a publishing house while raising two boys as a single mother.
How did she do it? She worked before sunrise.
Before traffic cluttered the New York streets. Before her kids beckoned her attention. Before the pointless team meetings at work.
The light was her transition. Not being in the light, but “being before the light arrives.”
If you’re in a slump, win back your morning routine. Run, workout, read, write. Do something that gives you focus and energy.
Your friends will wake up at 7:30 am and scroll Instagram till 8 am. And you? Where will you be?
My Routine: I write for about 2 hours before clocking into work.
2.) Carve out time for reading
For writers, it’s impossible to be any good without reading a lot.
I believe that holds true for anything big and important you’re trying to accomplish. For any business idea, athlete endeavor, or artistic project, everyone has to do their homework.
All great producers were once great consumers. Warren Buffett spends 80% of his day reading. Elon Musk learned how to build rockets from an old Soviet-era rocket manual. Lin Manuel Miranda got the idea for Hamilton from reading a biography while on vacation.
We praise people who make “gut” decisions; that they possess the “clutch” gene or something. There’s no clutch gene. Their power doesn’t come from god, it comes from skill. It comes from experience, practice, and reading about their subject.
My Routine: I read for about 1-hour each morning before I write. It helps clear my head of leftover anxieties and fill my cup full of new ideas.
3.) Clean your apartment
My best friend and chief first introduced me to the term “mise en place.”Or “mise” if you’re tight with the restaurant industry.
It’s French cooking slang, but to our ears, it simply means “everything in its place.”
Any professional restaurant you visit, anywhere in the world, mise en place is rule number one. And for good reason. Kitchens are chaos. If a pot is in the wrong location, if an ingredient gets to the chief a few seconds late, if the knives aren’t cleaned, the whole ecosystem unravels like the butterfly that erupted Mount Vesuvius.
Everyone has their mise, but people rarely take the same care of their spaces as a chief. Think about all the useless apps clogging up your cell phone right now!
A cluttered space equals a cluttered mind.
If you’re in a slump, start with your mise en place. Clean your room, organize the folders on your desktop, and put away the dishes.
As Jordan Peterson likes to say
“If you want to organize your psyche, you should start by cleaning your room.”
My Routine: It’s simple, I can’t go to bed if dishes are not put away, and I always make my bed in the morning.
Closing
Super simple habits, right?
That’s the point. A slump like writer’s block means we have to work backward to rebuild confidence, and the best way to build confidence is by doing the little things right. The things that don’t require much skill but are equally important.
First things first.
I know you write for a different age group but I always find I can apply to adjusting to retirement!! Thank you.