A two-minute motivation if you’re new to working from home.
The colorful picture below is not an advertisement for my book (illustrated by Aubrey Roemer), The Flowerdrops. Rather, it’s a small selection of some of the failures I’ve produced over the last year while working on this project—at home.
The closer I’ve gotten to finalizing the book, the more unexpected issues have cropped up. Most of the fails pictured below came in the last few weeks (though the total wreckage now spans longer a calendar year).
As the Zen sage says:
He who has a hundred miles to walk should reckon ninety as half the journey
I’m no newbie to working at home. For the best part of the last twenty years, my commute has required moving from the bedroom to the living room/home office.
During the last month (March 2020), millions of other workers have found themselves doing the same, as workplaces close across the planet due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
If you’re new to working from home, one of the first things you may notice is how much harder it is to get answers to work-related questions when there are no real and knowledgeable people close by.
It’s frustrating. And it’s normal.
Over the last year, while struggling to produce The Flowerdrops, I regularly wished I had an expert on hand who could answer my questions… and I had lots: about business, production, layout, design, ink, paper, distribution, etc. The list was endless.
I scanned the hundreds of articles on the subjects. I read software manuals, I tried discussion forums, support services, tutorials, Slack channels, and every other resource that popped up when I pushed a question out into the internet.
And mostly the answers I got back were close, but not exactly what I needed for my specific project.
And as a result, I had to try things out. And for each proof print run of The Flowerdrops there were 7-10 days where I could make no further progress as I waited for the latest results. Then I got the results. Then I usually had to start over again and fail again until I hit on what worked.
So, bear this in mind: When you work alone, chances are you’re going to produce a lot of failures—more than you do when working with experienced colleagues close at hand.
As you face new challenges, only hard-won experience will get you past screwing up and failing to achieve your goals.
And failing alone can be hugely discouraging.
But failure is inevitable and essential part of learning. The Flowerdrops project, for example, has been expensive, tiring, frustrating but ultimately rewarding. So many things can only be learned by making mistakes; and I’ve made so many mistakes I’ve inevitably learned a huge amount.
So if you’re struggling to deliver work you feel good about during this tough period, keep at it! Keep failing! Those hard knocks are learning reps that will benefit you in the long run.
As Winston Churchill said:
Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
There’s nothing, after all, that will erode your self-confidence faster than giving up on your goals, so persist, persist, persist… and if you need a little motivation on that topic, let me refer you to another statesman, Calvin Coolidge:
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Stirring words! And if you need a daily boost of practical motivation advice, I’ve recently been spending fifteen minutes every morning with Russ Harris’s excellent The Confidence Gap. It’ll get you in the right frame of mind not to feel overwhelmed by challenges and failures during this difficult time. It’s well worth a read.
The Flowerdrops will be officially released late March. Due to Covid-19’s effect on production, an available-to-buy date has not yet been set.