Latest / No Mess, No Magic / The Case for Half-Assing It
Transcript
- Monica Hay: Hello and welcome. This is the No Mess No Magic podcast with Monica Haigh, podcast for writers. Welcome back. I have to first start off with saying thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of the love and support I'm already getting from this podcast. I posted one episode, obviously this will be the second, and there response was incredible. So I just have to say thank you if you're listening. And we're back for another episode. Today's episode will be ⁓ me a bit deeper onto the subject ⁓ of the case for half-assing it you show up to write. ⁓ I wrote newsletter on this topic, and if you want to follow my newsletter... You can find it at monicaheadcoaching.com slash newsletter. I'll have a link in the show notes. In case you didn't know, I run a bootcamp called the Overcome Riders Resistance Bootcamp. where I teach people the brain science around why we have issues with resistance, why we procrastinate, why we don't show up to write, all the things that stop us from actually doing the work we want to do. The inspiration for this episode comes from one of the writers in my community, Elena. And she said the most profound thing in a call one day. She was like, I have learned that consistently half-assing it gets me further than sporadically killing it. And I love that description because so many writers I know have this romantic version, fantasy version of how they show up when they write, and so often it gets in their way. Let's talk about what half-assing it looks like and why I'm a proponent of showing up messy. This podcast is literally called No Mess No Magic. And the reason I call it that is because so often, We expect so much performance and perfection from our process, both in our lives and in our drafts. And we don't just allow our mess to exist, but humans are messy and we have to learn to create in the mess of life, okay? Sometimes when I ⁓ tell people I want to half ass it, these are some objections I get from show up and ass it. ⁓ One, ⁓ I won't be able to get into deep I want to finish my book and actually make good. am I supposed to get into deep work if I half ass it? Two, ⁓ this can't lead to good results. ⁓ I want to have a good book, not just a shitty book. Three, What's the point if I'm not fully showing up for my art or I wanna give my art 100 % of myself. It just gets so little of me that when I show up, I wanna give it all. And then another point is it's not very romantic to say half-ass it. And I'm gonna argue why it's really fucking romantic. It's actually super romantic to half-ass your art. Let's talk about why. Writers love to imagine this perfect writing life. Long stretches of deep work, lots of flow states, writing for hours in a cabin in the woods. I am not saying that this is impossible. I think this is also a great way to write, but it's not necessarily realistic for a lot of people. right? Most of us are writing in busy lives. You know, we have jobs, we have caretaking. We are doing our cooking, cleaning, laundry, groceries, you name it, taxes. We're adults who live very busy lives. And a lot of people will try to wait until their life quiets down because they have this version of their writing life in their head. And I'm here to tell you that that's not going to happen. It's just not. And I have been that writer. who is thinking, man, maybe life will just slow down. Like, you know that feeling of like, ⁓ if I could just get through this week, then everything's gonna be smooth sailing. But that's like your whole adulthood. So when writers have this grand version of writing, I think that's beautiful. And I'm not saying that Deep Work isn't wonderful. I actually have a lot of opinions about Deep Work by Cal Newport. I think it's a really great book. but I also do think that it's something that is written for a specific audience and I don't necessarily think that audience is everyday people. And I can get into a whole another podcast episode about that. But so many people wanna get into this deep work constantly. And I understand why, because it feels really good. It feels amazing to get into a flow state and to get into deep work. But most of us so much going on in our adult lives that expecting ourselves to do deep work every single day when we show up as writers will cock-block us from actually showing up. If you expect every time that you show up to write to be this magical thing you expect like, want to give it my 100 % of me, ⁓ want make sure it's good, I want something brilliant to come out of me, it has to count, you will not write. ⁓ You not write. ⁓ And if we don't have a lot of responsibilities, I still don't recommend expecting incredible stuff to come out of you every time you show up to write. I want you to think about this. Imagine you've had a long day at work. You've had a ton of meetings. It's very draining. You're tired. You just want to get home and you want to just sit in front of the television and relax. But there's this voice inside the back of your head that says, well, you need to write. ⁓ need to do your writing before you can go to bed. And it starts to weigh on you. And you're like, ugh, ⁓ so tired. I'm exhausted right now. How am I going to show up to write? for an hour and get into deep work when I've already did so much work today. So you don't write, you say tomorrow, I'll do it tomorrow. This is a recipe for not finishing anything. It's a recipe for procrastination. And the reason for this is because your brain's gonna bark at you. We're too tired for this. You want me to do an hour of brilliant masterpiece writing? That's not gonna happen. I don't have time right now. Ugh, never gonna finish this book. You might start going down a rabbit hole of negative thoughts and self-doubt because you're so tired and you don't have the energy to show up for a long period. And... Your brain is basically resistant because your standards are way too high. You have set such a high bar for yourself. an audio book I've been listening to called Monday Magic, which is written by Molly Donlin. She is a cohost of Demystify Magic podcast with ⁓ Madison. ⁓ in book, she talks about how what you do for two minutes daily is actually going to give you more results ⁓ than what do for 60 minutes once a month. And she broke it down really well in her book. And I just have to shout this out because What this is coming down to is that all or