Do We Always Know When To Take A Vacation?

From a recent staycation in Singapore - I am conquering my fear of heights!

Whether you work for others or are self-employed, if you are ambitious and want to make a name for yourself or create an impact in your field, you probably believe in working hard, developing your skills and getting as much done each day, week and year as possible. You probably have annual, maybe even quarterly goals that you try to achieve. And that's great.

But at the same time if you are a creative of any sort, a writer, designer, or architect, you know that success in your field chiefly depends on doing great work over a long stretch of time. It's not how much you achieve in a month or two that counts, but what you get done over the long haul. Over a ten year period, how much did you achieve? Or maybe a five-year period. What new skills did you develop? Did you take your work to a new and original direction?

Along the way towards success in a creative field, we require stamina and resilience. To face all the inevitable rejection and indifference towards our work, to handle the demands of clients and employers that see us not as unique individuals but as just another resource to be tapped, to accept the fact that meteoric fame is probably not in the cards right now. Stamina and resilience. Things that get beaten down, from long hours and less than ideal working conditions. From scrimping and saving, and putting all our money back into our work.  From declining social invitations to spend another evening working long hours on your side-projects. At some point, you need to replenish the well, to refill the passion and interest that keeps you going beyond logic and rational.

At some point, you know you need to step away from the desk and take a vacation.

It doesn’t need to be exotic or expensive. It just needs to be a real mental break. Something to anticipate. Something to feel excited about.

The last couple of months started the festival season for Indians, and while I notionally attended a few events, I basically focused on work. I had to market my just-released book, complete a few other projects and start to write something new. Or start to write a few somethings new so that I could see which would lead me to my next project. Taking a vacation now didn’t make sense. After all the end of the year is in any case a whirlwind of planning elaborate meals and gift shopping. Why not work as much as I could now?

Except I didn’t take into consideration that I had already worked as hard as I could to complete my previous book, and hadn’t quite recovered from that. I finished and jumped straight into the next ever-growing list of things to do. My to-do lists didn’t seem to get done before 10 new things were added each day. The ideas were flying fast, and I had to keep up with them. Taking time off, you say? Well, sorry, but now isn’t a good time.

But something wasn’t right. I could feel it. I was losing motivation to do things. Something that should take 20 minutes took an hour. Or sometimes didn’t get done. I would start, and then feel my brain slowly down, gurgling, and then coming to a stop. It refused to budge while I stared at the document, knowing what I was supposed to do, but not being able to do it. I put it down to laziness, to forgetting how long my list was, to procrastinating. Until my dad forced me to take a vacation. I'm going home to India for just over a week, to spend time over the festival with my mum. We will do festival-y things, and basically eat a lot and shop. And while some time back that seemed like a dreadful waste of time just when I couldn’t afford that, now it seems like just what I needed. Simply booking the tickets and starting to pack my bags, my vim has started to come back. My fingers are flying over the keyboard, I want to get as much done as possible before I leave. Sure, I will come back to an even longer to-do list, and have even less time to do it in. But I will be refreshed, have more ideas and more enthusiasm.

That’s why we need vacations. To work better and harder. To do good work and look forward to it. And that sounds so simple a kindergartener could tell you that. It's basically recess for grown-ups. And yet how many articles have you read about professionals not taking their vacation days? Of employers basically encouraging their employees to "commit" to their work by not taking any time off? It sounds good in theory – the less time you take off, the more you have to dedicate to helping your company (or yourself) succeed. Except for the inconvenient fact that we aren’t machines. We need a change of scenery and to unplug from the daily grind just to gain a new perspective. We need to sip a few mai-tais (or eat a bucket of tandoori chicken, in my case) to have renewed appreciation for the keyboard, easel or drafting table. If you never get away from your work, how can you miss it?

So, ask yourself, are you excited and interested in your work? Or frustrated and annoyed by even the smallest bumps? Don’t wait till you burst into tears over your laptop a few times to realize that you need some time off (unsurprisingly, that’s what it took for me to cop to it). See you at the beach (or biryani stall)!

