The Pressure to Produce
EPISODE 068: THE PRESSURE TO PRODUCE
Paralyzed by the pressure to produce and keep cranking out the work? You're not alone. Creators often feel like they're only as good as their recent work which means you got to keep producing recent work. But people don't respond to your work because you make it frequently. They don't need more from you, they need more of you. Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
On April 11, 2021, CBS aired an episode of 60 Minutes that looked into the prolific genius that was Prince, or truly–now that he's gone–the "Artist formerly known as Prince." It's hard to believe he's been dead for 5 years, but he's been busy in the afterlife. This summer an album he made but, never released, in 2010, Welcome 2 America, will finally be published.
If Wikipedia is correct, Prince now has 39 studio albums , four live albums, nine compilation albums, 17 video albums and three posthumous albums to his name. This on its own is impressive. Even more impressive is that, according to this 60 Minutes piece, Prince died with some 8,000 recorded songs in his vault. Think about that number for a moment. Eight. Thousand. To put that into context, Prince left us with enough unpublished but completed songs to give us a new album every year until the year 3000.
(Note: That 60 Minutes episode can be found here: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/prince-welcome-2-america-60-minutes-2021-04-11/#x)
I don't know about you, but though I find that incredible, I don't find it particularly inspiring. It's definitely not encouraging. Hell, when I was writing this episode it took me over a week just to get this far on an episode of this podcast that I wanted to have done a week before that. The words just wouldn't come, the topic I wanted to write about felt forced and most of all I felt an overwhelming pressure to produce, just to get something out into the world and meet my own deadline. In the same time, while I'm now only 12 sentences into this episode, Prince would have written 12 songs. And I'm not even sure the 12 sentences I've written won't be replaced or just deleted entirely by the time you hear this.
Of all the challenges in the effort to live a meaningful creative life, I think I find the pressure to produce among the hardest to get my head on straight about, and I know while not everyone has to trudge through this kind of thing, many of you do, and I thought now might be a good time to talk about it. I'm David duChemin, and this is episode 68 of A Beautiful Anarchy, my podcast about the joys and challenges of the creative life. Welcome here.
Music / Intro
So, in the spirit of full disclosure, this one is 100% a reaction to my own struggle right now. My creative life normally draws from a rich, deep well of adventures around the world and the creative projects that come out of those adventures, and my well is beginning to feel really dry. I know it's not. I know there's stuff in there, probably under that weird green scum that's forming way down at the bottom of the well, and yes, I know the water levels will come up again. They always do. That's just the ebb and flow of the creative rhythm. But usually I comfort myself about the dry times in that rhythm by going to Kenya and India and immersing myself in something challenging. Or I go to Venice and drink Prosecco and wander for hours with a camera.
So while I can't do any of that, my usual ways of filling the well again, I still feel the pressure to produce. To ship, and to feed the machine. To write the podcasts, to write the blog and the articles I send to my audiences. That's the pressure I'm feeling, and I think it comes from my fear of disappointing the people that make up those audiences. There's also this worry that if I stop, just for a while, my audience - you - will have moved on and forgotten about me when I'm ready to get back to creating and sharing that work.
I know these are mostly irrational fears. Our audiences don't leave because we take a week off. I always laughed when I was on social and saw a post from someone that apologized because they didn't post for the last 2 days. 2 days? Man, you didn't even give us time to miss you! And this is the truth of it, I think. Short breaks probably won't be noticed, you won't be as missed as you hope or fear you will be, and we all need time to slow down, to go AWOL now and then. It's probably not a bad thing if you miss me once in a while, and your own audiences might even benefit from the kind of reminder about what you do for them that your occasional absence will provide. They don't come to you because the biggest contribution you make in their lives is merely a regularly scheduled serving of whatever it is you make for them, and your audience won't leave in droves if you skip a week, or a month, and take some time to recalibrate.
But our audiences will leave, eventually, and in droves, when our work becomes so anaemic that it's lifeless. When our work becomes tired and half-hearted and loses its spark because we start mailing it in - that's when the people who loved what we made when we had the courage and strength to go all in, will start finding those things elsewhere. That is the real worry for any of us who find such joy in making what we do as a gift for those who follow our work: not that they'll forget about us, but that they'll stop caring, or finding in our work something to love and resonate with.
You're not alone in feeling like you constantly need to feed the monster with new work, or in feeling that if you're only as good as your recent work, then you better be making recent work. Always. Constantly. You're not the only one who might be feeling the pressure to keep cranking it out. It's not workaholism. At least it's not for me. It's love, for the work, and for the people for whom I make it. But there is fear there, too: the fear of losing relevance. Losing income, too. And most of all, losing impact.
What I most want in everything I create is some kind of impact. So there's a strange kind of comfort when I step back and remind myself that impact doesn't come from noise, but from signal. There is no shortage of noise out there. The world doesn't need additional contributions of content, no matter how regularly scheduled and reliably consistent. It needs signal. It needs depth. One more social media post won't add anything, and one fewer won't be missed. The world doesn't need more from you. It needs more of you.