nothing thinking gets us nowhere. And it's very addicting. This thinking is very addicting because of course we have these magical visions of ourselves showing up and writing for hours and hours and it feeling amazing. Of course we do. But for most of us that's unrealistic because we're so busy. And also doing that is going to freak your brain out. Do you think that your brain, you know, finds writing super chill and easy? Do you think it's like, yeah, I could write for four hours. No big deal. That's totally fine. I could write for four hours and like write a masterpiece. It's gonna come out to be so fast. It's gonna flow amazingly. Do think your brain sees that as easy and chill? No, it does not. Okay. Your brain's like, hell no. I've had a long day or I'm so busy or that sounds like a lot of energy. Your brain is a drama queen and she doesn't wanna put out energy where it's not necessary. Okay, this is some brain-stying stuff, which I can have another episode on this as well, because I love this stuff. But your brain will avoid anything that feels like it's gonna cost you a lot of energy and time, and feels like it could be painful. We might know logically that writing isn't gonna cause us pain, like we're not getting chased by a lion, you know. But our brains don't know that. Our brains just see this mountain of an hour or two or three with a masterpiece flowing out of me. And I'm already tired and I'm already busy and overwhelmed and have a million things on my plate. Excuse me? And so you don't do it. think a lot of writers forget how much energy writing actually takes for your brain. We forget because we imagine ourselves, we're sitting and typing on a computer or we're writing in a journal, whatever you might be doing for writing, maybe you also dictate. And it seems like it should be this easy thing because there's not really intense physical work. I'm not going out there and like, you know, doing a bunch of intense stuff. But it's a lot of work for the brain. Your brain takes up a lot of energy ⁓ and writing a book, writing in general, solving complex creative coming up with plot ideas, characters, coming up with so many things that are required for a creative practice is a lot of work for your brain. And so of course your brain's like, I don't want to do this. I'm not doing this. Writing is a very high effort activity. watching a movie, you know, doing things like that are low effort activities, so your brain doesn't see them as scary. Okay, but writing uses a lot of your working memory. It's decision-making, which if you have decision fatigue after a long day is very tricky. It uses your imagination, it uses language processing, and it's an energy barrier. Your brain sees it as an energy barrier. And that's why when people have these beautiful notions of showing up to write for hours and hours a day, they just don't bother. Because this energy barrier is saying, I don't have enough to put this out. Right? Now imagine that you're showing up and you're half-assing it. ⁓ Let's play with that. Say that you show up to write and you say, I'm gonna write 100 words or I'm gonna revise an imperfect page or maybe I'm gonna show up for 15 minutes and give myself a sticker. That's what do. I give myself stickers for showing up. Now, Imagine how accessible and easier that feels. How much more accessible and easier that feels for the brain. This is actually gonna make it so you show up. When your brain sees something as doable, it means that you'll actually show up. actually showing up for your writing, even if it's messy, is gonna get you to the result of a finished book. Imagining yourself showing up for an hour a day and never doing it, that's not gonna get you to a finished book. Let me tell you a little story. For the last week, I invited myself to do a writing practice, and I announced this on Instagram, if you follow me there, at Monica Hay Author. I stopped waiting for my life to chill out before I started writing because for the last many months, my life has been very hectic. And I won't go into a ton of detail about that, but it's been busy. And I kept thinking, man, like, ⁓ I just want to calm down so that I have space for my writing. And I finally accepted, it's not going to. It's not gonna calm down. And I am gonna have to make space for my art right now. And so I did a... challenge called writing inside the mess. And that's where I asked myself to show up for five minutes daily. It can be messy and it can be totally wild. I don't come up with anything good, that's fine. As long as I'm showing up. And let me tell you what I was shocked at the results so far. I... I try not to be super obsessed with results in my own practice because sometimes I get to a maladaptive place with it and I'm just focusing on results only. But what I've noticed in the last week since starting this experiment is that I've already written over thousand words in a week. To some people that might not sound like a lot, but for me it feels like a lot right now because I was showing up very messy. There were two days where one day I showed up and I wrote like this really simple 500 word short story. It was really bad. I didn't care. The second day I showed up, it was really rough. And I realized writing in the morning is not for me because I had done it in the morning and it was not going well at all. The third day and the fourth day and the fifth day were very different. I accepted that I liked writing at night, even though I had this whole long day of meetings. My brain is a lot more creative at night. And so I said, okay, I'm going to show up and I'm going to be really messy. And I still ended up writing a lot more than I expected. I have a short story that I'm writing that is already, I think, at 700, 800 words. And that was like from four days, four or five days of showing up and being really messy for five minutes. Some of the days I went to 20 minutes. I don't think I went further than 20 minutes, but I still ended up writing about a thousand words. And so I would not have gotten to that point of writing those words if I had not given myself permission to half-ass it when I show up and to be messy and to have a very low bar. It wouldn't have happened because I would have been exhausted. that I showed up to write, was 12 a.m. ⁓ I hadn't had any time before that because my meetings were stacked. and I had work I had to do, I had emails I had to write. Life of a business owner