Should You Revise A Published Piece?

I have been working on a project that I am embarrassed to admit, and I am not really sure if I should be working on. I have been editing, well actually completely overhauling, one of my published books.

The reason I am ashamed to admit it is because presumably when it was published it was good enough, and wouldn't really need an edit. Well, it was the best I could do at the time yes. I had spent months writing it, and since it was based on my Masters' thesis, months before that doing research and writing the core on which it was based. It had gone through a lot of iterations and was presumably good enough. It may have been, and yes, I was proud of parts of it. At the time I was actually proud of all of it.

But then I came across this book - Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors and Publishers by Scott Norton. And the book completely changed the way I looked at structuring a book, and profoundly informed the next book that I published. But then I started to think how I could apply the ideas to my previous work, and I could see many flaws in my book on arms control, structural issues that I just hadn't seen before. Presumably I could have solved this problem by hiring a developmental editor, but aside from the expense involved, I believe in doing things myself as much as possible. This may be a minority opinion and controversial in the world of book publishing, where every aspect of producing a book is assigned to a different person, but I reasoned that I was in this for the long haul, and I would need to learn how to do this myself, even if later I was in the position to hire someone.

I jotted down the ideas I had for improving it, and went on to work on other projects, because at the time I wasn't sure I should invest the time. The book was at the back of my mind though, and I kept thinking, when I have the time, I will go back to it, and revise it. It seemed like a large undertaking, so I just put it on the backburner.

One day while meditating, the idea for the revised outline just came to me - so I wrote it down. It seemed like a simpler structure than I had used before, and just getting that idea got me excited. I decided to start working on it a bit at a time, alongside my other projects. Initially, I made little progress, but the other day, I set aside a chunk of time to finalize the outline and assess how much I would really need to rework. It took a while, but having done the hard work of planning, I now think it won't take too much time to go through the actual editing and re-writing. I don't plan to change too much - it is less an entire re-write, more like writing the second edition of a textbook - where most of the book remains the same, but a few chapters are broken apart or combined together. The only difference is, that I am revising it not because the content has changed fundamentally, but that my own thinking has changed, its become clearer and more ordered.

This book hasn't really sold a lot of copies so far, which means spending a lot of time on it isn't commercially justified or pragmatic. In fact, I have been advised against wasting my time on this. I get the point - I probably won't make a difference to the sales of the book, and I could be using that time to write a new book. But then I asked myself - why am I writing? I write because I am compelled to, because I want to share things that I am obsessing about or intensely curious about with others. I plan to write many books, and although each of them won't be perfect, any of them won't be perfect, I must try to make each one as good as I can. And I couldn't live with myself knowing that I know how to make one of them better, more readable, more useful, and am not doing it.

So that's why I will be spending some time in the next few weeks, revising a book that I published last year. I will update here when the new version is out, and I would of course appreciate any feedback.

Have you ever gone back and revised a previously published work?

Can You Reverse-Engineer Success?

The plethora of self-help books and success tomes demonstrate that the topic of success and how to achieve it is something that most of us are intensely interested in. However you happen to define success, chances are, you would like to find ways to increase it.

I was having a conversation a few days ago with my mother, and we were talking about goals and achieving them. Well, she mentioned this young girl from Thailand, who came from very difficult circumstances, but ended up with a scholarship to study abroad, and fulfill her dream of making a difference in the field of education, by being asked to participate in creating new education policy for her country. This is an impressive achievement, and of course, one tends to ask the question – what lessons can we learn from this? What did she do to achieve her success?

Well, since I haven’t met or spoken to this girl, I can only make vague conjectures. And this post isn’t about how to achieve what she did, or something similar. Instead, I am wondering if it is possible to reverse-engineer big goals? Sure, you can read any one of hundreds of books on how to become more successful, and they are mostly filled with very useful advice, such as increasing your skills, learning to speak in public, or learning how to be a more effective leader. Reading such books can help to become generally more successful, but would they help in achieving specific success?