This is not yet another reminder that quality is more important than quantity, that's too easy. Over the long haul quantity and quality are often linked, at least in as much as those who make much and make often tend over time to make better as well. But this might be a reminder that whatever it is that makes your work resonate, whatever ability you have to make something meaningful and authentic–whatever gives it soul–if you find that you're diluting those things in exchange for endless output, then the price is too high.
It has occurred to me recently that I might have to slow my roll a little bit, and that's a tough one to reconcile with the fact that I love what I do. Not just the making of it, but the way that putting it into the world makes a difference to real people and often those real people, people like you, reach out and tell me just what a difference my work makes, and that makes it even harder to slow down. There's a genuine fear of depriving others of something in which they find meaning and joy.
So after working myself up into a lather about all this stuff, here are 3 thoughts I keep coming back to about the pressure I often feel to ship more work than I am sometimes able to, and I'm hoping, if you're sitting there feeling some of the same obligations, that these ideas help:
The first is the awareness that this pressure to produce is mostly self-imposed and if it's self-imposed then it can also be self-regulated. Basically, I bring this on myself and in my better moments it helps to take a deep breath and remind myself that the inner voice chiding me, saying "you've got to produce!" needs someone to ask for clarification. Produce what? Regular work? Consistent work? On-time work based on a schedule of my own making? Sure, I do need to produce, but why not slower work, deeper work? More sustainable work?
Maybe this pressure to produce needs to be regulated by a keener awareness, and acceptance, of my own natural pace and rhythm. And this is important - it could be that the rhythm and pace that once worked for us, no longer does. Things have changed and your pre-pandemic pacing and rhythm might no longer work for you. You might need much wider margins right now, and recognizing that might help you hit the purge valve and relieve some of the pressure. Maybe it's time to re-calibrate and update your own expectations of both the muse and yourself.
I'm trying to remind myself that the pace and rhythm of my work can't be determined by what we imagine is the hunger of the world for "more content" any more than it should be determined by the breakneck speed at which some other artist or creator might work. I can't speak to the quality of every one of the 8000 songs in Prince's vault, though I'm guessing it was up to his usual standards or he wouldn't have kept it, but I am certain I don't work the way Prince did. We are all motivated by different things, we have different resources and the demands on our time, energy, and focus will be different for all of us, so it's important we don't compare. Not with others, but also not with who we were a year or two ago. The world has changed, it continues to change. We have too, and what you expect of yourself and your work probably needs to change as well. It's OK to slow down.
Here's my second thought: the pressure to get our work done is not always a negative or harmful thing. Without the pressure to do my work, if all I did was sit and wait for inspiration, I wouldn't have done some of my best writing or made some of my best photographs. There is an upside to that internal nudge that pushes us to get to work. Many of my best podcast episodes were made not because I was inspired but because I was disciplined, sat down, and did the work, and somewhere in there the muse showed up and I managed to create something that surprised me and was much more than I had any inkling it might be when I sat down to write. The feeling of obligation to crank out more work is not the same thing as the pressure to embrace the discipline we often need just to show up and do our work. Giving myself the freedom to do better work, even though it might take longer and I might make less of it, is not the same thing as giving myself the freedom not to show up to do that work. At your own pace, according to your own rhythms, certainly, but the muse never shows up until we do.
Finally, I think it's probably much more important, to ourselves, our audiences, and our work, that we pay more attention to progressing than merely producing. Making progress is not the same thing as making product. My big concern with the pressure to always be shipping, and always producing more work, aside from the very counter-productive guilt that failing to do so can induce, is that it's very easy to produce and ship and never venture any further down the road of becoming. Being merely prolific is not the same thing as making art that takes risks, is authentic, courageous, or generous, none of which can necessarily be conjured quickly and on-time. Exploration takes time, and we don't always know how much time. The detours can take us into some fascinating and fertile places, but not if we're always rushing to wrap it up, hit publish, and get it posted or shipped.
Practically, for me, I suspect this means a change in the way I use my time. It does not mean the eradication of daily discipline, deadlines, and my commitment to give my work to my audience when I said I would. That's too important to me. But it probably does mean that I need to start my work sooner, and give myself much longer lead times for the incubation that can't happen in a rush. It means, I think, too, that I need to sit down with a cup of coffee or a dram of whisky, and reconsider what the last year has done to my pacing and my rhythm, and give myself the space to go deeper on some things. Maybe you need that too. And maybe, as it seems to be for me, this whole pandemic can serve not as a road-block but an invitation to take a detour into deeper places. Places of depth made newly accessible by the fissures this last year has opened. I think it's probably worth taking our time to explore those, and to see what they contain for us, and you aren't alone in awaking to the realization that you might just need to slow down in order to do that, and change the expectations you place on yourself, and set aside, for a while, the pressure to produce in favour of pursuing the possibilities to progress.
Thank you for joining me. We'll talk soon. In the meantime, at your own pace, and in no great hurry, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0