Make 2021 Your Most Productive Year
How Taking Your Pleasures Seriously Can Create Incredible Results
When the legendary Charles and Ray Eames were tasked with creating materials for the National Fisheries Center and Aquarium in Washington, DC, they did so with extreme gusto. To really get a feel for caring for an aquarium, they set one up in their own office, an eccentric move for the late 60s. Rather than commissioning studies or proposing hypotheticals based on readings and interviews, they spent time in the ocean studying sea creatures. Instead of a thick stack of typewritten papers and charts, they created booklets, films, architectural plans, and even a model of galleries and exhibits. For months, the Eames lived, breathed, (and ate), the ocean.
Why go to all this trouble? Because for the Eames, work was no trouble at all, it was fun. As Charles said, “The joy, the reward, the meat of the matter, resided within the process of fully pursuing something they loved.”
While it’s hard to imagine the people immortalized by today’s stern-looking bleached-white statues having a good time, the great sages of antiquity also enjoyed themselves. I’ve written elsewhere on Confucius’ Six Arts of a Superior Man, which included calligraphy, archery, and music. Lao Tzu’s philosophy could not be formed without much time in nature. Marcus Aurelius loved to hunt. Musashi was an avid painter, sculptor, and poet. And though the story of Bodhidharma’s eyelids becoming the first tea leaves is almost certainly apocryphal, the old monk did love a good cuppa. In each of these pursuits is found the keys to their success.
But these are all merely hobbies! You might cry. And you’d be partly right. The idea of the sage as a puttering codger, drifting indolently across some mountaintop engaged in mild and carefree trifles might be a common one in our productivity-obsessed culture. In reality, anything they agreed to do became an opportunity for self-cultivation. As was often said of the Eames, “they took their pleasures seriously.” In doing so, they created works of profound depth and enduring legacy. By making a conscious effort to do what they loved, they set the example for how to be lovable people.
Taking our pleasures seriously isn’t complicated. Just the opposite. By following a few simple tenets, we will not only get more done, but we’ll turn our own interests into meaningful, productive, and even lucrative enjoyments:
Be Rigorous In How You Play.
For starters, the sages pursued what they loved wholeheartedly. Confucius saw pleasures as simple as eating with family as a ritual for reaffirming our love and respect for each other that should be conducted as perfectly as possible. No phones at the table and no rote “fine” in answer to “how was your day?”
A sage’s pursuits were not passing interests. What you will not see practiced among any of the wise ones are half-assed pastimes. Confucius implored us to master the six arts so that we could be useful members of society, and come to grasp the deeper meanings of life within the nuances that distinguish a master from an intiate.
Not only that, but we don’t reach deeper rewards or levels of satisfaction when doing something without giving it our all. This by necessity requires that we bring great mindfulness and presence to our fun. Total engagement with a chosen activity, be it tea brewing, fighting, or ocean exploring, forms the basis of flow.
I have written about flow before, and how a life of work spent in a flow state means that one can bypass work as drudgery. This is not to say that work will be easy. In fact, the flow doesn’t happen unless you are challenged. So to take your pleasures seriously means to focus on what you are drawn to, delve deep, and explore fully.
While flow for its own sake is well and good, spending time in it also serves another purpose: to prepare ourselves for challenges outside our daily practices. As Musashi famously said, “If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.” Likewise, intense and consistent practice can turn anything into a way to know broadly.
Be Selective About What You Consume.
To really enjoy anything requires getting really good at it. The sages understood that we don’t have time to excel at everything, so they focused on a few interests to the exclusion of all others. Hence, the Six Arts, not the Sixty Arts. For us moderns, it means sacrificing things like television or casual gaming, or the daily barrage of clickbait content.
Like time, energy must also be spent wisely. Sages resisted the temptation to mindlessly indulge in drama or passively allow themselves to be moved to rage or despair over the latest headlines. Nor did they indulge themselves to excess, as their peers did, with little left to concentrate on their true passions. In fact, much of our modern snickering over Taoism’s seemingly prudish imprecations to preserve one’s jin and prevent the dissipation of sexual energies stem from a time when polygamy and prostitution were rampant. Emperors forgot themselves in their harems and let their kingdoms fall to ruin. Heirs neglected their fortunes while cavorting with courtesans and took on more concubines than they could afford. Like modern-day porn and sex addictions, it all seems frivolous but quickly becomes destructive when left unchecked.