This is a topic I think about a lot, as I am trying to pursue certain specific goals. And despite reading a lot about them, and acquiring a wide range of advice, I feel stymied and can show somewhat uncertain and dubious progress. This is also the case for some other people I know. On the other hand, plenty of people are obviously successful in many endeavors, so is it that my execution is simply poor? It is entirely possible of course. But I also think maybe there is something else to it as well.

Some years ago I read The Click Moment by Franz Johansson, and it made this point that even those who achieved incredible, once-in-a-lifetime success were many times unable to repeat their feats. That sometimes something just clicks, and we can't know in advance what that will be. His point was, just do a lot of stuff, keep throwing spaghetti at the wall, and something will stick. Take a lot of action, make a lot of art or start a lot of businesses, and you have a greater chance of one of those projects clicking.

For a while I was really obsessed by this idea. That we have no control over what will be successful. You have to admit that it's a more appealing idea than work for 10,000 hours, on one specific skill or set of skills, and then you will become a genius. If you abandon your skill, or need to change careers or whatever, too bad, you simply need to start over. Its compelling to think that there is no way to guarantee success, so it's not on me if I fail, it's not because I failed to put in my 10,000 hours. However, even though we cannot guarantee success with a formula, there is no doubt that the more you practice, the sharper your skill set, the more you bring to the table with each new project or opportunity that you are a part of. You make it that much easier for yourself to be successful. That's why, while I still appreciate the message of Johansson's book, I wouldn’t set too much store by it.

In my own career so far, with all its twists and turns and lack of meteoric upward mobility, one thing I have seen is that the combination of factors works well. You try to get good at whatever you are working on, and yet you don’t assume that skill alone will automatically guarantee the reception of your work. Some of the most amazing work-related experiences I have had, arose not from the fact that I was the best person for the job, but because a confluence of factors happened to move me towards a particular opportunity. While working on transitional justice and traditional human rights issues, I happened to help out a stressed-out and overworked colleague on a project she was involved with, in an area completely new to me. I read up on it, and helped her out with a tiny sliver of the project. That led to me being included in the project, getting to undertake the bulk of the research for it, and even write a small portion. I gained expertise in an entirely new field. This isn’t something that I could have predicted, or reverse-engineered. Sure, you might think (cynically) that that was my ulterior motive in offering help to my colleague in the first place. Although it wasn’t, there have been previous instances where I offered to help and either wasn’t taken up on the offer, or that assistance didn’t lead to anything further. In fact, in that same organization, this happened a few times. So I couldn’t really have predicted this.

This pattern has played out in many of the items in my CV that I am most proud of. Conferences that I attended, internships, published papers – most of this happened as a result of a chance comment, or a fleeting idea that I acted on. None of them were the result of a concerted plan of action, goals that I wrote down, or achievements that I actively pursued.

What lesson can you draw from this? The lesson that I learn from this is that it isn’t easy to pick a goal and figure out exactly how you will get there. Sure, if your goal involves you and no one else, that might be possible – such as deciding to write a book or run a marathon. You figure out the steps involved, and then execute them till you have completed the book or crossed the finish line. But where other people are involved, I don’t think it is as easy to predict outcomes. We can do our best to set goals, make plans and carry them out, but we don’t know how it will truly play out.

So if you're reading this, and hoping for a takeaway, what should you do? I suggest that you continue to make plans and take action as usual. However, don’t be completely wedded to those specific outcomes. Be willing to let the universe take you in a different direction. Be open to possibilities. And encourage those possibilities by trying new things, doing more projects, reaching out to more people. If you get a whimsical idea, follow it up if it can be done in a reasonable time frame. Talk about your dreams with someone who is the last person you ever thought could help you achieve them; you never know, they might be just the one with the right contacts. Remember that the world is complex and beautiful, and it continues to surprise us every single day with its wealth of possibility and richness. Watch out for serendipity, and you never know what might happen!