is like, you know, it just is what it is. And I finally showed up to write and I ended up writing for, I don't know, 20, 25 minutes and it felt really good. And I was like, wow, this is actually really working. If I'd asked myself to show up for 25 minutes, I probably wouldn't have shown up. But keeping the bar very low is making it so that I actually do it. because I know that I'm guaranteed to succeed. I know that it's not going to tax my energy too much. I know that it's accessible. I mentioned that a lot of people don't think it's romantic, right? To half ass it. But I wanna challenge that. I think it's beautiful and romantic to write in between your Zoom meeting and doing the laundry. Isn't that beautiful and romantic that you're giving your art time? That you're actually showing up for your art? I think it's really fucking romantic. You know what's really romantic is making time for your art imperfectly. It's actually showing up. Your writing doesn't need you to be perfect when it shows up. It's kind of, imagine you have a friend and you've had a long, hard day and you just need them to be there for you. Are you gonna ask them, need to show up perfectly and at 100 % and you need to be amazing and perfect at this? Probably not. You're probably fine with them just being there for So you're writing, doesn't care how perfect you do when you show up, it just wants you to show up. It just wants you to be there. It wants you to give it time, even if it's just five minutes. think a lot of this also comes down to a need for performance sometimes for writers. You don't need to perform your writing. That's not required. A lot of time I think writers show up thinking they have to have this performance, that they make it this big deal. They show up and they maybe have this perfect writing routine and all these different rituals, which don't get me wrong, I love me a writing ritual and a writing routine. But sometimes we get into a maladaptive state where we can't even get ourselves to do those routines because we've placed such a high barrier for all these things we have to do in order to write. You don't have to perform. You can just show up. Half-assing your writing doesn't mean that you don't care about your writing. I think a lot of times when people hear half-ass it, they think, you I'm not giving my effort. That's not what this is at all. It actually means that you care enough to show up even when things aren't going perfectly. You care enough to be imperfect when you show up. And I think that's really powerful. I think it's incredibly powerful to let ourselves show up as the messy humans that we are. it feels really good to give our art 100 % of ourselves. It feels good to be able to spend a lot of time on it and to devote ourselves to it. The problem is that writing every day or writing for hours and on end really realistic for lot of people. And so is that expectation stopping you from writing at all? of you might be thinking, well, it takes me few maybe 25 minutes to even get into the flow of writing, or it takes me blank. And it doesn't really feel like it's worth it to write for only five minutes because I don't end up actually getting anything out. ⁓ first of all, I want to say I hear you. And second of all, a lot of times this has to do with some brain science nerdy stuff. ⁓ I might do an episode on this, but When you look at the brain science any type of habit that we're trying to form, we often give enough training time. And by training time, I mean... For example, if you go to the gym, let's say you start going to the gym and you want to get stronger you go to the gym and you're like, okay, I'm gonna start lifting weights. Do you think that you show up and start lifting 50 pounds ⁓ you haven't lifted 10 pounds or 20 pounds? ⁓ you probably won't do that. ⁓ ⁓ when writers who are coming out of a creative slump or writers who aren't showing up very often but want to start showing up often, When they start trying to write again, they imagine themselves showing up for hours because they think like, I have to make up for lost time. Or they also think, well, it won't be worth it because I won't get anything out of it. The words won't really come out anyway. It's gonna take me a while to get into the zone. the beautiful thing about this is that we have neuroplasticity. And so if you don't write for six months, you have your neurons. your little neurons, if you ever heard of the term, neurons that fire together, wire together. It's the concept that your brain will put those really valuable neurons into the things that you're focusing on so that it's easier for you to do the said, when you start building a new habit, you have to build new neurons in that It doesn't just. happen magically, which that snap was not nearly as cool because I'm wearing a wrist brace. But pretend it was a cool snap. It doesn't happen magically. It takes training, actually. It can take weeks and weeks of training, just like it takes training to go build muscle at the gym. Because, I'm in that place right now. I went to Pilates today and I got my ass kicked. It was one of the hardest classes I've ever been at. But, you know, the next few days, I'm probably going to be very sore, right? And it's the same with your brain. When you show up to try to write, when you're building a habit, your brain might be a little rusty. It might be like, ugh, this is hard. I don't know what to say. The words might not come out very well. But once you're showing up consistently for five or 10 minutes, two or three weeks, Your brain starts to build neurons. ⁓ So it makes it easier to show up and actually get into the flow. And I will probably do a whole episode on this because it's a whole other topic. But basically what I'm saying is that the more you show up messy, the faster it will be to get into the flow and the faster it will be to actually jump into your story and get the words out. If you don't like the term half-asset, you can replace it with something else. Amy McNea calls this bare minimum. I think that's what also James Clear says is a bare minimum. And you could call it anything you like, but I want you to try it out. I want you lower the bar and the expectations for yourself so that you actually show up rather than just thinking about showing up and never actually doing it. Thank you so much for listening. like subscribe. It helps me with the algorithms and I'll see you in another episode very soon.