Conservation of energy and time is how Lao Tzu’s musings on nature deliver profound insights that those who spent less time thinking deeply in the woods never understood. It’s the reason people still crave the beauty and comfort of a classic Eames chair, whose design process involved endless iterations and a single-minded devotion to chair perfection. And it is why we won’t stop striving to emulate philosophers like the slave Epictetus, while men of greater status have long been forgotten.
Be Analytical About What You Like.
This holiday I watched the Christmas classic, Die Hard, for the umpteenth time with my family. For many, movies are just diversions to get lost in. But they’re also fascinatingly-constructed works of communication. An intricately-plotted, cleverly-scripted, convincingly-shot piece of cinema has a mesmerizing hold that draws us back again and again.
The implausible story of a New York cop holding off hostage-taking terrorists inside an LA office building is really about a man coming to terms with how he has neglected his family. It is also a puzzle—how does he win?—that unfolds for the audience over time. It is a perfect example of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat beat sheet down to the pacing of when major beats occur. There is also the scoring, the action sequences, Bruce Willis’ turn as the anti-80s steroid superstar, the perfect casting of Alan Rickman as his foil, and the engrossing story of how it even got made. That the entire thing manages to work on all these levels without the average audience member noticing is testament to its status as a masterpiece of the action-thriller genre.
Understanding why we like the things we like on multiple deeper levels helps us understand ourselves more deeply, too. They also help us to find ways to replicate the same magic in our own work. Armed with reams of notes on why we so enjoy this 30-year-old blockbuster, I now have ideas that could be useful for future projects and am inspired to apply its principles to my own work.
Be Creative In Expressing What You’ve Learned.
I get that most of us would rather just like something for the sake of liking it and letting things be. But in order to become somebody who is rewarded by others for what we like, we must turn what we take in into something we can give back. Bruce Lee did not just “Adapt what is useful,” and “reject what is useless,” he implored all of us to “add what is specifically your own.” Without the latter, we will have to get by producing things we don’t like or worse, relying on the taxes from others’ products. Worst of all, we will never know the true pleasure of mastery, the ability not just to replicate what brings us joy, but to improve upon it.
Here, too, the sages understood. The majority of Seneca’s philosophizing took place in helpful advice he wrote to friends, drawn from the advice of his own favorite philosophers as well as his many life experiences and interests. Chuang Tzu’s irreverent stories and profound musings were a response to many of the thinkers who came before him, and one can feel the delight he took in having them make cameos in his fables.
Regarding productivity, imbuing what we make with what we love is perhaps the best way to ensure we make more things.
Most Importantly, Be Humble.
So many of us have had our plans so completely upended by 2020 that it’s hard to believe anyone could still have the hubris to believe in their all-importantance or that the world will continue to conform to the wishes and desires of mere humans. However, those who refuse to wear masks, insist on gathering in large groups, and outright deny the pandemic’s existence would suggest otherwise. Nonetheless, coupled with the idea that we must take our pleasures seriously is the idea that our goals and tasks aren’t of titanic import, they are but a series of small actions that we do because we have chosen to do them.
Allowing ourselves to believe that the “thing which must be done” is an epic undertaking only makes them more daunting. In turn, this makes us less likely to do them. Or worse, we do them indulgently as unhealthy obsessions. Addictions which, far from enriching our lives and making us better people, turn us into egomaniacs who torture ourselves and our loved ones in the pursuit of the impossible. It manifests in the big ways, like Stephen King’s self-destructive years behind his massive writing desk, and the little ones, like the dogmatic fan attacking those who don’t share his interests.
Ultimately, we must always remember that the reason we devote so much time, energy, and focus to taking our pleasures seriously is so that others may share in our pleasure. Whether it’s a well-made dish, a finely-crafted chair, or a thoughtfully-composed poem, our enjoyment in making it is much-enhanced when the recipient truly appreciates it.
May the new year be filled with gifts of your making.