Work is Virtue. Isn’t Creativity a Virtue too?
Ever since I started working at my current job, I have felt a steady decline in my creativity. The foreshadowing of this downside of working at my dream job appeared when I was studying for aforesaid job. I had shown my professor a book review I had written for a book I was recommending to him (yes, I am that nerd who recommends books to my superiors). He said, “It’s really impressive that you continue to be so creative even after being weighed down by these course modules and vast syllabi. I really hope that doesn’t change ever.”
And like a horrible premonition, it actually did.
For perspective: I had built and worked on my book review blog the year I was preparing for my final year exams for undergrad alongside one of the toughest exams in the world. I passed both exams with flying colours. I also earned a meagre but satisfactory income from reviewing books.
But come the day I signed the offer letter and walked into the massive lobby of the office that has helped me develop skills that I never thought I had, disaster struck on the frontal cortex of my budding brain.
Writing used to come as easily to me as breathing. Take a pen and paper, write down the thought that’s been buzzing about in my brain for a while, and get a 1000 word post down in, say, an hour or so. Proofreading and editing done either the next day or after a quick nap, and I was good to go.
Now, writing is like a chore to me. I need to stew on an idea for days, if not weeks, on end. Then, I jot down a basic outline. That simple task drains me of energy. The next day, or whenever I feel motivated enough to, I pick up one point from the outline and focus on that. And so it goes. Believe it or not, it took me a month to write this post, right from the conception of the idea in my brain to clicking publish. For poetry or a story, however, my brain works like a whimsical machine. My emotional energies will go from zero to hundred in a second during either a nap or a shower and my physical body will be left scrambling around to search for my keyboard or a paper to vomit it all out before the brain wave disappears. Once the emotional energy dissipates, I add some finishing touches, add my trademark poetic devices and make sure there’s a lot of colour and emotion in the story / poem before hitting publish.
In short, it’s not like it used to be.
Knowing that a problem exists is taking one step closer to solving it. My friends had already dismissed my concerns by saying, “You’re too tired after work”, “You still articulate your thoughts well in your Instagram captions”, etc. Hence, I turned to my sister, who is a super smart Physiotherapist who has studied her masters in Neurology and has specialized in Paediatrics (phew!) and, more importantly, who is always brutally honest with me. I asked her for a scientific explanation for my declining growth towards being the next JK Rowling. She threw one single concept at me: neuroplasticity.
I headed to Google for an indepth learning of this concept.
In an article published by Joyce Shaffer in the journal ‘Frontiers in Psychology’ (Neuroplasticity and Clinical Practice: Building Brain Power for Health), she defines neuroplasticity as the capacity of brain cells to change in response to intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Her research focused on understanding how neuroplasticity could be used to improve physical and mental health. I applied this definition of neuroplasticity to myself and realized that while the intrinsic urge to keep writing and working on my craft still ran through my veins, the extrinsic paucity of time put a damper on these plans.
The line from my reading up of neuroplasticity that threw the brightest light on my current phase in life was a line from the book “The Third Vision: The Science of Personal Transformation” by Francis H. Val:
One of the fundamental principles of how neuroplasticity functions is linked to the concept of synaptic pruning, the idea that individual connections within the brain are constantly being removed or recreated, largely dependent upon how they are used.
Think of synaptic pruning as hiring a purely utilitarian Marie Kondo to clean out your closet: “do you need this skill? do you use it? If you don’t use it, lose it.”
If you don’t use it, lose it.
Was my steady transition from pen and paper to keyboard and spreadsheet merely an outcome of my early sojourn into the world of numbers and data sets and compressed files that make my laptop (and brain) crash when I open them?
More importantly, how do I ensure a conducive environment which would lead to generation of extrinsic factors to help me balance work and my passion for art in a way that didn’t lead to the death of the synapses handling either of these two important aspects of my life?
Given that I have inculcated perfectionist tendencies in everything I do right from an early age, maintaining boundaries at work is a real challenge for me. I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night recalling that a certain formula sat un-updated in my workpaper. I promptly head to my laptop and update it, or if that’s not possible, set an alarm for first thing in the morning to remind myself to do the same. My perfectionist tendencies also lead me to repetitively check the work I have done, be it sending an email or preparing a file. I’m always second guessing and triple checking everything I do. I have a similar attitude towards writing: always proofread my posts more than thrice, rearrange words in sentences to make them grammatically perfect, ensure that there are no spelling mistakes at all.
These perfectionistic tendencies currently force me to devote too much time to work and too little to writing.
I decided to write down a few small steps that could help me, and maybe you, overcome this major hurdle.
1. Use the Focus Assist mode on your laptop when writing or working: Ensure that you have uninterrupted time to focus all your energies at the task at hand, instead of feeling guilty about not devoting enough time to the other task.
2. Disconnect from work mentally when your laptop is shut: Keep a sticky note on your laptop for anything that you remember to do after closing your laptop.
3. Exercise: And contemplate while exercising. That alone time as well as the endorphins that your body releases will make you happy and more productive, be it either at work or with your writing.
4. Merge creativity with the mundane: If breakfast is a lonely affair where you’re bored out of your mind, play a podcast on a topic that interests you out loud. Your sunny side up eggs may turn out to be way more seasoned.
5. An hour a day, more on the weekend: Following the principle of 10,000 hours to achieve perfection, it would take you 27 years to be amazingly skilled at writing, if you start today. If this isn’t impetus to start working more regularly and for a longer duration at your art, I don’t know what is.
6. Draw the line when it comes to work: While I can recommend this to everyone else with relative ease, this step may be tough for me considering my junior position at my workplace. But I’m sure I could finagle a clear weekend once in a while to head to my mind palace and play paintball in there with my creativity.
I write this post to help anyone who may face a similar situation in their career. Tell me how you combat this problem and ensure that neuroplasticity does not wipe out your passions for non-work related activities.
